More of an environmental Skyhawk, actually

That was a great watch - it’s cool to find out the history.

I must say, society is much better off without widespread use of TEL, but as someone who used to do racecar things, TEL works like magic. A little goes a LONG way, and Midgely did legitimately stumble upon something with very high effect for the concentration (they also touch on ethanol in the video which has the drawback of needing a lot).

I’m not opposed to using it in a small scale racing context (like definitely not NASCAR) because it’s so fucking useful and the quantity is unlikely to cause harm. Unfortunately so much bad has been done with it at this point, I don’t think that’s a very popular opinion.

Whatever your views on it, it’s the only thing that can make gasoline legitimately 120+ octane, and that has huge implications for some types of racing.

It’s approved as of last fall, but the FAA spent well over a decade stonewalling it with unnecessary bureaucracy.

Now we’re left with the chicken-and-egg problem of the market, where nobody will offer unleaded because it’s more expensive, but it’s expensive because it’s not widely used. The feds should subsidize it down to $4/gal for 5 years to get it off the ground.

Yes, some light planes have fuel economy similar to efficient cars (which is very impressive considering how fast they are relative to cars). If you consider the advantages of direct, straight line routing, it’s not hard for planes to do better on fuel economy.

We’re not talking about jets here, though some of those do very well in mpg on a per passenger basis.

I gave up kids to have flying!

Worth noting that the amount of aviation fuel burned annually should make it a negligible contributer to environmental lead contamination compared to widespread automotive use (although I’m sure it contributes on airport grounds).

Edit: All the pilots I know want to use unleaded, and it was recently approved after being stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare process, but market forces may make it hard to adopt.

It was caught in FAA-Bureauctatic hell for 15+ years and just approved last year. It will be still be slow to become available and adopt for reasons that are complicated, but amount to bureaucracy, economics, and an insane degree of risk aversion. The vast majority of pilots want unleaded and it’s also much better for the engines.

Have you seen the unbelievably entitled, self-centered assholes who play music on trails because they’re too cool for headphones and fuck what anyone else wants?

Maybe you happen to be on a route that runs well from home to work without lots of stops and no need to change lines. Can you find a destination in your city that would require a change of bus or train and incur a larger time penalty? What if your job was located there instead?

I think most people buy sensible vehicles but there are certainly people who have a truck fetish that is not justified. Unfortunately it creates an arms race where all cars get larger because there are very real risks of a collision with a larger vehicle.

It’s hard to tell the intent of any poster, and there is a vehement anti-car movement here (and on Reddit) that allows for no exceptions to the idea that living should be done at high density, and without personal vehicles. It’s hard to read your intent and beliefs because the things you said before are very similar to what I’ve heard from the zealots.

I’m trying to make the point that public transit easily misses on serving every origin, destination, and timing efficiently. Usually it misses badly, and my average experience with specific commutes is a 3x time penalty for transit vs driving. The penalty gets worse if done at especially early or late hours. Maybe this is exacerbated by car infrastructure and lower density, but the anti car crowd would have you believe it’s intrinsic and not a function of history and preference. At any rate I usually disagree with them on almost every premise.

You’re off by a factor of 4 on the grocery distance for the last 3 places I’ve lived, and those stores were CLOSE. It’s like 100cc of petrol to go that far, 200cc round trip, in lieu of 40+ minutes of fast walking (in which you can only carry limited groceries). I know all about it because I’ve done the walk many times when I didn’t have a car, and it fucking sucks.

I’d say freaking out about 200ccs of petrol to get groceries is an insane degree of austerity, and the fact that people like you are proposing that is evidence of either an irrational need to control impact, or (if justified) evidence that the world is grotesquely overpopulated.

Nobody owns 3 ton cars around here. Mine isn’t even 2 tons. In fact it’s pretty close in weight to a Fiat 500, while being generally more useful in every way. Everything you’re presenting is a strawman/caricature of what you imagine typical suburban car owners to live like. And yes, we should all be driving electric cars, but it’s not going to happen overnight.

Edit: damn near nobody on earth would drive to get groceries if the store was 300m/1000ft away. Most people will never be able to live that close to the grocery store, work, or any other place that they routinely need to visit. That’s why your example is insane.

Are you going to be first in line to give up your computer? Your phone? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Electricity?

Innovation is real, even if you don’t personally like it. Motor vehicles are a legitimately good invention, arguably only becoming problematic due to increasing population and urbanization.

