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I don't care, anime has been fire the last bunch of seasons. Solo leveling alone has been just so damn good, but there's all kinds of stuff.

One financial guy I used to follow was adamant that you should invest in REITs. "Don't worry guys, it's not residential real estate, it's commercial real estate. It's safe!"

How's that working out for ya?

I'm awfully happy that we're not on any of their platforms... Imagine how much of a waste this is -- 20 billion dollars is enough to change the lives of millions of people permanently, and instead it's being spent on election fuckery.

Something that I've been thinking about a lot lately is the effect that drones could have on the democratization of war. Hearing stories out of Ukraine about drone attacks being extremely effective against extremely expensive military hardware makes me think a lot about the difference between the bronze age and the iron age, or the dawn of the firearms age against armored cavalry. Suddenly you can have some people with some extremely inexpensive weapons with extremely high effectiveness against modern arms.

Yes, unfortunately I think we can all agree that there is a massive amount of State corruption in the US right now, which is one of the reasons why the empire is so badly in decline.

Another way that all of this helps to hurt everyone is by basically forcing the destruction of the accumulated wealth of the nation. You might think that those cars were wasteful because they burned a lot of fuel, or because they were too old, but they were highly complicated devices that already existed that people have the option to use if they wanted to. The cash for clunkers program took cars that were perfectly serviceable and destroyed them. It has resulted in vehicle prices in North America overall being on a completely different level than for example Europe where such a program didn't exist.

Really, it would be better to let the car companies fail and then maybe they would come back with something people actually wanted to buy. On the other hand, as part of that failure maybe they need to start pointing their finger directly at the government for forcing companies make cars that nobody likes.

And even if they were your servants, what you're not going to treat your servants okay?

I was thinking something a little bit more like somebody pulling a wrench or moving a box, but I guess participating in a glowie op counts too. :p

At some point, somebody somewhere needs to actually do a thing. You need boots on the ground actually doing stuff or you aren't actually doing anything.

This truism being ignored is going to be really bad for our society that thinks everyone can get someone else to do it.

You know, I've been thinking about that Cash for clunkers program a lot lately. I have a sneaking suspicion it might be the primary reason why used cars are so unbelievably expensive. I mean, I was looking at some used cars, and for vehicle with almost 400,000 km on it they were asking the same as what you would expect to have paid for a new car not that long ago.

So it's one of those things where the people who make the decisions to have these programs aren't the ones who pay the consequences of having these programs. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a young person trying to get there first vehicle. Mine was 500 bucks, which admittedly was a very good deal for the time, but I'm just imagining going five figures in debt to buy something that could be scrap any day...

I've written at long length about hydroelectric, and it's difficult to argue that it isn't the best possible form of energy anywhere it's practical. There's a direct inverse correlation in most places between the amount of hydroelectric and the price of electricity. Unlike most forms of green energy, it is highly effective in places where it gets cold, such as Norway, Northern Quebec, and Northern Manitoba. You don't need particularly exotic materials to build such dams, you can use regionally sourced iron and copper if need be, as well as local earthenworks and limestone for portland cement.

Now that doesn't help much with transportation, but there's another long proven technology we could bring back which would be beneficial: The electric streetcar. There were cities with extensive public transportation operating using such streetcars at the turn of the 20th century, showing it was already practical 100 years ago. These were also successfully used in cities that are cold. One thing that would have to change for public transportation to be more useful is we'd need to accept that there is such a thing as good behavior and bad behavior and if you're not going to behave in a way conducive to polite society you shall be removed from public transportation. As long as it's ok to be bad in public with no repercussions, then people will want personal vehicles.

I just chose the year cause it kinda rhymes and I'm secretly 3.

Couldnt find a cat in the Haight by 1968?

What I mean is, did Gandhi actually say any of that?

It's like Abraham Lincoln famously said: "don't trust everything you say attributed to famous people on the internet, it doesn't cost anything that slap some words on a photo"

Not the base image I wanted but im not digging through meme generators for the guy from breaking bad

Imagine alone in the dark without midi music. C-

Pretty interesting, but is it true?

Why do most people get rid of their smart phones?

