At highway speeds aerodynamic drag creates more noise than the motor itself (externally). So an electric car makes little difference there. Reducing speed reduces noise non-linearly. Therefore electric cars make a big difference for noise pollution in slower city streets. Inter-city travel just needs to be reduced, slowed down, and moved to well built electric rail.
True for aerodynamic noise, but tire noise starts to dominate at speeds as low as 30 km/h[1]. Obviously it's going to vary depending on the car and the road cover. It certainly seems intuitively true from the quality of the sound at the side of a busy city street.
EVs do nothing for that and aren't a panacea regarding roadway noise. I've been snuck upon by an EV in a parking lot a couple of times, but never on the side of the street. It would work if we limit the speed within cities to something like 20 km/h, which is something that, yes, we should be doing immediately.
For most people in most societies it always was. It just used to be surplus value extraction from the wife for the husband and clan, and later the capitalist employing the husband. With the increase in bargaining power of women in society extraction of surplus value bacame more two-way and the capitalist class was able to extract surplus value directly from the women instead of roundabout through the men. Hence both partners need to work to have the same living standard as before with just one partner working.
I can already see this in the Balkans. Countries which have stronger ties with the US (eg Romania, Kosovo) can easily see developer salaries be 5-20x local average salary. This has contributed to real estate prices getting out of whack for certain areas in the main cities.
For anything abstract I would argue that the people who are able to onboard and form teams and ideas remotely are inherently the best for the job and likely produce a disproportionate percentage of any teams output. In my experience when you remove middle management (as it happens when you go remote), you want to only hire those people adapted to remote and self-directed work.
I would argue that location based and remote teams are fundamentally different companies. Similar to how tech first and tech-second companies are fundamentally different. I can't think of a single tech-second company that was able to move into the tech-first world. Some local companies might be able to morph themselves into remote companies, but as we see today, they will both lose a lot of staff, and even change their product eventually.
I work with hardware that either I do it at our facility.
Or I risk making a few hundred people homeless if the hardware goes up at flames at home because it'll take a good day to put out the...volatile fuel source :D
The ultimate WFH experience.
That's the supply chain reality of most non-port cities/countries in the world. It's also normal to pay 1.5-3x the original ticker price for what you ship in based on tariffs, fees, shipping, etc. The trick is to pick your location based on a Ben diagram of requirements. Personally I buy almost everything locally direct from producers. Many artisans are so cheap that it's even worth custom ordering certain products. For high tech or industrial goods you could be out of luck though.
The geothermal plant in Basel, Switzerland was AFAIK among the very first production ready plants using fracking. I remember the news of them turning it on and then a series of 2-3.5 Richter earthquakes happening. The city was leveled by earthquakes before so people got scared and immediately turned it off. The tiny damage that happened in the very old housing stock was costlier to the insurances than the geothermal plant itself. It did produce quite a bit of clean electricity though.
> For me as a technology manager, I'm more exhausted than ever. Video meetings are a pain. Because of this, people switch to asynchronous communication methods, which is definively more effective, but lacks even more personality. Text has many more layers of ambiguity. People get more aggressive and lonely. Misunderstandings rise.
IMO That's a cultural and psychological problem similar to when people moved from industrial facilities to service industries, or from waterfall development to agile. People can and have to learn workflows to accomodate that, and they will be happier.
> My job is to be aware of the emotional undercurrents of arguments and technology and physical distance just seems to get in the way of that. Any forms of creativity that happens in a group, like whiteboarding together, just isn't the same.
In my experience online whiteboaridng on tablets is far superior to in-room whiteboarding. Recording, replaying, integration of other tools, etc. It's again a question of consistent workflows.
If you include all known positive and negative feedback loops we're talking about human extinction within a couple decades. Furthermore, most of what the public thinks is the key leverage points of climate change generally turn out to be something else. Ie deforestation for meat production is the dominant human made climate mover, not CO2 from energy use. All other natural feedback loops then end up being force multipliers.
> Ie deforestation for meat production is the dominant human made climate mover, not CO2 from energy use.
No it isn't, it's around (under, really) 10%. CO2 from US transportation alone is 6.7 billion tonnes, vs 4.8 for all tropical deforestation (which is the place land use for livestock takes place). It is a common misconception that land use or agriculture are significant drivers of climate change. They are of course tremendously damaging in their own particular ways (eg water/runoff/biodiversity), but globally energy, and fairly close behind it transportation, are by far the largest causes of increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Is that a rhetorical question? Because a person who makes conscious unethical choices is a bad person. Otherwise there would be no metric for "badness" and the word would be meaningless.
I fund it fascinating that in "developed" or "fully western" countries it is the youth that is disregarding the lockdown measures. In Kosovo/Albania it is the precise opposite. An acquaintance of mine in China told me that it is the genX and older generation there too that seems to not understand the gravity. How come this big difference?
