as alive as you need me to be
Oh I mean... it has, because the UX and UI are fucking awful and confusing and changing all the time.
That was a rhetorical question.
Ah ok, haha yeah sorry, I'm over here in belligerent burger land, terminology is a bit different... along with ... a lot of other things.
Yeah, our "truck"/suv culture is... just actually insane.
Many common US "trucks" are literally as large as WW2 medium tanks. Its fucking nonsense.
Also yes, delivery vans, utility vehicles that are van-like... yeah I think those generally make sense as well.
With mopeds / motorcycles ... Yeah, small vehicle with no driver/rider encompassing frame around it + high speed = dangerous.
But... mopeds are incredibly popular in eastern asia, many other parts of the world a lot of other parts of the world because they are small, cheap, and if you have a traffic law paradigm and road system that accomodates them, they totally make sense.
Motorcycles... have more effective maximum range though. Higher sustainable top speeds.
Theyre a bit more popular in south america, which generally has less medium/long distance mass transit.
Cheaper than cars, but they can actually drive a significant distance.
The US is also really really spread out, in lots of places. We built our cities so you have to drive everywhere within them, and also between them, because we generally hate mass transit that is medium or long distance.
And the wild thing is, in the US, right now?
I can get a decent, gasoline powered, starter motorcycle, which is street legal, for about the same price, or even cheaper, than an e-bicycle, which has ~60% the top speed, maybe ~20% the overall range.
Really, a decent starter motorcycle is more like half or a third the cost of an e-bike that... could possibly, maybe get me from place to place in a spread out US city, that is 50% parking lot by land use.
And bicycles are not street legal in the US, the way that cars and motorcycles are.
They get shunted into their own sort of ruleaet governing where they can be ridden, which is highly variable and not standardized from city to city.
Practically speaking, our bicycle infrastructre is either non existant, or designed by insane people, basically. I tried, I really tried to do the bicyclist thing in a lefty, US major city that was supposedly all about bike infrastructure for a time.
Nope. I'd feel much safer in that city, on a motorcycle, on the actual main streets, just moving more slowly, following the road laws of basically juat being a very small car, being cautious..., than I would on a bicycle, where...
... you get insane little unprotected nonsense lanes that are sometimes on the shoulder of a road, sometimes they weave into the middle of a street at an intersection, sometimes there's some kind of shunted off specific bike path through a block or two, or most of the time there's just no bike lane at all, but its illegal for you to ride them on a sidewalk... if there even is a sidewalk.
Incredible mess, and if an SUV going 45 mph t-bones a bicyclist crossing an intersection, or just doesn't see them and does a lower speed turn into them... they're basically as dead of injured as a motorcyclist in the same position... though motorcyclists tend to wear full head encompassing helmets.
Anyway, in the US, having a one or two hour commute to work in the morning, and a one or two hour commute back home, via some kind of motor vehicle, on a highway system... is pretty common.
Some vehicle has to exist that can make that distance, but is also affordable... unless/untill we actually build medium/long range mass transit.
Motorcycles can do that.
So could kei vehicles, maybe, kind of... they generally can't maintain US highway speeds, and honestly, they'd get pretty obliterated in a collision with a US "truck" or SUV, and their suspensions / ground clearance also can't really handle the shitty state of US roads and potholes, caused by those "trucks" and SUVs.
I'm rambling at this point, but ... some new kind of personal vehicle paradigm is going to have to exist in the US soon... because cars are simply now unaffordable to the average person, we're too broke, car prices are too high, soo many people are in massive debt for their cars.
We're either gonna need cheaper vehicles that can go fast and can go a significant distance... or we're basically just gonna collapse as a society.
We're extremely car centric, and people can't afford cars anymore.
I don't know how to solve that problem in a 'good' way, motorcycle is the best I can come up with.
Sorry I don't read sci fi with garbage worldbuilding.
Confusing and bad UI/UX is... confusing and bad.
We're all glad you're a poweruser, anyway, can we maybe have an operating system that doesn't actively hate and fight the user?
Ah, yes, of course, just pay MSFT more money, that'll solve the problem.
... and you're calling other people cattle?
Wait, this is ... news?
Hasn't this been happening like, constantly, since they rolled out OneDrive?
Stardew Valley is a logistics and optimizing game.
You're just primarily optimizing social obligations, not some kind of mass, materially productive process.
I am genuinely convinced that the difference between female autism and male autism just literally is the difference between Stardew Valley and Factorio/Satisfactory.
Your... roads are powered?
Via what, a third rail, that can electrocute anyone who touches it, does 'funny stuff' in snow or rain or ice?
Every road segment has a... gigantic cellphone style wireless charger?
That sure wont be a nightmare to maintain.
... Cars somehow become maglev trains?
What are you talking about?
Cool and hows all that coming along?
Hydrogen vehicles?
The whole initial pitch from Tesla, that basicslly got EVs conceptually over the hump into being potentially practical... at a paradigmatic level...
... was Elon saying he was gonna build a whole network of infrastructure for that, charging networks.
