It’s pretty clean. I moved here a few years ago and have never gotten the feeling that it’s dirty. Around the homeless camps though it can be a little rough though.
Been here 15 years now… By comparison to 2008, Seattle is a wreck. The turning point was around 2015 when Amazon decided to make it their permanent HQ. Pre vs post 2015 rent prices are insane. I had a top-floor waterfront place on Lake Washington for $850 until 2015.
I wouldn’t necessarily put that on Amazon coming in. That’s been the trend in all cities over the past 10 years. Even suburban areas are feeling it. Hopefully remote work pushes up populations in smaller towns so other non-remote growth can occur in more affordable areas.
Our population increased by tens of thousands in the first year as a result of the announcement by Amazon that Seattle would be the permanent HQ. Following that, tons of cheaply made, overpriced housing was put up all over the city. Businesses were priced out and knocked down to make way for the shitty people-boxes.
Seattle is a geographically constrained area that was already at capacity. Blue collar workers and service industry folk were priced out and pushed into surrounding areas. Traffic and congestion increased. Homelessness skyrocketed.
I would agree that the issue is widespread, but in this case, correlation and causation line up.
It’s rough everywhere, I know. Shit like this article discusses doesn’t help. Austin, TX was also reeling from the use of software like this. I’m sure other places are as well.
Its always more costly and less efficient to produce new things in smaller quantity than large numbers. So electric car manufacturers at this point in time costs more to produce from an environment perspective. As the number of electric cars go up, my understanding is that this will compare to fossil fuel car production.
Imo you cannot compare these two as its impossible to be as efficient as a large scale manufacturer until you become one yourself.
Fossil fuel cars do use cobalt though, significantly less though. But they also need fossil fuels which are hard to come by (in an environmentally friendly way.
At the moment they do with the Lithium batteries but better and cheaper batteries are already on the market that have solved that rare minerals problem. Sodium ion batteries have most of the capacity by weight of Lithium type batteries, but they do not require any of the rare minerals, in fact they can be made with minerals that are cheap and abundant in the USA. They are also non-flammable, much safer than lithium.
Yeah economies of scale are absolutely a thing, but what the average person is coming around to is the idea that the personal vehicle is environmentally unfeasible. Tyre wear alone has a significant environmental impact and electric vehicles are only going to make that problem work. That’s just one factor of countless factors. Transportation is a necessity, personal transportation isn’t (not entirely true, some places have such terrible transportation infrastructure that a personal vehicle is a necessity). Electric car manufacturers are never going to tell you not to buy their car regardless of the fact that their products significantly contribute to climate change.
The problem is more like that cars that use fossil fuels have a very much lower efficiency rate than electric cars. So theoretical if you use the same amount of FF for the energy production and use that for electric cars it would be more efficient. But that shouldnt be the solution.
memes
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.