Comment on China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 day agoSeems obvious to pick a new transit paradigm for personal cars, obviously trucks can stay.
Also in the current era, coal plants already have a good replacement: nuclear. At least for bigger countries, but most are shutting down rather than improving. This might be (hopefully) starting to change though in recent times.
Also I don’t know what fusion power is, I shall be on wikipedia now. Good day sir.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Assuming you mean commericial grade hauler trucks and such, I absolutely agree with all your points.
… Are we running commercial trucks on biodiesel yet?
But yeah, for personal transit… a huge amount of the world gets around on bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles. Cars are basically a luxury, like, any car.
Of course that works because public transit over long distances tends to work, and the whole country tends to not be laid out as just a cancerous mass of utterly useless suburubs, strewn out around urban cores that are half parking lot.
I dunno, if we just say, banned pickup trucks and SUVs for private use, well, that’d cut down on road maintenance a good deal, would make being a moped or bicycle or motorcycle commuter a bit more feasible.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Oh yes, I mean commercial hauler trucks, etc. The ones that do their job well of course. Of course theres other types of trucks for maintenece, last mile deliveries, etc.
(Side note, europe has nice delivery vans)
Definitely not the things the average american has started calling a “truck”, which has 5mpg and is used solely for one person to go to and from an office job, etc, never hauling anything.
And plus 1 for bikes, idk about motorbikes though, sadly they seem like death traps because of how fast you can go, one mistake by you or someone else on the road and you could see black.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I’m over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different… along with … a lot of other things.
Yeah, our “truck”/suv culture is… just actually insane.
Many common US “trucks” are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.
Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like… yeah I think those generally make sense as well.
With mopeds / motorcycles … Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.
But… mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts if the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap.
Motorcycles… have more effective range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.
Theyre a bit more popular in south america.
Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.
The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.
And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?
I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has 30% the top speed, maybe 20% the overall range.
Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that… could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a US city.
And bicycles are not street legal in the US, practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.
Nope. I’d feel much safer in that city, in a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, being cautious, than I would on a bicycle, where…
… you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there’s some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there’s just bike lane at all, buts illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk.
Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn’t see them and does a lower speed turn into them… they’re basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position… though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.
Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system… is pretty common.
Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable… unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.
Motorcycles can do that.
So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of… they generally can’t maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they’d get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US “truck” or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can’t really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those “trucks” and SUVs.
I’m rambling at this point, but … some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon… because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we’re too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.
We’re either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance… or we’re basically just gonna collapse as a society.
We’re extremely car centric, and people can’t afford cars anymore.
I don’t know how to solve that problem in a ‘good’ way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Luckily major european countries that have well designed streets publish a lot of their found research, it just has to start being adopted in the more car-centric places.
The US as an example is pretty far gone, but if the major cities went fully in the correct direction, it probably would only take a few decades to look completely different (amsterdam is decent proof of this).