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> The Horse Association of America calculated that 54 million acres of US farmland was spared by the automobile

If only there was some kind of extra large horse more than one person could ride around town


The article is full of these false dichotomies, and relies on the bias of its audience to replace reason with hope. Most of its assumptions would be reasonable to make if we had the carbon dioxide levels of the 1980s, but that's four decades ago. The hope for technological progress without sacrifice is understandable, but wishful thinking nonetheless.

https://xkcd.com/1732/


Not to mention cherry-picking facts (at best). Case in point, cars today are more environmentally friendly than the 1980s, we are told. So much so that a car driving down the motorway today is greener than a parked car in the 80s.

Even over the past two decades the global annual car production has increased by over 50%, increasing embedded (production), direct (tailpipe) and indirect (electric) emissions because few countries are free from fossil fuels. Cars create noise pollution, air pollution through tyre particulates and poor land use practices that lead to urban sprawl and further car dependence.

Fortunately there is a lot of work being done in this space on many fronts, most notably around making public transport fast, efficient, comfortable and convenient, which reduces the need for cars. In the IT space there is tons of waste in short lived, locked down devices that people regularly replace because it's too hard; government action is needed (and in some cases has been implemented, like forcing Apple to support USB C cables).

I'm neither here nor there on nuclear power plants, but are actually insanely expensive. Just look at France which will spend over $US10b per replacement power plant, in a country with well established nuclear capabilities.

The idea that "climate activists" are wrong and pro-nuclear optimists are right is just a real weird take.


I helped the author make sense of the weird sparse data format USDA begrudgingly provides about bird flu. It appears to be increasing unabated


It’s lobbyist who will fill this gap


Lobbyists will fill the gap, and 70+ year old judges will rule on the intricacies of nuclear regulation by harkening back to 15th century English law.


It's so funny when people from common law countries pretend like they have a functioning legal system


> funny when people from common law countries pretend like they have a functioning legal system

As in the oldest continuously-operating legal systems?


Too snarky.

Common law works very well in practice. Law is a problem that is impossible to solve optimally. Civil law has plenty of weak points - like every complex system.


Can’t wait for an American Chernobyl disaster in a civil society that looks like handmaids tale.


We're still doing the handmaid's tale thing?



Multiple states are currently legally mandating teaching the Bible in schools, so... Yeah?


Blessed be the fruit.


FYI US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has form letters for dealing with debt collectors: https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/compliance-resour...


It was the Internet. Not because the powerful gained more power, because all possible revolutionaries became opiated.


> It was the Internet. Not because the powerful gained more power, because all possible revolutionaries became opiated

Is the claim that the frequency of revolutions scales inversely with internet penetration? Because this is trivially testable and obviously false. (Ukraine and Tunisia off the top of my head.)


Right? The climate is fine as long as you don’t depend on man made objects


Is it possible to contact the people impersonated so they can sue these companies?


At the time you could download the public comments on the FCC website. It was just a ton of copy/paste entries. Useless.


I think individuals would have to prove some sort of damages if they want to win a suit, unfortunately.


Misappropriation of likeness, fraud, etc.


So you have a single point of failure


It's too big to fail ;-)


That's not how modern web scraping works


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