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magiccupcake

@ magiccupcake @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
129
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Has any country actually solved the housing crisis?

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  • I live in the United States, and as I understand it the housing crisis is caused by several factors.

    1. The lowest level of zoning is typically residential single family. This means small scale owners and developers cannot increase supply by taking a house and adding to it. Either by adding extensions, subletting, or even building a mini-apartment building. To add to this, US regulations require apartment units to have access to 2 staircases, in the event of a fire. This is good for safety, but greatly restricts style of apartments to hotel styles, and increases costs, so smaller apartments don't make as much sense. This requirement should be able to be waved in the case of fire resistant building materials.
    2. Speculative land owning. Some property owners simply sit on properties in developing areas, waiting for its price to increase, and since tax is based on the value of the total property (land+building), a decaying building reduces the cost of owning that land. To fix this, we should be taxing the value of the land instead, punishing speculators, while incentivising people to improve their land (by building housing).
    3. Overuse of cars. Even when places want to expand housing, the complete and utter reliance on cars as transportation in the US leads to backlash for increasing housing, as the perception is that it will increase traffic. To combat this cities need to rethink their transportation strategies to radically increase things like bus and bike lanes. Even when cities do have buses, the strategy funded by the federal government is abysmal. For example instead of running buses that can hold 15 passengers and run every 15 mins, cities will instead run buses that can hold 50 people every hour, and so these buses run mostly empty with 2-3 passengers.

    The main policy changes that we need are less restrictive zoning, tax speculators, and diversify urban transport. But resistance is heavy, many politicians themselves are land holders and do not want to implement these changes, or to anger those that do. Landholders generally have more political voice, power, and wealth.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • As someone who checked it out for physics here's my experience:

    Anything that could easily be found and be correct that would be found on chegg, would be easily repeated by chatgpt, and with usually clearer solutions that was easier for slightly different problem prompts.

    Anything that could not be well answered by chatgpt likely would not have a good solution on chegg, being either outright wrong, or extremely confusing as an answer.

  • Disc Editions Make Up 82% Of All PS5 Console Sales

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  • More like Sony doesn't want to cannibalize selling their own dedicated Blu-ray players for a much higher profit margin.

    A $100 bluray drive, an Ugoos am6, and coreelec can get play everything for way less than a high end bluray player that can cost $1000.

  • Disc Editions Make Up 82% Of All PS5 Console Sales

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  • Shame it doesn't support dolby vision though.

  • I refuse defeatism

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  • Transporting food halfway across the world ain't free either.

  • US to probe Tesla's 'Full Self-Driving' system after pedestrian killed in low visibility conditions

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  • Not in one exposure. Human eyes are much better with dealing with extremely high contrasts.

    Cameras can be much more sensitive, but at the cost of overexposing brighter regions in an image.

  • Report: Methane Emissions From Major Meat & Dairy Companies Rival Big Oil

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  • While pork and poultry are not great for the environment either, they have nothing on the methane emissions of ruminating animals like cows.

  • These are the weather machines you are looking for

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  • I can't control the infrastructure that requires me to drive a car.

  • If only there was a way to get all of those people there and back home without a car.

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  • Except that cars are heavy, so multi-level parking is prohibitively expensive.

  • EV sales are growing. So why are automakers getting cold feet?

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  • Well let me clarify a bit why I think they are the worst.

    They have the full complexity an an ICE car, with the added difficulties that arise in a full EV

    You need to build and design a car that has all of the downsides of ICE cars. Complicated engine, emissions management, fuel, air intakes.

    With a lot of the downsides of an ev. Large heavy, expensive batteries.

    Meanwhile you get limited upsides. Evs get lower maintenance and transport costs and ICE cars get range.

    Plug in hybrids will have harder maintenance than either, while not getting the fully reduced transport costs as it's not as efficient as a full ev.

    Here's where traditional hybrids win out, their battery can be really small, correspondingly cheap and more efficient.

    Lugging all that extra weight around decreases the efficiency of the vehicle, where for full ev that matters a lot.

    When running in full gas mode your lugging around a heavy battery for nothing, and in a full ev mode your lugging around a heavy engine for nothing.

    The High-medium range of full gas would be better served by a traditional hybrid, and the low-medium range would be better served for full evs.

    I'm sure there is a narrow window for plug in hybrids, but again that is going to be rare and shrinking as evs get better.

