marinuso
10mo ago
This is how you get anarcho-tyranny. People just end up ignoring the permits and regulations out of necessity, and then the government only goes after easy targets to fine and/or after people they dislike for some other reason.
marinuso
10mo ago
(i.e. electric cars charge as fast as normal cars do, on the same schedule normal cars require it)
It isn't possible.
Consider that the biggest battery you can get on a Tesla Model 3 has a capacity of 100 kWh. They claim it'll do 362 miles on a full charge. Which is indeed nearly as far as small European hatchbacks will generally make it on their 9-gallon tanks, except of course that in the case of the hatchbacks that's the real-world figure and in Tesla's case it's the marketing figure.
If you wanted to charge that battery in six minutes (for easy math), you would need to supply a megawatt of power continuously for those six minutes (in reality even more than that, accounting for losses). Even assuming you could find battery tech that could withstand that, where are you going to get that power? A big, modern, new American house will generally have a 44kW connection (200A at 220v). Charging the one Tesla in 6 minutes works out to the equivalent of the maximum allowed power draw of about 23 houses.
An electric charging station with 10 chargers would need a 10MW grid connection, as much as 227 houses, that is to say as much as a whole neighbourhood. And again, even more, as residential power networks are generally quite a bit undersized on the (for now correct) assumption that not everyone will be drawing the maximum amount all at once.
If you wanted to charge it in three minutes (at which point it would actually approach the time it takes to fill up) you can go and double all of that again.
marinuso
10mo ago
road locomotives
That's what they called steam cars and steam tractors when they were just invented, which makes sense given that rail locomotives were first.
cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.
This comes very close to what was actually done in the UK. Common sense eventually prevailed, (edit:) but it set back automobile development in the UK by probably half a century.
marinuso
10mo ago
There's been EU elections recently, so the Commission gets to appoint new people, and they are all jockeying. Thierry Breton wants to keep his post and is acting all tough. He wants to position himself as someone who isn't afraid of the Americans.
marinuso
10mo ago
For example, instead of government-dictated healthcare provided by your employer, you're allowed to opt out in return for $X, where $X is less than the average cost of the healthcare plan.
The problem with that is that people will take the money, spend it, and then we'll see a parade of sad little kids on CNN whose parents can't afford medical treatment, and then the government will have to either pay for the medical treatment anyway (encouraging people to take advantage and raising the costs), or they'll have to go on CNN and publicly declare "fuck the kids", which they won't.
marinuso
10mo ago
Every time I bring my car in for service I have to sign a form allowing them to read out my car's computers and send the data to the EU. EU laws say they can't use my data without my affirmative consent, but EU laws also say they're obligated to send all my data to the EU when they work on my car. So every time they give me a form and every time I sign it. I could withhold consent, but then it would be illegal for them to work on my car. That's EU regulation for you. But luckily my privacy is safe.
Big companies will do what they want anyway and the fines are just taxes by another name.
marinuso
10mo ago
The better parts of Eastern Europe are shaping up to be this counterfactual. For what it's worth, places like Poland and the Czech Republic have little crime and no ethnic tensions, and maintain their culture.
marinuso
11mo ago
I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."?
They shouldn't, really. Riots don't follow deaths, but media coverage. Media coverage doesn't follow deaths, but political expediency.
US police killed 245 black people in 2023, near enough to one per workday, at least according to the Washington Post's data. The vast majority, we never hear anything about. The media does not need 4-5 such stories a week. A couple a year is more than enough.
Now, cops are always going to be people, so no matter how good the hiring and training are, some of them will fuck up every once in a while. Even if, by magic, we would lower police violence by 9/10ths without screwing up anything else in the process — at which point the US would have by far the nicest police in the world — still two black people would be killed per month. And the media does not need two stories a month. There aren't two a month now. If this 9/10ths reduction were achieved somehow, nothing would change.
This is not the fault of the woman who got shot, and it isn't really the fault of the cop either. Though the individual cop is at best as dangerously incompetent as the Secret Service, and should be tried for manslaughter, you can't blame him, let alone cops in general, for the fallout. That is, dare I say it, systemic.
marinuso
11mo ago
You can't fix it. For one, cops are people, so some of them will make mistakes, or panic, or even simply be malicious. You can, and should, minimize this with proper hiring and training, but it will never be entirely zero, because cops are people. Meanwhile, racial tensions are not driven by the deaths but by the media coverage, and the media coverage is not driven by the deaths either but by political expediency.
According to the Washington Post the police killed 245 black people last year. That's pretty much one per work day. We certainly don't get national attention for every one. That only happens when it's convenient.
Suppose we had some magic way to lower police violence by 9/10ths. By this point the US would have the nicest police in the world by far. But there would still be more than one black person killed by the police each month. Today, there is much less than one big news story per month even though they could do this multiple times a week if they wanted. One or two a month would still be more than plenty to keep going as they are going.
US police killed 1161 people in total in 2023. If it were lowered by 9/10ths, you'd save 1045 people a year (assuming this lowering of police violence doesn't just increase the rest of the violence), but you would otherwise change nothing. For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths. So even that is only a small drop in the bucket. You can round that down to nobody. (After all, one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.)
The actual police violence doesn't matter at all in the big scheme of things, and not even with literal magic could you do something about police violence and thereby change anything about society.
marinuso
11mo ago
but the null hypothesis here still seems to be "she just made something up in the middle of an investigation", which would mean it's at least some evidence of malice
I mean, not necessarily. Probably she spun a tale literally on the spot, just to have something to say. She failed the speech check this time. But when it does work, you don't notice. That's PR. No spokesperson is ever going to honestly say "we can't do our jobs well and I have no explanation."
Perhaps such an attitude technically is malicious, but no more so than any other PR in the history of PR.
90% of everything is shit, that doesn't mean nothing good is produced.
To add to that, we see everything that is vomited onto our market, but we don't see the Chinese market (or other East Asian markets). There's a big cultural and linguistic gap, the only things from over there that make it over here despite that are almost by definition the good things. We're not showered with crappy Chinese phone games or CCP propaganda or what have you. We do get showered with our own crap.
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