Wrong. First of all only 25% of the natural gas inserted into the reactor are converted (with the rest presumably resulting in emissions) and natural gas also produces emissions during exploration and exploitation
I’ve literally transported dishwashers in a Renault Twingo. And the „small car + trailer“ combo will always carry more than a pickup. Pickups are pure lifestyle.
In a lot of smaller cars, you can fold down back row.
And if you are ok, with having trunk open, and tied down, you can transport fridges (I used reno clio, that is slightly bigger). Done that myself (not two door wide ones, one door fridge).
That's said I just found out you can hire van for 35EUR 20min away from where I live, so nowdays I just do that.
I looked it up. It does not appear to me it would be possible to fit an American dishwasher in that car in the box, seats folded down or not, based on the internal dimension and hatch width/height or door width/height. It might be possible if you take it out of the box.
It's important to note that American appliances are generally larger than European ones.
I drive a small very useful car almost every day I have moved a ton of stuff in (including a DRESSER) but it's inarguable that trucks simply have greater utility for this sort of thing. And any time I do need to move something...I just use the cheap pickup I bought so I don't even have to worry about it or spend ages trying to squeeze it in.
Most recent purchase: Christmas tree. Yeah, that wouldn't have fit in my car.
Christmas tree? Real ones are usually tied to the top of the car for transport. Artificial ones absolutely fit inside a car with the back seats folded, and possibly just across the back seat. I bought and transported my current artificial tree in my WRX years ago.
An artificial tree that can’t fit in a car would be a big tree.
1. Let the Christmas tree farmer toss a 8’ tree in the back of my truck, tying the base to the anchors behind the cab. Very little overhang with the tailgate down. Drive away. This is what most people do.
2. Spend 15 minutes balancing the the 8’ Christmas tree on the roof of my Honda Fit with substantial overhang, precariously tying it, I guess leaving the windows down in the cold weather and praying the Highway Patrol doesn’t pull me over. This is not what most people do but I’m sure it can be done.
Lots of things “can” be done but people value convenience.
I don’t know where you live but around me I see people carry trees on top of their cars all the time at Christmas. It’s not complex. You put the tree on the car. You open the doors and tie the tree. You get in and close the doors. You don’t drive with the windows down because why would you? And why would highway patrol pull you over? I’ve never even heard of anyone getting pulled over for carrying a tree or anything else.
Is it more convenient in the back of the truck, though? Sure. I didn’t say otherwise.
I will say that buying a giant truck with poor visibility and 2.5x the kill rate of a sedan so that you can haul a tree once a year is nonsense. It’s a shitty tradeoff and a much smaller truck would do exactly the same job. But little trucks don’t sell like giant trucks because people are not actually buying them for their utility.
Do you think suggesting people who do things you don’t like are just not as enlightened and rational as you a productive way to change hearts and minds?
Of course not. Probably more than 99% of online conversations are a complete and utter waste of time. I would assume there is literally nothing anyone could say to you that would make you get rid of your truck.
With that said, you admitted with your first comment that buying these trucks is based on feelings and not rational.
“Consumers buy what they like and feel like they need and can afford. They place an almost absurdly high value on convenience and not having to think about things like "oh I need to move this thing I need to go rent a truck because I only ever need to do this once every two years, making it irrational to buy one."
Because a 7 bedroom McMansion is unlikely to drive over my child in a parking lot or kill my wife in a collision. The dangers of these giant trucks are not hypothetical. It’s documented that they kill drivers of cars at 2.5x the rate of cars.
In terms of pure annoyance, the McMansion is also not using 3 parking spots at the grocery store.
An minivan will transport almost anything a normal person would want to move, while being more practical the other 99% of the time, but of course they have the wrong image.
A number of my whitewater paddling friends really like their minivans. There are still at least a couple of models available but they have largely gone out of fashion.
Personally I have a mid-size SUV but if you regularly need to transport around a lot of people, minivans seem more practical in general than a lot of the big SUVs.
The anti truck sentiment is directed largely at the ever-growing full size trucks. SUVs get less hate because the market for the absurdly huge SUVs is much smaller than the market for reasonably sized (by American standards) SUVs.
I don’t think smaller trucks get the same level of hate.
I absolutely use the capacity of my mid-size SUV quite often for a variety of purposes. Don't need anything bigger or the towing capacity of a full-size truck. And, given where I live, renting for a weekend would be very inconvenient. Sure, I could use a smaller hatchback/SUV day to day but I'm not going to own two vehicles at this point (though I used to own a two-seater as well) which some folks would probably also object to.
You pick a reasonable compromise and arguably a full-size truck is overkill for many but a Mazda Miata is probably too small for a lot of people even if it largely works for a lot of day to day stuff.
