post
banning permanent lights aimed at the sky would allow millions more people to see stars at night with no downsides. but nobody seems to care.
have you not heard of darksky.org?
it's not like no one cares. just not enough
During covid or right after they turned off every other street light to save energy. It was great, they turned them off after 22h or something. Pretty much everyone hated it for no reasons. "It's dangerous for the children." The children that plat on the streets in the middle of the night? It wasn't even pitch black or even close to. We still had more streetlights at only 50% running than many other places.
There are an absolutely unreasonable number of car dealerships near me that are the main cause of light pollution in the area. I once found a fantastic online pamphlet aimed at businesses directing how they can reduce pollution without reducing the (illusion of) security. It had all sorts of useful, illustrated info on flood light angles and the like. Unfortunately I've lost track of it, but if I ever find it again I'm going the rounds
One of the many benefits of only living in major metropolitan areas.
Bicycle drivetrains keep getting more complex and expensive. A 3x9 drivetrain is beyond adequate, bulletproof, and inexpensive. But NooOoOoOooo, it's nearly impossible to get a quality bike with 3x9 now, without a full custom, DIY build. Everything has to be 1x11/12, which is expensive, touchy, and very particular, all while still lacking the gear range of 3x9.
It all seriously sticks in my craw.
I'm sorry, 1x11? I've never really shopped for a bike more expensive than like $500 and the idea of getting less gear options for more money is wild to me.
There’s surprisingly a fair bit of overlap on the gear ratios of a 2 or 3x that makes a 1x11 or 12 have a similar range of ratios. However you do have to sacrifice either a bit of top end speed or climbing ability so you see a few more 2x on road bikes. I’ve never found myself wanting more from my 1x mtb drivetrain
Wait, you said a 1x can have a similar range, and then immediately followed up with:
you do have to sacrifice either a bit of top end speed or climbing ability
It is impossible for both statements to be true at the same time.
For mountain biking at least, 1xs are superior due to the narrow-wide chainring, not to mention completely eliminating a derailer and associated controls. I don't understand how this could possibly be more complicated or expensive than a 3x9, but I'm sure these companies have found a way.
superior due to the narrow-wide chainring
Fully agreed. Narrow-wide rings are absolutely a boon to mountain biking as are derailleur clutches. And 1x is superlative for hard trail riding on that factor alone.
A factor in the issue I take is the proprietary nature of modern bike drivetrains. With older drivetrains, we could mix and match to our hearts' content. But now, even within a component line, e.g. Deore XT or SRAM X[n], specs such as pull rates can be different even for the same cog count. "These are the only combinations of components we think you should use, and we will do everything we can to block you from customizing." Shimano is especially egregious about this expensive mess, and they know it, which is why they tried to un-hash things with CUES.
Pretty much everything 3x9 all works together. Road derailleur and cassette with mountain crank and bar-end shifters? Sure! Gear range for days. I sincerely believe this is to sell more bikes. Want to climb hard pack and mixed surface? You need a gravel bike! Want to get groceries? You need a commuter or loaded tourer! Want to go on a fast road ride? You need a road bike!
It used to be really easy to build up a bike that could perform most bicycle functions well. Mixed-surface, loaded, commuter/grocery-getter, randonneuring, snow, rain, club rides... one bike with maybe a wheel change*. Good luck with that now. Gravel bikes are kinda filling that niche now, but the components and frame manufacturers are again trying to fracture that even further. The gravel drivetrain won't have the range to cover all the use cases without a cassette or crank change.
Moar rant, moar example: my partner works in an LBS. We can literally afford to buy any bicycle we could want. She wants a general-purpose gravel bike, and it's not even a case of "just spend more money to get these additional features." Component selection on a pre-built, geometry, wheel selection... all tightly engineered to cover as few use cases as possible. Okay, we'll build from a naked frame. Oh, the more racy geometry frames lack braze-ons and can't fit a 50mm tire.
*It makes complete sense to have a full-squish mountain bike for the aggressive off-road stuff, and those bikes are necessarily different. Even for that case, I can hang with the LBS trail/flow rides on my do-almost-everything bike. My current do-everything took me more than six months to source compatible parts and troubleshoot. This used to be a matter of just pulling the trigger on the parts I wanted.
Agree with the overall sentiment: the trend towards more complexity is silly, but triples are terrible.
I don't know what this all means, but I do know my son blows through bikes like crazy. The chain always, always get fucked up and falls off. Even with a cover, even if it's a more expensive bike, they don't last.
I had the same bike all my childhood needing nearly no repairs, yet my kids bike is constantly broken.
As someone who has a 1x11, all I have to say is:
Push click, push click, push, push... push...
Invasive species.
