Somehow this is the worst bit – a Polish company fucks the Polish state railway operator because of greed. If they’d done this in another country, there might have been some international repercussions etc. but they opted to burn their name in their own home country. This being found by random hackers is actually the best way for Newag for this affair to become public. This could have been so much worse.

6.9M people spent money on this!?

I feel like an EV has an 8-10 year lifespan because after that, you better have the cash on hand to replace the battery.

Entirely true. But we can hope battery tech gets cheaper. But I’m not convinced that’s going to happen. Especially with how fast battery tech is moving, it’s not entirely unreasonable to worry about whether the battery will even be available anywhere when it does die.

Prices for useful batteries have already come down massively, to the point where lithium batteries are now growing into former lead-battery niches, because while lithium batteries are still more expensive, they are smaller and a lot more reliable. A lot of the research on battery tech is focused on using cheaper materials and on using less material per kWh. Cheaper LFP batteries are already complementing NMC batteries, and cheaper-yet sodium-based batteries are essentially in the stage of on-road validation. Even semi-solid state batteries are not too far out.

Also, by no means are batteries all dead after 8 years. There’s a bunch of Nissan Leafs and Tesla S’s to prove you wrong on that. It really depends on whether the batteries were fast-charged a lot and how much the car was driven. Also, it’s worth noting that the car industry basically defines a battery as totaled if it holds somewhere between 75-80% of its original charge. By which point it is in fact not useless.

You have another year’s time! I guess trash-sorting companies would be happy to have your help sorting through the new arrivals.

Is there a way to remove yourself from this?

Sure: There is a third box “no confession” next to “Catholic” and “Protestant” on the form. You can check that and those 9% remain with the state instead.

German secularism has a few more peculiarities. Many charitable organizations e.g. running hospitals or institutions caring for the homeless, elderly, and disabled are in fact religious (Diakonie, Johanniter, Caritas, Stadtmission, …). This has some unfortunate effects: They often hire people of Christian faith only, meaning atheists or adherents of other religions are mostly excluded at these organizations. There have also been cases of a doctor at a Christian-run hospital denying the abortion because of their faith – despite abortion being legal here. However, much of the money these organizations receive is in fact public money, supposedly spent on serving the public. Another wrinkle is that Religious Law is used when it comes to e.g. prosecuting rape cases involving priests etc. Somehow, this separate system of law that doesn’t really seem to work particularly well is accepted by the German state.

You’re right. When I grew up, I was told to brush three times as well, more I brush twice only. Not sure when or why that recommendation changed.

Could be worse, I guess. I live in a “secular” democracy that essentially collects members fees for the Catholic and Lutheran churches (and only those two!) via the federal income tax.

In a sense, I guess op is right though — I recently read that ~70% of people in a study were brushing ineffectively, no matter how long they were told to brush. Their brushing only improved after being told to make sure to brush every every “sector” of their teeth.

So if the clay is re-usable (as the article says), why aren’t they re-using it?

Actually a useful idea. Except, the free version is functionally limited to the degree it’s basically a trial and it also includes Facebook trackers.

O shit. I was really hoping my old spammy blog would automatically be deleted. At least the connection to my email address is not public and will be gone.

A belated answer…

This is such a weird line of reasoning. A farmers land is their most expensive asset, are you just assuming they’re all morons who want to throw that away?

I have another question: In an irrational world, why would farmers be rational?

Some examples: EU farmers buy Brazilian rainforest soy/corn to overproduce EU-subsidized chickens which are then sold into African markets, thereby killing African agriculture because African farmers generally aren’t subsidized and can’t compete on price. Half the food in the EU is thrown out, largely because it doesn’t adhere to visual norms, can’t be sold before the BBE date, or is thrown out by consumers because of the BBE date or cosmetic flaws. Most industrialized nations have subsidies to overproduce animal products, despite this massively increasing monetary, environmental, and health costs. Does any of that sound remotely useful to you?

Even if you really want to farm sustainably, there are quite a few hurdles:

• Stupid subsidies. There are many stupid subsidies, and even more of them existed in the past. For example, in Germany, you used to get money for removing trees from your field. Which is, essentially, a way to make it easier for the purveyors of tractors to sell farmers bigger machinery. But these days, some farmers are starting to use agroforestry (again), i.e. they are waking up to the fact that trees on the field can be extremely helpful: They keep water in the soil, help against soil erosion, provide a bit of shade, increase biodiversity, and when you cut them down after a few decades, there’s an extra revenue streams. Some countries now have subsidies for putting trees on fields again, which is good. But a lot of subsidies are still focused on generating unnecessarily large amounts of feedable and human-edible biomass, no matter the quality, no matter whether it’s actually needed to sustain the populace.

