One might argue that it is, instead, the Lunchable that is the poor facsimile of a charcuterie.

Myths? Electric cars are not good for the environment, period, as their manufacture has huge impacts everywhere especially with lithium batteries.

The important thing that the conservatives miss is that all individual car transportation is horrible for the environment. Only public transit cuts emissions massively. That’s why electric cars exist. They’re not built to save the environment. They are built to save the car as a concept and means of individual transit. To keep consumers buying more cars and car parts rather than building and investing in public transportation.

What I find infuriating is how electric car makers lie in their advertising about how eco-friendly their vehicles are. They’re not, and they know they’re not, and they lie anyways because some people believe it.

Anyone who says paid software is guaranteed to be better is either selling you something or delusional.

FOSS has almost never disappointed me as an end user. Windows disappoints me every time I use it.

American here and that is completely, 100 percent true.

Almost every piece of infrastructure built in the US in the past century is built around cars. Every American is expected to learn how to drive a car at age 16, as soon as legally possible. Except in very large cities like NYC, it is considered “strange” or “a significant inconvenience” to not own a car. For the vast majority of the country (both by land area and population) a car is required for commuting to work and almost anywhere else.

I have an older touchscreen, non-backlit e-ink Nook, and I don’t use any of the Web interfacing or store to buy books. I do all my library management and acquisition on desktop and then USB transfer it. Mine freezes and stutters occasionally, mostly when browsing menus or waking up from standby mode, so it’s not perfect. But it’s acceptable and I’ve done plenty of reading on it. Mostly it was cheap. I think I paid less than $40 for mine used. My last Kindle was a Kindle 3G and it behaved pretty much the same after I jailbroke it to read epub format.

I knew those cars were bad, but that article is terrifying. Tesla continuing to use defective parts after knowing that those parts made the wheels fly off cars, and suspension assemblies collapse? That should be criminal. According to the article, China forced them to recall parts, but in the US it was somehow avoided…just astonishing.

Personally I just abandoned my Kindle library when I bought a Nook. That’s not particularly helpful, of course, but it’s what I did as part of kicking Amazon out of my life entirely. I started buying my books from non-DRM sources.

I will say this: you may have paid for “licenses” for those books, but you don’t actually own them. Amazon can rip away your access to them at any time. Were it me, I’d simply pirate DRM-free copies of the same books. Though if you can successfully strip off the DRM and convert them to open-source formats, that’s just as good and carries less risk. Every time I’ve converted ebook formats with Calibre it’s done weird stuff to the text: letters incorrectly interpreted, missing punctuation, page breaks in odd places, and enough of them to be annoying. Something to consider. Maybe that kind of thing can be corrected but I haven’t yet figured out how.

Motorcycles are not as dangerous as people think. What they are is unforgiving of mistakes.

My opinion is that the crash and fatality statistics are heavily inflated by the fact that risky people are drawn to motorcycles, and the evidence backs me up on that somewhat. Studies like the Hurt Report and subsequent NHTSA studies on fatal crashes show some absolutely baffling things, like over 20% of all fatal crashes involving unlicensed riders and almost 40% involving alcohol consumption in some way. Hell, in a shocking amount of US states, helmets are not required and every time I’m in one of those states I see people riding around on the interstate without any head protection. Absolutely terrifying and an incredibly stupid thing to do. I never ride without a full-face helmet personally.

There are plenty of ways to mitigate risk but most of the riders who die in crashes don’t do them.

Oil processing is definitely bad for the environment, but think for a moment about the scales. Just in raw materials, ignoring the massive impact of battery manufacture alone, the average motorcycle weighs less than 600 pounds. The Prius weighs about six times that. That means six times the amount of shipping, forming, refining, finishing, et cetera…

The Prius still has an internal combustion engine that burns gasoline, and requires a significant amount of rare-earth minerals for the construction of its catalytic converter. Most motorcycles now have catalytic converters, but they are smaller and thus the environment suffers less damage per vehicle.

I agree that a Prius will burn cleaner while running than probably any motorcycle – but the total amount of damage done just by being built has to be a whole lot more than almost any motorcycle and it can’t be close.

Must be something pretty modern with fuel injection!

I was very heavily generalizing; there are so many different kinds of motorcycles and they vary so widely in fuel efficiency that it’s really hard to average. Here in the US, the average new motorcycle sold is a 700-pound monster with an engine larger than 100 cubic inches of displacement. (Again, generalizing a bit, but Harley-Davidsons still make up over 4 out of every 10 new motorcycles sold here.) Harley-Davidson’s largest model, the Electra Glide Ultra Classic, gets less than 40 MPG and weighs well over 800 pounds.

My understanding is that the motorcycle/rider combination in most cases has a very poor coefficient of drag and that’s the largest issue at highway speeds.

Depends strongly on the motorcycle, however, as there are so many different kinds with varying amounts of bodywork. Some are absurdly efficient, like the Honda Grom, which routinely achieves over 100MPG.

Depends on the motorcycle. Anything loosely above 500cc and the fuel efficiency gets worse than a Prius.

That Prius, just by being manufactured, had an incredibly toxic environmental impact that it would take a motorcycle hundreds of thousands of miles to equal. Lithium battery manufacture is hell on the environment.

Overly complex? That’s a baffling thing to say about any operating system when they are all insanely complicated. Windows and MacOS and a typical desktop Linux distro contain more code than a single human could write in a lifetime.