bigschnitz
@bigschnitz@lemmy.world
- Comment on Wales 20mph: Calls made for 1,500 roads to revert to 30mph 2 months ago:
Any motoring organisation that proposed speed humps should be ignored, as they clearly aren’t competent. Proper road design slows drivers without needing to impede emergency services or add wear to vehicles. Adding bike lanes or planter boxes to the road center brings the desired behavior (slows drivers) with literally no negatives.
- Comment on Let's chat about these SEVEN nuclear power plants the LNP want to build ... 5 months ago:
Existing nuclear tech is dramatically more expensive than every competing low carbon power generation and will never have any place in Australia.
Future nuclear tech (be it fission or fusion) may be a different story, but our power plants are at end of life so we need new power gen now, the world is dying so we need carbon neutral now.
We can’t sideline this for 20 years to wait and see what happens, the strategy should be the roll out renewables to the point where the grid doesn’t need any major changes. When we hit the point where the grid does need big investment, reassess available alternatives. If nothing has changed, roll out the grid changes and more renewables or if fusion drilling geotehermal or nuclear or whatever has come viable work it out then.
- Comment on Windows 11 just isn't enticing Windows 10 users to upgrade, and its market share is actually falling 6 months ago:
XP sp1 and 2 were more or less the same as me with an updated UI and non existent 64 bit. However flawed vista was, it added an actual tangible benefit for 7 to further improve on.
I’d argue 7 was the last windows os that could be described as “better” in some way than what came before (which most, even the ones we remember as “bad” at the time, did offer some real step forward which isn’t true for 8/10/11).
- Comment on What DID Apple innovate? 10 months ago:
I used to have a pebble back in the day, and then later a pebble steel. I’ve not found a modern smartwatch that is as good for my needs (partially because it doesn’t look like a smartwatch).
I use a Samsung Galaxy wear, which also looks like a normal watch. I’m sure competing products are used a lot and you just don’t notice them because their styling is modelled off of dumb watches.
- Comment on The average car purchased in 2023 emits higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) than its 2013 equivalent. This is due to the large proportion of SUVs in the mix, which tend to be bigger and heavier. 1 year ago:
If people wanted them, they’d sell them here.
Yeah depending on where “here” is different things are available. If people don’t buy them or if dealers make more money off SUVs, then they will be gone.
Also seems they have bigger engines and clearly a larger physical footprint than my wife’s CUV, so that argument is gone as well.
Size and fuel economy weren’t things I mentioned above, but yeah I agree with you. Usually station wagons, like SUVs, have different engine configurations which dictates fuel economy more than ride height. The fuel efficiency argument against SUVs is a little out of date, the smaller ones are shared chassis with passenger cars often with the same engine, so fuel economy is more or less unchanged. By footprint I guess you mean length, which in the example I have is right, obviously height goes the other way. Smaller SUVs are more comparable to hatchbacks (eg Mazda 3 is the same as CX-30), I don’t think the mid sized car platform is as directly comparable to the mid sized CUV/SUV.
- Comment on The average car purchased in 2023 emits higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) than its 2013 equivalent. This is due to the large proportion of SUVs in the mix, which tend to be bigger and heavier. 1 year ago:
Ok so we could’ve saved time if you just said you’re the least cool person imaginable with negative sense of style. Claiming that this is somehow cooler than this is entirely indefensible, SUVs are the literal antithesis of cool, the “soccer mum” moniker is not a term of endearment.
Aside from just being criminally uncool and unsexy, there are objective ways that SUVs/CUV are worse as well, most notably safety for other road users but also higher cost and of course the one people.lile me care about, that they also that they universally drive worse than a comparable passenger car.
- Comment on The average car purchased in 2023 emits higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) than its 2013 equivalent. This is due to the large proportion of SUVs in the mix, which tend to be bigger and heavier. 1 year ago:
Google pedestrian deaths by SUVs compared to conventional sedans. To say there is no rational argument against the SUV trend is laughably ignorant.