I own a small/mid-size SUV (and a van) so I’m not judging your car choice, but why would you not be able to rent a truck in Boston? Home Depot, Lowe’s, U-Haul, and more all rent trucks.
I don't live in Boston--about 60 to 90 minutes outside.
So, sure, I could pay for a delivery or rent something from Lowe's if I needed to for a specific purpose but I routinely use my mid-size SUV for weekend trips, transporting a canoe, picking up construction supplies, and the like. I need a vehicle in any case and it makes sense to own a somewhat larger one than I really need day to day to run to the grocery store, especially given that parking isn't an issue and my gas mileage really isn't bad.
If one actually lives in a city (which I don't), renting a vehicle can actually be something of a hassle on a weekend based on what I saw people go through when I was in a ski house after school.
If it’s a regular thing, yeah, renting becomes massively inconvenient because of the frequency. I misunderstood your comment to mean that even a 1-time rental would be extremely inconvenient somehow.
I don't need to transport 8 people around and I can always get mulch or gravel delivered. But, yeah, it's not uncommon for me to want to easily stuff a mid-size SUV's worth of stuff into my vehicle for a weekend or longer trip. I could probably do it with a somewhat smaller vehicle but why? The longer drives are probably when I need to do so anyway.
I did also have a smaller car as well when I did more shorter regular local drives but I really don't do those much any longer other than very local drives to the grocery store or nearby hiking trails.
A lot of standard SUVs don't have particularly great ground clearance relative to Jeep Wranglers and the like. Though that doesn't really matter unless you're going off-road in Death Valley and the like. The current Toyota Sienna (which has improved a lot) is better than my Honda Passport in terms on gas mileage.
Yeah. I don’t really need or want high ground clearance. But I would like enough that parking at a curb doesn’t risk dragging the front bumper. My van (Odyssey) is low enough that I’ve scraped on a few unexpectedly tall curbs and I would be pretty uncomfortable with anything resembling off-road. I wouldn’t drive my van anywhere I wouldn’t drive a Civic.
> The current Toyota Sienna … gas mileage.
Better mileage and optional all wheel drive were the only things I preferred about the Sienna. But while I don’t like the mileage the Odyssey gets, I also don’t actually drive far very often so it doesn’t matter much. I put less than 10k miles on my car every year.
I was actually surprised when I looked at what the current Siennas get. I have a friend with a, now, quite old Sienna who was really surprised at how high the mileage of my relatively new Honda Passport was. And the current hybrid Sienna is a fair bit better.
Renewable energy is literally available everywhere and solar and wind are now cheaper than hydro in many places.
„Economic development“ can mean many things and there is a scenario where it supports the concept of „well being“ rather than actively undermining it, as it is happening in many places currently.
> solar and wind are now cheaper than hydro in many places.
It's not possible to run a country entirely on wind and solar, you need backup for when it isn't windy or sunny.
It is possible to run a country entirely on Hydro. The lake on a hydro electric dam will last for a while - in some cases several months - between needing to be topped up by rainfall.
yes, but as the top comment suggest the problem in large countries is that economic development isn't as localized. one project that improves the lives of 1 million people in buthan means that india needs 1000 such projects to bring the same improvement to all its people. do less, and the effect is less noticeable.
My father’s decidedly non-nerdy logistics consulting business with roughly 20 employees ran (and runs) on Mac OS since the founding of the company in the mid 1990s with my mom being the „IT team“. There are some situations where companies rely on certain compatibilities requiring windows. But most could do completely fine without, especially nowadays.
You can run a logistics consulting business without windows, but you will struggle without Excel and PowerPoint, and 365 with SharePoint is basically needed for collaboration in any consulting business.
Im also a logistics consultant… try to parse a multi-million line orderlines extract in Google Sheets compared to excel.
I’m also on Mac but to be honest it’s a challenge - there are still enough industry specific tools that are windows only so I have to run a parallels VM to get by.
Collaboration with Sharepoint is I think the biggest issue with M365. It’s impossible to figure out where a file is stored… on your hard drive? One drive? Teams? Sharepoint?
And the biggest problem I have is managing revisions with multiple editors. If I were talking to Microsoft about strategy, this would be the thing I’d suggest. I know it’s common to use Sharepoint for collaboration, but it’s such a Frankenstein’d system that it’s going to be a problem for everyone sooner or later.
It's still better than anything else and the de-facto standard so you need it.
Clients will send you their PowerPoint template and want you to use it. They will send you their complex spreadsheets riddled with VBA macros and you will need to fix them. They will invite you to a Teams site because that's where their project updates go. I just don't see how you can avoid it as a consulting company!
For things like Excel - We can say it's 'bad' but I've not seen anything do the job it does better. And besides, even if it was bad, it doesn't matter - as a consultant you need to use it because your clients probably want your workings as part of the deliverables, and if it's on Google Sheets they often won't want that.
