I see you here - you make very good points. It just seems like economically it’s too hard to manifest more of those pleasant, walkable cities and neighborhoods into existence in a way that they aren’t just as costly to live in as the existing ones. You can’t just build Williamsburg on the next available spot of land next to the last suburb, because no one will want to live there without a car when there isn’t a subway right in the neighborhood to take them to Manhattan in 25 minutes.
So, they just aren’t making many net new walkable cities or converting previously car-dependent ones into walkable paradises. The only newly-built ones are built on insanely expensive land (because of the proximity to great transit and/or very high paying jobs), so they’re really only feasible for people with at least $250k annual incomes, which isn’t most people. I think a lot of people know all this instinctively and therefore are against even talking about it because they see it as an unsolvable problem.
I think most people - even Floridians - know that our pretty small-population country swearing off all internal combustion transport will have zero impact on whether sea levels rise, because a ton of the coal burning and other massive pollution happens in countries that aren’t going to decarbonize (in fact, they think it’s fair game and morally right for them to use that cheap coal for 100 years since the Western countries got to do that).
There is one political party who believes the US should do degrowth and major carbon regulations, but they have been losing relevance even at the state level lately.
> because a ton of the coal burning and other massive pollution happens in countries that aren’t going to decarbonize
Everyone is moving away from burning coal, even when they have plenty of plants in which to do so, because of the very same logic which had us burning it in the first place:
Price.
> There is one political party who believes the US should do degrowth
Yes, and I dated one of their campaign managers. However, the Green Party isn't relevant.
America is not a small population country and is still per capital emitting more than China; while China is now on a downturn (admittedly from a very high absolute level of emissions)
Not sure where you live, but in the US, used EV prices utterly crashed in the past 18-24 months or so, due to new Tesla price cuts destroying the resale value of used teslas, which kinda bubbled across the whole industry. I bought a “$80,000” car with 16k miles for under $35k with 0 interest (was gonna pay cash but who can say no to that rate).
On the other hand, I fully support the idea that you just wait till your car is actually ready to replace - that’s much more economical than going EV immediately with a car payment, just to check the EV box.
Can people in Britain post their actual electricity rates per kWh?
I want us Californians to be able to see how badly we are (or aren’t) being ripped off by our utilities compared to you (mind you, these rates are approved by our regulator). We’re basically told we have to pay this much because of our lovely renewables requirements (they’re still far from 90% renewable though).
We are on a ‘time of use’ rate designed for EV charging at night.
We are paying 26 cents (£0.20) except for 4-9PM when it’s 59 cents (£0.44). Plus a monthly base charge which they just increased.
Those answers won't be too helpful. We have very high bills compared internationally, due to a difficult-to-explain quirk (pay-as-clear marginal pricing) where all electricity is charged to the customer at the highest rate possible at that moment. So wind may cost 0.05 pkwh and be freely available but if gas is being utilised anywhere else in the grid at a cost of eg. 0.45 then everybody gets charged 0.45 pkwh, even for the wind energy.
Its a messed up system which means often pay the highest in Europe, without even helping that much towards the tax coffers. But reform of this system does seem to be gaining a bit of political momentum.
The volumetric rate for electricity is almost totally irrelevant. California's bills are dominated by the fixed cost of the grid, and we use very little grid power compared to other states, so the volumetric rate has to be really high as a consequence. Electric power bills in California are in the middle of the pack compared to the other states, almost exactly the same as Texas and less than ten other states.
This isn’t convincing to me - our electricity rates in 2002 were 8 cents per kWh and none of those other facts were different back then. Inflation hasn’t done 5x since then, but our electricity rates have. We are being ripped off by the three companies that CPUC allows to do it.
They should have imposed a ruinous penalty on the utilities for their wildfire liability, and seized their assets for non-payment of it. And I say that as not a liberal and not a socialist.
People who live in cities that have municipal power are paying HALF the rates people with PG&E and SCE are.
For numbers like that, I can never tell whether it's just a vastly larger-scale dataset than any that I've seen as a non-FAANG engineer, OR, a hilariously-wasteful application of "mAnAgEd cLoUd sErViCeS" to a job that I could do on a $200/month EC2 instance with one sinatra app running per core. This is a made-up comparison of course, not a specific claim. But I've definitely run little $40 k8s clusters that replaced $800/month paid services and never even hit 60% CPU.
Anything that’s a premium paid feature will be irrelevant. Most people don’t subscribe to YouTube premium, even though they know their kids are watching a ton of ads. Adoption has also been incredibly brisk on the ad tiers of the formerly ad-free TV services like Netflix and Hulu.
I realize “less addictive algo” is a different thing to pay for than removing ads - but it’s, if anything, an even harder sell - I think the layperson wouldn’t even acknowledge that they are vulnerable to being psychologically manipulated. They think they spend so much time on these apps because it’s so enjoyable.
From most parents’ point of view, paying a monthly bill for their children to have a less toxic experience on TikTok, or YouTube will be considered an extravagance instead of a responsible safety expense.
This makes me wonder if my local McDonalds, which has three big screens mounted vertically in the drive-thru, ended up with not the commercial grade ones. They’re cooking in the sun in a hot climate all day, so they fail and turn into flickery messes, and it seems like they’re on a cycle of roughly 3 months newly-replaced & working, 1 year flickering.
Agreed, and honestly, I’m put off by the freeness because I agree it means that support will be nothing, just the Tier 1 call center reps who can read you scripts of how to hold down the power button to reset your computer, etc.
And I’d be very skeptical any business user anywhere can skate by on the iCloud Free Tier. Of all the stingy free tiers, it’s that one.
If they cared, they would make a Teams/Slack equivalent, a Zoom Killer, maybe a Confluence Killer, and charge per head, and offer storage tiers comparable to what MS and GOOG do.
(And no, don’t even joke that Messages and FaceTime are Slack and Zoom killers.)
So, they just aren’t making many net new walkable cities or converting previously car-dependent ones into walkable paradises. The only newly-built ones are built on insanely expensive land (because of the proximity to great transit and/or very high paying jobs), so they’re really only feasible for people with at least $250k annual incomes, which isn’t most people. I think a lot of people know all this instinctively and therefore are against even talking about it because they see it as an unsolvable problem.
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