lemming934

Electric cars are bad for the environment since they require mineral mining and polute the city with micoplastics from tire dust. They are almost as bad as ICE cars.

Ebikes are the way to go.

If you're doing it over an app, without the chance for the person you're dumping to respond, I see no risk of things turning nasty

I'm not an expert, but have used a real time kernel for scientific research, using rtxi. My understanding is that the real time threads allows the computations to occur in a deterministic amount of time. This is necessary if you want to quickly respond to changes in personal membrane voltage with injections of current, and don't want it to sometimes take longer to calculate how much current to inject.

I'm generally against the idea of planting as many trees as possible.

Trees are not very good carbon sinks because they decompose and burn. Also, there are also some ecological communities where adding trees makes the land a worse carbon sink.

Avoiding cutting down forests to build suburbs is something I can certainly get behind though.

Do you think anyone ought to go to prison?

If a person has harmed others, and is likely to do more harm in the future, it's appropriate to remove them from society. This is why prisons exist.

Drivers licence suspension typically is the consequence of crimes that are too minor to warrant prison. In this case, the perpetrator has the chance to make changes to their life to avoid prison. For example, they can accept slow public transit, bike to work, get a closer job, move to a place where it's easier to live without a car.

Obviously, It will be challenging for the perpetrator to reorganize their life in a way that does not require them to risk harming others, and many will fail.

But your argument that society is required to accept being victimized by dangerous drivers because it would be inhumane to force them to use alternative forms of transportation (used by millions of people too poor to afford a car, even in the most car dependent cities) is absurd.

something like 15,000 empty houses right now

This statistic is meaningless because many of the cities with excess housing are in places with no jobs

building brand new single family homes doesn’t empower the working class, it empowers landlords

This is incorrect. The important statistic to look at is vacancy rate In almost all the major cities in the US vacency rates are well below the tenant empowering 8% and many are below the 5% rate where tenant have a fighting chance. We absolutely need more housing. I'd prefer duplexes, triplexes, row houses and apartments for urbanist reasons, but the idea that building more houses empowers landlords over the proletariat is ridiculous.

That is not an example of market capitalism. It's an example of regulatory capture by homeowners: capitalist developers would like to build more housing, but homeowners cause the local government to block this.

With housing, we are in an unusual circumstance where both less government intervention (let people build more housing) and more government intervention (build public housing) would be better than the status quo.

In Amsterdam the mode share for all trips is like 30% for biking and for walking and like 20% for driving and for transit

Maybe if Paper abortion existed. But as it stands, the ability of an abortion to free a man from child support duties depends on his ability to convince someone else to get an abortion.

I mean the policy in question was to tax second homes at 10,000%

Presumably that includes houses an organization wants to rent out. It's hard to imagine that this policy wouldnt make it very difficult to rent