I'm building a freemium browser extension (https://trashpandaextension.com/) that primarily removes "social metrics" (number of likes, subscribers, views, friends, etc. you see on websites) and sales tactics (20 people have this in their shopping cart, limited time offer, -78% sale!, etc.).
It's also a hodge-podge of other annoying things I want removed on the web, like when articles have pull quotes that repeat what they just wrote one paragraph ago, or when sites block the ability to paste passwords.
The extension is available for Firefox and Chrome/Vivaldi, but it has a lot more development to get it where I want it.
Would appreciate any feedback and tips on both the extension itself as well as advice on monetization.
> renters get the same one vote per person as everybody else
It's not just directly voting for a city councilor, planning board member, etc. that counts. Showing up to public meetings to show support or disagreement with something can do much to pressure those elected officials. But renters are going to have a much more difficult time showing solidarity for pro-development action, not only because of the difference in socioeconomic status (e.g. living paycheck to paycheck vs. a homeowner who has a stable, white-collar job).
1. Homeowners can shoot down a proposed development by demonstrating a strong response against threats on just their street or block. As long as homeowners defend their turf locally, and it can be counted on them to do so across town, they win. Renters, on the other hand, have an asymmetrically difficult battle: pro-development individuals need to show up to all the proposed-development meetings, not just one for a particular street or block, if they want to expand housing.
2. Homeowners are probably much more strongly driven to show up because the focus is on what they lose. Character of neighborhood, traffic, safety, noise, etc. and the threat against the status quo seems more likely to trigger that visceral defense mechanism. Renters probably focus on what they gain: affordable housing, access to new communities, etc. My intuition is that the perception of losing something is a greater call to action than the possibility of gaining something.
3. Homeowners are well-defined and known individuals. They already exist, and their turf is already developed. Renters, on the other hand, are an abstract group of people who may or may not even move in, should something be built. I currently rent an apartment - but will I show up to a neighboring town's planning board meeting to voice my support for some proposed apartment complex that's still in the early stages, could flop at any point, and even if it succeeds I may not even move there? The renters of a future complex may not even know who they are yet, if they aren't adamant on moving in there should a place be built.
4. There's strong stigma against renters, to the point of being demeaning and tribal. A local council near me voiced their opposition to building more affordable developments, and the chairman said he was concerned about "derelicts" (exact word) moving in to the neighborhood and said if they built more affordable units, you'd see a rise in street drug vendors, threatening the local children. How can renters and low-income earners combat such ridiculous accusations when local leaders cast them as criminals, just because they can't afford to buy a median $400,000 house?
Your comment ignores so much of the asymmetric power dynamic between owners and renters.
> Renters, on the other hand, have an asymmetrically difficult battle: pro-development individuals need to show up to all the proposed-development meetings, not just one for a particular street or block, if they want to expand housing.
It's not homeowners vs renters, it's homeowners vs property developers. Property developers who, I can assure you, are perfectly capable of sticking up for themselves.
> Homeowners are probably much more strongly driven to show up because the focus is on what they lose. Character of neighborhood, traffic, safety, noise, etc. and the threat against the status quo seems more likely to trigger that visceral defense mechanism.
Are these.. bad reasons to be opposed to development?
> Homeowners are well-defined and known individuals. They already exist, and their turf is already developed. Renters, on the other hand, are an abstract group of people who may or may not even move in, should something be built.
This is all the more reason to listen to homeowners vs renters.
> There's strong stigma against renters, to the point of being demeaning and tribal. A local council near me voiced their opposition to building more affordable developments, and the chairman said he was concerned about "derelicts" (exact word) moving in to the neighborhood and said if they built more affordable units, you'd see a rise in street drug vendors, threatening the local children.
Sleight of hand there. Renting != affordable housing. To be blunt, although maybe not as much as that councilman: poor people commit more street and petty crime. This is inarguable. Most people commit crimes near where they live. Also inarguable. He's not wrong.
> It's not homeowners vs renters, it's homeowners vs property developers. Property developers who, I can assure you, are perfectly capable of sticking up for themselves.