My region is absolutely infested with Siberian Elm and Tree Of Heaven (A.K.A., the “semen tree”). You cannot cut them down, because they will resprout like a hydra from the stump. You cannot dig them out, because the smallest root left behind can and will resprout wherever it is, leading to a many-year game of whack-a-mole.
I have near-daily fantasies of going around with a powerful backpack sprayer filled with glyphosate (Round-Up) and an application wand that can extend from 1m to 10m, and hitting everything just as they’re sending nutrients to the roots for winter.
The problem is, Glyphosate is highly restricted to purchase and own in Canada unless you have both the appropriate class of Pesticide Applicator’s License (an agricultural variant, for example) as well as the venue to use it in (own or manage an orchard, for example). Thankfully my family owns an orchard, and I am starting the process for the former.
But still. It’s an absolutely bizarre thing to be obsessing over and I. Just. Cannot. Help. Myself. Every time I drive and see clumps of those disgusting trees, I start to uncontrollably strategize how I could hit them with glyphosate in late September.
I hate the spotted lanternflies! When they're small and black and white they hop and scare me! When they're a bit bigger and red they're more scary! Then they get WINGS. Eurgh.
We also have the tree of life around which is what they enjoy munching on. I'd like both gone!
I found out all the ladybugs here are the invasive ones. And if I want to buy ladybugs for pest control, I can only buy the invasive ones. Annoying.
We do at least still have some native pollinators and other bugs.
also people mistaken the asian lady beetle for native ones, and those are also invasive and very noxious.
Lanternflies are so pretty! But there are so many of them again this year.
One of the hallmarks of a destabilizing and imminently pre-collapse ecosystem is when certain fast lived species like insects have sudden surges or collapses in population.
And I’m talking about short-lived species that typically have yearly cycles. Something that can respond very quickly to sudden surges or absences in food or environmental niches, but which does not normally see sudden population fluctuations in a healthy ecosystem.
We have Autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) here.
Ive been battling it for years. I mentioned bittersweet in my comment down thread, but I've won my battle with bittersweet. I pluck it everyyear and keep it at bay. I have not won with this fast growing (so fast) shrub tree. You cut it down, it grows back triple, relentlessly. It's everywhere. I hate it so much. If it could just chill and be a bush, it would be fine, but no, ive a 40 foot tree bush in the back that was cut to stub 5 years ago. 40 feet tall, in five years. I hate chemicals, but when I get to the day I can afford to haul away 40 ft of tree bush brush, I will definitely be spraying this shit this time around. Fuck invasives. I go down the road and the forest edges are just bittersweet and autumn olive, also called japanese silverleaf. It's ugly.
blue gum here, cali doesnt want to get rid of this invasive species, because its "iconic" its a huge fire hazard, and they are designed to burn due to massive amount of oils they produce in thier native environment of australia. they also grow very fast compared to montery pine and cypress. Also thier leaves and bark drop very frequently and that is also a fire hazard because of the oils, and they have allelopathic affects near the trees.
Russian thistle. These asshole things pop up all over the yard and driveway and I go around and pull them out of the ground with welding gloves. Sometimes I get stabbed even through welding gloves. I can completely understand why someone would blast a cancer causing chemical across their whole yard. I've been experimenting with everything else but I'm too worried about my dog to do roundup.
I feel the same about videos with titles like "Try not to laugh challenge" - well guess what, I'm not watching your video and I won your challenge, plus I saved myself some time. Just... leave it to me to decide for myself what I find funny, okay?
"Watch to the end!"
I love cars. I also love this planet. Cars are bad for the planet.
I have never felt so seen on the internet!
I love cars and the environment. I really want EVs to be cool / better but we just aren’t there yet.
They still have issues with tire dust, but yeah they're a lot better.
If ICE cars were banned for everything but racing/recreation I'd be very happy.
Racing series' do not need to make their race cars green. They need to make their logistics fleets green. Race cars need to be able to remain loud and dirty. The sights, sounds, and smells of racing combine to create the majesty that is racing.
I look forward to a future of efficient public transit, no new ICEs on the roads and V12s back in F1.
Oddly, the wake-up call that made me realize I needed to step back from cars was at a racetrack. I was standing on pit lane with our race about to start, and was looking up & down pit road. There must have been 1000 gallons of gas all stored in 5 gallon jugs (100+ teams, each with 20-30 gallons, so probably closer to 2500 gallons in hindsight). And it made me realize we were all going to burn it all just for fun.
I do not regret my time racing at all, in fact I still encourage new folks to get out there & actually do it (check out ChampCar & 24 hours of Lemons!). I learned so much, had way too much fun, and made some simply irreplaceable memories. But I also feel it's an irresponsible use of a limited resource. Still haven't found a way to balance that equation in my head. For now, I've hung up the helmet.
