Enough to block the instance now. (I’m so glad Lemmy provides that to users now!)

This is one of those times when even having it explained doesn’t make things any more comprehensible.

Not owning a personal vehicle is only okay if you live in the heart of a city …

Like most people in the western world (and indeed likely in most of the world) do.

… and don’t go outside of that little bubble.

Because rental of smaller vehicle services (like taxis, etc.) is totally not a thing.

The problem here is that you have the American disease (even if you’re not American). You’re so infused with the cultural insistence that there’s only one way to do things … the way things are done now … that you literally cannot conceive of a life without cars (or guns, or with public health care). Despite this being, you know, the norm for most of the world.

Switching to an electric car is a 100% reduction in carbon usage for my commute.

Is it really? Are you positive?

How is your electricity generated. Coal, natural gas, or oil? Congratulations, your carbon usage is HIGHER with an EV than with an ICE! Is it hydro? Go look at the methane produced by those huge reservoirs. I haven’t seen the calculations, but it’s not neutral.

Oh, I know. You use solar and/or wind. Now look up the environmental costs of producing those. And of mining the special metals needed for the batteries. Or if you’re nuked, the costs of mining uranium.

Switching to an EV is not the simple “zero carbon” solution you seem to imagine it to be.

No new car, of any kind, is cheaper than a car you already own.

Except that EVs don’t do shit to save the planet. Personal vehicles are the problem. Making a slightly different version of them is worthless.

Let’s not forget that EVs are heavier than their ICE equivalent classes of vehicle, meaning they use more energy. Which is a problem because a) they store ever so much less energy, and b) they’re ever so much less energy-efficient. So you need more energy to move them, and charging inefficiency mounts on top of that, but hey, at least you have shorter range!

EVs are not what is going to save the environment. Indeed depending on your source of electricity (most of the world still uses fossil fuels to generate electricity, recall!) you could well be making things worse by switching to an EV.

You know what will save the environment? Ending personal automobile ownership and instead beefing up public transportation.

Personally I’ll embrace the technology by putting tire puncturing strips all over the place.

👏

I need to work out a quad-lingual joke sometime: English, German, French, and Mandarin.

This is not even slightly true.

Base 10 was used because people in one influential area counted the tips of their fingers. But there are recorded (and in some cases still living!) finger counting systems where they count using the gaps between the fingers (giving us base 4 or base 8 depending on how many hands are used), using the thumb and the finger segments (base 12), the same as base 12 plus the finger roots (base 16), etc.

There is literally nothing “natural” about base 10. Indeed it’s not even a particularly useful system; bases 12 and 16 are far more useful given how you can do divide them in many more ways than base 10. It just happened to be the one that was used by the cultures that became most influential.

(Western) base-10 needs two hands. Base-12 is one-handed. (There’s a base-10 system used in China that’s one-handed, mind. Or, rather, it’s one-handed until you reach 10.)

Also some maths operations can be done fairly easily (like division) with the base-12 finger-counting system.

Binary finger counting is a pain in the ass, though. Too complicated for most people.

There are a great number of ways you can count on fingers. You can easily support base 4, base 5, base 8, base 10, base 12, base 16, base 19, and even higher (144, say) with finger counting. There’s nothing particularly “natural” about 10.

I hate you. So much.

All these high-quality puns in response are leaving me kinda blue.

That is absolutely correct. Writing isn’t language, in fact. Language is instinctual and barring severe brain damage, everybody on planet Earth learns to communicate in at least once. (Sign languages are language. Indeed they’re an extension of body language.)

Writing is an attempted encoding of language (and not a very good one, given how much is lost in written form vs. in-person communication!) and is a skill that takes a lot of time and effort to learn. Writing is not instinctual in the slightest.

Look at the flags on my ID (not to mention the name in the middle).

I do not live in the USA either.

And trust me, unless you’re some kind of very weird outlier (and if you are, GO TO THE NEAREST UNIVERSITY’S LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT IMMEDIATELY because you’re literally a dozen different Ph.D. theses in a single pair of people!) you use sandhi if you’re a native speaker. Period. You can no more avoid this than you can avoid being pulled toward the centre of the planet Earth.

This is something that is well-researched. “I talked to my partner” doesn’t even qualify as anecdote!

I’ll leave that to the expert.

Surely you mean “Trahnah”?