danhor

It's pretty setteled that people tend to drive slower on eg. narrow/twisty roads or with more stuff near the road (e.g. trees in an alleyway), even after acclimating to them.

In the sense that they're not part of the road and may have their own RoW, yes. In the sense that non-ground level infrastructure is commonly used do replace level crossings and seperate cars and others, no.

You don't need to make the infrastructure more dangerous to lower speeds, it only needs to feel that way (narrower RoW with some plants around, more constant small curves, ...). If it would be more dangerous at higher speeds, but speeds are decreased due to this, it is often safer in the end.

Separate pedestrian ways mostly suck. Segragated infra in very bad weather is used, but in most conditions walking at ground level is preferred. In Germany, many Pedestrian Underpasses (often with shops), Overpasses, Skywalks were abandoned in favor of level-crossings, due to accessability concerns, pedestrian dislike, maintainance hassle and the general tendency of them to get unattractive very quickly.

Here in an accompanying blog post by one of the study authors: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/02/25/the-issue-of-c...

They say that it's not just consultants and there are many other problems, although their overuse is a huge issue.

Cursory googling throws out various different numbers for the rail length with english wikipedia saying that they're both roughly equal size at 210 vs 220 Mm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...) with old UIC data, the German one citing the cia world factbook which specifies 230Mm for the European union and 300Mm for the US (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/railways/).

I highly doubt that the US rail network is twice the size of the EU one by most metrics, I guess different methods for counting length were mixed there (e.g. how is single-track vs double-track counted).

This is taking europe as in the EU, as anything else is annoying.

It'd also be pretty interesting to get the frequency of passenger rail derailments vs freight derailments to more accurately compare the numbers given the high amount of passenger rail in EU. As a very rough idea, the first document I found giving any indication about the distribution had 2 dangerous freight derailments and 3 dangerous passenger train derailments in germany for 2021 (https://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/SharedDocs/Downl... P. 16ff.).

The EU also differs from the US in that that cargo trains are much shorter, leading to more trains needed for the same amount of freight cars. So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?

EDIT:

Looking at the floridarail.com link, they say that the US has a broader gauge than europe. Since almost all of the US is standard gauge and almost all of europe is standard gauge or wider, this is just wrong. It's also news to me that europe (specifically germany) doesn't allow toxic chemicals to be transported over rail. The article seems a bit iffy.

I really like the way android did it. Retaining old touch screen buttons as a default and for those who want it, but also having the opiton of switching to a sleek new gesture-based way to navigate (taking less screen space), with both being supported.

But that's probably not an option for apple.

Around 60% of people in germany fly less than once a year. A third never flies. I expect that to be similar in other european countries. A lot more people eat meat.

A attiny might not make sense, but you can get something like the PMS150C for around ~5ct, where it makes more sense to use a single MCU than a 555 with all the extra needed BOM Items.

Individual sacrifices (I would rather say individual lifestyle changes) do scale somwhat (for example meat consumption has gone down in germany by almost 10% over the last 10 years and it's not because meat is expensive or had disincentives attached to it), but not to the degree needed.

Saying we only need nuclear power is obviously not true and in this case the snide comment points to the fact that the lifes of individuals will also need to change and pushing all needed change away to the industry is wrong. Peoples lifes will need to change, encouraged and enforced by legislation.

And I do think people also hava a individual responsibility (especially for stuff that can't be decarbonised in the near future with good alternatives like meat consumption or flying, but also for buying unneeded large cars or wasting energy), even though it doesn't work for change on a larger scale.

Gas emits less CO2, but when it leaks it's much worse (Methane) so in the United States it's not far off in the normal pipeline network.

In most countries we're not close to a penetration of renewables that significantly profit from the flexilibilty of gas. Thus building new gas infra isn't really helping. If storage (not just batteries) pans out the way we're hoping, gas can just be skipped. If not, it can be built quickly.

"Big Industry" matters a lot, but personal transportation is also a large part of emissions. Especially for people that fly intercontinental more than once a decade.

It's wrong to assume that you can just convince people to give up their fossil fuel SUVs, but that means another mechanism has to be used to make them, not that aggregated personal choice doesn't have a huge impact.

This campaign promoted an inefficient mechanism, fully knowing it wouldn't work, but that doesn't mean that peoples lifestyles don't matter.

Arguing that only industry needs to change is also a cheap cop-out, belying the scale of the problem.

You can get 32 bit MCUs for much less (~20ct). But many sensors, USB Hubs, specialized chips have some kind of small processor inside (which is often an 8051 right now) where this could be a good replacement, being low-gate-count, having good tools and a very low licensing cost (0$).

Magnetic cables aren't spec compliant, and for good reason. It's way easier to mess up with the voltage connections and fry the usb c port due to stray metal and a lot more exposed to ESD. You should avoid using them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/motlhn/magnet...

