[HN Gopher] The 1955 Le Mans disaster changed motorsport
___________________________________________________________________
The 1955 Le Mans disaster changed motorsport
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-12-14 14:52 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.essesmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.essesmag.com)
| russfink wrote:
| Expert piece of writing: "The enormous impact had torn the engine
| mount and front axle from the SLR's chassis and sent both of
| these large pieces scything through a shoulder-to-shoulder
| crowd."
|
| Scything. Brilliant.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Gruesome, maybe they are taking too much pleasure in being so
| graphic. Should tone it down.
| elpocko wrote:
| I disagree, deadbabe.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Nobody takes pleasure in it. Motorsport is something where
| people generally respect, acknowledge and understand the
| inherent dangers associated with it.
|
| That's just good writing there.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I don't believe that Motorsport audiences do generally
| acknowledge that they could be killed by flying pieces of
| cars, though. They acknowledge that the _drivers_ are at
| risk.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| I see it as having a wide enough range of vocabulary to be
| able to pick the most succinctly descriptive word for the
| situation. Brilliantly done in this case.
| fsckboy wrote:
| to me, a scythe implies a handle, leverage, etc.
|
| the word "mow" would have been better, evocative of lopping
| all the tops off without the wrong mechanical image.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Scythe implies a large swinging blade, cutting down
| everything in its path. Also Death carries a scythe, so
| that evokes another good image.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I think that sentences accurately conveys the incredible
| violence and destruction of the crash, which killed 83 people
| and injured 120 more.
| deadbabe wrote:
| If you view it all as statistics sure but how would you
| feel hearing about a loved one's death as getting scythed?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 50 dead in an instant, but I missed the total death count. Over
| 80?
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| 84 dead, 120+ injured.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Le_Mans_disaster
| prmoustache wrote:
| My dad, his parents and all his siblings were in the
| grandstands but escaped uninjured. He was 7 years old.
| Mltiple decades later he would become emotionnal and angry if
| we, as adolescents, would mention dead bodies in a very
| casual manner, for exemple while commenting on a video game.
|
| I knew about this accident and them being close to be hit by
| some of those parts that day but it took me years to make the
| connection between this and how his reaction. This must have
| been a huge war scene.
| tromp wrote:
| While Le Mans has proved most deadly to spectators, it is topped
| by 5 other races in driver fatalities [1], with Indianapolis
| topping the chart.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driver_deaths_in_motor...
| Palomides wrote:
| note that page excludes motorcycles, the isle of man TT is way
| worse
| arrowsmith wrote:
| "Since 1937, the only "deathless" Isle of Man TT's happened
| in 1982 and 2024." - Wikipedia
|
| Wow. I'm genuinely surprised that the event is allowed to
| take place when people reliably die every year. Where else
| does that happen?
|
| (The above Wikipedia quote is also contradicted later in the
| same article, which says that a driver named Louis O'Regan
| died in 2024.)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Isle_of_Man_TT_Mount.
| ..
| atonse wrote:
| But the riders participating are fully aware of the risks.
| So why not allow it?
| mannykannot wrote:
| Agreed - and in proportion to the number of competitors,
| I would guess that the fatality rate is less than, say,
| climbing K2.
|
| Update: Summing the 'number of finishes' column in the
| Competitor Analysis' on the IOMTT site I get 17355
| finishes (the data appears to cover competitors who have
| finished 6 or more races.) The above-mentioned Wikipedia
| list of TT fatalities page gives a total of 281
| (including 16 non-rider fatalities), giving a BoE figure
| of 1.62%. In contrast, the Wikipedia 'List of deaths on
| eight-thousanders' page says that, as of August 2023,
| about 800 climbers have summited K2, and 96 have died
| trying.
|
| Annapurna has the worst statistics among these mountains:
| "for decades, it has the highest climber to fatality
| ratio of around 32%".
|
| For the TT, if you think the number of competitors rather
| than finishes is the correct figure to use, the TT list
| used above contains 1275 competitors, for a fatality rate
| of about 22% (though, as mentioned above, this seems to
| exclude competitors with fewer than 6 finishes.)
|
| https://www.iomtt.com/tt-database/competitor-analysis
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_on_eight-
| thousa...
| trgn wrote:
| because other people now need to waste their time going
| to collect their bodies, calling their families, dressing
| their corpses?
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| We should ban all activities that may cause human injury
| or death, regardless of participant consent
| trgn wrote:
| cute. but it's not what i said.
