Technology

YouTube has ads? 🤔

"Use this eye mask to protect you from 5g while you sleep" yes, such a thing existed, and it was removed from amazon for putting out harmful radiation.

Not just ads, but actual content creators themselves. If a channel has someone calling themselves "Dr." and giving out medical advice, 99% they are a chiropractor.

And don't forget that mr Beast is gifting all his subscribers 100$ if you just send a pic of your social security card

YouTube is filled with whatever people fill it with. Some of it is misinformation, some of it is (obviously) super valuable and helpful information. It is not YTs job or responsibility to be the arbiter of truth.

They solve tailpipe emissions AND all the emissions associated with mining, refining and transporting the fuel - which is enormous and usually left out of the calculations. Public transportation / walkable infrastructure is god-tier but lots of people live away from dense neighbourhoods. Ev's are not a golden bullet solution to climate change but they're pretty good and neither is anything else. It makes sense to attack the issue from as many angles as possible instead of getting all tunnel-vision about one particular solution.

To be fair EVs only solve the tail pipe emission problem

Gotta start somewhere. At least I can say that I'm part of the solution and that I am not one of the negative nellies who don't do squat because they cannot find the ONE solution that solves everything.

It's would be much better to focus on public transit and pedestrian and bike infrastructure, that solves more issues and is accessible to everyone.

Or both...?

They also introduce their own share of issues like increased road wear due to weight and environmental costs from the mining of rare metals like cobalt and lithium.

With the fact that vehicle size is generally trending towards larger, at least stateside; we're looking at a situation where those shiny electric pick up trucks that need a battery that's four to eight times larger than a compacts or sedans battery are going to require further scaling of rare metal mining and are going to result in vehicles that blow way past the weight of wanting our roads were designed to handle. Public transit is just far more sustainable. Trains can be hooked directly to a grid so no ridiculously heavy battery, buses carry the same number of people on a road that it would take... Let's be generous... 30 cars, so even if they were using a cell larger than a pick up truck, their wear would be far lower than the 30 or so cars they could replace.

Of course the issue with America is we've got bigger fish to fry like boys who kiss boys and people who want to fuck without having kids.

Twitter isn't blue anymore. It's black like Elon Musk's heart.

Not sure either, I'll have to think about it while I drink my coke

At an EV car showroom the other day, one of the big main focus function of the car that the salesman tried to pitch was "you can browse Amazon or do shopping online on the infotainment system". Also, you have to pay for a subscription to "unlock " the top speed and torque.

This is not the USA, so maybe it's just a thing in my country.

YouTube used to be good for music until they put 2 ads before AND after EVERY VIDEO!

I know this comes off as "old man yelling at clouds" but there used to be a time when there were NO ads on YouTube. You could make an entire playlist of songs without having to hear a single ad.

Honestly it's the other way around. Most of the downsides are vastly overstated in my experience, and people don't really grasp how nice it is to never visit a gas station and always have a full tank to start the day, until they are living it. If you have the ability to charge at home and aren't making 1000 mile trips very often, there is basically no reason to not have an EV.

Pretty much all of the arguments against EVs from the right are solvable. There are arguments against them that are also unique from the left, but I've seen too many leftists adopt some of the bullshit arguments from the right.

Charging does need to improve. Believe me, I drove a Mini EV from Madison to Chicago once, and it was a nightmare to find two working stations along the way. But this is solvable with time. At least, it is when you're presenting it honestly, and not "haha EVs suck ROOOOLLL COOAAAALLLL!"

They're a huge facet to fixing climate change. Mining issues are not part of climate change. Burning petroleum is.

The problems with lithium mining do exist (and in ways that are less hypocritical for the left to point out than the right), but it's also not permanent. There's an interesting string technique that, assuming it can be scaled up, can use far less land and open up more reserves (that being the amount of lithium that can be economically mined, which people often mistake for the amount of lithium actually there). Even if it doesn't, oceanic methods of extraction are being ramped up already, and there's more lithium available there then we'd have a use for.

All that's even assuming we stay on lithium batteries, or that we won't reduce the amount of lithium per kwh.

Now, there's another set of arguments--the kind conservatives would never touch--which get into how cars are bad for society regardless of what they run on. They take up tons of space just sitting there, they enable urban sprawl, they hit pedestrians and animals, and are all around an inefficient way to move your moist meat flesh around. These are why I did an e-bike conversion recently and am looking to heavily reduce my car reliance.

But we're stuck with them to a certain extent. There are decisions literally set in concrete about where people live and where they work. Even with the most radical government imaginable, we could not rip our cities up and lay new concrete without releasing so much CO2 that we might as well drive ICE cars for an additional decade.

Getting rid of cars is not on the table, at least not in any reasonable timeframe. That said, what can we do to get American cities from <5% bike commuters to 25%? That alone would be massive.