Ever heard of Jehovah’s witnesses? Or Mormons going on their mission? They aren’t constant here, but they are definitely a thing in the Netherlands.

At the very least, do so for the infrastructure. I don’t mind companies trying to sell me the service competitively, but the infrastructure should allow for a competitive market.

Slowly? It’s already dead in most parts of the country, save for the bigger cities. For example, where I live, I can take a bus between 6am and 6pm, once an hour. Most people wouldn’t be able to get home using public transport. The city has no bus lines in the city itself that aren’t volunteer run.

Luckily the bike infrastructure is pretty good, otherwise it would’ve been a car dependent hell.

Wat een vervelende catch 22 oplevert. Stad waar ik woon wilt een nieuwe wijk realiseren en die zoveel mogelijk autovrij maken. Maar er is niet genoeg werk om al die mensen binnen de stad aan het werk te brengen en OV is ruk (lees, binnen de stad kan je nergens komen met OV, verbindingen naar steden en dorpen eromheen zijn ook slecht). Dus, iedereen zeurt over hoe er meer ruimte moet zijn voor de auto of dat het OV significant moet verbeteren. Waarop de gemeente antwoord dat ze niet over het OV gaat, dat is aan de provincie.

Om gek van te worden…

My BIL got a new Tesla a few weeks ago, my dad has an older one (4 years iirc). I’ve driven my dad’s one and I must say, I don’t like it as a car and the build quality is not great. Too much fiddling with the touchscreen to get basic things done. Then I looked at my BIL’s Tesla and it’s a hard no now. You can’t remove the stick for the indicators. It’s moronic.

It’s not just Elon that makes me not even consider a Tesla. He’s just an extra reason to not consider the brand.

Ah, haven’t thought about youarelistening.to in a while. I should turn it on while working. It’s strangely relaxing and helps a lot with focus.

I had a nice one today. I saved an email for archiving for all to see ( you know, as a .msg) and tried to open it. Windows asked if I would like to open it with Outlook (new). Sure, I thought, only to be greeted by the message “sorry, this function is not supported”.

Why do you do this to me Microsoft?! Why?!

As the owner of a Fairphone, this is indeed my experience. The only non-standard app is the Fairphone app, which is easily ignored or might even be useful.

A friend of mine: liters are not the same as kilograms. She’s 30…

I mean, producing hydrogen by using electrolysis is probably the best option we have if we want to truly free ourselves from fossil fuels. You’ll run into the same issue that hydrogen cars have tho, which is that it’s expensive to run something on hydrogen compared to batteries. Even electric trucks are preferred to hydrogen trucks now due to the difference in costs, meaning that it’s unlikely that infrastructure will be rolled out that makes a hydrogen bike usable.

In the end, these kinds of bikes might be better off with a battery swapping system like seen in electric scooters.

I was about to say. Wikipedia has an overview.

I would honestly hope we would be smart enough not to go the road of the car again but instead invest in good public transportation, at least in cities and other densely populated areas. Flying cars, even automated, would be a terrible idea from both risk and energy/climate change perspectives.

That looks good! I think I’ll try it out soon, thanks for the tip 🙂

Might be a slightly unpopular opinion, but Volumio (software for a raspberry pi to run it as a headless audio system). It’s good, it’s relatively well maintained and works. But paying 7,50 a month for this software to get multiroom audio, Tidal integration and some other stuff is ridiculously expensive. That’s nearly 90 euro a year and the only thing that is actually an addition server side is syncing settings across devices and the Tidal integration (requires license fees iirc).

And sure, I can’t buy multiroom speakers for that kind of money, but damn, is it expensive.

So why not use something like WhatsApp or Signal instead then? Sounds like a terrible user experience to me. Nobody I know uses iMessage, everybody uses WhatsApp instead, which is platform agnostic.

But I’m European, so the iPhone penetration is lower iirc and they can’t stay in their bubble as much.

Even the Fiat Multipla looks better than the Cybertruck…

It’s the order of importance sir! First one on the list actually gets work done!

I don’t buy a U-Haul truck just for the occasion that I’m moving, am I?

In a less snarky response, in case you can downscale your primary car to be more efficient and less costly, you can save significant amounts of money. In my country, weight, size, type of drivetrain and the sticker price all determine the amount of tax you pay on the vehicle. Getting a small, light vehicle instead of a big one you need for towing can definitely make sense financially, even if you are going to tow a caravan once a year and therefore have to rent a car to do so. Of course the individual circumstances really change a lot and in general people don’t do this due to convenience or the simple fact that they do this more often.

But you also missed the point of my reply. The point is that these tow bots will essentially be a second vehicle on their own. It will be expensive to buy one, it will be expensive to rent one and it will be expensive to own one. It won’t make sense as a product, even if you can still use your car when you arrive at your destination. The economics won’t work out, I’m pretty sure of that.

That’s not a problem that a small machine like this will fix though. The problem with EVs towing isn’t that they don’t have enough power to tow, it’s that the energy consumption goes up significantly due to changes in aerodynamics and the loss of regen braking. Petrol and diesel cars have the same problem, but can refuel quickly. EVs can’t.

Now imagine an autonomous trailer drone behind your EV. It’s most likely going to be electric, as most new automotive things are going to be electric by now. Then there are two options:

1. You end up with a small thing that can’t go very far due to limited battery capacity.
2. You end up with a gigantic machine that can go pretty far, but that’s in no way cheap or easy to store.

In the first case you might as well use your own EV to tow. In the second case you might as well just rent or buy a vehicle meant for towing. I don’t see how the economics of it are going to make sense.