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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…


  • I know BC at least solved this problem a few years ago by just legally requiring landlords to provide L2 chargers when asked and suddenly EVs were very popular with apartment owners.

    While L2 chargers are definitely the ideal for household charging, it’s worth noting for places with street parking and such that you absolutely can charge an EV overnight with an household outlet and an extension cord, At least you can if you’re not averageing more than 60 miles(100km) per day, and if you’re dependent on street parking you’re probably closer into town than that.

    Ideally the government would institute a similar must provide L2 if asked for employees at places with electric service, as that would ensure that they could not only get 170miles (290km) during a 9-5 shift, but allow for bidirectional charging to actually help with bulk grid storage, or at least incentivize charging at times when solar is plentiful instead of at night where you’re going to be drawing from a grid scale battery or hydro resivor.

    On the grid front, while electrification will require expansion of capacity, it is worth remembering that this is not a unprecedented surge in growth so much as a return to the normal rate of grid expansion after decades of austerity. Even in north america, with our sprawling suburbs built on long freeway car commutes, our average EV consumes less power than our average air conditioner does over the entire year.

    Admittedly optimizing for grid distribution means charging overnight though, when all the infrastructure that feed those hungry air conditioners during the day is siting around with unused capacity, so the optimal mix will depend on whether upgrading distribution infrastructure is more expensive than upgrading grid storage infrastructure and nighttime generating capacity.


  • Of course, and busses (or at least trolley buses) are and for all of the foreseeable future will continue to be the best form of mass transport for rural, near rural, towns, and suburbs. I’m just jaded by politicians who seem to think that a big bus completely equivalent to a tram or light rail, and despise thouse who take half decent tram proposals and downgrade them once more into f-ing BRT, which is at best a slightly cheaper to build worse tram, and which rarely live up to even that goal.




  • Sonori@beehaw.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyzJet Fuel
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    7 days ago

    Note, since the 80s the vast, vast majority of piston driven aircraft engines have been able to operate on unleaded fuel. We know this because for decades GA pilots have been filling out the paperwork for an experimental fuel variance and then running these engines unmodified on the cheaper unleaded they got from the gas station down the street without any apparent issue or rise in engine maintenance/failures among pilots that do this. The main hurdles being the necessary and not insignificant paperwork as well as concern over insurance rates.

    From my understanding there was a problem with one series of engine in the seventies that was suspected to be due to unleaded fuel among the more modern product line of a major manufacturer, and while the engine was modified to fix it neither Lycoming nor Continental, the two primary piston engine manufacturers who make up the vast majority of the market, saw significant pressure to drop the official recommendation for unleaded until relatively recently.

    Since the US finally started to get serious about phasing out leaded avgas in the 2010s, and the aditude of its been fine so far so why risk any change has run up against said pressure, both have to my knowledge dropped the requirement retroactively with no modification necessary for the majority of their historical and current product line.

    You might need to re-engine or more likely just get an exemption for flying history aircraft, but the benefit to the hundreds of thousands that live near GA airports in terms of reduced damage to children’s nervous systems far outweighs the nebulous cost of switching the default form of avgas.








  • I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.

    Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.



  • Well if we make building an already solidly profitable lot half a percent more profitable then suddenly all the developers will start selling units for far under market rate, obviously. It’s not like developers will continue to sit on land instead of risking completely supplying the market and thus causing unit prices and profit margins to fall, after all they can now add another closet to each floor instead of an interwoven staircase./s


  • Same reason people convicted of raping children here in the US heavily push for the limiting of school sex education, its statistically proven to significantly limit the number of children who report being raped.

    While most children are sexually abused by their family, and as such giving the abusers the option to opt out of sex education for their children has proven useful, you still have to worry about their classmates catching it, and so the more of them you can keep from knowing what rape is and how to report it, the better your odds of getting away with it are.


  • I’d argue that even if you waste everything from hunting deer, in most areas of the US fact their is now one less deer is definite ecological benefit all on its own.

    A forest with a large deer population where people don’t landscape and fence every tree is going to become either a near monoculture with the only exceptions being invasive species. This is because deer eat most but not all native saplings before they can grow to the point they can survive a deer attack, and with most forests in the US having far, far higher populations than natural we get far fewer native trees than natural.

    Normally anything like modern deer levels would have led to a population explosion of predators to keep them in check, but because most deer predators are far more vulnerable to human presence, activity, and historical control efforts than deer, which thrive in human dominated areas, the result has been significant damage to forests.

    As such, anything like hunting that can lower the deer population back towards natural is very enthical as it doing far more to protect the forest than any number of newly planted saplings could ever do. Your mileage may very, all forests arn’t the same, check the ecology of your local forest before hunting to figure out what the forest needs more of and what it need less of, etc…