We’re very quickly moving to a place where the QUANTITY of people is so high, the QUALITY of their lifestyles have to be sacrificed to cut down on human impact. The impoverished/developing world has very low impact, at huge cost to their quality of life. Who wants to volunteer to live like sub-saharan Africans, or Indians in abject poverty to cut down on human impact? I’m certain they don’t want that life - and why should they? I’m sure they would like to travel on a jet to a beach vacation like those in more affluent countries do.

I’m calling this eco-austerity. Instead of publicizing overpopulation and promoting low birth rates, we’re expected to belt tighten and give up on quality of life. It’s bullshit. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants.

This is exactly the point I’ve been making to them. I think it’s a bunch of people who have never lived outside of a major city, or grew up in new-construction actual suburban hell like Phoenix, DFW, Vegas, most of FL etc. Try old Midwest small city suburbs by comparison. Maybe parts of the northeast.

They probably couldn’t afford a car after used car prices spiked sometime between 2000-2010, and never experienced the freedom and autonomy. They can’t imagine not being into a downtown club scene - it hasn’t dawned on them that they will probably grow up and hate living in a congested apartment world and might want to stretch out in a bigger house in a quiet neighborhood. It’s never occurred to them that not everyone works from home and their spouse may need to take a job 20 miles in the opposite direction.

Do you sell your house because your job changed? Get divorced because your partner’s job changed? You can’t have ALL of the employment in easy reach by public transit from your home. This ideal-city with perfect transit and no commute is a handwave. UNLESS you live in a sufficiently small town that has everything but hasn’t blown up yet - and those aren’t dense enough for transit, and require personal vehicles.

Public transit is also more inconvenient than convenient even if you give it a maximum advantage in density and stipulate that the trains will run 24/7 and frequently (NYC).

It’s just inexperience with life or being an urban loving weirdo who can’t imagine that other perspectives exist. I want to spend all of my free time in places you couldn’t service with transit. They can’t even imagine it.

Get in, make as much as possible (with little to no regard for others), get out, retire early.

Arguably, this is what the American dream has become. It used to be we wanted middle class wealth, 2.1 kids, and a nice suburban house. But now all we want to do is sell out, retire, and never have to work again. I can relate, even if I lack the skills to play the game.

That’s where we got antiwork, FIRE, etc. It’s true: nobody wants to work anymore. I sure don’t. Maybe we never did.

Courts have also ruled that cops don’t have to know the laws, and they are given broad discretion to ticket/arrest on any pretense that seemed reasonable to them at the time. It doesn’t mean the law allows cycling in a crosswalk. Everywhere I’ve lived treats bicycles as non-pedestrians and doesn’t afford the same considerations to them as someone on foot. Bikes are considered a type of vehicle.

I don’t think that’s totally ridiculous, but there are some effects that are: running a stop sign on a bike can be a moving violation that counts against your driver’s license, and cycling while drunk can and has been charged as DUI. I think that’s absurd.

Quite literally, same here. There’s nothing wrong with bikes, but used cars became unreasonably expensive and younger people never tasted the freedom. Planes are like that with even smaller percentages of pilots and even more unreasonable prices (last affordable in the 1960s, while cars were affordable until the early 2000s or so). People hate what they don’t have or understand. Personal vehicles are incredibly liberating for those of us who get it. We’re being shamed for appreciating an independence everyone should experience, but can’t because there are too many people, too much demand, and all the ecological problems that come with it. Yes, human impact could be reduced if everyone lived in abject poverty, but guess what, poor people in developing countries want Western amenities too. Everyone should.

In most states, riding a bicycle in a crosswalk is not legal, and you are not considered a pedestrian that cars are obligated to yield to. I was taught at a young age to dismount the bike and walk it across for this reason.

There’s a lot of land in North Dakota as well. It’s super flat, boring, and winters are ultra cold and windy as hell. There are very good reasons it has a low population. It’s further south than most of the places in Canada you’re talking about.

EDIT: I’d like to add that “we’re not overpopulated, there’s plenty of land!” isn’t really the whole story, either. Occupying every square mile that can be occupied should not be a goal. Leaving more places in a natural state without human impact is highly desirable, IMO.

Huge areas of Canada are at high latitudes and very dark, cold, and inhospitable in the winter. Something like 50% of Canada’s population lives south of the northern extent of the US (i.e. south of Seattle, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, half of MN, and almost all of MT/ND.

https://www.secretmuseum.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/canada-population-density-map-this-is-how-empty-canada-really-is-photos-huffpost-canada-of-canada-population-density-map.gif

Huge areas of Australia are desert.

The population distribution of Canada and Australia is not an accident. The coasts and more temperate climates are much more hospitable.