It's the batteries. People end up getting new smart phones because the batteries die out and they can't last anymore.

Batteries for an EV have been quoted as tens of thousands of dollars, and on many EVs they simply aren't manufactured after a point and so your car is scrap. As well, insurance costs for EVs are starting to rise because relatively small accidents can have repair costs so high it'll write off the vehicle.

The saddest thing as batteries die on your phone is maybe you start off with your phone able to last for a few days, and then maybe a couple days, then maybe you last a day, and then eventually you're sitting there running around trying to find a charger to get a few hours in between.

And if you're not charging at home, the cost to get a charge at a charging station is surprisingly high. About 10 years ago I did a study of the difference in price between the cheapest EV and a cheap new gas vehicle (I think it was a Toyota Corolla), and found you'd really struggle to make up the difference in price in gasoline usage and oil changes.

According to my research at the time, and inexpensive Corolla was just under half the price of a battery electric vehicle. I just took a quick look, and the same Toyota Corolla is aboot 29,000 canuckistani kopecs, and the cheapest BEV I could find was the Volkswagen golf at 39,000. There's completely other dimension to this being the new versus used but I'm not going to get into that right now. The key thing is that if your gas budget is about 40 canuckistani kopecs per week, then that's 2000 kopecs per year, so if you assume you basically get travel for free then it's 5 years to break even (give or take a 3 oil changes per year). That's now, with der fuhrer's carbon taxes in full effect. I have to assume that he will be spending that money on something extremely good for the environment, such as paying off charities that employ his family members. On the other hand, if charging costs a bunch of money because it turns out those chargers aren't so cheap (it might be just fine, but I've seen multiple videos where people charge up and the cost is in like the several tens of dollars which was not what I expected)

And for all of the times you can't use your EV, for example trying to drive to the next city in the winter, suddenly you need to count the costs of using something else.

So I think it's more accurate to say that the known costs of driving a car with an internal combustion engine may be higher than the as of yet not really known costs of driving an EV. On the other hand, maybe not. We don't really know yet except for a small number of people who self selected because their lifestyle worked for EVs, but it'll still be a while before things are known.

There's also a whole other part that no one talks about because most of the people who drive EVs don't live in really cold places: if it's 40 below, your starter battery on your car is in bad shape. You can keep it on a charger and keep the block heater turned on though, and the car will start and once it does that, it'll get comparable performance to in warmer weather for a variety of reasons where some things are more efficient and other things are less efficient. You basically get cabin heat for free. Especially when you're driving, it can be really really cold out and you can have a nice warm toasty vehicle cabin, and that doesn't affect the range of your vehicle at all, since instead of redistributing waste heat to the outside using the radiator, you redistribute waste heat to the inside of the car using the heater core. By contrast, if you turn on the heat in an electric car, an electric car is going to see a commensurate and rather large drop in range because to heat an EV you use the battery to create heat. Meanwhile, the engine bay of an ICE car warms up from waste heat, and the EV needs to keep its battery warm using energy that can't be used to move the vehicle.

You will often find videos of electric vehicles being tested in Arctic conditions, but one thing that you need to note for those videos is that they drive out of a heated garage into the cold. Therefore, in order to have your energy efficient ev, presumably you need to keep at spare room in your house heated to keep the car in overnight. That might seem like a wild conjecture, but I've worked somewhere with electric vehicles and 40 below, and those electric vehicles had to stay in the heated garages when it got really cool or else they would not move.

Anyway, I know that this all seems like I'm completely cutting down EVs and saying that you can't possibly want to buy one ever, but the reality is more like "these are not a magic wand that one can wave" -- there are going to be situations where they make a lot more sense, and other situations where they make a lot less sense, and unfortunately I think for a lot of people at least for the time being they might be in the latter camp. On the other hand, as with literally everything, you need to do your own research and come to your own decisions because what might not be a good idea for one person could be a great idea for that person's neighbor. Decisions are mostly personal, after all.

What's the point of building EVs if nobody is buying them because they're super expensive and can't function as vehicles in all the ways ice vehicles are?

If you cut car sales by 90% it won't matter where they're made.