I'd argue that current zoning laws and processes encourage large developers. They are the only ones who can navigate the system.
That's why so much new construction in the last several decades (at least) has been by large developers who buy cheap land on the outskirts of town, cut down all the trees, build a bunch of identical cheaply made houses isolated from everything else, sell them all at once, and hand over management to a homeowners association where rules are enforced to ensure conformity.
> much more strongly driven to show up because the focus is on what they lose. Character of neighborhood, traffic, safety, noise, etc. and the threat against the status quo seems more likely to trigger that visceral defense mechanism.
Not just those. For most home-owners, their homes are by far the highest-value assets they own, and especially given the lack of strong social safety net in the US, they often represent a large store of value that home-owners expect to be able to support them in retirement, in the event of unforeseen emergencies, etc. The thread of homes losing their value can be much more tangible than just fears about neighborhood character (and those aren't nothing).
I lived in Highlands Ranch, CO for roughly half a year, and man the suburban sprawl in anything outside of Boulder is on steroids. My impression of Colorado is that it's a "hot" place to be right now (very much hyped as the place to escape to), but that will in time be expended as housing costs skyrocket and no new housing can be built because everything is interconnected by a 6-8 lane highway.
> For example, at the grocery store, a theoretical eight-pack of bottled water costs $3.00. A theoretical 32-pack of bottled water costs $5.00. But no older person can lift a 32-pack of water. So to get 32 bottles of water, an older person has to pay 140% more just because they made the mistake of not dying young.
The grocery store I go to (large regional brand) has for the last few years been asking people at checkout if they need help carrying their groceries to their car. Some packaging is ridiculous (remember people having to go to the hospital and get stitches over clam-shell packages?), but I can't imagine an elderly person wouldn't get help carrying a heavy item if they asked for help - people want to be good Samaritans.
In cases like that of the bottled water, where the difficulty is because it is a large package bundling several smaller items, you can open the package in the car and bring the smaller items inside in smaller groups.
I see similar arguments with vehicle prices, where vehicles are more expensive, but they are higher build quality, have more features (heated seats, blind-spot warning, etc.), so it's not technically correct to use the term "inflation" since the product is different.
But it still feels wrong to say that this isn't a concern and to dismiss it with that argument, since people still need entry-level options, even if we tout the new bells and whistles we've added to the houses or vehicles over the past few decades.
Saying "housing prices are ridiculous" followed by, "but you get more features!" is no consolation to the family looking to get their foot in the door of the housing market.
The analogy to pacifiers may be overly condescending (equating adults to children), but in general I have adopted the view that smartphone usage in public is essentially second-hand smoke, and that hopefully within the next 1-2 decades the public will finally begin to recognize this as widespread addiction and begin setting some limits.
I got into computers when I was in early elementary school, and that began my track toward exploration and software development. There's no doubt that my mom's worries of me being addicted to the computer were absolutely true - entire summers were spent on the computer.
What's different about computer addiction and smartphone addiction is that computer usage is more limited in where you can do it. My computer-addicted young self would not have been able to whip out a desktop computer at a restaurant, barbershop, or waiting in line to pick up an order. But with smartphones essentially being "pocket computers", people can use them anywhere - even driving.
I do believe in personal choice, so I don't want to be heavy handed, but I imagine our society will need to grapple with this problem. I see couples on dates with each other in restaurants, both on their phones nearly the entire time scrolling through endless feeds. I watch sports events where any small break in play people need to pull out their phones. There is no presence anymore, and public space (along with suburbanization) has rapidly eroded over the past 10-15 years since smartphones were invented. Now commercials for phones/5G normalize the idea that you should be able to download/stream a movie on your phone walking down a sidewalk.
There's a balance that needs to be struck here, and it's going to be difficult to reach because we're still relatively in the infancy of these fancy electronic gadgets. Particularly in the US where individualism and personal choice is so deeply part of our culture, it will be difficult to restore the public space so that we can come to expect if you go out in public, people are actually... present and there. But somehow we eventually came to the same conclusion with banning smoking in restaurants et. al.
