Pipoca

@Pipoca@lemmy.world

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Pipoca, (edited )

DS9 ran till '99, though.

The first seasons were 30 years ago, but the ending is only about 25 years ago.

BSG, though, finished in 1979. If someone says “thirty years ago” and your first thought is the 70s, you might be old. BSG ended 45 years ago. It’s 20 years older than the finale of DS9.

Edit: if someone asks you “who was president 30 years ago”, do you instantly think of Jimmy Carter? Because BSG came out basically in the middle of his presidency. If your first thought was Bush or Reagan, you associate the Sci Fi of 30 years ago with reruns of BSG.

Pipoca,

Sometimes in colonial America, people named things in honor a Duke who funded/controlled the place.

For example, after NY was captured from the Dutch, it was a proprietary colony of the Duke of York.

Better York sounds like it’s just antagonistic towards the guy.

Pipoca,

Yes, uncountably infinite sets are larger than countably infinite sets.

But these are both a countably infinite number of bills. They’re the same infinity.

Pipoca,

So why was there such a big spike in deaths during the pandemic, essentially limited to the US?

They have phones in the Netherlands, too, but didn’t see the spike in deaths. Are the Dutch naturally more responsible drivers or something?

Pipoca,

It’s not just car-centric Euclidean zoning and suburban sprawl.

The US also builds really dangerous stroads that you don’t really see in most other countries.

5+ lanes of 55mph traffic next to a sidewalk and tons of driveways for businesses is inherently unsafe.

It’s also interesting to note that the biggest spike in fatalities was during the pandemic.

The best explanation I’ve heard is that bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic essentially disappeared with the switch to WFH during the pandemic. Streets artificially looked safer pre-pandemic due to drivers getting stuck in traffic at peak periods. The pandemic just revealed how inherently unsafe American stroads are.

rivoluzioneurbanamobilita, to fuck_cars Italian
@rivoluzioneurbanamobilita@mastodon.uno avatar

"Big Clearance! 12 in place of 1!"

"Grande offerta! 12 per 1!"

ENFB cyclists' union, Woerden, 1993; poster by Theo van den Boogaard

@fuck_cars

Pipoca, (edited )

I mean, you also see that in the US with bike path design in general.

Bike paths around me in the US mostly go along creeks and railroads. There’s one in the suburbs that’s an abandoned rail line out into farmland. They’re mostly designed as places for suburbanites to drive to for exercise. They’re more of a park than a piece of transportation infrastructure.

Oulu, on the other hand, has bike paths that go through the center of town, out to the suburbs. There’s over 300 bike underpasses on the main bike paths. It’s designed for commuters, for people running errands, and for kindergarteners to bike to school. They’re a practical bit of transportation infrastructure.

Pipoca,

Plenty of people in Oulu, Finland bike literally all year round. Fully 12% of all trips in winter are made by bike.

Their secret? Just as the roads are plowed, so are the bike paths. If we didn’t plow and salt the roads up north, cars would also seem ridiculously impractical compared to a snowmobile or cross country skis.

Oulu invests in making winter biking safe and practical, while American cities of comparable size and climate like Syracuse, NY don’t. The results are predictable.

Pipoca,

The problem is that it isn’t a matter of cars vs busses. It’s a matter of urban design in general.

Public transit gets better as density goes up. A bus that drops you off at a giant-ass Walmart parking lot with nothing else but two drivethroughs in walking distance isn’t very useful. A bus that drops you off in a neighborhood with 4 dozen shops, a dozen restaurants, 4 bars and 3 coffee shops within a 5 minute walk is way more useful.

By contrast, density makes driving worse. Density means more people are driving the same way you want to go. More people in cars means more traffic on the road with you. Designing for cars pushes you to low density sprawl.

Just building public transit isn’t the solution. Just building public transit in a typical American suburban sprawl makes something about as compelling as a Ford F150 in Vatican City.

You have to fix urban design - stop building stroads and start building streetcar suburbs again.

Pipoca,

The walkshed of public transit is also really important.

People aren’t going to take a train to a parking lot…

Pipoca,

The statistic that “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions” is better understood as “Just 100 companies responsible for selling 71% of global fossil fuels”. It’s fundamentally saying that there’s a few large coal, oil and gas companies worldwide selling us most of the supply.

If you want those companies to stop polluting, that amounts to those companies not selling fossil fuels.

Which is honestly the goal, but the only way to do that is to replace the demand for fossil fuels. Cutting the US off from fossil fuels would kill a ton of people if you didn’t first make an energy grid 100% powered by renewables, got people to buy electric cars, cold climate heat pumps, etc.

Pipoca,

Sure - blame Rockefeller, Henry Ford, etc. for that. Also e.g. Robert Moses, not that he was a billionaire. But they’re all dead. They’ve been dead.

