I was talking about efficiency and range, which typically falls pretty short of cars intended to be EVs. But there are also other changes like wheels being closer to the front ends of the vehicles and not needing the transmission hump in the floor, giving more passenger and cargo space.

All new cars are terrible for privacy, EV or not. Small shops doing conversions on older cars will absolutely be better in that regard. But as soon as you make it a mass market thing, the same incentives to invade the privacy of their consumers will end up with the same result. Better privacy and data protection laws are the only way to stop that, I think.

Well, a car ICE car converted to an EV will typically not be as good a vehicle as one built as an EV in the first place. But the real issue is the same one behind not seeing small cheap EVs in the US, lower profit margins.

Very true. Unfortunately, this process just pulls gold from dilute sources and gathers it into nuggets, from small ones to very very large. No gold is being made new though, that would be great.

Well, that is the amount gold that is mined or recycled every year that is used in electronics. The thing is though, a lot of the gold used in electronics is never recovered. So a considerable amount of the gold used in electronics is removed from from circulation in a way the gold in jewelry or bullion or coins isn’t. It isn’t the primary driver of gold’s price increase, but it is a significant factor.

Gold prices have risen steadily for a long time, partly because of its use in electronics. Over $2500/ounce now. But another quirk of gold is the ease with which we can make very thin coatings of it over other materials, sometimes only a few atoms thick. So it is commonly used, but in very very small amounts per device.

Metric measuring systems are superior in almost every use case, with the exception, I think, of how temperature feels to us. As arbitrary as Fahrenheit seems, it does seem like a more natural scale to talk about the weather or body temp. The smaller units are nice for these purposes too. 0 being very cold and 100 being very hot feels less arbitrary than -18 and 38, even if celcius is more logical and easier to use for many other things.

At some point it almost stops seeming like greed and more like the willful extinction of the human race. But I’m probably just underestimating the greed.

Sure he’s got climate wins, but some of the wins are questionable, like giant hydrogen hubs. Hydrogen sounds great on the surface, but the more you dig into it, the more issues crop up. Some of these hubs will end up producing hydrogen by burning fossil fuels, and that isn’t a win at all. And speaking of not winning, we are producing more oil and natural gas than ever before. That’s why we aren’t excited about his “Climate Wins”, they are offset if not overcome by losses.

Having said that, regarding the Climate, pollution, and everything related, Trump is the worst choice. He’s already promised Carte Blanche to oil execs if they donate to his campaign. (Not in those words of course, simpler, more incoherent ones.)

Take that house so they never see that view again.

Oh, agreed!

Sure, to get them to speak in unison. They did all read from the same script though. It wouldn’t be as viscerally creepy without the editing, but I would say the situation is as bad as the video makes it seem.

Probably worse for Barbra than the picture is this phenomenon being named after her. I was familiar with the the Streisand Effect and who the name came from, but didn’t know the backstory and hadn’t seen her house.

For anyone curious.

Maybe that was literally the case, he apparently had mercury poisoning at around the same time.

It’s starting to sound like a retelling of the old lady who swallowed the fly.

Someone needs to invite /u/Poem_for_your_sprog to Lemmy.

Growing crops to make ethanol is not particulatly green. In fact, in most existing production loops we would be better off environmentally to just burn pure gasoline than produce the ethanol to mix into it, unfortunately. Too much water, too many tractors and trucks, and way too much electricity into ethanol production to be worth what we get out of it. And the bit of carbon the crops sequester doesn’t overcome it. Electric vehicles are by far the greenest option right now.

It won’t have started getting closer again before the Milky Way collides with the Adromeda galaxy in 5 Billion years, so it and anything we send on a similar path isn’t coming back.

Last year their revenue from selling cars, powerwalls, and solar tiles was around $90 million. Makes the stock price seem crazy, yes. But then they sold $1.8 billion of carbon credits to other auto manufacturers, and that costs them basically nothing. Still doesn’t justify the stock price, but makes it less ridiculous. Selling carbon credits is Tesla’s main business at this point, the things they make just provide the justification for it.

In general I agree with you for sure, we have way too many. But if there are any worth preserving, I’d say it’s the old ones in Scotland where golf was invented. And at least there they don’t have to be watered constantly.

Oh, it’s not the only reason, and the other may actually be worse. They sold $1.8 billion of carbon credits to other auto manufacturers last year. Which is pretty much free money to them. And hastens climate change, but, you know, free money.

That is goddamn infuriating.

I looked up prices in Massachusetts, they are higher than the national average. Looks like 2 main factors:

1 A higher than usual percentage of mini splits vs central air. These will be more efficient and have a lot of comfort benefits, but are considerably pricier then retrofitting a central air system. So if you are retro fitting CA, you could come in under average.

2 MAs impressive $10k+ incentive system for whole home heat pump systems has resulted in HVAC companies raising prices, because of course it has. This is why we can’t have nice things.