You don't have to license USB, you just need a VID. The USB-IF is planning to enforce some of the labels with trademark law, but (for example) for the Nintendo Switch Nintendo often didn't mention that the connector was USB-C, so that wouldn't work.

GDPR doesn't require popups, it also allows for programmatic solutions. For some reason (lookin' at you DNT) online advertisement companies, publishers and browser vendors never came together to specify one after GDPR was passed.

Some sites like geizhals.de respond to DNT and only use the bare minimum, but that's the exception, not the norm (for some reason hint hint).

Usually laws don't prescribe some specific technical implementation unless absolutely necessary because they're often not optimal and go out of date quickly.

We had cars on rails. It doesn't really make sense: The train is much heavier, thus has much lower acceleration and lower max speeds.

The mass & area needed per person is also much higher, increasing fares a lot.

Terminals & stops need to be much larger and take longer.

Self driving doesn't improve on any of this, even worse, it takes away the major advantage of not needing to drive.

There's a reason loading cars on trains as a way of travel is basically dead and self driving makes it worse.

The law of diminishing returns has thus far been wrong on battery and renewables. Previous estimates often were wrong due to assuming a slowdown. Not to say it can't or won't happen, but unlikely isn't the word I'd use.

The last two years were weird, especially regarding batteries due to prices increasing, but I'd put that on Covid and the resulting mess.

Especially as solar & wind is already cheaper than everything else by far, so the critical part is batteries which is a broad field with a huge increase in relevance & research over the past few years.

The chances are pretty good, but of course a slowdown could still happen.

Aside from technical concerns, they're loud as hell during takeoff and landings, making their use inside populated places a bit controversial.

Looking at heating: There are still (admittedly fewer each year) people heating with coal, often with district heating. This results in approx. 1kg of CO2 emissions per kWh of heat (with losses due to the distribution) (gas heating is 200g per kWh).

The german electric grid has a carbon intensity of approx. 500g per kWh. If you supplement this with a local solar installation that (let's just say) halves the carbon intensity and have a great heat pump setup with a COP of 5 it results in 50g per kWh. This means you can heat 20 times the amount of the worst-case commie-block dweller with coal district heating before it gets even. And even though commie blocks aren't bad, I'd expect modern houses to have much better insulation (at least in Germany) than original commie blocks (worst [reasonable] case, remember).

In cities there is generally less infrastructure per person, but even though there are less road, cable, pipe kms per person, the ones are bigger and/or more heavily used, needing more maintenance and more frequent replacements.

In Germany public infrastructure accounts for 800kg of CO2 per person, while heating and warm water account for 2.2t of CO2. Public infrastructure is important, but so large to matter so much (and remember, this includes things like public service and military that isn't effected by your living style).

Electricity consumption at 0.5t and food at 1.7t are not that different for urban vs rural areas. Other consumption at 3.4t is hard to classify.

Looking at the statistics in Germany (http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/MiD2017_Ergebnis..., page 48) people living in metropolis drive roughly half as much as people living in very rural regions. This is significant, but hardly an order of magnitude. Just because you live in a metropolis doesn't mean you live in a commie block, but I find it hard to imagine it gets down 1/6th. Even people without a car (not only not owning one, but not having access to one) in a metropolis drive 1/7th of people in very rural areas (but commie blocks are certainly not without cars). So this is hardly an order of magnitude.

A car replacement rate of every 3 years also sounds very high to me (ignoring company cars, but that doesn't change in either case), I think 5-6 years at least is more likely for suburbs and maybe a bit higher for commie-block dwellers but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same.

This was only looking at CO2 (since it's easy to find numbers) and it's undoubtedly true that on average living in dense housing is more sustainable than suburban sprawl or even rural living. But an order of magnitude is huge and much harder to reach.

And since energy usage & emissions are heavily shaped by factors beyond "how dense do you live", it's harder to speak beyond the average. Someone living in the commie block that flies once a year from germany to new york and back produces more CO2 emissions from these two flights alone (~2.5t) than the average german with his mobility (~2.2t).

But of the places known to have a large share of cycling, none have mandatory helmet laws (at least as far as I know). Thus, it may not be sufficient but it seems necessary.

If most cyclists wear helmets, why do you need to mandate it?

No doubt it's greener, but not by an order of magnitude. Looking at the car: A large part of emissions are produced during manufacturing, especially for electrical cars. Driving less helps, but not an order of magnitude. Same with heating. A heat pump just needs (generally speaking around) 1/3 of the energy, so you really need a large size differential to get to an order of magnitude.

People living in a large city also have better access to an airport, which generally leads to more flights and more emissions (in total still less, but not great).

Railroad tracks are pretty flexible, there's no need to bend them separately, you just put them in the sleepers and can fine tune them in there.

You can see how much they bend in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpP6ar63Qxw (1:40). In this case they get delivered as 200m sections on normal rail cars, so they hava to withstand normal curves during transport.

It's strange because it's written to generate a debian package.

You can also use the normal rust build process that hasn't changed since v1.0: `cargo build --release`

Car carbon emission are usually around the level of aviation emissions with typical occupancy levels [1]. But Air travel encourages flying much larger distances as opposed to e.g. driving. Without air travel, no sane person would travel to e.g. Asia from Europe a few times per year. Flights over 4000km are 6% of flights but around 52% of emission in europe [1]. Few people will drive 4000km with a car.

In my opinion, simply comparing the averages is also not useful. I expect that car occupancy will be higher for distances where flying becomes reasonable, reducing the average emission levels. For example vacation travel most often happens in a group not alone. I also think that the economic benefit of car emissions is higher than plane emissions.

Emissions of air travel are commonly often given as CO2 Emissions (around 2% of emissions worldwide), while the complete warming effects are likely around 4% of warming worldwide [2].

Air travel is very unevenly distributed, with most of the population never flying as opposed to e.g. cars (in germany 2/3 of people fly less than once per year with half of them never flying [3], 12% of adults in the US account for 68% for flights takes [5]. In general look at [6] figure 4). Thus a small portion of the population benefits from air travel as opposed to e.g. car travel.

The increase in flying for developed countries and the further economic growth in developing countries means that without any intervention flying is expected to increase a lot in the next decades and threathen the paris goal.

It's very unlikely that air travel can meaningfully decarbonise in the next decades as opposed to car travel where a broad adoption of electric vehicles is expected in the next decade. The adoption of SAF has been pretty much non-existent up 'till now, contrary to industry promises (and fraught with issues both financial and energy usage) and battery-based solutions are only an option for ultra-short distance flights. Hydrogen based solutions are also very much in the early development phase and IMHO also unlikely to succeed.

Long-distance air travel is also without real alternative and can't be rolled back. For example, as air travel gets adopted more broadly, more people live in other countries a longer distance away and regularly visit their families at home. Trying to revert this is basically impossible (people can't see friends and family anymore), so higher adoption is hard to revert. If the population broadly becomes used to international vacations, reducing them in a large way also becomes unpopular. This is continually increases, so social solutions continually get harder.

Thus we expect to increase flights (but still with uneven distribution), have little hope for technical solutions for eliminating emissions in the next decades and social solutions will get harder as time goes on.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_effects_of_aviat... [3]: https://www.eurocontrol.int/sites/default/files/2021-02/euro... [4]: http://www.mobilitaet-in-deutschland.de/pdf/MiD2017_Tabellen... page 74 [5]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802... [6]: https://theicct.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/global-aviati...

In that case you'd probably have a lot of empty trips, dropping the average occupancy of cars below 1. I think it's unlikely we'll see a lot of 2-4 person ride sharing (dislike of strangers, longer trip times due to needing to pick-up and drop-off more people). If you don't have higher density, the time for a vehicle to get to you will also be an issue.

It'd increase car-miles (likely increasing congestion) and likely lead to a move away from public transit in denser regions, akin to uber.

I'm highly doubful a large sharing economy for cars will happen anyway. Conventional car sharing (not uber) isn't popular and one reason for that is that people like having a personal car as a second "living room" (leaving personal belongings) without strangers and for the instant and hassle-free access it provides.

Thus I believe that self-driving will just lead to people driving more with their own personal vehicles, since it's becomes easier to do something else while driving and feels like less of a time sink.

Policy decisions for linux itself don't (necessarily) apply out-of-tree modules?

It's 25kmh for pedelecs. Most countries also limit E-Scooters to 25kph, but (for example) Germany limits them to 20kph.

It's impossible to get AAA games (and most AA games) without some form of DRM (with some notable exceptions), the same as high(er) budget media productions.

The Kindle was already 8 years old when I got it, isn't it better to re-use it with more current software? The same with router hardware that gets exploited to flash OpenWRT.

It's very hard to get a modern Smartphone (with acceptable cameras, battery life, performance and software availability) with manufacturer-intended root access.

While I agree that people should adopt Rust (and other approaches) for their security porperties, it's not hard to see how it may lead to exploits getting rarer and to more categories of devices & content that can't be reasonably used in a "free" way, even if not intended by the manufacturer. Thus making it much harder to have control over the devices you own (without becoming some kind of luddite).

Germany never went all-in on electricity like e.g. France did, even while building NPPs.

What is now an issue for germany is the move away from domestic or easily replaceable fossil fuels like coal or oil in favour of gas.

The only issue with that point is that the share of natural gas in the electricity mix hasn't meaningfully increased in germany over the last decades.