Is America’s suburban sprawl the fault of Bill Gates in particular? Or Bezos, Musk, or Dell?

Pipoca,

Bullshit.

The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.

That is to say, if you multiply the emissions of the gasoline sold by ExxonMobil by whatever percentage of ExxonMobile that’s in Bill Gate’s portfolio, you get an absolutely ridiculous emissions number.

But that seems to assume that if it weren’t for those dastardly billionaires investing in oil companies, we’d all be living in 10-minute cities with incredible subways connected by high speed rail, powered entirely by renewables, and heated by geothermal heat pumps. And I honestly don’t beleive that.

Pipoca, (edited )

That would be “cut homelessness in half” or “cut the number of homeless people in half”. That’s very different from “cut all homeless people in half”, which would be bisecting each homeless person. This is clearly a joke about conservatives being heartless monsters, right?

Or is this a dialectal grammar difference between UK and US English?

Pipoca,

Crappy default package management.

What’s wrong with homebrew?

Pipoca,

I don’t really think it’s better. They’re fine for coding.

They’re basically the corporate default because they’re easier for companies to buy and remotely administer, they’ve got good VPN software, good resale value, etc.

Pipoca,

There’s a Sci Fi trilogy about that. All aliens are omnicidal.

The main rule is “don’t ever get spotted by another civilization”. If another nearby civilization wants to conquer you, you could stop them by threatening to broadcast both our and their locations more broadly, a kind of mutually assured distruction.

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Pipoca,

How do you ensure the accuracy of the data going into the block chain in the first place?

Pipoca,

There’s many regional differences in American English.

First, pronunciation is always changing, and changes tend to happen regionally.

For example, there’s the Mary-merry-marry merger. A bit over half of American speakers pronounce all three of those words identically, as mɛri. About 17% of Americans have a full three-way contrast. In NYC, for example, they’d say meɹi, mæɹi, and mɛɹi. And other people merged two of the three.

The pen-pin merger is a famous feature of southern American dialects.

Some words have regional pronunciations - crayon can have one or two syllables, for example.

And then there’s regional words, like pop vs soda, bucket vs pail, firefly vs lightning bug, you vs y’all vs yinz vs youse vs you lot vs you all vs you guys etc.

By asking about all of those sorts of things, you can figure out where someone’s from.

Pipoca,

EVs have about half the lifecycle emissions as a gas car, given today’s electric grid. Which is better, but not all that much better.

However: 80% of the US lives in metropolitan and micropolitan areas. 20% of the US is rural. You can build better public transit in cities and small towns, and stop doubling down on building shitty-ass suburban stroads and sprawl. But Farmer Joe is never going to bike 20 miles to the nearest Dollar General. It’s just not practical, and neither is putting a bus stop in front of every farm.

A car-lite world where Farmer Joe drives an EV to a farmer’s market that 95% of people walked, biked or took a bus to seems way better than either the status quo or a car-free world.

Pipoca,

The largest sources of transportation greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (21%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%).

Yes, your average driver creates a fraction of the emissions of the average flight.

But there are hundreds of millions of drivers in the US. Billions of car trips. And only tens of thousands of flights.

Changing the impact of one driver is small. Systemically changing the impact of tens of millions of drivers adds up.

Pipoca,

Noise pollution is a function of speed.

At low speeds, it’s mostly engine noise. At highway speeds, it’s mostly tire noise.

Pipoca,

Regenerative braking is basically turning the motors into a generator to recharge the battery. If you brake regeneratively, you’re not using your brake pads at all.

Many EVs can have their settings adjusted to where 90+% of braking can be just regenerative.

Pipoca,

Not quite.

FPTP always devolves into local two candidate elections.

There’s no guarantee, though, that those two parties are the same everywhere. Regional third parties can do quite well under FPTP. That particularly works for e.g. the Scottish National Party or the Bloc Quebecois.

Pipoca,

Pigs and chickens don’t eat air, you know.

70% of US soy becomes animal feed. Some of the rest is used industrially, or becomes biodisel. Relatively little US soy becomes soy sauce, tofu, etc.

Soy subsidies, in practice, mostly function as a chicken and pork subsidy.

You’ll notice that we heavily subsidize animal feed crops like corn and soy, and spend much less money subsidizing fruits and veggies, nuts, and other legumes like black beans or lentils.

Pipoca,

If you knead bread by hand, it’ll have some human DNA in it from e.g your skin cells. It’s almost impossible to cook or process food while preventing it from getting literally any human cells into it, because humans are shedding cells and DNA literally all the time. You can wear gloves, hairnets, and frequently mop up, but eliminating the problem entirely is hard.

Both a vegetarian burger and a beef burger are probably going to have more human DNA in it than either a steak or a pot of black beans would.

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