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| Was probably equally as informative as whatever you're
| trying to say
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Waste is kind of a stretch. Every outsider involved would
| be getting paid.
|
| If I'm hosting a race, ensuring medical staff, etc are
| present it's not really a waste of their time if someone
| does get hurt/dies. It's literally why they are there.
| You could argue that their qualifications can be better
| used elsewhere but that applies to anything.
| prmoustache wrote:
| These people would have died anyway. We haven't reached
| immortality. It is mostly a scheduling problem.
|
| Also first responders at the TT and irish road races like
| the flying doctors [1] are also mostly big fans of the
| sport and I would say you would be silly to call Isle of
| Man your home if you can't stand the TT or Manx GP. And
| you are totally free to take your vacations during those
| events if finding a crashed bike and a corpse on your
| lawn is an issue to you.
|
| https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/2016/april/mcn-plus
| ---dr... https://www.carthrottle.com/news/why-flying-dr-
| john-hinds-wa...
| https://youtu.be/FdRM0KGGSAk?feature=shared
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| There's no mandatory requirement for anyone to collect a
| body from a morgue, even if it is a first degree
| relative.
|
| That being said, some relatives don't have to work
| everyday so they're not waisting much.
| thefaux wrote:
| I am sort of with Kant who believed that we have duties
| and responsibilities to others. There is an enormous cost
| imposed by deaths caused by reckless actions, which is
| not limited just to family and friends. The effects of
| these types of things fan out beyond the individual
| incident as well. These deaths normalize behaviors that
| are then mimicked by future people keeping us stuck in
| the cycle of wanton and unnecessary death.
| nradov wrote:
| Every man dies, not every man really lives. I'm glad
| there are still some people with the courage to push the
| limits and damn the consequences. Modern life has become
| a little too safe and comfortable. Cheers to the Isle of
| Man TT riders, and let's hope the moralizing scolds and
| killjoys never get their way.
| pengaru wrote:
| Nobody gets out alive, get over it.
| jdietrich wrote:
| If you aren't familiar with the TT, it's crazier than you
| can imagine. It's a race on ordinary roads, large
| sections of which run through residential villages.
| Spectators are seriously injured on a fairly regular
| basis. _Completely uninvolved bystanders_ are seriously
| injured on occasion. Local residents have come home to
| find the charred wreckage of a motorbike in their front
| room.
|
| It's incredible that races like the IoM TT and the
| Northwest 200 still exist, but I can't imagine anyone
| ever sanctioning such races if they were new. There's
| just so much unmanageable risk.
|
| https://youtu.be/KFJSVtsckyI
|
| https://youtu.be/ocHeJG5o8N0?t=421
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Presumably the motorbike owner or team or event sponsors
| have insurance to pay for the charred front rooms and
| bystander injuries? I could see spectators being at their
| own risk, but if the event becomes uninsurable, it will
| stop being held.
| fredoralive wrote:
| The fact that the Isle of Man is largely self governing,
| and that the TT is a big tourist draw perhaps leads to
| things not being banned.
|
| The Wikipedia list includes deaths for other events using
| the TT course, so there were no deaths during the TT itself
| this year, but there was one during the Manx Grand Prix, a
| different event.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Isle of Man doesn't have speed limits either, is a tax
| haven, and is generally quite low-regulation.
| lisper wrote:
| One factor is the format: it's a time-trial event, not a
| head-to-head race. So if a rider dies, it's hard to pin the
| blame on anyone but the rider, who clearly knew what they
| were signing up for.
| awkwardpotato wrote:
| > The above Wikipedia quote is also contradicted later in
| the same article, which says that a driver named Louis
| O'Regan died in 2024.
|
| The list of fatalities is for on the Isle of Man TT
| Mountain Course which is used by both the Isle of Man TT
| races and Manx Grand Prix races (the "amateur rider's
| alternative" to the Island of Man TT). Louis O'Regan died
| qualifying for the Manx Grand Prix, meaning the 2024 Isle
| of Man TT was deathless. The list is confusingly combining
| two races for some reason.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Incidents during the Hajj, almost every year:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_during_the_Hajj
| Lanolderen wrote:
| "Between 14 and 19 June 2024, at least 1,301 pilgrims had
| died due to extreme heat in Mecca during the Hajj of
| 2024, with temperatures exceeding 50 degC (122
| degF).[41]"
|
| Damn
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Why would it not be allowed? All drivers are adults who, on
| a track, should be left to decide their own fate.
|
| Spectators if they go there to watch should also be left to
| decide their own fate. It's not like they're not aware that
| accidents happens and a piece of a car can hit them right
| between the eyes and kill them instantly.
|
| This "things should be banned on a track because they are
| unsafe" is getting tiring.