I'd hate to see them regulated, or... how would I ever remember anything? With paper? I'd be hosed if I lost it, and I lose... everything.. including my keys and wallet.... all the time, which I also use my phone to find.
The 1990s solution was just to really amplify the public space. Things like the rainforest cafe were very normal aesthetically. We essentially used clickbait in real life.
Smartphones are one half of it. The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea. We hardly even have them besides restaurants!
Even virtually, we don't have anything like true community forms to the degree we used to. Single player epics are a major game genre. Watching netflix is the new pastime, etc. Most of our big cultural things are fairly private now.
We even talk about privacy probably more than any other technical topic, and that is very new. Nobody but pirates would have known what a VPN was till know, and it was common to not care what the NSA knows about you(Ok, a lot of us like me are still like that).
And at the same time, everything has become about sex more than ever before, and even that seems to be more of a private thing than a public Hollywood drama spectacle.
The concept of a "dream job" is widely mocked. Everything seems to be seen as just some infrastructure to support private life.
What do you... do in public exactly? We are told every day it's just place you go to get ready to be at home.
Banning phones would just lead to everyone staring at a wall instead of a phone, until we actually restablish the public sphere as a real thing.
We've been very unconscious about our acceptance and deployment of technologies, and I don't know that there's really any way around that. It's sort of a Catch-22, technologies empower the individual. Reflecting on it, they tend to create a path of least resistance which is typically isolated (visiting Radio Shack in person as opposed to online). This isolation is inhumane though, we're social animals at heart, but it's way easier to find exactly what you want in the online catalogue of literally everything than it is to move around in the physical world, dealing with x, y, and z. Ultimately, as an arbitrary unit (society?), we've sort of walled ourselves into a really undesirable landscape that I'd argue we're pretty actually fucking averse to.
We hand off these novelties to future generations without any real bearing, all the organizations, traditions, adaptations, and more or less say "You figure it out." And the craziest thing is just the fucking rapidity of it all. Think of life in the 1920's. People have lived that long, 100 years. Imagine the cognitive whiplash watching highways and motor vehicles emerging, radio, television, the nuclear bomb, commercial airliners and transcontinental travel being trivialized, mass warfare, helicopters, wireless communication, calculators, computers, internet and the list goes on - every alteration of the nuanced fiber weave of the social fabric that all those techniques have shorn, altered or displaced.
We have no real reference point in the here and now that can comprehensively assist us in a meaningful convergence, we've sort of been shot into a dark vacuum entirely unconscious of the consequences with the pretense that it's what we desire. But I think we're quickly coming to find, at least those conscious of the implications, is that what we desire isn't necessarily good for us.
But the thing is, I don't think it's probable that we could really retard the unraveling of a technology. If it wasn't Ford it would've been someone else. I don't think it's possible to limit human curiosity, if not culture A, then culture B will ask the questions.
>it's way easier to find exactly what you want in the online catalogue of literally everything than it is to move around in the physical world
Perhaps if cities and communities were pleasant places to walk and bicycle this could change. In that case, the traveling is a positive addition and makes the trip enjoyable rather than a negative cost.
>The other half is we have kind of deprecated public spaces as an idea
We used to use the coffee house/bar in my town as the public house, where news was spread and discussions took place. The demise of such places has been very unfortunate and our interaction is now much poorer in both quantity and quality. Facebook/Twitter/Reddit are poor replacements, although I do like my town's subreddit.
I really don't know how we are going to reestablish public places again but I hope it happens.
I would love to see something like the cafeterias in Mexico City where people go to have coffee, eat, talk, play games, and catch up with each other.
If I want to remember something I write it down, or I train the memory. The phone is so ephemeral, just a vague cloud without landmarks or permanence-- how would I find the information again after I put it in my phone?
Your system (probably) works well for you, and I'm happy you have something which serves your needs.
