eldaisfish

and i remind you that this framing is completely misleading outside the world of simulations and calculations.

Nuclear doesn't need to be the only source of electricity generation. In fact, it can be the base on top of which a serious country expands electricity generation with renewable energy.

I will also remind you that there is not a single industrialised economy anywhere on earth that has successfully supplied new electricity growth with only renewable energy. Not one.

might be a mixed bag but when safety of vehicles is involved, the japanese and germans are very good. Observe cars driving almost anywhere in southern europe and you will instantly spot the difference.

indeed. Japan is a compliance and shame based society. that alone is the foundation of a very strong safety culture, something that southern europe is famous for lacking.

it is deeply ironic that a toyota hilux pickup truck - an actually practical pickup truck - does not meet US "standards" but the pedestrian killing, inefficient, wasteful, and expensive "pickups" from US auto companies somehow do.

the US regularly wastes money on its military and fights wars around the world, causing misery for millions.

If the US decided to divert half of the Pentagon's annual budget to electricity, the US could absolutely build the infrastructure to transport electricity thousands of kilometres.

Here's your serious citation - the polar vortex.

These usually drop ambient temperatures across Canada and the northern US to below -20 C, and produce generally high winds. This combination of extreme cold, cloud cover, and high winds last for multiple days, often longer than a week.

The wind plus cold means that many wind turbines cannot operate and the cloud cover and shorter days mean that solar is barely generating any energy.

North American cities very much were built around walking and trams.

The US auto companies paid for the destruction of tram lines with the long term goal of selling more cars.

just a meta comment about the comment you replied to.

I am consistently surprised by the levels of self-righteous hubris in the techbro community. People rationalising horrible behaviour and perpetuating the tragedy of the commons, just with computers.

I'm old enough for nostalgia so i regularly find myself pining for the days when the software industry was smaller and the nerds arena was not taken over by the MBA types and temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

This is complete and utter horseshit.

Caste is very much alive in India and this sort of blanket denialism reeks of upper caste privilege.

If caste is all that irrelevant, please go ahead with changing your surname to an obviously lower caste one. We will see how quickly you come crawling back to your so called “irrelevant” caste privilege.

this is not a problem for you, given where you are, and your lifestyle.

Those are absolutely massive caveats.

Where i am in Canada, relying on public charging is just not practical.

lol, this is complete nonsense. The average person has non idea how the electricity grid works or how much capacity it has. "The grid will collapse" is just FUD spread by the oil industry and parroted by the boomers who run electricity companies.

Even in a city like Bombay, with a famously unplanned electric grid, people are buying electric scooters not because the government told them to, but because it's cheaper. Bombay has yet to have this "overload" that so many here seem to fear.

just a caveat - some EVs, like Hyundai models, require using an app and the internet to enable this. If you use only the key fob, the heat pump compressor does not run.

you're not making the point you think you are. The average January temperature in most of Norway is about 10 C higher than in most of Yukon and Alaska. Norway just isn't that cold.

That said, heat pumps absolutely do work in -20 C. I would know because i have two at home and one in the car. All three worked just fine at -25 C this past winter.

I invite you, respectfully, to take a moment and consider how many average people would even begin to comprehend anything that you suggested.

Android's "free" market comes with the freedom to be bombarded by ads. As much as i used to like that, i now recommend only apple phone and computers to normal people. The average person has no idea what lineageOS is, forget about knowing how to install it.

i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.

As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.

Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.

Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.