We've also got tons of bikes. I'll keep biking into work just like I did before. And taking the train/bus/tube to places further afield.

What really surprises me though is the aggressive anger Americans have towards Europeans for having choice of how to travel. It's like you really hate freedom.

Waah

Hey if you get butturth about being called out for bullshit then maybe don't spew bullshit?

You mean like this?

Hey fanboi, none of those people are me.

Did you notice that and tell a bunch of lies or are you having real trouble grasping the concept that different people exist?

Where did I say it doesn't count?

I'm your previous post.

He's part of your club dude.

No,, my dude. The guys a fuckwit, like you, so you're part of the same club as him.

why would you think that?

What use would I have for an EV?

Yeah but somehow it's still way more expensive than other places.

Plus it's also the way we love doing things: once we get around to it, make sure it's a 1 off so all the costs that get amortized (like getting an experienced workforce, supply chains etc etc) don't get amortized!

It's the same problem with HSR here too.

Endless fuckage and then doing it piecemeal.

Well, yeah. Though the longest I've run my microwave for nearly continuously is something like 45 minutes (it's rated at 100% duty cycle), when I was catering for 16. It basically served the same purpose as a second oven except it's much smaller and way more useful the rest of the time.

It won't allow more than 15 minutes at full power to be entered.

But also...

If it's the middle of a spell of good weather, I don't want to be dumping a bunch of extra heat into my house!

Haven't the government kept fucking with it though? Plus there were a whole bunch of shenanigans around whether China was OK, or not back a number of years ago.

And they went for some sort of existing design then fucked with it extensively via regulations and then the weird environmental stuff kept piling on requiring change after change after change.

The stupid thing is that Starmer wants to "rip up" environmental regs and let companies trash the environment, because he's a fucking moron frankly. The environmental regs we have are both very burdensome and also not very good at actually protecting the environment. Unfortunately Starmer has no idea why anyone even wants environmental protection (because he believes in nothing), so he's more likely to make it worse.

Wasn't Crossrail something like 30% over budget and several years late? Maybe that's not bad for the construction industry ;)

Yep, that's generally pretty good for the construction industry especially a project of that complexity. And don't forget that it also crossed COVID which messed a whole bunch of everything up.

It was a few years late and a bit over budget and now it's a roaring success.

Or are you an ascetic individual, which refrains from using machinery to make life easier and prefer to wash dishes/clothing by hand and then let them dry naturally? :)

I don't wash by hand, but in summer I often dry on the line outside. I don't really consider it asceticism, especially as it doesn't add extra heat to the house.

My dishwasher averages probably 200W. But also, I generally run when it's full.

Another point of reference, the new Sizewell C nuclear plant has already hit ã40 billion

This is the problem: the central government is incapable of building anything big, because everything becomes a political football to be endlessly fucked with. Compare the endless shenanigans of HS2 to the the non central government shenanigans of crossrail.

Once it was funded successive mayors of different parties (and I hate to give Johnson credit for anything) basically stuck with the plan without trying to score political points by massively fucking with it and simply acted as custodians of the project. And it was delivered well with the norms of time and budget for such a project and worked.

Given the current lot, i.e. that Starmer has basically no principles/ideals and governs by panicking about the latest Daily Mail headline, I don't see any long term projects well run on the horizon. If it'd cost 20bn in principle, I doubt we'd get it for less than a cool hundred.

Probably the most energy intensive thing is the tumble drier, but I tend to line dry outside in summer.

Actually my microwave gives it a run for it's money, it draws almost as much as my kettle. I'll microwave some shit and drink a fuck load of tea (perfect for hot weather!).

Well that only works if you have an EV.

I don't plan on buying one.

So the real problem here is locally produced cars can't compete with China because China has slave labor all throughout its supply chain up to and including final assembly and manufacture. Do a bit of googling and you will find that byd got caught using slave labor to build cars.

This is oversimplifying the situation. It's not wrong, but it's also not the only reason. There are quite a mix.

The other reason is for a variety of deeply broken reasons, it's vastly more profitable to sell massive, oversized light trucks with poor safety, so that's all the indigenous car manufacturers make now.

The other thing is that China basically never had great combustion engine tech, and they just abandoned that route to focus R&D on upcoming electric drive trains, leapfrogging quite a few western manufacturers. The results are pretty good, by all accounts.

So as always it's a mix of reasons.Their execrable record on human rights certainly contributes, but with just that it wouldn't be enough.

1. In most parts of the country, car usage is mandatory. Zoning regulations have made walking and mass transit impractical, as a result there's high demand.

It's hard to overstate this. All the usual excuses (America is too Big! I saw a poor person on the bus once!) are just excuses. The reason transit is bad in America is that there are a lot of actually properly enforced laws that more or less prevent it working, to the detriment of almost everyone.

Can't drive? Car dependence really sucks.

Shouldn't drive? Car dependence sucks.

Don't want to drive? Car dependence sucks.

Love cars and driving? Car dependence STILL sucks. Do you really like driving on clogged, poorly designed roads surrounded by a bunch of shit drivers from the previous two categories?

Yes. But also any given country completely controls the design of bank notes so they can make sure those marking dots are on the banknotes in the first place, and put on in such quantity and variety that they are hard to remove without making it too obvious.

The thing about 3D models is they are made by anyone, so anyone who makes them would need to put the "this is a gun" marker somewhere on the 3D model. Even if people were willing to do that in principle (unlikely) they would still have to be able to do it in practice. And in a way that would be hard to remove, which is tricky because some parts are presumably functional and can't have weird modifications, and anything else can be modified freely.

With that said there are a LOT of utterly specious arguments in this thread.

The argument "well I can make a working gun using only pipe parts and a toothpick" is a specious one, along with "I'm a skilled machinist and can make guns". They're not wrong, but it takes time, skill and knowledge that most people don't have and won't acquire. If they could they probably wouldn't be robbing liquor stores with handmade gnus. See for example in the UK there are laws preventing under 18s from buying knives.

Any under 18 can cheaply buy tool steel blanks, a low end grinder, etc and make an incredibly good knife. But barriers to entry do actually make a difference because even if someone can theoretically do something it doesn't mean most people can do it in practice.

So something that makes it harder to get guns can absolutely be effective even if it's not 100% watertight.

But this absolutely 100% is not it.

You already have the most extensive prison system in the ENTIRE WORLD. Clearly punitive justice does not work as well as you think it does.