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lemming934

@lemming934@lemmy.sdf.org

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Electric Aviation is already better than you think - Volts with David Roberts (www.volts.wtf)

Electric vehicles that can take off and land vertically, but then fly like a plane, are already being sold and used by hospitals and shipping companies. These vehicles have 5 batteries that give it a range of over 350 miles using current battery technology, though the batteries are intended to be swapped over the life of the...

lemming934 ,

Short haul flights should probably be high speed train rides anyway

lemming934 ,

I don't think it hurts the economy since moving people to producive areas increases productiviy.

It does hurt homeowners, who have managed to capture the regulatory regime by pressuring their city government into passing and maintaining zoning laws.

lemming934 ,

I think OP believes every town in the US has twice as many homeless people as churches, it doesnt need to be exactly 1 church and 2 homeless people.

But either way, that's probably not true. Since homeless people tend to be in larger cities.

But then again, lots of people become homless in the suburbs and then move to the city to get the social services. If churches in the suburbs housed a few people as they become homeless, it would probably help. It's better to keep people in their communities so they have a better chance of returning to housefullness.

But probably not that much, since homelessness rates are strongly correlated with housing prices, so expensive cities create more homelessness than cheap suburbs.

lemming934 ,

My issue with degrowth is that it's incompatible with capitalist society. Capitalism only works if the economy is growing. If the economy is stagnant, a win for your neighbor is a loss for you. It would be difficult to build a community under these conditions.

I know I'm on .ml and capitalism has a bad name around here. But I think is clear that markets can improve peoples lives, and alternatives are difficult to implement.

Turning fuckcars into an anticapitalist movement is unnecessary and unhelpful in my opinion. I just want to be able to bike around my city safely.

lemming934 ,

Unfortunately, Tina Kotek would rather allow citys to annex farmland to build more suburbs, defeating our urban growth boundary laws, which are a big part of what makes Oregon great.

ajsadauskas , (edited ) to Fuck Cars
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

Concerned about microplastics? Research shows one of the biggest sources is car tyres

A lot of the emphasis on reducing microplastics has focussed on things like plastic bags, clothing, and food packaging.

But there's a growing body of research that shows one of the biggest culprits by far is car tyres.

It's increasingly clear that we simply cannot solve the issue of microplastics in the environment while still using tyres — even with electric-powered cars.

"Tyre wear stands out as a major source of microplastic pollution. Globally, each person is responsible for around 1kg of microplastic pollution from tyre wear released into the environment on average each year – with even higher rates observed in developed nations.

"It is estimated that between 8% and 40% of these particles find their way into surface waters such as the sea, rivers and lakes through runoff from road surfaces, wastewater discharge or even through airborne transport.

"However, tyre wear microplastics have been largely overlooked as a microplastic pollutant. Their dark colour makes them difficult to detect, so these particles can’t be identified using the traditional spectroscopy methods used to identify other more colourful plastic polymers."

https://theconversation.com/check-your-tyres-you-might-be-adding-unnecessary-microplastics-to-the-environment-205612#:~:text=Tyre%20wear%20stands%20out%20as,rates%20observed%20in%20developed%20nations.

"Microplastic pollution has polluted the entire planet, from Arctic snow and Alpine soils to the deepest oceans. The particles can harbour toxic chemicals and harmful microbes and are known to harm some marine creatures. People are also known to consume them via food and water, and to breathe them, But the impact on human health is not yet known.

"“Roads are a very significant source of microplastics to remote areas, including the oceans,” said Andreas Stohl, from the Norwegian Institute for Air Research, who led the research. He said an average tyre loses 4kg during its lifetime. “It’s such a huge amount of plastic compared to, say, clothes,” whose fibres are commonly found in rivers, Stohl said. “You will not lose kilograms of plastic from your clothing.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyres-are-major-source-of-ocean-microplastics-study

"Microplastics are of increasing concern in the environment [1, 2]. Tire wear is estimated to be one of the largest sources of microplastics entering the aquatic environment [3,4,5,6,7]. The mechanical abrasion of car tires by the road surface forms tire wear particles (TWP) [8] and/or tire and road wear particles (TRWP), consisting of a complex mixture of rubber, with both embedded asphalt and minerals from the pavement [9]."

https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43591-021-00008-w

@fuck_cars

lemming934 ,

I don't see what's wrong with quoting the introduction. Generaly, literature reviews are more reliable than a single study, and the introduction is a mini literature review.

I guess if op was writing a scientific paper, they ought to cite the original research to give credit to the right people. And maybe it would be better to cite a proper review article in a Lemmy post, but I think what op did was fine.

lemming934 ,

If you follow the sources the source of the data and it’s methodology uses the CBECI which the latest update lists a range of 75-384 TWh. (Note that the “2%” listed in the parent article is the global power consumption of the Bitcoin network compared to the US electrical network, aka a bad faith comparison)

This is Incorrect. The source for the 2 percent is https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364. Which is a government study giving a rage from .6 to 2.3. They arrived at this number by extrapolating the CBECI data to the US, and by investigating individual bitcoin mining facilities.

Electricity is ~38% of US energy consumption

38% is a lot. Also, electricity consumption is 100% of the load on our power grid, so its worth looking into whether the use of electricity is pro-social or anti-social. From my perspective, even the 0.6% figure is far too much electricity to devote to mining bitcoin. We are talking about power use at the order of magnitude of a small state whose sole purpose is to generate profits for a few people.

lemming934 ,

Its sole purpose is to be a global currency you can send from A to B effortlessly and without relying on trusted intermediaries.

Perhaps that was the design goal, but it seems that speculation is also a significant (perhaps the larger) use case. I agree that crypto has been great for international money transfer, but it is far more expensive than traditional banks for domestic transfers. It seems that

it's nonsense framing to not put them in context.

I checked a few of those links, and wasn't completely convinced. It was full of peoples blogs comparing the costs of running all the brick and mortar banks to crypto. Of course, banks provide more services than saving and transferring money. Perhaps a better comparison would be to the energy use per dollar of the EFT system, or to a proof of stake crypto.

On its face, spending a measurable amount of energy guessing random numbers to satisfy an algorithm is wasteful. This is especially problematic since society subsidizes energy costs with the assumption that people will use it to create value.

As far as I can tell, (please let me know if I'm mistaken) mining Bitcoin does not create very much value since marginal increases in mining does not have a commiserate increase in Bitcoin trade efficiency or security. Marginal increases in mining does put money into the pocket of people doing the mining.

lemming934 ,

I have the highest salary possible on that contract. This year, I'm only getting a 10% raise after 0% raise for a couple of years. The new contract will still put me more than 4k below the living wage.

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