• Lobbies. Producers of farming equipment, chemical products, and GMOs throw around a lot of marketing money. That obviously influences their worldview, especially since many of the farmers left went all in on the trifecta of monocultures, big machines, and pesticides and they don’t want to be proven wrong. You can also see this warped worldview in many farmers’ opposition to nature preservation societies. In a better world, farmers and environmentalists would be natural allies; but they aren’t. Like in every other aspect of modern life, these lobbies often sell little conveniences that cost just a bit more, but going back on conveniences tends to be hard for all people anywhere.

• Buyers, including private buyers, wholesalers, and supermarkets. Most buyers have high standards regarding uniformity, immacularity, and freshness of food. Some of that is certainly useful (you don’t want an upset stomach all the time), but in many cases it just leads to useless waste. A two-ended carrot tastes just as good as a regular one, but it simply can’t be sold in most supermarkets. There are even field machines that automatically sort out the smaller vegetables and leave them to rot on the field.

• Lenders/investors. If you need to expand your farm or buy new equipment, you have to talk to a bank or an investor. Guess what? They don’t give a hoot about sustainability, they want their money back quickly.

• Tradition. Farmers tend to be pretty conservative people, for whom it takes a bit to take bigger steps or even just to reverse steps that the generation before them made. Even some very traditional farming techniques, something as basic as plowing are in fact maybe not quite as helpful as farmers think – plowing destroys some life in the soil and it also releases CO2 stored in soil. In an ideal world, farmers would either all be biologists or at least listen to and iterate along independent biologists (but see above about lobbies).

And when is this collapse happening anyway? I’ve been hearing about it coming in a few years for decades now.

Sure, you can’t be sure it’s happening until it does, I guess. But we do have good science on worldwide insect/bird/fish count, on soil health, on climate change (granted, while farming is an issue, it’s not primarily the fault of farming). And these all data points point in a certain unfortunate direction.

Meanwhile, in the real world, there are hundreds of soil management systems, because of course farmers understand that their dirt is the most important thing they own. They want to keep it working optimally, so the ones who aren’t cartoon villains manage it carefully.

This is not about cartoon villainy. I am not a cartoon villain either but I know that I (as well as 99+% of the people in this society) lead live in a way that will make our planet uninhabitable in a matter of decades (cue climate change). So, I have zero trust in your assertion of “if it was dumb, they wouldn’t do it”. Much of our live is staked on pretty dumb premises and we still live that way.

What is very much a problem is that farmland is indeed an ecological deadzone, but it’s been like that since we discovered farming.

This is just wrong. Human-managed land is not automatically a dead zone. It only becomes a dead zone if management is bad. We just need to learn (again) to amend rather than completely fuck up natural cycles.

There are plenty of e.g. organic farms that will prove you wrong on this point too.

You get optimal output when you waste as little growth as possible on non-production plants, and that results in a perfect monoculture.

Monocultures are a product of the idea that farms need to produce standardized, industrial products, nothing else. I’d guess that the kind of monocultures we see today were an absolute rarity before WWII.

And even that is not always a problem, as long as you set aside plenty of actual nature area. Earth is one big, indivisible system.

That’s an incredibly flawed way of looking at it. For one, you can’t neatly separate your farmland from the forest or brook next to it. If you use pesticides or fertilizer, as soon as the next rain arrives, it will influence those neighboring areas.

For two, humans have been grabbing so much land, there is simply no way to just zone off any more “nature areas” that are uninhibited by humans. Where those zones sorta kinda exist, e.g. in the Amazon, they are rapidly shrinking or on the verge of collapse. In industrialized nations, we have zero areas that are untouched by humans–but that wouldn’t be an issue if those areas were managed well. And therein lies the issue.

The real problem is when people demand less effective farming practices. Because less effective method require more land for the same production, and I would rather have biodiverse nature there than farmland.

Glyphosate may, in the short term, be a part of “effective farming practices”, but it is certainly not part of efficient farming practices. For one, if anything, we need a lot less farming, as half the food in the EU is in fact trashed – and everyone in the EU who goes to bed hungry is a victim of injust and ineffective distribution rather than too little production. Second, it does not help us that we are overproducing now while depleting the soil for the future. I won’t even go into how much land and effort is going into the nutritionally counterproductive raising of excessive numbers of livestock, because this post got too long anyway.

I don’t think that they’re pretending that. However, the issue is that right-wing and right-of-center parties carelessly throw around lies and half-truths that match the way people tend to be thinking anyway.

