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> The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait It's written as a bait to people who have bought into the oil industry propaganda that EV's
by labrador 4y ago
> The headline feels like someone crafted it for maximum clickbait
It's written as a bait to people who have bought into the oil industry propaganda that EV's aren't a solution. "Where do you think the electricity comes from? Coal, gas and oil fueled power plants, that's where." If I had a dollar for every time I've heard this I could afford a Tesla.
- dheera 4y agoYeah I've heard this way too much too. Why are humans so bad at second-order thinking and understanding that it's possible and, barring politics, straightforward to change where electricity comes from but it's not really possible to change where gasoline comes from?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago130 million adults in the US have low literacy skills, meaning that more than half (54%) of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level, according to a piece published in 2022 by APM Research Lab. https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy My note: critical thinking is not as prevalent as one might think, and there are also folks at various levels of gov and corp acting maliciously about the topic (fossil fuel consumption, climate change) due to entrenched interests. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- fbdab103 4y agoThat the article did not make a bigger reference to immigrants makes me suspect. What are the percentages for native English speakers vs ESL? The states with the largest rates of Level 1 are all in the southwest where I expect there to be larger numbers of native-Spanish speakers.
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- osigurdson 4y agoI don't like "most people are dumb" arguments. Most people have average intelligence (i.e. a normal distribution). It is generally most accurate to assume that "the masses" are just as smart as us - even if it hurts.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> I don’t like “most people are dumb” arguments. Most people have average intelligence “low literacy skills” or lacking "critical thinking" is a description of learning/education, not intelligence. > It is generally most accurate to assume that “the masses” are just as smart as us IF “us” refers to people of average intelligence only, this is accurate, though irrelevant here for the same reason as the preceding.
- JamesBarney 4y agoIf you do believe in intelligence it's pretty clear the average professional software engineer is probably up there with other professionals which are half to a full standard deviation above the rest.
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- rayiner 4y agoThe map in your link suggests that low literacy rates are the result of states with large minority populations and immigrants. For example Iowa and Idaho have much higher literacy rates than say New York or California. Mississippi and Alabama have comparably low literacy rates to New York and California, but I’d hazard a guess that this is a product of their Democrat-voting minority population. Because it’s not like education funding or anything like that otherwise distinguishes North Dakota from Alabama. So I’m not sure what point you’re trying to get across here.
- dheera 4y agoEnglish proficiency != literacy Most immigrants are fully literate in another language and if they can speak broken English are more intellectually accomplished than a huge fraction of Americans who speak only 1 instead of 1.5 or 2 or even more languages. I'm not convinced that correlation is due to immigrants, unless they mistakenly equated English proficiency to literacy. Anecdotally though, I feel there are a whole lot more homeless people in New York than in Idaho, and maybe that's the reason for the correlation.
- rayiner 4y agoThe survey linked above relies on English language material to gauge literacy: > Some of these high county-level percentages stem from high populations of immigrants, whose first language is not English. The PIAAC only assesses English literacy… Also you can just see this in the chart. The highest literacy rates are in states with the highest native born white American populations, but are otherwise very different in terms of politics (Minnesota and North Dakota). Meanwhile the lowest literacy states are those with large minority or immigrant populations, but again are otherwise very different politically (California and Mississippi).
- imtringued 4y agoThe politicians in Germany somehow believe in synthetic fuel... Hydrogen is difficult enough, adding carbon makes it absurd.
- sokoloff 4y agoWas there any significant evolutionary pressure to reward better second-order thinking? Better thinking? Yes. Better long-term, second-order, or very nuanced thinking? Probably not.
- ianai 4y agoRaising a kid for over a decade before they’re biologically mature is actually pretty long term. Granted, they were probably able to contribute to a hunt before puberty so maybe my points not so sharp. But humans are clearly tasked with survival for decades. Modern society being able to invent scenarios basic human logic fails is probably more a reflection of poor design or lack of accountability somewhere. Ie the periodic learning that things that seemed good were poisonous (lead paint, asbestos) is more about lack of perfect knowledge and thus unforeseeable consequences. Or outright malignant intent. Ok so definitely the capacity for one human to decide a slight increase in some metric is a fine reason to lie/cheat/steal/kill another human is definitely a bug. There are species which don’t kill one another.
- sokoloff 4y agoAre there any large mammal species (say, bigger than a rabbit) that don’t? In an environment of limited resources, I can easily reason my way to a harsher filter being optimal for a species long-term, including more fit members killing less fit members of another sub-group.
- ianai 4y agoThey’re all damnable together.
- throwaway894345 4y agoYeah, it’s a weird argument to make in public. It’s an admission that you don’t understand the difference between a binary/dichotomy and degrees.
- mshake2 4y agoMassively increased WFH (triggered by the pandemic) has done more to improve carbon emissions from transportation than any electric vehicle movement will ever do. yet you don't see a hard line top-down push for more WFH, only resistance, why?
- hnhg 4y agoAnother one is the fashion industry[1], amongst others. But that would be inconvenient for a lot of folks and so everyone forgets about it. [1] https://carbonliteracy.com/fast-fashions-carbon-footprint/ https://carbonliteracy.com/fast-fashions-carbon-footprint/
- gedy 4y agoBecause many people don't really care about carbon, climate, and just latch on to that for their biases and agendas
- Schiendelman 4y agoThere’s a real reason for this. Notice that traffic is back to normal? The demand for space on the road was WAY higher than the people actually using it - pre-pandemic far more people were using public transport. Even with a sizable increase in WFH, the people who were previously dissuaded from driving alone by traffic have filled much of that road space with cars (in the case of Seattle, nearly all of it).
- bnlxbnlx 4y agothx for pointing this out. i wasn’t aware of this before, but it be totally makes sense. so we need also need to keep reducing (rather than increase) road space in combination with reducing reason to travel/commute at all.
- sokoloff 4y agoI think traffic in Boston/Cambridge is way better than I recall it being pre-pandemic. There’s still some at rush hours, but it feels like a lot less to me.
- 4y ago
- hackerlight 4y agoEVs are a significantly worse solution than mass transport. Not because the electricity comes from the grid but because of the wastefulness involved in the construction, from the cars themselves and roads, also the additional electricity that's required per capita from cars than from mass transit. That said, they're better than ICE cars.