This thread demonstrates the idealogical purism and lack of pragmatic political expectations from leftists and progressives. There is literally nothing the Biden admin can do that will ever be enough because it doesn't match some rosy fucking dreamland that only lives in your heads. Descheduling is huge, and signals the end of 100 years of madness with cannabis laws. If you want more, then we need to have more legislative power to implement it.

This is a fucking win, dumbasses.

Average new home in 1960: 1300 sq/ft. (without garage)

Average new home in 2020: 2600 sq/ft (+ 2-3 car garage)

Average household size in 1960: 3.4

Average household size: 2.5

Number of households with 2 or more vehicles in 1960: 22%

Number of house holds with 2 or more vehicles in 2020: 59%

Ya'll, I don't know how else to explain this - the reason home ownership and cost of living is expensive is very straightforward. We don't build or accept smaller homes, we don't build enough of them, and we spend far more on vehicles.

Edit: if you want affordable housing, advocate (aka vote, canvas, donate) for candidates in your local government that support -

• Zoning and regulations that benefits smaller home sizes.
• Zoning that permits denser and missing middle development (for less need for vehicles)
• Zoning that permits mixed use development.
• Land Value Tax
• Reduced or eliminated parking minimums
• Bike infrastructure.

Except most people are not going to tolerate having a multiplicity of apps, and if people in your circle don't already use signal, they definitely won't now. Whereas previously, I was getting pretty decent traction from people slowly adding it.

For some reason the "zero risk of getting an STD" made me cringe the hardest.

Voters don't reward doing the right thing at the wrong time.

No they don't. They don't understand that industry emits carbon because we consume their products.

Two of the larger EV companies are new and I think both have quality control issues. I suspect that is probably the bulk of the gap. Im willing to bet that Hyundai Ioniq 5 has far fewer reliability problems than a Rivian.

The body positive movement is a non-variable in practice. This is simply a continuing trend of decades of poor diet and little movement.

Even not-new cars are far more expensive than most people like to thing.

Yes, fuel and insurance.

Also maintenance.

And also depreciation of the asset.

New cars are obviously much higher, but the average car is also much closer to $10k than most people are willing to admit.

That is also ignoring:

• Cost of adding a garage to a home (~10% of the home cost).
• Taxes paid on property for roads (70%+ of road construction and maintenance).
• Deferred maintenance for car infrastructure not captured above (easily in the dozens or hundreds of billions, equivalent to thousands of dollars per adult).
• Increased cost of living due to parking minimums (and "free" parking in general - - $5000 a space * 3-8 per car).

TL;DR: Car ownership has a lot of hidden costs that people hate to admit to having to bear.

We all "pay the bill" because educating children is a moral requirement for humanity.

It's not a service you are paying for for yourself. That is warped sense of morality.

Meh, this article really only discusses lithium ion and lead acid batteries. It is well known both of these are abysmal for grid storage, and are at best relatively expensive solutions for mobile energy.

There are already several energy storage solutions that are starting to be installed that aren't these and that are far more cost effective. Flow batteries are an example. For the same cost as lithium ion we get 3x the energy storage and 3x the lifespan (and are essentially 100% refurbishable) for the same cost. They just come at a price of weight and volume (which isn't a problem for most grid or residential storage). There are others as well.

The article does do a good job talking about thermal as a solution, and this is very true. They don't talk about high temperature thermal energy storage, though that is admittedly more of an industrial use case.

I will also say thag more solar is also something that is compelling and interesting - meaning we significantly overbuild solar capacity to capture the majority of mismatch of demand vs supply. We often think about trying to build the minimum amount of solar to get to match the output we need, but in the end it is probably cheaper to massively outscale what we build vs what we need.

The number of times I've seen people complain about Biden not doing anything about student loans begs to differ. Republicans drag their feet or block, and democrats suffer for not doing enough.