Notices by Clive Thompson (clive@saturation.social), page 6

@band

You'll need entire towels

Canada is a petrostate ...

... so it isn't surprising that its emissaries to COP28, including a large team of oil executives, worked diligently to derail language about phasing out fossil fuels

But it is nauseating

Over at the Atlantic, Zoë Schlanger did some excellent interviews with Canadian oilfolk to capture their views, which are worth absorbing: https://archive.is/qk5hT

@aburka @dalias

Had not heard of that, thank you for the pointer!

Another thing that really stood out to me in that piece asking "why did American drivers start killing more and more pedestrians at night since 2008" ...

... was this data point:

According to the reporters, after a driver hits a pedestrian, "police typically don’t ask people involved if they were using phones"

If that's true, and I have no immediate reason to doubt the reporting, that is *nuts*

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nighttime-deaths.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FE0.uEMf.FuV3jZhYzZHu&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share

(Obviously, the driver may not answer truthfully, but if the driver has killed a pedestrian, one would imagine the investigation ought to require the turning over of phone-activity logs for the time immediately preceding the death)

Why are so many American pedestrians being killed by car-drivers at night?

Fascinating piece in the New York Times (free link here: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nighttime-deaths.html?unlocked_article_code=1.FE0.uEMf.FuV3jZhYzZHu&hpgrp=k-abar&smid=url-share) on this question

After years of decline, the number of pedestrians killed by drivers began to rise in 2008 -- but only *at night*

No-one's quite sure why

Embiggified vehicles don't seem to be the cause ...

... though distracted driving does seem to be part of it

Also: more people living alongside massive highway-esque suburban roads

@danilo @glyph

Yep -- as I was reading @danilo's original thread, and that anecdote of realizing the Airbnb founders were happy to let their users/community bear the costs of entirely-foreseeable problems caused by Airbnb existing, my first thought was that one trend that unified the big Silicon Valley firms that emerged in the late 00s was ...

... "shrugging off externalities" as a business plan

A venerable strategy in business, bien sur

But rediscovered with exuberance by those guys

@danilo @glyph

One of the most interesting things to me has been watching the rare times when regulators actually do clearly see the potentially-malign externalities that are outgassing off a tech business model ...

... and pass regulations to account for them

I'm thinking of how many US cities began more-tightly regulating electric-scooter firms, and even (eventually) Airbnb

This regulatory action has, a far as I can tell, mostly been at the local or state level ...

@maximum_mew

Subarus! They are f'in indestructible

When we bought our Hyundai Elantra back in 2013 we wanted a used Subaru, but there weren't any for sale

Nobody ever sells a Subaru

they just drive it until it falls apart, which is never

Great piece on the Cybertruck’s design

… which distills every malign trend in US trucks: Massive weight, jacked-up height designed to lethally throw accident victims beneath it, noise baffling so perfect you can’t hear the outside world

Cars are rolling buckets of externalities: They greatly improve the life of their riders, while making the lives of everyone *outside* them worse

The Cybertruck is a tone poem to this impulse: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/12/02/how-to-build-a-car-that-kills-people-cybertruck-edition

@slimdave @autumn @thomasfuchs

I had no idea about that tax!!

@autumn @thomasfuchs @slimdave

Yeah true

And more to the point, they probably wouldn’t be as profitable – wouldn’t have the margins of the high-end SUVs and trucks — so no auto maker is going to bother making them

@thomasfuchs @nyquildotorg @lkanies @vfrmedia @sidereal @autumn

😂

@phil_stevens @thomasfuchs @nyquildotorg @lkanies @vfrmedia @sidereal @autumn

With a very ultralight, one-seater nearly-glider-class plane that might be of use!

@autumn @thomasfuchs @vfrmedia @lkanies @sidereal

Yep

It’s mildly related to the difficulty of electrifying planes of any significant size

A fuel-filled tank gets lighter as the fuel is burned during the flight, which is precisely what you want — ie as fuel depletes, you need marginally less and less of it because the plane is lighter and lighter

But a battery is the same weight whether it’s charged or dead

@autumn @thomasfuchs @vfrmedia @lkanies @sidereal

Damn, that’s a conundrum

I would’ve thought by now, with the market for golf carts being as big as it was, there would’ve been some model that offered light towing

@vfrmedia @autumn @sidereal @thomasfuchs

True!

the wee truck would probably most just be better for lots of yard and farm work, ie schlepping stuff around

@thomasfuchs @sidereal @vfrmedia @autumn

Yeah — I mean you could do light towing, but nothing really big

@autumn @vfrmedia @thomasfuchs

Yeah -- when I'm on the road doing some reporting and rent a car, they always try to upsell me to a big SUV but I don't even want to drive something that big

I don't feel like I have the experience -- muscle-memory and proprioception -- to drive it safely; I'm used much smaller cars ... I'd be dangerous behind the wheel

@philbaker1 @mlanger

Yeah, agreed -- as @thomasfuchs pointed out, if you need to haul a really big trailer today, you definitely need a heavy and powerful truck ... a smaller one won't do!

My point was based in my suspicion -- admittedly absent any data, though some folks in the thread later pointed to some -- that quite a few of the bigger trucks one sees on the roads, particularly in the suburbs, are rarely/never hauling anything 😅