Tiles are great, I’d love to have a roof last 100 years. But they don’t get as much use here because of issues with ice damning up the bottom edge and pooling water up under the tile, which then freezes and expands and dislodges or damags the tile. That can be overcome, but it’s easier and cheaper to use shingles.

A fiberglass mat core with asphalt around it and grit stuck in the asphalt on the top.

And the person who found it isn’t doing a good job either, putting new shingles over old. The old should be removed.

And it costs municipalities less money than the problems it prevents, so obviously we shouldn’t do this everywhere and raise the standard of living for everybody. Because it wouldn’t be fair, somehow.

Growing crops to make ethanol is not particulatly green. In fact, in most existing production loops we would be better off environmentally to just burn pure gasoline than produce the ethanol to mix into it, unfortunately. Too much water, too many tractors and trucks, and way too much electricity into ethanol production to be worth what we get out of it. And the bit of carbon the crops sequester doesn’t overcome it. Electric vehicles are by far the greenest option right now.

This is misleading, billionaires have been paying effectively lower taxes for many many years. They just had to be more creative about it before now.

It won’t have started getting closer again before the Milky Way collides with the Adromeda galaxy in 5 Billion years, so it and anything we send on a similar path isn’t coming back.

In general I agree with you for sure, we have way too many. But if there are any worth preserving, I’d say it’s the old ones in Scotland where golf was invented. And at least there they don’t have to be watered constantly.

Well, you are right about the subsidies and going after bigger market shares. And they may not be the highest quality vehicles, but I don’t think they will be terrible either or they wouldn’t hold on to the market share they gain.

They have been making electric buses and forklifts in the US since 2009, and have a decent reputation.

EVs very rarely catch fire. A vehicle with a large tank of gasoline which is burned to produce power poses a much higher fire risk.

20-60x more likely to catch fire, depending on which study you look at. My first Google result said 20x, but it was on an EV focused website, and I thought they might not be impartial. But Kelly Blue Book should be pretty good, right? Their article says 60x.

https://www.kbb.com/car-news/study-electric-vehicles-involved-in-fewest-car-fires/

Well, as far as crash safety, I would think it would almost always safer to be facing backwards. That’s the way infant car seats are. Facing backward would mean your whole body would absorb the inertia change against the seat and your head would be supported. Better than seat belt bruises and a bobble head imitation, seems like.

That’s assuming the forward facing people in the back row are buckled of course. 60 mph headbutt would be…bad. Turn those seats around too maybe?

Nissan Sakura and Mitsubishi eK X EV are $14-16k, but are only for sale in Japan. Nissan closed orders for the Sakura because they already had more orders than capacity to make them. We need vehicles like that everywhere! That would drive EV adoption far, far more than another “affordable” $45k SUV.