The human race actually is a product of alien genetic co-creation and manipulation. Aliens have been on Earth since hundreds of thousands of years. Using Star Wars terminology, around 300K years ago “The Empire” won some sort of cosmic conflict for the control of planet Earth, and since then the presence of the dark side has been ubiquitous on Earth. You can find many related information at Biblioteca Pleyades and many other non-official sites. Those who are in power usually are manipulated puppets who publicly won't say a thing (for good reasons). Spiritually evolved people knows this and work to free humankind and the planet from the inside (which is a living entity as any other planets, stars, etc).
Oh! I do not intend to die in this life, by the way… O:)
It seems most people here read the headline and jumped to a conclusion that is consistent with your prior beliefs.
but it was misleading and inaccurate.
There were three vehicles in pursuit and all three stopped the pursuit.
The police department in Fremont put out a statement to correct the record, stating they are happy with the Tesla
I agree. Being alive means you're gonna use some energy, and you're gonna pollute a certain amount.
To my way of thinking, unbridled population growth is the biggest environmental threat. If population is allowed to grow unchecked, in the long run, no amount of conservation/clean energy/etc. will prevent ecological degradation.
We're talking about a declining quality of life, and not necessarily human extinction.
I heard an interesting speaker at the Commonwealth Club a year or two ago explain that limits on the amount of potable water on the planet will impose a limit on human population later in this century. For poor countries in Africa and south Asia (including India) and many other places, getting clean drinking water will become harder and harder. The incredible increases in lifespan that those places have seen over the last 75 years—due in large part to fertilizers and modern agricultural methods—will begin to be lost. People will die younger. This speaker predicted a leveling out of the population at around 9 billion. That ain't extinction, but 10 to 20 years off your life certainly qualifies a reduction in its quality.
In the first world, you may not even notice that the quality of life has declined. More and more, for instance, we now have to eat salmon that are grown in the pens of "fish farms." Do you think a farmed salmon—one that swims back and forth in its pen—tastes the same as a wild salmon that roam the oceans freely? I don't. Many of our children and grandchildren, however, will never have tasted wild salmon. They won't even know that their quality of life has diminished, because they won't know what they are missing.
The issues of overpopulation are massively overstated. The issues is distribution of resources and lack of infrastructure in densely populated areas. Overfishing happens because it’s profitable not because we’d starve otherwise. Same with deforestation.
On average a person in the developed world uses MANY times more resources and the same for the pollution and garbage they produce vs a developing or undeveloped country.
I’ve been driving a battery EV since January 2014. The technology has come a very long way since then. So has the charging infrastructure.
I have never run out of charge. I did come close once in 2014 when I was driving a car that only had about 80 miles of usable range and there weren’t any rapid chargers. I admit the “80 mile” car could be limiting at times. I handed that car back to the leasing company in 2017.
Since then I haven’t had a single problem. My current car has about 160 miles of range, which is more than enough. It takes about 30 minutes to rapid charge the car back to 80%.
But I hardly ever use public chargers. Most of the time I recharge the car at home overnight.
I never have to wait to fuel up. Instead I wake up to a full “tank” every morning.
I don’t have to hunt around for the cheapest gas station.
I save about £120 a month on fuel. (Gas is about 2x the price here that is in the the US, but our electric is more too)
My car is quiet. Really quiet.
In the winter, I can set the car to preheat the interior while it is still plugged in. I come out to warm, defrosted car…
I charge my car from a standard (UK) wall plug. Yes, I can get 2.2kW from a wall plug. Most EV owners in the US get a 240V clothes dryer plug installed in their garage if they don’t have one already. There are EVSE adapters that plug into a clothes dryer outlet.
— There is plenty of capacity to spare if people use the charge timers and charge between 1AM and 5AM….
EVs don’t stress the batteries they way some of us do with flashlights. There are safety buffers at the top and bottom of charge. Most EVs have active thermal management too. battery life is getting better - partly because there is more capacity to play with. My 2014 EV lost about 10% range after 3 years and 30,000 miles. The second EV was down about 3% after 2 years and 22,000 miles. The current car hasn’t lost anything after the first 8,000 miles.
AA and RAC both trialed vans with generators. There was very little demand so they quietly dropped the service. For the tiny handful of people who do run out, AA and RAC flat bed them to the nearest 50kW charging station.
Nissan and BMW both offer a free tow service with their EVs. We used it once to pull the car out of the mud after someone ran Debbie off the road.
Gotta disagree here. Take recycling as an example. It is better and often easier not to produce waste in the first place than it is to develop systems to recycle it. So it goes for human beings too. Every new person adds a small burden to the planet. Rather than develop systems to provide for billions of new human beings, it may be easier to manage global population, so that those burdens are never created in the first place. Otherwise, we will impose an ever increasing load on the Earth.
Of course, history is on your side. Since Malthus first sounded the population alarm back in the 1800s, technological developments have pushed our day of reckoning further and further into the future. The "green revolution," in particular, involving fertilizer and agricultural innovation, has proven Malthus wrong.
Science and technology could get us out of this jam, as well. Too bad it is politically fashionable to dismiss science these days.
Right you are. The human species is not going extinct. At least, not right away.. That's why I say quality of life is the issue.
Right again. It's ironic that those in developing nations will pay a higher cost than we will. In many ways they are not causing the problems. My wish, of course, is that the people in developing nations could all enjoy a standard of living on a par with those who live in the rich countries. Were that to happen, however, the planet will be burdened even more.
Like Roseanne Roseannadanna (the SNL character played by Gilda Radner) used to say, "Well, Jane, it just goes to show you, it's always something — if it ain't one thing, it's another."
