aseerdbnarng

Am I being a moron or are the weights only applicable to trucks? The lowest rung is 7.5tons.

But of course it's absurd how big cars have become. If you're a 50kg woman why do you need a 2.7ton SUV to go from stop light to stop light? Get a grip people

How daft do you have to be go on a hiring binge in Europe without looking into the labour laws. These laws didn't just fall out the sky last Tuesday

How is this the top comment

It might mean the switch to EVs are insufficient if it bakes in unrealistic expectations of future benefits. The cost and subsidies to EVs might be better spent elsewhere. I’m not making a comment on pro/against EVs only that the cited paper makes an assumption I believe to be overly optimistic

I read through one of the papers and a key assumption that the energy mix powering the grid will more halve its co2 output over the next 10 years and cites Germany as the baseline trend. This is a crazy optimistic assumption to make

While the Chinese threat to Taiwan is not something to be dismissed completely, the article doesn’t mention just how incredibly vulnerable China is to possible sanctions targeting their food supply. China imports most of its food and as their farmland is quite poor, its hugely dependent on fertiliser to feed itself. Sanctions targeting these basics would be devastating so I really struggle to see a convincing case for the CCP risking national suicide and its own existence over Taiwan

I’m always curious how different insurers cover the use of hands-free driving. Would anyone still buy the FSD feature if people thought insurers would reject accidental damage claims? It feels like its sitting on sketchy ground

How exactly is the ECB supposed to provide cheap energy via interest rates? And what exactly is the thinking here? Energy bills have more than trebled and people are going to be thankful to central banks for paying 3x more for their mortgage? The best thing central banks can do is sit on their hands for now

I'd bet anything the restrictions are for insurance reasons otherwise the premiums would be too high

I price motor insurance for a living and in my models the absolute worst 'insurable' risks (ones that pass underwriting scrutiny) will have some sort of impact every 3rd year. If we filter that to more severe cases where there's bodily injury it moves out to 8/9 years.

What this means is the absolute worst drivers will go ~100k miles between causing serious accidents so the threshold between good, bad and awful drivers is really far out into the tails of the distribution. Without actual driving data to work from we don't know how safe FSD is and youtube videos are purposefully selected for views. Even so the sheer number and 'randomness' of fails is concerning because nothing like alcohol, speeding or inexperience to point to.

Things that spring to mind:

- Gas in an open space is the main one. It would need to be very potent stuff to be effective and something that potent in tiny doses is almost certain to be highly toxic

- Getting the gas widely disbursed in a built-up area may only be effective by destroying the buildings (so we're likely back to square one)

- Logistically a challenge as your own troops/transport would need to be quite close to take advantage (whereas dead people tend to stay put)

- Even if you could solve 1-3 it probably takes way too long to zonk someone out and it can be easily stopped by putting on gas masks or retreating.

This naturally human response thats existed for longer than commerce needs to be suppressed because it doesn’t further your career. Yup. Makes sense to me.

There's a (cold) calculated logic to this in that there are more than a dozen countries closer to Ukraine the refugees can escape to, so what exactly is the reason to open up the borders? its not like Germany and France are persecuting the refugees. I dont say I agree with it, but I can understand it

fair point. I was focusing on the 'removing subsidies' part and not the 'reallocate' part. Accept the correction

Whoa there chief. The whole 'that would be a good thing' is an overreach. There are 'better' ways to spend that subsidy but having a steady surplus of food subsidy or not is a way better position for a country to be in than implementing some JIT mechanism with supply/demand set purely by market prices. Just because agriculture makes up a small % of GDP compared to tech we can more easily get rid of Google than we can get rid of grain.