NoLinkToMe

> No excuse is good enough to justify that.

There was no excuse at all in my post, not sure what you're replying to.

It was only pointed out that despite failures in train systems, it's still safer than driving a car.

> One such rule might be, for instance, that following an electronic interlocking failure causing axle counter sections to be reset, meaning track vacancy cannot be proven, track sections must be swept by trains that may only run on sight at ~40km/h max.

All the rules you spoke of by the way were already in-place, but overruled. The protocol wasn't followed. The driver was supposed to go at 40, it's the protocol, but the rail operator instructed to continue at normal speed. When the train driver asked 'at normal speed?' the operator confirmed. The normal speed on that track is 200km/h by the way.

Per capita is pretty useless, you'd want to go per kilometer, which as I stated is still way safer for the train.

> the point is to not die while taking my daily commute

Exactly, which is why you need to take trains, not cars.

Everything else you said completely misconstrues the point, nobody is arguing for less train or car safety, or that this crash was fine. That's ridiculous.

Doing anything is a risk. The salient thing is relative risk. Even with record levels of train accidents it’s still the safest way to travel.

The bodycount sits around 100 this year for trains and 1775 last year for cars.

Even correcting for distance travelled it’s still way more safe.

But the activists are not the point. Animal rights activists are a minority, things change because the majority or a significant share of people backs them.

In this case this large group that backs banning horse drawn carriages is very likely eating industrially produced meat. That’s the inconsistency, 95% of Americans eat meat and a substantial share cause far greater inhumanity on animals through their diets which are completely optional (as in, they could vote with their mouth and stop it), than these horse drawn carriages which they want to ban.

Essentially this is simply what solar panels have done for ages, feed back electricity to the grid, sure it's not through a power outlet but essentially it connects to the grid in a similar way.

What's new is cheap and ubiquitous micro-inverters. Before it wasn't worth putting a $800 inverter on a small 2-panel 600 or 800 installation. Now with micro inverters being so cheap, this tech becomes viable. And with loads so limited (less than a microwave) the regulation is equally light to allow this convenient plug-in solution.

I mean a Toyota Yaris (first facelift) from 2016 for example sits around a ton (1070), and it's completely comfortable to drive on the highway.

And it's not some niche car, it's one of the most sold compact cars on the planet. And the 2026 versions are actually slightly lighter at 1025 and are very comfortable.

Of course comfort is up to interpretation, and as cars get better, our window of expectation moves, the cars my dad used to drive for 8 hours in a row for our summer vacations in the 1970s are considered ridiculously loud and cramped by today's standards. Just like Kings of the past had no tropical fruit in winter, while even unknown shitty corps hand them out for free to their unpaid interns at this point, our standards move.

But even with today's standards I think a modern Yaris at 1 ton (+2%) is completely fine for highway driving.

No not per se, but most people tend to stop using the switches.

The Hue basically just adds a switch inside the bulb, which can be remote controlled. The lamp's switch is still there, and functions as normal (turning on or off electricity to the bulb).

So your light is on when the lamp's switch + the hue's switch is on. It's off when either one is off.

So if your light is on, you can indeed walk to a lamp and turn the switch off to turn off the light. Or you can turn off the Hue bulb via your phone (or Philips Hue switches you can put anywhere in the house, they're basically bluetooth switches that run on a <$1 replaceable battery that lasts 2 years.

If you turn off your Hue light via your app, you can turn it back on later via the app, but not the light switch (as that's already on, but the bulb isn't).

And if you turn off your lamp via its switch, you can turn it back on later via the same switch, but not the app, as the bulb is already on but not getting power as the lamp's switch is off.

Especially with multiple people living in the house with different behaviors, that becomes annoying. So usually people choose to stop using the lamp switch and only use the Hue. You can of course hook-up the bulb to a Hue switch, so you can turn it on and off with both the switch and the app.

I'd want to add a bit of nuance to that, as bright lights hurt my eyes and induce headaches (sometimes migraines).

