I don’t know. It depends.

Asphalt spread out on very large surfaces sure sucks. Like parking lots and street parking. It contributes to flooding and heat island effect. It’s also bad for runoff polluted water, filled with microplastics from tire shedding. Too much asphalt everywhere is bad.

But! Some major bike green ways and rail trails here have started to put asphalt on their bike paths, and they have good reasons for doing so. Those rail trails were covered with fine crushed rocks before, and the runoff was also pretty bad for the environment. The maintenance was higher because the gravel needs to be replaced. And the path couldn’t be used for some weeks in the spring and fall because of thaw cycles. This article in French has a mayor saying they had this studied and it was better for the environment to have their part in asphalt. Plus, bikes are not heavy enough to damage the asphalt so it also needs much less maintenance for cycle routes.

I’m all for having asphalt on major bike roads and rail trails. But not on rural roads mainly for cars, and not to cover parking lots.

EDIT: Asphalt for bicycles, not cars. Like this.

It does vary depending on the manufacturer. Some are pretty quiet. I can’t hear any Tesla “honking at low volume” when they pass by, but they probably just don’t comply with new regulations. I find Hyundai to be the worst.

I live in a tower at the intersection of a busy street with traffic lights and I can hear the Hyundai EVs while sitting in my couch when the windows are open. In fact, they’re open right now and I can clearly hear a Chevrolet EV decelerating before coming to a stop at the traffic light while I’m typing this. Toyota EVs are also pretty loud. Granted I can also hear loud and modified fossil fuel engines but most of them usually blend into a white noise.

When walking around the smaller streets of my neighbourhood, cars are going pretty slow and the noises of Hyundai, Chevrolet and Toyota EVs definitely stand out. It’s weird because I’m a pedestrian. I don’t have a car. I hate them. And I want them to be secure for pedestrians. But some of those warning systems are so loud and annoying that I wish they would just be quiet.

And I even pasted the wiki article. Thanks, I corrected it.

I don’t know if he counts as a celebrity but, Aaron Swartz.

I left reddit because I was apparently too anti car for /r/fuckcars. If this community becomes like the reddit diluted sub where people were making car apology and justifying their use, I’m going to be very disappointed.

I would really love that all cars in existence be crushed into a heap. It’s a fantasy and I know it won’t happen. I can compromise. But if most could be crushed in a heap, that would be very great too.

Smaller cars will continue to kill a few billion animals yearly. They will also continue to kill around a million of humans every year, or about one human every 30 seconds.

The area covered by parking lots is mostly impervious and contributes to flooding as well as heat islands. Cars and parking lots make cities hotter and are worsening climate change. They also contribute to noise pollution. And no, electric cars are not better for noise because at highway speed they are as noisy as fossil fuel cars, and at low speed, their pedestrian warning system is also louder than fossil fuel cars.

I can be nuanced and understand that some people will always need a car, but most people in the world live in a town, a suburb, or a city, and the existence of the vast majority of those cars cannot be justified, whatever their size. Of course smaller cars are desirable. Electric cars are desirable A mix of electric and smaller would be better than status quo. But fewer cars is even more desirable.

There’s one thing that would certainly stop me from cycling in Australia, and it’s the helmet laws. We don’t have those here and I’m used to decide if I wear a helmet or not. Sometimes I like to live dangerously and have the wind in my hair at 20 km/h.

If my country had laws like this I would not cycle.

They’re no longer gooey here. They were gooey in the 90ies and early 2000 but at some point the recipe changed now they’re grainy and dry.

Like a boot stamping on a human face forever.

This is nice but not an option for me. This won’t pass through any chicane of the cycling network and I wouldn’t be able to leave my town. I also wouldn’t have any space to store it when not in use. Plus, I’m usually doing multi day trips that amounts to more km than what an electric bike can do on a single charge in a day, and pulling a camper behind would reduce even more the possible range.

I fantasized a lot about campers like this, thinking I could leave it at my parent’s and tour my native region. But again, chicanes… chicanes everywhere.

I would have to use the roads, with cars, and be very limited in range compared to what I’m used to. So unfortunately, as nice as this seems, it’s not really an option.

EDIT: Here’s an example of a very tight chicane on a remote rail trail.

You can physically live in a car but depending where you live, this might me illegal or difficult to do legally. You don’t have an address and governments usually don’t like that. And it’s also not always possible/legal to park a car somewhere a sleep in it.

Still, motonormativity makes living in a car much easier than just roaming around with a tent. There are exceptions here called “relay villages” where people can legally park and sleep in their car or RV for the night. I love touring on my bike and some rail trails are going through those villages. And obviously you can sleep in a car there, but not pitch a tent for the night if you just have a bike. I’m so jealous of the privilege of people with RVs and cars sometimes.

The biggest issue I’ve had with my Pinebook Pro is getting any external display to work. I have bought multiple dongles and none of them are working. In fact, there are multiple smaller issues all different depending on the OS installed. I settled on Manjaro but wifi stops working after coming back from suspend, and it needs to be rebooted. The speakers are weak too.

And there’s software compatibility. Most of the software have ARM packages in multiple versions, but sometimes it doesn’t exists or can’t work. Like wine.

It’s not very polished and it requires knowing tech and Linux a good deal. It’s functional enough and could be useful for development, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an everyday laptop.

I tried to have it nearby and use it from time to time but I just end up getting back to my x86 laptop.

are you saying that the solution for genocide is more genocide?

Israel not existing is not a genocide against Jews.

It’s so weird to give that information to a government. Here if people want to vote for internal party elections, they become party members. You register directly with the party and it is entirely independent from the general elections.

Parties have their own elections, members of that party vote for their leader. Then we have general elections where everyone can chose between those parties.

The government has statistics about the number of members for each party, but not who. Knowing what voter is a member of what party would probably break some privacy laws. A vote is supposed to be anonymous.

“Which party?” Say “Uhh. Independent?”

Why is there a party affiliation at registering?

Hey, beyond apathy, as an outsider, I want to point out the fact that voter registration seems extra complicated in the US, and designed to prevent people from voting. Coupled with voter roll purges, and other measures, it requires extra determination to vote. When I learned how it’s done in the US, I was horrified. Some people have to go through a lot just to vote.

Where I live we’re all automatically registered. It’s the election bureau that makes all the work from what the government already knows about us. We get a card in the mail every election telling us we’re registered. That’s it. We can also register directly at the polls super easily. AFAIK voter fraud is nonexistent.

So he’s a cop?

As we all know, we can always trust on businesses to do the right thing.

Doctors are giving bills?

Torrenting a song from cassette? From what specific era should that be? You forgot Napster, Kazaa, and IRC.