    While you can't fix stupid, we do have to think about how a product actually gets used vs it's design.

    If nobody is plugging their plug in hybrid, then maybe the manufacturer should remind them, even if its only outlet level power.

    To me it is also a symbol of overconsumption. Buying a vehicle that will cover 100% of your use cases vs buying for 99% and renting a more suitable option for that 1%.

    I do think this argument for me would change if manufacturers took a different approach. If they took something like a traditional hybrid, like a Ford fusion, and stuck a modern battery in and added a simple plug would be great. Then increase the efficiency a bit and maybe someone could get 10 miles of battery from a regular outlet.

  • EV sales are growing. So why are automakers getting cold feet?

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  • Honestly plug in hybrids are the worst of both worlds.

    There was a study recently from Europe that found the vast majority of people with plug in hybrids hardly every plugged them in, and drove them like normal cars. That defeats the entire point of a plug in hybrid, and now you are carrying a heavy battery everywhere that you are not fully using. Which makes the car less efficient than a normal hybrid!

  • [article] What to do about America’s killer cars

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  • I don't see why we can't go after both at once.

    Fix zoning issues and work on reducing car weights

  • [article] What to do about America’s killer cars

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  • Try thinking about the math a little differently. Instead using a by mile approach I get a similar result.

    1. Average American drives 15,000 miles/year
    2. Over 60 years, that's 900,000 miles total
    3. Using a death rate of 1.33 per 100 million miles:
    4. So for 900,000 miles: (1.33 / 100,000,000) * 900,000 = 0.01197
    5. Convert to percentage: 0.01197 * 100 = 1.197%
    6. 1/75 is about 1.3% which is not far from my guess.

  • Americans misunderstand their contribution to deteriorating environment

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  • Too be fair, it is not the choice of individual Americans to live in and be dependent on a society that was forced to become car centric and dependent.

    With very few options to travel by car, and the large dominance of single family homes, we don't get many options.

    Fuck people who drive gas guzzling trucks and giant suvs though. That is just unnecessary. But again car manufacturers have been slowly convincing Americans to purchase larger more expensive suvs for obvious reasons.

    This issue is absolutely a governmental policy choice, and one that is continuing to be upheld.

  • Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

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  • While it would be cool for it to appear the size of the moon, it is not necessary with a shaped mirror.

    You can keep the same size in a higher orbit, maybe even geosynchronous, then sync the rotation of the mirror to keep it pointing in the same spot on earth.

    Granted a shaped mirror that size would be much harder to put into orbit than a flat mirror.

  • Startup Says It'll Use Huge Space Mirror to Sell Sunlight During Nighttime

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  • It's certainly a stupid idea if your trying to illuminate at the suns level, but if you wanted an area to have permanent moonlight? Not so unreasonable.

    The moon is 400,000 times dimmer, so 1km^2 of mirror, which is ridiculous, could illuminate an area the size of Germany.

    New York metro area is 12,000km^2, which would only need a mirror 173m on each side.

    Actually might not be a bad tourist attraction for a crazy city, permanent artificial moonlight.

  • Batteries start to rival gas on California’s electricity grid

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  • Grid storage wouldn't be lithium ion, something like lithium phosphate would be better.

    Step one, buy in bulk to get a price closer to $150/kwh

    Step 2, use for much longer than 2000 cycles, lfp have much longer expected lifetimes, and since space/weight aren't a huger consideration, you can replace individual cells when they go bad.

    Step 3, produce your own energy, if you have your own energy generation, you don't need to pay grid prices, and profit is much better.

    Disclaimer, I am not an expert in this at all, but this is how I imagine it could make sense.

  • Swiss Researchers May Have Solved Hydrogen Storage

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  • It seems like it's best use case would be in conjunction with nearby buildings. Where the waste heat can be used for heating.

  • Intel’s Troubles Complicate U.S. Chip Independence

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  • They've had fab problems for years, in that it cost them a ton on money and much longer than desired to shrink nodes, so they've fallen from a leader in fab production to being behind.

    Not to mention there's not much money to be made from fabs, unless your tsmc.

    AMD, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Google, Apple, are all huge tech companies that design their own cutting edge chips, and only Samsung is another company that both designs and produces chips.

  • Threads deepens its ties to the open social web, aka the ‘fediverse’

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  • Ehh mastodon and lemmy don't see a ton of cross talk. Threads is mainly going to affect mastodon instances.