Memory has a limit. I'm about 90% sure I have dyspraxia which is an ADD/Dyslexia/etc type condition, and have essentially never been able to learn.... anything to a 100% reliable level.
At the moment I'm using a custom app called Drayer Journal which is designed to solve the permanence and search issue with P2P sync, Heirachal organization, and exporting subtrees as shareable documents. Unfortunately it's a KivyMD prototype and I'm not sure I want to rewrite it in something less buggy.
It does seem that for whatever reason, most artistic fields were doing better without present day tech though.
Even if we took this as a valid statement on its face, it's also
- A personal safety tool used by vulnerable people to protect themselves, from joggers to the mentally ill
- A way of checking in on one's family member suffering from illness
- Access to information that is contextually important like specific venue masking guidelines
- A means of spending time with family; as long as work knows they can reach you, you are good.
Etc.
I think it's a good idea to ask not only if we still want to be "blame the tool" people, or "blame the people" people, but also whether we want to open up this general context where we enshroud efforts to project values in a casement that looks like generalized blame of device and person both.
IMO we can do better than methods that turn into "see something, shame something" especially when so many details matter.
I'm not sure I agree that it's second-hand smoke to the public, but it's definitely first-hand smoke to the user.
I mean, yea it's great you can use the smartphone to do those noble things you listed, but that's not what 99% of the people standing in line, head crooked down, eyes glazed, thumb flying back and forth are doing. They're scrolling insta or snap, or tiktok, chasing that continuous dopamine drip. I remember pre-pandemic walking past a huge line outside of a movie theater, and every single person was scrolling content, eerily silent, not even talking to the people they were with. These people were not checking in on local safety information.
I'm not going to shame them. If that's how you want to live your life, it doesn't affect me. I don't care if the guy in front of me in line is high on drugs or high on instagram as long as 1. I don't smell it and 2. he moves forward along with everyone when the line moves.
Sounds pretty serious. Why not take a moment and ask them what they are doing and why their phones help them out, rather than projecting your worst expectations onto them en masse? It'd be much easier to help them out that way, if you are really interested in assisting via your personal values.
Otherwise it appears indistinguishable from shaming them inwardly, which could be even worse than doing it loudly, in person, and giving them a chance to defend themselves.
This is a weird argument to me, since second hand smoke causes cancer. I agree that we're probably more distracted than is good for us, and there are contexts where that's a public health risk (specifically when driving), but until we see evidence that public phone use causes bystanders to get cancer, equating the two seems hyperbolic.
I get your sentiment, but treating it like second hand smoke seems a bit silly. There's no health risk if a stranger on the train wants to be on their phone instead of talking to me.
Before covid, I went to a few speed dating events with a "no phone" policy. And no one had any trouble with that. We also already have "no phone" on occasion, like on quiet cars on trains.
So do we need cell phone free spaces enforced by law instead of social politeness? What spaces should be cell phone free.
As a parent of a three year old, one of the worst things to me is seeing other parents pushing a pram with the baby facing the parent, but the parent facing their smartphone; their mind somewhere else. I know I'm an outsider on this topic; I don't have a smartphone¹, but I just can't fathom how you can let that thing get between you and your child in that crucial bonding phase babies go through. How is this not an addiction?
I fully agree with your smoking analogy. I wonder how long it will be before the majority sees it that way too.
1: Technically speaking I do, but its a smartphone with Ubuntu on it (Meizu sold them years ago). As it is now long out of updates and as society is pushing hard to have certain apps available (banking, authentication, messaging), I will probably have to get an Android soon. I have no intention of changing my behaviour with these devices though.
This article is about petroleum-derived products, and cutting your carbon footprint by choosing alternatives.
One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage. If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means. It seems incredibly wasteful to massively build out green energy to continue to prop up a system where we all drive several-ton hunks of metal one mile to grab a coffee at a drive-thru.
I see stock pictures of traffic jams [0] and just think that EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle.
> One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage.
The big problem we have with renewables right now is matching generation with demand. Solar is really cheap for daytime generation, but what are you going to do at night?