For that reason I really like overhead lights as: 1. You can easily fit a larger number of overhead lights (e.g. 6 overhead lights vs 2 eye-level task lights) 2. For equivalent lighting in a room say x lumens, each overhead light must be x/6, whereas the 2 eye-level lights would be x/3 lumens, much brighter. 3. Because the lights are overhead, they're not in my vision, yet light up the objects in my room.

I still have 5 eye-level lamps in my living room, but they supplement the overhead lights which always give a base amount of light, and allow the lamps to be less bright. Every time I turn off the overhead lights I see too little, and if I turn up my lamps to see better, it is too bright for the comfort of my eyes.

It's akin to driving: I like having a sun above me, when it's low in the sky before dusk and shining in my eyes, it sucks, even though objects are less bright and visible than midday, simply because of the positioning of the light vis-a-vis my eyes.

A regular household plug should be more than enough unless you want to use your home as a quick pit-stop between two long rides. (e.g. drive 150km from work to home, then drive 300km to your holiday home for the weekend an hour later).

Typical EVs nowadays get about 6 km per kWh, the average driver in the US drives about 54 km. A US home typically has 15A plugs, or 20A in the kitchen/garage. That's 1.8 - 2.4 kW. Even at 80% safe continuous charge, you'll be averaging 1.5 kW at minimum. So that's just 6 hours of daily charging at minimum.

If you have a garage and plug in when you get home, your car typically sits there from 8PM to 8AM for 12 hours. That's already double the time necessary to charge 100% of your driving at home, at the minimum charging speeds equivalent to a microwave or washing machine. And you'll typically have much more time with the car plugged in on weekends and home-work days.

A 5k upgrade to the electrical box might be a good idea, but it's definitely not necessary for most normal EV users.

As for ROI, a Corolla might get 20 km per liter, in Connecticut that's 6c per km. An EV even at the 29c per kWh is just 4.8c per km which is 20% cheaper. If you have some solar panels you can cut that figure by another 65%.

Not to mention the lower maintenance costs for EVs and the rebates various local governments give.

> The reality is, however, that consumers don't want EVs for a myriad of reasons and prefer hybrids.

I think this is completely true for the period 2010 - 2030.

But from 2030 onwards, it seems 4 things are structurally different in many markets: 1. energy per kilometer, improved about 30% (from about 5 km per kWh to about 6.5) 2. kwh of useable battery, increased by about 80% 3. chargers per person, increased by about 20x 4. Charge speed increased by 5x from about 50 kW to 250 kW

All these figures are approximate averages for normal EVs, the very low / very high end are different.

So we have more battery, which we use less of to drive, which we can charge faster, and at way more places.

The reality is that an average European for example drives about 30km per day. Take the base model Tesla 3, it has 575 km of range and can charge 285 km in 15 minutes. The base model. So for the average driver that's a ~15 minute charge, every 10 days. For the average person an EV makes more and more sense.

That's today, for a base model car, which is suffering from cheap and quality competition out of China that will be even better.

Cars that will be released in 3 years from now (>2030) are even more favorable. I honestly think the 'myriad of reasons to prefer a hybrid' is soon going to be an exception, not the rule, for newly purchased cars (of course the 2nd hand market is a different, delayed story). And compromising your car design won't let you compete with manufacturers that don't compromise and go fully EV.

If you consider the squeeze that regulators worldwide are going to be putting on gas the next decades, I think going full-EV on new models makes sense. Sure you can keep selling some ICE cars but developing entirely new ICE models, and mixing an EV into them?

Yeah very creepy, I'm afraid it'll be normalised in a few years, together with the cameras in our glasses.

I always knew this was coming eventually, with storage and compute getting so cheap, eventually every record can and then will be saved for security / convenience reasons. Every word uttered, every emotion shown on your face, every URL visited, every view you laid your eyes on.

I will miss the days that things could happen and be forgotten.

No doubt this stuff is all very useful, but I'd rather we skip this line of technology.

‘… but contrary to what a regular person may think (that this level of data gathering is unusual), privacy experts know that it’s not, it is standard practice’

This is correct, it's monetisation, not commissioning.

Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.

It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.

However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.

Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.

Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?

I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.

Japan beats Dutch train frequencies, hence it's not unbeatable.

And if you include metro rail there are plenty of more frequent rail systems including again Japan but also China, France, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea.