I’d rather an easy to manipulate person in office than an explicitly corrupt suit.
But beyond that, wealth and prestige isn’t granted to people based on intelligence or capability. There are plenty of smart capable people that have had lives far more relatable to the average person.
We have more than a few examples of idiot million and billionaires.
Anyone who’s name ends with “the third” should not be allowed to run for office.
Also anyone that calls themselves The X king should be banned from office… Heck, anyone that’s ever owned a business of any sort should be banned from office. These are people not representative of the general public.
The cost has already been paid. Even small farming communities have rail line access that’s mostly been abandoned because the line owners switched business models.
As for flexibility, again, that’s mostly an issue with how rail line management has evolved. From shorter more frequent trains to ultra long infrequent trains. Mostly to cut the cost of staffing.
The solution is simple, nationalize the rail service. Put it under the USPS and have them figure out scheduling to optimize the speed of goods shipping.
The current state of the rail system is entirely due to the monopolistic nature of ownership. The incentive is to increase prices as much as possible while shipping to the fewest stops possible. Profit motives are in direct conflict with generalized shipping.
The reason trunking works today is the public nature of roads. Well, why shouldn’t rail lines be equally public? We practically gave the property away to the current rail owners with the notion it was for the public good… They’ve failed that.
And frankly, I’m really ok with this.
Trains should be the backbone for shipping. They are WAY more fuel efficient, like 3 to 4x more efficient than shipping by truck. Rail requires far less maintenance. And there’s always the option install a 3rd rail and use electricity instead of fossil fuels to ship.
The only solution is a bigger truck.
We need to get rid of the commie laws requiring special licensing (CDL, Communist driver’s license) for freedom trucks.
I mean IANAL but in a rational world there would be a minimum of grievance requirement before being able to file such a lawsuit.
There is, that’s what the discovery phase of the lawsuit is for. That’s what the dismissal phase of the lawsuit is for. The issue isn’t that these things don’t exist, it’s that these things are the most expensive parts of trial.
Imagine the reverse case where you find out someone has started a campaign to keep you from getting hired anywhere. You know they are doing this because someone tips you off on this happening.
You do not have enough evidence to prove that this is happening in court at the moment of the lawsuit but you are damn sure that the person you are suing has a trail of documents proving your allegation and if they don’t the third parties that didn’t hire you likely do.
If you find enough evidence you can get the person to settle before trial. If you don’t find any evidence you can either go to trial and lose or simply drop the lawsuit.
The unfortunate thing is gathering minimal evidence, which really is the job of lawyers beyond just knowing the law, is a time consuming task for someone (Usually multiple someones) that is pretty expensive.
Now, to the actual real problem. It’s actually 2 fold.
Gigantic lawfirms gobble up basically all lawyers that have any sort of talent. This drys up the pool of lawyers available to represent people and consequently drives up prices, for everyone. These lawfirms can keep increasing their prices because their rich clients will pay for it and the smaller lawfirms that would represent your case can similarly raise prices because there is no competition.
These gigantic lawfirms and big companies when they sue take a TON of time and resources from the court. You can expect 100 or 1000 issues being filed by one of these lawsuits just at the very beginning. They apply a “Well, there’s a 90% chance you’ll win without these motions, but there’s a 95% chance you’ll win with them. So we’ll file whatever we can to make sure every single avenue is explored. Oh, and we bill you for the hours we spent with our law ghouls scouring legal books in the dungeon.”
These 2 issues mean the courts are constantly flooded, any lawsuit (especially against someone with the resources) takes a long time to resolve, the cost will be astronomical on both sides because the legal team on the other side needs to respond to every court filing, and finally the number of available lawyers will go up because there is little competition forcing them to have lower prices.
The reform we need, if anything, is some sort of penalization on these giant firms for wasting time. Perhaps applying sanctions to the other side if it’s found that they spent 90% of their filings for stuff they never used.
You don’t have to get a lawyer, but you do have to respond to the lawsuit. That is, participation is not optional.
Now, there is protection from the “bad haircut” lawsuits. It’s called “Vexatious litigation”. If someone sues you for a bad haircut, and they’ve sued others for it as well, you can ultimately seek sanctions (including covering your legal fees) against them and their lawyers. That’s why you don’t generally see bad haircut lawsuits.
Further, if the lawsuit is so bad that it’s “bad haircut” level, it’s possible to get sanctions against the lawyer that filed it for wasting the courts time.
But again, participation isn’t optional here. You HAVE to respond to a lawsuit, you can’t just shut your eyes and hope it goes away.
The other route that could work is public civil defenders. It requires the government to properly fund and staff, but having a legal firm sponsored by the state willing and ready to take up cases would mean that the private entities can still get their lawyers but they can’t steam roll over someone that doesn’t make $500k a year.
Of course, there could be corruption issues. I wouldn’t want the lawyer on my case being drinking buds with the lawyer on the opposing side.
You get sanctioned and maybe even thrown in jail.
You HAVE to participate and pray that the judge in the case is willing to listen to you arguments for dismissal. If you don’t do that much a judge is free to issue punishments for not participating. Sanctioning can be as bad as fines but could further be things like “Ok, you’ve failed to participate so we are going to assume you are guilty” (Which, btw, is what happened to Alex Jones. He did not participate in discovery in any of his cases and so got a default judgements in multiple cases).
If the judge decides that there is any sort of merit (and the standard for that is really low. Cases almost never get dismissed) you enter the most expensive part of trial, pretrial and discovery. This is where both sides get to see each others documents on the case and lawyers spend countless hours filing pretrial motions with the court. This is something that can literally last years and even decades, especially in civil matters which take a back seat on the docket to criminal cases. Generally speaking, this is why people and companies tend to settle. It’s a cost saving measure because making you way all the way to trial can easily dwarf the cost of settlement.
This also, btw, is why patent trolls are so effective. They’ll often ask for an amount low enough that most companies will just pay the fees yet high enough to keep them in business. Even if the patents themselves are potentially invalid.
Yes, it doesn’t make sense. In fact, a big issue is that we don’t have any sort of public civil defenders (we absolutely should). So for most individuals lawyers are prohibitively expensive. You basically have to either be rich, be lucky enough to have a case that aligns with a charitable legal organization’s goals, or luck out on a legal firm deciding to take your case pro bono for their own reasons.
Yup.
Because here’s the thing, lawyers are super expensive and these corporations have in house lawyers for handling anyone that wants to sue. They’ll happily argue the validity of the EULA because they know just getting through the pretrial phase will cost you tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Corporations have weaponized this fact at every chance they get.
It’s the exact same reason why companies in California and other states make employees sign noncompetes, even though they are explicitly unenforceable. It’s so the company can financially punish you even if you are in the right.
Not all will, but that’s why expanding the narrative to these tricky situations and making it a talking point is so important.
When the only discussion is only around rape and medical problems, it creates people that think “ok, we added a rape/medical exclusion in the law, that’s good enough”.
The goal, IMO, is to force pro-abortionists to admit the real reason they hate abortion is it let’s women escape godly punishment. They’ll admit it privately but we need to make their politicians say it publicly. Calling fetuses babies is a soft selling way to make things more palatable to constituents that never think about the why.
Abortion is popular and should be the thing Democrats run on more than anything else. But then, having a devout Catholic president as leader of the party really sucks at this moment. Pretty much any other dem would be willing to hit the abortion note harder.
The narrative is just broken.
Pro-abortion folk like to focus on medically necessary abortions, but they shy away from the myriad of valid reasons to get an abortion.
For example, A mother of 3 that can’t afford a 4th child. You can’t expect someone in that situation to put the 4th child up for adoption.
And when later term abortions happen, pro abortion folks need to be ready with the why. The why is simple, abortion access. How is someone supposed to get an early term abortion when there’s only one clinic in the state, constantly under protest, that’s booked solid for the next 3 months?
AAA says that EV batteries tend to lose power faster in cold weather, getting as little as 50-60% of their advertised range.
Right, and the EVs that lose that much range are the ones with the smallest battery packs. The heating requirement as a percentage of the battery pack goes down as the battery gets larger. It takes roughly the same amount of energy to keep a 40kWh battery warm as it does to keep a 150kWh battery warm.
The same logic doesn’t directly translate for a car as a bus.
Buses will have fairly large batteries (Bird does 150kWh). The percentage of the battery needed for heat goes down as size goes up because the interior size is relatively negligible in how much added heating capacity is needed to keep the bus warm.
But yes, probably wouldn’t be too crazy to throw on a propane heater in especially cold climates.
Electric cars run just fine in icy weather
Heatpumps, which work a lot better for larger buses than smaller buses.
Bus routes are generally short, fixed, and planned. They are literally the perfect place for an EV.
The Walmart self checkout layout is generally just bad. Because they are paranoid about theft, it’s setup to make it easy for the worker monitoring to make sure nothing fishy is going on. However, that means that the customers that want to checkout often can’t see what’s open.
This creates lines as the machines aren’t fully utilized.
But further, it’s often the case that for whatever reason these machines need an employee to interact. With 10 machines running at full capacity, that means longer waits for everyone because 3 machines are waiting for an id badge scan.
Walmart can solve some of these problems with more employees but that cost money.
The problem with this is that every vehicle would need to be built around the same battery pack dimensions
There’s a lot of ways to tackle this issue. You could have a couple of standards (think AA vs AAA batteries). Or you could make the packs smaller and more modular so different applications can have more or less of them.
have the same amp-hour rating
No, they’d not need that. In fact, I’d say it’s desirable for them to not have that.
same voltage, same cooling system
Same voltage, yes, same cooling system? Not exactly. They’d just need to have cooling system hookups in the same place.
I seriously doubt that would ever happen as nothing like that has ever existed in the 120+ years of automotive history.
Loads of things like that have existed in the automotive industry. In fact, that’s one of the biggest features of the big 3 automotive manufacturers is having standardized parts shared between one another.
Standard and swappable battery packs? Yes. All the skateboard style vehicles or ebikes have battery packs that can be removed and replaced.
Making that automated could be nice but isn’t necessary to get the benefits of a standard. A standard forces pack producers to compete with one another in terms of quality and price. It makes it cheaper to install new batteries. And it makes it possible to upgrade your cars range with newer packs. With an EV, you won’t need to get a new vehicle hardly ever if getting new packs is relatively affordable and easy. Further, the worn packs still have value so swap locations will be incentivized to pay you for the pack they remove.
The notion this needs to be part of a giant battery swapping network to reduce charge times is silly. 10 to 15 minute charge stops are already very short and all you need on most cars for the next leg of a journey. It also introduces a lot of complexity. Like, what if I want or need a 100kWh pack but the standard is 80kWh packs? What about pack wear? Who’s in charge of pulling the degraded packs? And what do we do about someone putting in a pack with fake capabilities? You have a situation where you are cycling parts worth well north of $10k. That’s a mighty tempting target for theft.
A standardized battery is still a really good thing. I just don’t think it needs to be a part of road trips.
Every EV has this already. What they don’t have is a standard. Not shockingly, every EV manufacturer will argue why theirs should be the standard.
It does not work like that.
The problem with such statements is the energy costs are nowhere near fixed. The amount of energy needed to play a song on my iPod shuffle through a wired headset is wildly different from the power needed to play that same song on my TV through my home theater equipment.
The same is true on the backend. The amount of power Google spends serving up a wildly popular band is way less than what they burn serving up an unknown Indy band’s video. That’s because the popular band’s music will have been pre-optimized by Google to save on bandwidth and computing resources. When something is popular, it’s in their best interests to reduce the computational costs (ie power consumption) associated with serving that content.