Electric cars don't have that problem. They're parked for most of the day, they need to be charged once a day or less, so they can be charged whenever renewable generation is available. Which makes deployment of renewables more economical, which means we get more of it.
> If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means.
We can do two things at once.
The biggest thing we can do to reduce vehicle miles traveled is to relax zoning near urban areas to allow higher density housing to be built closer to jobs. That works, it makes housing more affordable (which is independently good) and people waste less time commuting.
It also takes years before the new housing is actually built and even then doesn't solve the entire problem. You can't replace last mile truck deliveries with higher density housing or mass transit; you need electric trucks. Nobody is going to build low ridership mass transit to the low density suburbs that already exist, and they're not all going to cease to exist.
100% of cars are not going away anytime in the next century, but making the large majority of new cars electric is feasible within the next few years.
This is not a problem with a single solution. It's a problem with 100 solutions that each have a niche and you solve the problem best by deploying them all, each in the place where it makes the most sense.
The whole "what about at night?!" line has been trotted incessantly out here, slashdot, hackaday, reddit, etc like people in the utility industry aren't aware. A huge amount of electrical load happens during the day that doesn't happen in the dead of the night, which is why many utilities offer nighttime cheaper rates.
That hasn't stopped utilities from deploying wind and solar for 40% of their new generation over the last year or two, while shutting down coal plants left and right. For half a decade it's been considered settled fact that solar and wind are cheapest and the way forward. So, maybe this isn't as big a deal as you think it is.
Attention long ago shifted toward planning the grid to accommodate that, and also on grid-scale storage projects. Pumped hydro has been used extensively in the UK for decades because every time the BBC finished a program, everyone watching TV would fire up their electric kettle at the same time. There are several pumped hydro installations in Canada and the US as well.
Most EVs can schedule charging cycles and numerous utilities provide special rates for customers who agree to some level of utility control on their charging similar to how utilities provide discounts to people who let them tweak their AC thermostat; you can still override it, in most cases. In Australia, going back several decades, there was a grid load reduction signal system that worked by generating a harmonic that load reduction switches would look for.
An increasing number of EVs are set up to be able to backfeed power into the grid, and the idea is that they could do so on request from the utility.
Lots of utilities offer off-peak billing incentives. Imagine a world where your fridge does most of its cooling during the day, and "rides" through the night, etc.
EV charging stations are starting to come with their own local battery systems because DC fast charging, particularly at 800V, is enough power that it can be difficult to get enough electrical service and in some locations the station sits unused for a fair period of time.
Add in the fact that lithium ion battery prices continue to plunge following expected rules about production costs, as well as other technologies maturing; there's an iron salt based flow battery that looks really promising, made of very cheap and extremely prevalent materials (salt, iron, and water mostly) and scales fairly well.
>That hasn't stopped utilities from deploying wind and solar for 40% of their new generation over the last year or two, while shutting down coal plants left and right. For half a decade it's been considered settled fact that solar and wind are cheapest and the way forward. So, maybe this isn't as big a deal as you think it is.
Conspicuously absent in this incomplete story is the fact that so much of the coal has been replaced by natural gas, which doesn't have the giant unreliability downside of solar and wind. You can get away with >=~40% of your energy generated by solar/wind on every single day of the year with no interruption. Bump that up to 80% and it'll take a long time and a lot of money to accomplish that without sacrificing reliability.
But why? Just use nuclear for the other half. The goal is not "renewable energy ASAP". The goal is "minimize fossil fuel usage ASAP".
Smaller series-built plants will solve the long lead time problem. Once installed these are to be run at max capacity all the time, providing the base load - actually running a nuclear power plant is cheap compared to all other energy sources, the costs are mostly made in the beginning - planning and construction - and end - dismantlement and conservation - of the plant. Those costs - both head and tail - will go down radically with series-built plants. Once a reliable and cheap nuclear or hydro base load is in place the rest can be filled in with a mixture of renewables with storage (which is not available for now except for regions with a large established hydro-power infrastructure), renewables with fossil-based backup or more nuclear capacity. Renewables can not be used on their own as long as the storage problem is not solved, insisting that they can will and does lead to extreme price hikes and brown/blackouts.