The problem is that no one can even address the overpopulation issue without sounding like a racist/Nazi/villain-du-jour.
In places where people breed like stray cats, no one wants to say, “Hey, rather than just dumping more food and meds over there to let them breed even more, maybe we should ‘encourage’ lower-to-negative population growth instead”.
With cats, catch’n’release spay/neuter programs work wonders (if you ever saw a cat with a nicked ear, you know why). Try that with humans, and ho boy!, everyone from the various churches to do-goodnik organisations will be howling and wailing like wounded animals at “violating their human rights”. Yes, even the “right” to overpopulate yourself to mass starvation.
Countries, whole continents, inner-cities, doesn’t matter where it is, it’s a problem that will continue unabated.
I keep warning people, one sweeping pandemic will “fix” the problem, but it won’t be pretty. There just won’t be enough meds to go around.
No one’s suggesting active means to “cull the herd”, but for the love of B’harni (pbuh!), stop the hæmorrhaging before it gets too far out of control! It’s far easier and gentler to be proactive than reactive.
Back in 2010, when Haiti was struck by a catastrophic earthquake, I got a lot of pushback when I suggested that every box of food, medicine and other life-saving supplies should be accompanied by a crate of condoms.
Forgive the ignorance, I’ve seen you mention this name on more than one occasion and now I’m curious… Who/what is B’harni? Only info I get on the internet seems to be about a purple dinosaur (I’m not sure if the results were satire or sincere). From your usage of the “pbuh!” (I’ve seen this in the context of Islamic texts/quotes when referring to their prophet or their deity, so I’m thinking B’harni is a “who”).
I know this post is way off topic, but we’re already pretty far from flashlights with this thread. I hope I haven’t offended anyone by my asking a question that may be considered religious in nature. A careful reading of my words above should yield an understanding that I am not seeking to inflame, ridicule, preach, or pass judgement. Please excuse the offence if you inclined to take one.
More to the subject, I read somewhere that the Tesla 3 has similar/lower projected 5 year cost of ownership than a Camry or an Accord. This is interesting to me, because the performance of the Tesla (even the 3) should be impressive when compared to the other two. It wouldn’t replace a truck (I often drive a pickup for some of the work I do), but it would work for most of my driving. I drive 92 miles round trip when I go to the office. If I charged the thing at night, I’d never need to stop at a gas station unless I wanted to get something to drink/snack on.
I see some real benefits to EVs and I think we’re just getting started on some of the cool things they can do. When the primary selling point isn’t “you’ll be able to tell everyone how GREEN you are and how much you just love the environment now that you drive an EV!” and turns to “This vehicle is better in nearly every way for a similar cost” I think more people will go for it.
B’harni (pbuh!) is the Great Purple Satan. Kinda like Cthulhu, only more badass.
If you value the souls of your children, take care not to show disrespect to him.
Pffft. You’d have to work overtime to even come close to “offending” me. Call me names, question my parentage, mock my choice of flashlights, I don’t care. It’s all 1s and 0s…
If I didn’t luck out with the only neighbor on the block who’d “prefer not to” have a car in the (shared) driveway (seriously, no one else on the block even has to ask, they just do it), I could’ve gotten something like a Volt or Bolt or whatever long ago. All I’d need/want it for is commuting, and I could take a real car on weekends.
I figured you’d be good, but I was a little worried about some of the more delicate members here… I’ve seen some get riled over some small/petty things. Also, it seems that mentioning something sounding even slightly religious these days can be met with cries of “Hate speech!”, “Rhetoric!”, “Stop oppressing me!”, etc… and the forum itself has some rules about religion and politics. I personally feel similar to you. Everybody has a right to their own opinions (though everyone’s opinion may not be right), and I don’t really care if someone else disagrees with me. That makes for better conversation anyway right?
When I searched for “B’harni”, the results I found matched what you have posted. Glad to see I found the correct answer. I remember when I was much younger, it was popular to prove you were a big kid by professing your dislike of the purple dinosaur. Maybe this is the grown up version of that?
Sucks about the car situation… We currently live in the suburbs, and it seems all of our neighbors have too many cars (one next-door has 6 of their own and usually several visitors, across the street they have 5). My wife and I have 2, and they are always in the garage or on the driveway, but somehow our mailbox has been blocked enough times that the USPS sent a letter about not delivering our mail if we don’t move the cars. Neighbors can makes things unpleasant, and I look forward to the day I can move back out to nowhere and get some peace. I wish you luck with your ridiculous neighbor.
Wellp, I see it this way. If someone can get me riled with just a little name-calling, that person has power over me. He’s a puppeteer who can pull my strings on-cue and make me react.
If I don’t give someone that power over me, then he has none. It’s as simple as that.
Wellp, we got multiple neighbors who have driveways and garages and choose to park all their cars streetside, across their driveways rather than in it (oh, unless there’s no parking and they have to). I gotta keep 2 cars, 1 as a placeholder — so double insurance, double registration, double yearly-inspections, double everything — just to have a parking space when I come home at night.
And some schmos would still park across my driveway. Little love-notes on the windshield did nothing, ’til I started calling ’em in and having ’em ticketed, and made noises about having the next ones towed as well. “But you don’t use your driveway…” Yah, well, tell it to Mr Neighbor, not me; it’s still a driveway (half mine), and I will have ’em towed.
Some nabes have each plot as house+driveway, but we got half-driveway+house+half-driveway for whatever reason those geniuses divided up the plots that way.
And I can imagine parking (an EV) out front and having an electrical cable draped across the sidewalk. Helloooooooo, lawsuit!
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