Moderation my guy. If everyone had a car they only drive on weekends or as a sport, there wouldn’t be an issue. So cars are not really the problem per se, it’s how we designed our world to revolve around moving in a car.
Sane take.
I'm also very much a "car guy", but I fucking love that since covid and work-from-home I don't have to do day-to-day driving anymore. I do less than 20% of the mileage that I used to do.
So yeah don't get mad at car owners, get mad at return-to-office mandates and such.
Solar powered cars when?
It said weirdest. This is common and I see it a lot so not weird at all.
How I feel about motorcycles.
How am I supposed to care about a series that takes 4 years between seasons
The only show I ever liked enough for that was Venture Bros, and it was only that bad once.
4 years? What the f do you watch? Three Body Problem?
This is why I can't do manga. I switched to webtoons and novels. Novels tend to just get dropped and that drives me nuts.
all of my hatred and disgust is perfectly and completely justified
bingo.
like LED headlights that are obviously way too bright. no, I don't care that you bought it like that. you chose to buy it like that. you are the consumer and you have responsibilities. you are therefore an asshole. perfectly justified and reasonable take.
I get a bit frustrated sometimes to see stars and think of the universe burning away it's entropy without anyone putting it to useful ends, like most of the universe going to waste before anyone can even reach it.
without anyone putting it to useful ends
You never know; we might be a car battery.
In the context of the universe as a whole, what even is "useful"? Maybe its just here to shine bright for a few trillion years and that's all it needs to be. Art doesn't need to be useful.
If human history tells us anything its that we'd somehow suck the beauty out of it all in the name of profit.
I'm not really a nihilist or anything but it seems like almost anything we touch turns to shit. I'm all for colonizing the moon and Mars and making use of the asteroid belt but on bigger scales, maybe its better off to just sit back and enjoy the view?
I tend towards a variation on utilitarianism, from that point of view energy in a finite universe that could be used to support intelligent life in some way, but isnt, is unethical, and while that might not really demand much action from us right now given that space development is a very, very long term project by nature and we're already working on developing the most basic forms of the requisite technology, it still seems a bit frustrating to lose that which we cannot reach. Its not just us either, statistically speaking it should be extremely unlikely for life and advanced intelligence to occur once, but only once, so I take it as a given that theres more out there somewhere, but evidently it cant be that common or else hasnt gotten much further than us, given all the stars we can see out there.
I dont really think everything we touch turns to shit, I just think we judge ourselves much more harshly than we judge "natural" things. I dont really care that much if the people that go off to the stars do so because of some desire to harvest them for some kind of profit or put up a space-mcdonalds at alpha centauri or whatever, as long as someone goes. Obviously I would prefer they build a nicer society there than just a rehash of what we have here right now, but in my view even the crappiest society is preferable to a dead rock or inanimate clump of gas, even if it is an aesthetically pleasing rock. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say, and I think we can make beautiful things, or failing that, and least find the beauty in what we do make, if we try.
Random thing I was disappointed by recently. I live near a hospital that has a pizza vending machine near the cafeteria. So whenever I have to go to the hospital for appointments and stuff, I like to get some pizza. I went for an appointment a few days ago but the machine was broken so I didn't get to have pizza.
I'm annoyed that I was born in the armpit of history. There are people alive who were alive when the Wright Brothers were. And we can see a shining future ahead of us. But we're stuck in the middle. Too late to be excited for all the progress of the first flight, moon landing, dawn of the internet. Too early for commercial space flight, nuclear fusion, full dive VR, true AI.
We can see those things in the future. It's being built now. But by the time it's fully available and normalized we'll either be dead or too old to care. If capitalism doesn't kill us all with climate change.
So yeah. Armpit of history. Shit sucks.
Apparently, concrete blocks are a thing to be mad about
Our prime minister couldn't explain what prime numbers are
I'm annoyed the tomatoes went from growing good to growing Very Sad
This is on me, and it is my first time planting and I mostly went "eeehhhh I think this is good"
I did my goal, which was get from seed to red tomato.
But now there's fungal infections, end rot, armyworm moths, splitting skin, and general sadness.
I did get enough to make salsa though.
I feel our ancestors spirits because I'm sure they felt the same way about farming.
Doctor Who losing Ncuti Gatwa and facing an uncertain production future.
wasnt he kinda of a weak link, i think people are also upset what they did to the previous doctor, whittaker.
IMO Ncuti did a great job with what he was given, but the writing was pretty hit and miss
HBO never finished Carnivale.
My favorite ancient culture is only known by the pottery they left behind. There are so many unanswered questions!!!!
Moche, Wari, etc.? I'm an Anthropology nerd, what are you digging?
It frustrates me that there were complex societies with written records that we know nothing about. All the information we could want is right there, but we have no idea how to translate it. Always just out of reach
top 92 comments