I'd be wary of using Wikipedia as a source on this politically contentious issue since it has a known and fairly extreme slant to the "left" on most of these issues, in part due to the Wikipedia "reliable/perennial sources" policy [1] which promotes the use of left-biased sources while demoting centre- or right-biased sources.
That mostly depends on the will of the regulator, technically these systems are mostly ready. The NuScale 50MW modular reactor has now gotten its safety approval [1,2 - interesting to see how Popular Mechanics claims to "like nuclear technology" while the Scientific American article shows the more negative attitude "green" proponents usually espouse ] so it is a step closer to reality, what remains is mostly more rounds of approval and certification. In the UK Rolls Royce is working on a larger (440MW) [3] type of modular reactor with a stated goal of having them up and running in 10 years, building at a pace of 2 per year. Russia and China are also working on this type of reactor, so is Argentina. The IAEA has a technology roadmap for the deployment of small modular reactors [4] for those who want to read more on the subject.
To answer your "less than 15" question succinctly: certainly, as long as the activists are kept at bay. Possibly, if they are allowed to roam free to wreak havoc. Probably not if they are put in control.
It's doubtful the utilities are going to leave money on the table if there is a significant uptick in nighttime electricity usage due to to charging.
I'm not sure I'd want the lifetime of the most expensive component in my car being used to supplement the grid. But not only that, the incentives for feeding power back into the grid are under attack from the utilities:
“I'm not sure I'd want the lifetime of the most expensive component in my car being used to supplement the grid.”
I’d imagine that a service like that would be paid for, indeed. Tesla has talked about setting up a system to orchestrate grid support from car batteries and powerwalls.
As I understand it there is more money to be earnt to maintain grid frequency, than to shift load. I guess with more battery storage on the grid the variability in price at higher frequency will calls being made for seconds and minutes will dip.
There’s storage over the day night cycle but earning once a day will take longer to generate income.
But seasonal variability will be generating income a lot more slowly unless the price goes very high, but there would probably be other problems at that point.
If the workplace has chargers then a large number of cars can also be charged in the 9-5 time span when there is usually plenty of sun. Cars are idle most of the time, so we just have to make sure that they are plugged into the grid whenever they are not being driven, and then have intelligent charging systems that use EVs as sinks when there is a surplus.
It's a nice idea, but for it to work, it's going to need to be cheaper for the end user to charge their car at work than at home overnight (this is unlikely to be true in the near future, although could be made true with the right incentives), and workplaces are going to have to have some incentive to install them.
Something like, the employer provides free low speed electric car charging to the public because this is good PR and shows that they're green and encourages customers or clients to hang out on their premises.
But then since it's available to any "members of the public" yet using it involves parking your car at that company's building for eight hours, there is high uptake of the service by employees, and the company is sure to mention their green initiative when recruiting new workers.
That’s expensive, especially on top of a new EV purchase and charger install. How do you avoid a tragedy of the commons without mandating batteries on every new charger installation?
An EV driving 15k miles per year only averages ~500w of electricity 24/7. The infrastructure is therefore relatively cheap.
So at scale a 1GWh battery pack can charge ~100,000 cars at any time of the day. But, assuming PV adoption continues electricity prices will be lower in the day so most people will end up charging at the office.
They average 500W but that's a lot of 0W mixed in with a little bit of 10,000W. If everyone decides they want their 10,000W at the same time it's not going to work out.
> a 1 GWh battery pack
Some day soon. For now though that's about the total installed capacity for the entire USA [0].
Trains are amazing for cutting out carbon from the delivery chain. You can even run double stack containers with overhead electrical traction (both China and India do it). Honestly using trucks to ship from a California port to Utah makes no sense - use trains and then transfer to trucks only for the absolute last mile
It's a false dichotomy. We can BOTH build more green energy, and use some of it to displace fossil fuels from transportation.