... and then 90% of that never happened.
Remember when we were gonna have basically a carwash type thing but it would just do a battery swap on your car?
Remember when he was all giddy about the SOLID METAL SNAKE that was gonna basicslly just be a robot tentacle that would automagically plug in to your charging port?
Yeah, basically none of that shit happened, similar to all that money we gave to the ISPs and such to build out fiber networks, most of which just went into stock buybacks, not infrastructure.
So my point is, you run into the same fundamental problem with hydrogen, now you need to build a whole new set of infrastructure.
... Who is going to pay for that?
Oh and also power would not be free.
Not for a long long time, not untill you solve capitalism.
Even with the magical thinking of an over unity power generator, you have do another order of magnitude of magical thinking to think that that somehow just makes power, in general, free, in a capitalist system.
They'll find a way, many ways, to make it cost money.
Assuming you mean commericial grade hauler trucks and such, I absolutely agree with all your points.
... Are we running commercial trucks on biodiesel yet?
But yeah, for personal transit... a huge amount of the world gets around on bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles. Cars are basically a luxury, like, any car.
Of course that works because public transit over long distances tends to work, and the whole country tends to not be laid out as just a cancerous mass of utterly useless suburubs, strewn out around urban cores that are half parking lot.
I dunno, if we just say, banned pickup trucks and SUVs for private use, well, that'd cut down on road maintenance a good deal, would make being a moped or bicycle or motorcycle commuter a bit more feasible.
Its not 'funny', its the result of enormous structural subsidies for the oil and gas industry for ... what like 125, 150 years now?
Brought to you by all the people who preach the merits of the perfectly competitive free market for everyone else.
... Its a multi generational, ongoing crime.
I wonder what Smedley Butler would have to say about the Trump-ezuela operation.
... on the other hand, nuclear fusion powered steam engine car... what could go wrong?
Just a reminder that even if you have a fusion generator that reaches over unity, untill you can fit that in the space and weight of a car or truck engine, you still need a lot of oil, and you still need a lot of rare earth minerals for batteries.
Either that or a whole new transit / economic trade paradigm.
Not saying that it would not be great to be able to retire coal oil and gas power plants from the grid as a theoretical over unity fusion power source someday becomes a thing...
But I am saying its not a cure-all.
... Maybe SomethingAwful will somehow make a comback rofl.
While (I think) I totally understand what you are saying here...
... Yeah I'm honestly fine with lemmy just being more or less a tiny cluster of neo forums.
I like the cozy.
At the same time... from I guess a less selfish perspective... yeah, this is the exact time an alternative to Reddit and other corpo social media needs to be popularized.
But, somewhat alleviating myself from that... I don't really know anybody that I could 'word of mouth' spread lemmy to, that I haven't already.
And I'm too crippled to put stickers on really anything outside my own apartment, lol.
Perhaps, but, counterpoint:
Anyone who looks at this, and has the genuine stance that this was justified?
Entirely seriously:
Such a person is significantly mentally disabled, and also a sociopath, and belongs in a mental institution, should not be allowed near sharp objects or wires or cords.
ALL YOUR DIRECTORY ARE BELONG TO US
YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO PRIVATE
MAKE YOUR TIME
Yeah I felt a bit more clever this time, than just repeating, for the umpteenth time on stories like this, over the last year or so:
... People still use MSFT products?
Yeah I keep making that exact same comment... its been really easy, as a former MSFT employee, to see where this train has been headed.
MSFT is a cult, ok?
Thats the only way to explain/describe management and C Suite.
And they've been like that for at least a decade.
I mean, that's entirely how it makes sense.
Trump is a literally demented mad man, acting out of vindictive spite.
He's the mad king.
Him, and his supporters, want people to suffer and die.
The cruelty is the point.
They're just evil, its... just ... more clear now?
As if it wasn't somehow clear enough before?
They're an existential threat to everyone who isn't them, and even a to great majority of their own.
They need to be put down, like the traitors they are.
Here, here you go:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8SYmgOM1kHc
The infinitely lamer version of Hans Landa comes to Minnesota, to disappear some poor woman doing DoorDash, who just barely escaped being nabbed ... her husband and kid got caught, but she forced her way into the house, to hide.
This is Anne Frank, USA, 2026, except Anne speaks Spanish.
There is no complexity in evaluating the overall morality of this situation.
These people are Nazis.
Never Again means Never Again.
I don't know that 'country' is exactly the right word, but yeah, it is a self governing and autonomous territory, that basically just exists within the legal framework / domain of Denmark.
Internally, it controls itself with its own government, but as far as foreign affairs and the military goes, its a territory of Denmark.
The majority of its population are Greenlandic Inuit, who've been there for thousands of years, Greenlandic is one of its official languages, along with English and Danish.
Prior to all this nonsense, there had been increasing support from both Greenlanders and the Danish government to it being its own fully independent country.
Brief history lesson and sitrep here:
I would argue that that still constitutes a ... kind of optimizing social obligations.
You're just doing it backwards, maximizing antisociality.