What do you think of the argument that EVs actually do make this better, albeit not entirely, due to the efficiency difference between[0] (coal-fired) power plants and internal combustion engines in gasoline powered vehicles?
There are many more ways that cars cause problems to our habitat much beyond carbon emission, they include: requiring roads which pave over local ecosystems and create heat islands and exasperates drainage, requiring large open parking lots which make a city less traversable in any form of transportation beside cars (but parking structures are better I suppose), creating noise pollution (a bit part of it is tire noise, EVs aren't silent at medium to high speeds), causing eutrophication and health issues when ablated tire particles get collected into runoff, also that cars are much deadlier per capita than most other forms of transportation like walking, biking, subway, airplane, (but safer than motorcycles if I remember correctly)
I think that a single train can hold over 1000 people, and requires much less energy, not to mention space, materials, infrastructure and maintenance, than hundreds of individual cars in which these 1000 people sit in 1s or maybe 2s.
Again, it doesn't matter how they are powered; cars suck as an idea; simply because of how horribly they scale. They require tons of resources to build, they require tons of resources to maintain. They eat up tons of space. They kill hundreds of thousands of people per year. They are energy inefficienct compared to trains.
Oh, and railway-based public transport systems would be trivially easy to automate, compared to cars.
If we invested even a sizeable fraction of the resources into public transport that we waste on building ever more lanes and ever bigger parking lot hells right through our cities (aka. our livingspace), barely anyone outside of actual rural areas, would even need a car.
And this isn't a pipe dream. This is how actual people in actual cities live, today. Many european and asian cities are completely accessible by public transport.
Honest question: doesn’t the factor of individual freedom to move anywhere you want any time you want have any weight in this matter for you? You’ve got good points and I live in a rich European country for 7 years without a car, but there are other aspects of this kind of forced communal life that depress me quite a lot. In fact the problem here for me is exactly that you don’t need a car because even if you have, there is nothing interesting to do with it.
> Honest question: doesn’t the factor of individual freedom to move anywhere you want any time you want have any weight in this matter for you?
Let's get the obvious out of the way first:
Does it matter more than keeping our habitat viable to support the continuous exstence of our species? No. No it does not.
With that out of the way: I don't see why individual freedom to move would be impacted by this. Imagine a world where we invest as much into public transport as we now do into cars. Imagine how spacious, frequent and comfortable the public transport is in that world.
Additionally, focusing on PublicTransport doesn't mean cars need to be abolished completely. Need a car for a day? Where I live I can rent one (and a nice one at that) within minutes on my phone, and get it from a public garage where it is stored.
We will need to have street infrastructure in the future as well anyway: Local delivery, emergency vehicles, construction, etc. That's fine. That can stay. And so can rentable cars for those in-between times when people actually need a car.
> It sounds like you’re more interested in trains than solutions to global warming.
No, it really doesn't sound like that.
Trains, and other public transport vehicles, in comparison to the damage that individual traffic does, ARE a contributing solution to global warming.
> Scaling up packing as many people as possible into cities is not a desirable goal to significant chunks of people.
Oh really? Then how did cities come to be in the first place?
But you know what really makes cities a hell to live in? Covering them with multi-lane roads and giant parking lots for those flotillas of pointless metal boxes with rubber wheels.
> Oh really? Then how did cities come to be in the first place?
Because it was and is the only way to escape poverty for many people.
I grew up in a small city and the majority of my classmates had to go to larger city to get a good job.
This effect was very extreme during the early 1900s especially when the Great Depression hit. Either starve on the farm or move to filthy city. Cities being desirable for anyone but the rich is a very recent phenomenon.
Contrary to some of the negative replies this comment is receiving, just wanted to add that I've had new coworkers do this very thing to introduce themselves to me, and I found it a great way to get to know someone new and develop a nice working relationship with them.
I had a job once that put new employees through a scavenger hunt that took us all over HQ. The secret benefit of it was not only to get to know people, but you had specific onboarding tasks to do that would also serve as a way of getting introduced to people.
"Go meet Jake on the 3rd floor". Some you had to do in sequential order, but other than that, we were turned loose to roam the halls, take the elevator/stairs and solve the hunt in whatever order we wanted over the course of about a week.
Turns out, Jake is the person who also handles payroll and direct deposit. You'd stop by, do your payroll stuff, have a little "getting to know you chat", he'd put his initials next to his spot on your scavenger hunt sheet, and give you a clue to how to find the next name or hunt item on the list. All of them directly related to something you would have had to do anyway to get 'onboarded' as a new employee.
It was fun, it was engaging, but it was also highly useful and germane to the usually boring tasks of "fill out this form to get paid, now fill out this one to get insurance, now this one for..."
Great stuff! I'd love to use something like this at work.
Speaking of which, I work at a larger tech company, and the webapp we work on is quite large. How does/would Reploy handle a webapp that doesn't have a simple backend? i.e. the backend is distributed among many servers
Ah, good question! We've spent some time at larger tech companies, and realized that when you have many distributed teams, you can actually run Reploy with smaller subsets of your stack, and treat external dependencies like you would for external providers.
For example, maybe your team contributes to a frontend/backend regularly; you'd just staticly point the Reploy environment to other service dependencies that don't change as often.
That being said, market-wise we're targeting <200 eng companies, but definitely a cool thing to think about.
This was a terrifying, sickening read. The comments by the head of People Operations (re: "cattiness", "cool girl") remind me a lot of Fowler's description of Uber HR.
[0] https://blog.ucsusa.org/jimmy-odea/electric-vs-diesel-vs-nat...