If you predicate the future on reducing car dependency, good luck. I mean it's a noble goal, but you're gonna be holding your breath a while. Cars are popular for a lot of reasons.
Likewise trying to build enough solar panels for all the car-miles currently driven ends up being a mountain of solar indeed. So reducing the miles driven would ALSO be nice.
But we have to start on both and push hard on both, because meeting in the middle will happen a lot sooner.
Cars can be popular and not be a necessity for the majority of the population, and that will still drastically cut emission, pollution and traffic congestion.
And so is jetting off somewhere for holidays.. realistically we need to cut down so much to survive, but so far everyone is working on "it's future society's problem".
Only when the threat of death was within weeks did humans actually react with lockdowns, etc...
It's going to be interesting when we go back to the normal human behavior of dying within 50 miles of where we were born.
I can see a lot of people posting on this forum telling their grandkids, "I actually saw the Eiffel Tower in person, once. Yes, really! There was this thing called 'tourism'."
Well, governments quickness to full shutdowns, lockdowns, and travel bans across the world has made international travel much more less likely for myself, which sucks because I would've liked to see the world.
EVs are going to drive out gasoline for very comparable reasons to digital cameras driving out film cameras. That's a win for CO2, a win for air pollution in cities (that may be shaving points off people's IQ and definitely is shaving years off their lives), and a win for fungibility of energy generation. As gasoline infrastructure withers, it will be a win for retaining progress; it will no longer be possible to go back.
None of these things end car culture, but switching away from gasoline may help to de-fang it by reducing the macho attraction. If cars become just about getting from A to B, then alternatives may start to look more viable.
It's also a win for reducing oil dependency for many nations. Many of the oil producing countries are not always the most savory characters, and energy independence is an important national security goal in itself
And perhaps more importantly, there isn’t miles of red tape and NIMBYism to overcome to be able to roll out EVs.
I’m strongly in favor of nationwide electric rail, but I also know that accomplishing that will be nearly impossible short of the federal government steamrolling it through, which itself is unlikely due to oil and auto lobbying.
So I see it as a sort of, “take what you can get” situation.
I agree, the much better solution would be to reduce the cultural reliance on cars in general. Incentives for more work from home, more walkable and bikeable cities, more amenities locally, better public transport... Unfortunately at least in the US such changes are basically impossible due to the culture, at least currently. A generational die off or two might radically change that.
> EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle.
Bad urban planning in the US is arguably a bigger problem. Most people aren't rich enough to live within walkable distance of their nearest coffee shop, grocery store, and train station. Trains make you wait an hour outside in the cold wet rain without bathrooms while a mentally ill person harrasses you for half of the hour. Buses don't show up. Curb ramps don't have drainage, so you have wet socks. And the nearest actual bathroom is for "customers only" (at least for males).
Right. Oddly this is where our climate problems can meet our affordable housing problems: start building clusters of neighborhoods that are designed to be walkable and bikeable. These are in stupidly high demand, we just need more of them. Default to installing heat pumps, solar panels, and EV hookups.
There's no silver bullets, but if the average person winds up driving X% fewer miles because they have the option to walk, that's a meaningful win.
Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though. Likely the market will speak at some point and oil / electricity will become too expensive for people to own houses in the suburbs, but it’ll be painful when so much of the suburbanites identity is tied around this false idea of being “left alone”.
That, and the majority of Americans don’t even walk anymore, you can spend hours of driving without seeing someone walking to somewhere (as opposed to walking their dog), it’s insane.
> Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though
Europe where? Suburbs are mostly an American thing, and the closest equivalents in most European cities are dense-ish, and usually have some form of public transit connection. Many cases can be improved a lot, but it isn't even close to being comparable to the thoroughly unsustainable very low density American sprawl.
Reduce the need for cars which will reduce the load on the grid if they're driven less.
But move people to buy EV cars instead of ICE where they can't do away with having a car.