It also confuses me why yanks keep pretending small SUVs have more space than conventional station wagons. Unless you’re going full Yankee and think a 7 seater is “small”…
- Comment on The average car purchased in 2023 emits higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) than its 2013 equivalent. This is due to the large proportion of SUVs in the mix, which tend to be bigger and heavier. 1 year ago:
A station wagon is easier for moving animals, more space than a small SUV - it’s lower to the ground (huge plus if you have to lift them in, easier for them if you are leading them up a portable ramp).
The trade off is you can’t do soft sand, cross deeper streams etc, but IMO animals don’t need to be released far off track, to me it’s worth the trade off.
- Comment on Apple users bash new iPhone 15: ‘Innovation died with Steve Jobs’ 1 year ago:
People always down vote when I point that out as well lol. Windows mobile was already moving towards icon based UIs pre iPhone, so while the UI was a definite improvement it wasn’t the revolution it’s made out to be. The iPhone 1 had no app store or 3g so was not good for emails and, back in 2007 when flash still mattered, couldn’t access most of the Internet where windows phone could. I’m pretty sure it was successful purely based on the iPods popularity, at least until the iPhone 3gs and app store came out and it iPhone became arguably a better smartphone than those that came before.
- Comment on Apple users bash new iPhone 15: ‘Innovation died with Steve Jobs’ 1 year ago:
Apple was literally founded and initially successful off Steve jobs monetizing Woz’s genius. It is not at all a stretch to claim Steve Jobs never innovated a thing.
In modern apple, of course they are far more likely to buy innovative technologies and fund development or copy competitors. Why would they spend money funding R&D when they can more cheaply buy out worthwhile concepts?
- Comment on AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble 1 year ago:
Money isn’t an investment, it’s a currency. Of course it’s a bad investment and investing in forex is barely a better investment than crypto (purely because there’s less risk of a sovereign currency devaluing to 0).
Investing in capital, like stocks, property, equipment etc does not require someone to lose money for the capital owner to profit. If I invest in a stock, each year I’m paid a dividend based on the profits of that organisation - no losers required. I could later sell that stock at the exact price I paid for it and come away with profit from those dividends. What determines whether it’s a good or bad investment, is the ratio of profit to the capital owner to cost of the asset. Crypto generates 0 profit, so it has 0 value as a capital investment.
- Comment on AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble 1 year ago:
Money has value insofar as governments use it to collect tax - so long as there’s a tax obligation, there’s a mandated demand for that currency and it has some value. Between different currencies, the value is determined based upon the demand for that currency, which is essentially tied to how much business is done in that currency (eg if a country sells goods in its own currency, demand for that currency goes up and so does it’s value).
This is not the same for crypto, there are no governments collecting tax with it so it does not have induced demand. The value of crypto is 100% speculative, which is fine for something that is used as currency, but imo a terrible vehicle for investment.
- Comment on Why do most religious conservatives support capitalist ideology? 1 year ago:
Socialism is defined by the elimination of the purely capitalist class, wherin workers own the means of production.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that capital isn’t assigned for investment based upon market demand or that “EvEryoNe gEts pAId tHE SAmE” like others claim. Socialism in a modern economy can (and likely would be) market based, it just means that shareholders would be entirely made up of employees of a company (obviously this would lead to better conditions for workers, lower wages for executives and no dividend payments to people who aren’t working). Taking a more academic definition of capitalism, it’s entirely possible to be both socialist and capitalist. Few people are arguing against capitalism in entirety.
- Comment on Why do most religious conservatives support capitalist ideology? 1 year ago:
I would say that most “MAGA” or whatever equivalent regressive movement exists anywhere is not at all conservative (MAGA supporters attempted a coupe, which is radical, the opposite of conservative), that’s just branding. In much the same way as the people’s democratic republic of Korea is not democratic, “liberals” in the USA political landscape are usually leftists (typically with a lot of illiberal positions) etc.
It isn’t that these people support capitalism (they are often ignorant of what capitalism even entails, the same way they think communism means anything they disagree with) it’s that they vaguely support existing power and class structures, though again, from what I’ve seen they can rarely coherently describe what they support and what they oppose, outside of a few tailor designed talking points like abortion or transgenderism.