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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Two facts:

    1. The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
    2. Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars. They will circle empty with no passengers and drive to pick up passengers empty (dead heading) even with a fully rideshare system. If there is widespread private ownership of autonomous vehicles (and you bet your butt that car companies will campaign for this aggressively to keep sales up), the dead heading problems only multiply. If you don’t believe me, look up any recent literature on the topic: by most accounts it will be worse, not better. Dead heading is only the tip of the iceberg of problems there.





  • I as pro-EV as the best of them. A cradle to grave emissions drop of 40% is a great step forward on reducing transport emissions (public transport and active transportation are a whole other aspect of this we’ll avoid here). However, characterizing the energy gap for EV charging as a non-issue is disingenuous.

    You’ve correctly pointed out that peak hours are when the grid is most strained and vulnerable. Well, if most everyone who drives to work starts charging their EV when they get home from work, that is at the highest peak of the day: around 5-7pm. It’s the addition to the peak curve that’s the real concern. In most places, that means triggering on fossil fuel burning facilities to meet that peak demand. It also means increased peak loads on the transmission infrastructure that could overwhelm it.

    That being said, there are some simple solutions: e.g. charge EVs on off-peak hours, smoothing out the demand on the grid. Where I live there is already an incentive to charge overnight in the form of ultra low overnight rates. I’m sure we’ll find the solutions, but please don’t pretend it’s not a problem.









  • As with most sci-fi the author gets loopier in the later books. That being said:

    • Dune: masterpiece of philosophy, one of the best books ever put to print
    • Dune Messiah: a worthy sequel and must read after the first book; completes Paul’s arc
    • Children of Dune: more plot driven than the first, but still thematically rich and entertaining.
    • God Emperor of Dune: the most divisive of the books: you love it or you hate it. I am in the love it camp, the book is unhinged and the themes are marvelous. This is where I’d stop a read of the series.
    • Chapterhouse and the other (Heretics?): forgettable in my opinion, simply because I’ve forgotten them. Later book fan opinions welcome.
    • anything Brian Herbert: not terrible but not awfully good either. Makes for decent light reading I guess, and there’s good lore building in some of the books despite some unforgivable retcons (Agemmemnon, sigh)