It also doesn’t matter to them that they create rather than solve issues, as long as their narrative is stable. A very recent example: Conservatives normally claim that they are in favor of having a strong and growing economy. However, German conservatives just deliberately worsened the economic outlook of the entire country by suing against the 2021 state budget. To do so, they weaponized an overly aggressive debt ceiling they themselves[1] put into place in 2009 and which they themselves ignored for most of the years between 2009-2021.

[1] Along with the Social Democrats who unfortunately have been moving further to the right for at least the last 20 years. Since Conservatives, Free Liberals and Social Democrats all voted for this debt ceiling rule at the time, it’s now part of the constitution. Abolishing that rule is now an impossibility, as the coalition would need support from a large number of Conservatives to do so.

Canada is extremely picky when it comes to refugees. And it has the choice to be picky, because crossing the sea from the Mid-East/North Africa to Canada is hard. Even refugees from South America need to travel through the US first. So in the end, Canada gets people who are relatively well-off and well-educated and who pose fewer problems integrating.

Europe on the other hand is the natural route for Mid-East/North African refugees which due to the geographical closeness is available to a lot more people, including some from social segments below the middle class of their original country. And since the people coming to the EU tend to integrate worse, need more education and social services, there’s a tremendous opening for right-wing parties to swoop in and make claims. The EU also really needs to work on integration of new arrivals, even a country that pretends to be fairly open like Germany is partly really steeped in outmoded, hostile, demotivating processes and a mentality of not seeing refugees as people but as a burden to society.

No controversy. Just a submission to HN, basically an ad (of sorts).

Honest question: Is the Hungarian leadership’s hate against Soros actually (more nakedly) antisemitic in its messaging or does it rather stem from Soros probably being the only billionaire invested in Hungarian politics who’s not an Orban crony?

Granted, it can be extremely hard to discern, and I do know the concept of dog-whistling. There’s also definitely an overlap in the groups of people vilifiying Gates (not Jewish but influential), vilifiying Soros (Jewish and influential), and believing in Zionist Space Lasers (antisemitic conspiracy theory).

I say that because:

• Eating plants directly is always going to be more efficient than eating lab grown meat which was fed on plants (because there are going to be waste products).
• Eating plants directly is also healthier. Cancers, heart attacks, blood pressure issues… some very common health issues partly stem from humans in industrialized nations eating way too many animal products. Lab grown meat won’t magically be healthier.
• There’s still a chance that lab-grown meat doesn’t pan out because it’s hard to scale up.
• Lab grown meat is going to be high-tech for a while. This gives a lot of power to a few select companies. Lab-meat shoppers are going to be dependent on a few startups and eventually a few multinationals which have bought up the startups.
• This also means prices are going to be dictated by this oligopoly of companies, most of which need to serve investors. Often that’s going to be tech investors who expect a lot of growth leading to a lot of profit.

Glad to see that right-wing idiots have found yet another topic to be outraged by. I am not saying that lab meat is the best of solutions but it seems incrementally better than what we have today.

You’re right that just banning glyphosate will only mean farmers switch to another poison.

However, pesticides that kill entire ecosystems and in the process endanger human food production or at the very least mean that farming will have to move into warehouses eventually certainly do not have a “good cost/effectiveness/hazard ratio”. Farmers urgently need to fix their mindset which has been warped by decades of chemical industry propaganda and counterproductive farming subsidies if they want their profession to continue to exist. (And of course, there’s a massive lock-in effect: So much farming soil is mostly dead and too rich or poor in nutrients. It takes a few years before such fields are restored to a state where more natural farming is possible. Farmers won’t have much income from that land in the meantime.)

Well I like bashing on Tesla and Musk just as much as the next guy. But there are also a lot of anti EV sentiments in the article which aren’t warranted in my opinion.

Pretty much, seemingly a mix of apparently genuine factual concerns, snide (but accurate) remarks about PepsiCo, and stupid anti-EV sentiments.

I wish Tesla’d invested more energy into this project. But economically, it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to produce semis when they could produce cars instead which have much better scale and margin. Car buyers are much happier to pay for useless frills (like the 20" rims that only serve to increase fuel consumption) than ROI-focused truck buyers.

Using electric trucks for trips of 400+ miles doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Better invest in a better rail system, too bad Elon spoiled that with his loopy bullshit.

Right but that would be a systemic solution. Or in other words: Something that a government would have to commit to, whereas private companies are much happier to just add another hack to a suboptimal system. Roads exist already, and (today!) they can be used in much more flexible way than rail.