Sonori

I didn’t even know there was a 2.

My mind went to otter or beaver so it’s definitely not that easy even for us organics.

I mean, regulating air pollution and managing air quality in cities was literally the reason Republican president Richard Nixon created the environmental protection agency in the first place, and it has managed vehicle emissions standards for decades, so this very much feels like the agency doing exactly what it was created to do and has long done.

Isn’t Waymo famously reliant on having nearly as many remote operators as the have vehicles when they first had to disclose the number, and have outright refused to reveal it more recently?

Personally I tend to be hesitant on relaxing the duel means of egres rule completely when i’ve seen buildings in Vancouver use two sets of stairs interwoven in the same stairwell to achieve the same effect with only a 30% or so increase in floor space. Even if it’s statistically not much help knowing there are two ways out of the building in an emergency does have an advantage, and i’m not convinced that it’s actually as much of a factor into the proliferation of double stacked corridors as them just being the cheapest way build.

Otherwise i’m definitely a big fan of the suggestions, especially more interconnections between buildings.

Those little electric Pipistrels have been getting more common for instruction and pattern work down here for a bit too. I’m told they’re great fun if you just need to do a lot of sub hour flights every day.

Actual radioactivity matters quite a bit as to how safe it is, and that’s dependent quite a bit on the actual amount and thorium density of the specific item in question. From Tokaimura to a banana levels of radiation covers quite a large range, and I in good faith assumed that if someone was going out of their way to find and mention thorium on Unix socks of all places it was probably a pretty safe assumption that they know the basics and could check where on that spectrum the item falls, that it’s an excuse to play with a detector is most of the fun after all.

Also worth noting that sometimes people just like jewelry made with weird and neat rocks.

I’m curious as to what that boat was trying to do there. The seaplane can’t really turn when moving that fast, but the boat should have been easily able to turn around, slow down, or get out of the way. Were they just not paying any attention to their surroundings dispite being in a part of the harbor with a lot of boats and where seaplanes are constantly landing and taking off?

Well There’s Your Problem episode on how so much rubbish and corpses get up there in the first place.

Yes, obviously, but for some reason they don’t bring that up as much.

Don’t worry, the same actors who are very worried about recycling EV batteries (but now phone and laptop ones for some reason) will ignore little things like useful lifespan or reuse, focus on how few solar panels are getting recycled compared to being built, and then go back to explaining how all these renewables are really so much worse for the environment than perfectly good Clean Coal and gas pickup trucks.

If it makes you feel any better, modern climate and economic studies have shown that even a full scale nuclear war involving every nuclear power at the height of the Cold War and when nuclear stockpiles were far larger than today we still wouldn’t have come very close to actually killing off all the humans on earth, with the vast majority of the casualties being owed to famine in regions that were/are heavily dependent on western fertilizer. Indeed entire nations in the southern hemisphere tend to get through such senecios without much of an direct effect from world war three.

Mostly this change from earlier predictions came from being able rule out the theory of a nuclear winter as climate modeling became more accurate and we could be sure that the secondary fires from such a war could not carry ash into the upper atmosphere in significant quantities, which was practically shown when a climate change fueled wildfire in Australia got so large that it should have been able to carry the ash into the upper atmosphere under nuclear winter theory but none was observed, validating modern climate models.

Also, dispite what some less scrupulous journalists trying to drum up clicks have posted on the Ukraine War, the Russian government itself hasn’t really made any major signaling moves with regards to bringing nukes into the conflict, and indeed has maintained and repeatedly reiterated Putin’s 2010s no first use policy when asked.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not the result of some greater Russian morals or whatever, but just a consequence of the inherent risk that such posturing could lead to nuclear escalation and breaking the nuclear taboo or even just other nations actually believing they plan to, and such scenarios end very badly for Russia in general and Putin in particular.

Obligatory two hour Soup Emporium video essay.

Don’t forget Putin bravely defending himself against western imperialism by invading neighboring nations, and how he must secretly be a communist no matter how much of the country he has privatized and sold off to his cronies.

Primarily LFP, and as for cars that currently use them, off the top of my head base model Teslas, Fords, some Kia, and basically everything BYD or other Chinese manufacturers export use it.

Ment to hedge that with the qualifier often, as some manufacturers with little competition or reason to make cheap EVs do just use a cut down high end cobalt battery bank and pass the large additional cost onto the customer. It is a practice that is increasingly going away, and when it comes to things like moving everyone to EVs the general assumption is that regardless of what Amarican manufacturers want, most of them will go with the lower cost and longer lived chemistries over the premium density ones.

Neglecting that Cobalt isn’t even used in non-luxury EV’s in favor of cheaper chemistries like LFP or Sodium Ion, it’s worth noting that while so called ‘artisanal mining’ has been supplying much of the cobalt needed for over a half century now in oil processing, it’s being replaced by larger and cheaper industrial mines as demand for cobalt in electronics and premium EVs grew.

Not that such industrial mining doesn’t come with local environmental costs, or that we shouldn’t work on better recycling capture for personal electronics, but sticking with oil sure hasn’t done anything to help the Congo so far.

Opinion pieces on the Internet and political saber rattling by low level politicians does not a nuclear policy make.

States actually have quite a few different ways of signaling they are serious about potentially ending the world as we know it, and Russia is currently using none of them.

As an example, the Russian state’s own published nuclear policy has remained unchanged for over a decade and still explicitly prohibits nuclear first use in cases like this. Currently high level Russian politicians including Putin continue to reference said defense policy in response to questions about the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine. If they were seriously considering using said nuclear weapons in Ukraine, they would be unambiguously signaling through changing these documents and other such methods that other governments actually take seriously.

More to the point, breaking the nuclear taboo would be massively harmful to both Russia and Putins own interests. It would at best result in a NATO backed no fly zone over Ukraine while China and Iran completely abandon them, and quite possibly result in a direct conventional or nuclear war with Nato. I simply don’t buy that they would do that with no warning or previous signaling simply because an artillery rocket was manufactured in a different country.

I mean, the government has mandated that all cars built since the 90s have to have a lot of computers and sensors for engine monitoring and emissions logging so that ship has long since sailed. Automatic braking is also credited with eliminating something like 1 in 5 fatalities in car accidents, so as long as we have any motorized vehicles around at all I don’t really have a problem with the government requiring manufacturers to spend the extra 20 dollars or so per vehicle it costs them to add a few ultrasonic sensors and a microcontroller it takes to slow the vehicle to the point where a driving into a pedestrian might just be survivable.