Even if that still uses dirty energy sources, it's still cleaner than having ICE cars driving everywhere with their little inefficient engines, when a big power plant can do much more to be efficient. It also decouples energy sources in such a way that green energy can be built up to replace it without consumer disruption.
It's a win win to move people to EVs, but it's not the only end goal for better climate policy
>If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency
I've spoken to a subset of EV proponents who would strongly disagree with this. They say that it's not feasible or even possible, or maybe even acceptable, to convince enough people to change their lifestyle this radically. Therefore, we need to just all buy EVs.
Personally I agree with you, although the huge boost that continuing new development gives to my field as an engineer is undeniable.
If HN had a vote option that represented "I mostly agree with what you've written, but worry you're only saying it as half-garbled talking point designed to oppose something else that I support" it would get a lot of use from me.
I applaud your support of walkable cities with robust public transportation infrastructure.
I'm sad that it seems to mostly just be an echo of a decades long misinformation campaign against EVs rather than a positive and sincere suggestion to improve society.
The phrase "if we were rational and serious" is a red flag. Rarely has that come up in climate change discussions without a whole bunch of (ironically) irrational assumptions attached to it.
Oh if only those silly greens had been more rational! What amazing progress we could have made on this problem. Are we all supposed to pretend that lots of serious (acting) figures on the, let's say, non-green side didn't openly and blatantly lie about it not being a problem and all the solutions being cons long after everyone knew this was what they were doing?
If I was to come up with a list of things that were not rational or serious "pretend climate change is not happening" would come way before "let's stop using internal combustion engines in crowded cities because we have cheaper, better, quieter, healthier alternatives readily available".
This is the only solution I accept these days in any serious discussion about cutting carbon emissions. And yea I know about Chernobyl and Fuckushima, but we’re still better off dealing with focused problems like that instead of vague extinction level crisis.
Yeah, I know about Chernobyl too - I grew up there and my parents still work there (since 1987). Yes, it was a huge tragedy but it’s effects are hugely exaggerated by oil and gas lobbyists in US.
The bigger problem with EV revolution is carbon footprint of its side effects, e.g., extra emissions from producing and utilizing batteries, or extra particulates from tire wear due to weight of electric vehicles.
Explain why it's heavier? Because electric vehicles carry all the chemistry, while gasoline powered vehicles only carry carbon and hydrogen and take oxygen from the air.
Or explain why the difference in weight is negligible? But it's not, electric vehicles are noticeably heavier, and vehicle weight is the primary driver of tire wear and road wear.
Also worth adding that wealth doesn't need to mean owning more material possessions. Wealth can take the form of knowledge, opportunities, increased quality of life, etc. Think educational wealth, mental wealth, spiritual wealth, etc.
Less can also be more. How wealthy is an elderly person who requires multiple prescription drugs, nurse/home-care, etc.? Sure they might have acquired money during their life to pay for these things, but that also means they are dependent (read: not free) on a lot of things too. Dependency is a sort of anti-wealth.
Besides the high-tech hype, there's also the economic absurdity behind all these proposals. The average American household already spends 1/6th of its income on (car) transportation. These VTOLs are cars on steroids, with even more modes of failure and imaginably more regulation. I assume they would do a ride-sharing / taxi business model, but even then... the average person won't be able to afford a ride in one of these because the average American can't even keep up with ordinary car payments.
It's depressingly comical to see these futuristic pitches when the reality is there won't be any customers left because the middle class will be completely gone in near time. People need to have money in order to spend it.
All air taxi services are targeted toward affluent customers, not the middle class. That's just the nature of the industry. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad business plan — Ferrari does pretty well targeting those customers. But even if the industry is viable that doesn't mean Lillium will succeed.
It's also a hodge-podge of other annoying things I want removed on the web, like when articles have pull quotes that repeat what they just wrote one paragraph ago, or when sites block the ability to paste passwords.
The extension is available for Firefox and Chrome/Vivaldi, but it has a lot more development to get it where I want it.
Would appreciate any feedback and tips on both the extension itself as well as advice on monetization.
https://trashpandaextension.com/
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