Many of the 22-25 year old-ish people in a grad school class I was part of recently had no idea where a shared project document was or how to edit it outside of Office 365’s online editor. Many didn’t know that the “attachment” from email was actually a Sharepoint link and not a file. This becomes a problem when you need to use some features in the desktop Word program that aren’t in the online editor.
Honestly, I’m less interested in how things work on day one. When systems are fresh or new, it’s easier to keep working. The mess always ends up happening after things have had time to accumulate cruft. Working on a collaborative manuscript in the current Microsoft shared system is normally a nightmare.
Trying to manage/accept/reject edits and revisions between different people is still difficult. That is unless you can use a source code repository like GitHub. But good luck trying to convince people to do that. Sadly, this means that emailing files around is still the easiest way to keep things straight.
This. Apples execs have choices on how to keep making profits. Enshitification is a choice, not a requirement by some force of nature. Tim Cook could just as well sell his shareholders on the idea that really good and user friendly products can be sold for a lot of money.
For consumer spending and disposable income, as for gdp per capita, averages are irrelevant as they can (and are) skewed by high earners/spenders and tell us little about the experience of the other 70% of the population.
Air conditioning is simply not necessary in many places in Europe. Either because of climate or building standards (ie proper insulation and/or traditional building styles with a lot of thermal mass).
The size of housing is more due to limitations on development permits designed to limit urban sprawl, as well as differing traditions and preferences.
Having top universities is nice, but won’t help you if the rest of your education system sucks, because 99% of people do not visit the top universities.
Same with wealth and quality of life: the strength of a society is probably measured best by asking where you’d rather be poor, than where you’d rather be rich.
> Air conditioning is simply not necessary in many places in Europe.
67 thousand people are dying each year in Europe from extreme heat, compared to 3k in the US. I'm sure AC "is not necessary in some places in Europe", but this lack of AC is a real material difference and has real, obviously negative consequences.
"Europe is the continent that is warming most quickly, at twice the global average,” says Tomáš Janoš, ISGlobal and Recetox researcher and first author of the study.
Historically you didn't need air conditioning in Europe to survive the summer, but that seems to change very quickly.
The average wholesale price for electricity in 2024 was close to 0.09 €/kwh.
The consumer price is about 0.3 €/kwh currently, depending on the deals you are getting. The difference between wholesale and consumer price is made up of transmission costs, taxes and markups of various middlemen.
Shutting down nuclear power had 0 impact on electricity prices, as wholesale prices are set by the most expensive producer needed to satisfy demand. That is usually a natural gas turbine. All producers get paid the rate that this marginal producer demands.
You don’t need surveillance if you have relationships and trust. Bullying is intractable because traditional schooling is essentially and structurally exactly that: the bullying of kids by adults. It’s only logical that it results in the bullying of kids by kids.
Make teachers (and parents) people of trust, not only of arbitrary authority, and you create options to address bullying between kids as well.
80% of buildings in Gaza are destroyed. There are well documented cases of arbitrary killings of civilians and attacks on hospitals. IDF is routinely demanding entire cities to be evacuated, knowing that not all people can comply with such an order. Multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity investigations have been opened by national and international prosecutors.
It is very obvious that the only restraint that the IDF is showing is that they do not kill every single civilian on sight.
Demanding cities be evacuated is what you do when you have restraint. Otherwise you would just kill everyone inside. If they had not done this, you would also claim that it's evidence of lack of restraint.
Beyond that, everything you wrote is perfectly compatible with the IDF showing tremendous restraint. It is all more or less inevitable with any war in such an environment. All of it happened in Iraq with the Americans, for example.
- Buildings destroyed aren't people
- Documented cases are just that - cases. You need to demonstrate a pattern at scale. Bad cases are inevitable among millions of interactions.
- Investigations opened is a signal of political incentives as much as actions taken.
You are committing the same fallacy that you are prescribing to others. If rehabilitation is taken seriously and provided the required resources, recidivism is a „statistical minority“.
As with many social issues, the US happens to be very bad at this currently, with recidivism rates double those of the UK, for example. UK prisons are notoriously bad by European standards and they have plenty of violent crime. But criminals are in the vast majority of cases not criminal by nature. Most people want to live a socially conforming life, given half a chance.
UK prisons are almost as bad as American or Brazilian prisons because UK is almost as unequal as the US or Brazil.
You can rehabilitate folks as much as you wish, most of them will leave and find no job in a society that cares more destroying jobs and disruption, so VCs can make another billion with another stupid SaaS exit than we care about have industry and a healthy lower middle class with social mobility.
What you are writing is demonstrably untrue and you would recognize that if you’d spend even a few minutes researching the actual facts. Rehabilitation works, if done according to established best practices.
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