| wslh wrote:
| ***Spoiler alert***: Ferrari (2023) [1] depicts a very realistic
| and dramatic 1957 Mille Miglia accident [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari_(2023_film)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_Mille_Miglia
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Safety consciousness really started only in the 70s. I think
| Jackie Stewart was a big proponent. He often was accused of being
| a wimp because real men embrace risking their lives. Then it
| started picking up more steam in the 80s with carbon fiber
| chassis and then more in the 90s when Senna died. Rallye stopped
| the insanity when Henri Toivonen burnt to death.
|
| I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There is
| a lot of resistance against improving things just because. Only
| when something really bad happens, people wake up. But even often
| nothings happens.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There
| is a lot of resistance against improving things just because.
| Only when something really bad happens, people wake up. But
| even often nothings happens.
|
| And then a generation or two later they forget that we had so
| much pollution in our rivers that they occasionally caught
| fire. "Why do we need these protections?" Protections get
| weakened, problems recur. It happens everywhere, we forget why
| we do things a particular way, fail, and then re-learn the
| lessons (the hard way).
| pwg wrote:
| > It happens everywhere, we forget why we do things a
| particular way, fail, and then re-learn the lessons (the hard
| way).
|
| https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/
| dylan604 wrote:
| When I was a kid the pollution was so bad in the US, we
| learned about acid rain. They made changes that nobody liked,
| but the acid stopped failing from the sky and people accepted
| it was a better situation.
|
| Change takes energy to implement. It is much easier to not
| make the change, and for the most part people are just lazy.
| It takes a determine group to decide to expend the energy to
| get the changes started.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Still the forgetting part in the danger, the complacency. I
| think that's why the US is in the state it's in
| politically. Too good for too long means people are willing
| to let it get silly again.
| leoc wrote:
| For example, in the 1967 F1 Grand Prix (the subject of the
| legendary cult-favourite racing sim _Grand Prix Legends_
| https://www.pcgamer.com/why-i-loved-hardcore-racing-sim-gran...
| ) two drivers died, and apparently half of the drivers would
| eventually die in motor accidents over the course of their
| careers.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I have very fond memories of working at Papyrus (1995-1997,
| including the very start of GPL; some of my code probably
| lived on in the telemetry recording and replay system, though
| I left early enough to not be in the credits [correctly so,
| IMO].)
|
| The iRacing crew has a large overlap of ex-Papyrus,
| unsurprisingly.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| The problem I think is that if you take the two extremes/limits
| - e.g. the "do as little as possible until we absolutely have
| to" and the "do everything that could feasibly make sense"
| sides, in the absence of an existential event, the former
| outcompetes the latter both in the short and long term because
| if you regulate _everything_ then you end up in absurd
| situations that kill progress.
|
| What we really need is a time machine. With the benefit of a
| time machine we could implement a bunch of safety mechanisms,
| many of which would be inconvenient and retard progress, and
| then go back in time and tell people which ones made sense and
| which ones didn't make sense.
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| I think time machines would be used to opposite effect if
| they existed. If something bad happens, you just rewind a few
| minutes and say "hey Jim, be careful on that ladder, eh?"
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There are at least two timelines, one where Jim falls off
| the ladder and one where he doesn't. The time machine would
| not change that.
| wat10000 wrote:
| You don't need a time machine. Smart people are pretty good
| at figuring out the costs and benefits. What you need is to
| cultivate an environment where safety is a priority, but it's
| recognized that it also has a cost and tradeoffs, and there's
| a sweet spot that isn't "maximum safety at all costs."
|
| The American FAA is a pretty good example. They've made air
| travel extremely safe while also allowing it to become very
| cheap. Their safety record has become essentially perfect but
| that doesn't come from preferring safety at all costs. They
| put a dollar figure on each life to determine if a safety
| requirement is actually worth the cost. And they recognize
| when unintended consequences result in a worse overall
| outcome. For example, child safety seats are not required on
| airliners despite clear evidence that they would save lives
| in the event of a crash. Why? Because the expense and
| inconvenience would push some parents to drive to their
| destination instead of fly. Driving is much more dangerous.
| They ran the numbers and found that requiring child safety
| seats would cost lives on net.
|
| The FAA is far from perfect and they seem to have been
| slipping in recent years. But they're a good example of how
| this can be done. The hard part is getting people to allow it
| to be done. A lot of people will insist on spending a billion
| dollars to save one life. Or insist on focusing on one
| particular area and saving lives there, ignoring a loss of
| life caused elsewhere. This can be resisted but it takes a
| lot of work.
| naming_the_user wrote:
| I agree with this but I think that the FAA comes with
| pretty heavy caveats which limit the wider applicability of
| the model.
|
| An airliner is something that is essentially impossible for
| a garage crew to produce, even less so if they want to be
| FAA accredited, but that doesn't really matter because,
| well, it's basically impractical for someone to build a jet
| anyway.
|
| Most industries aren't like this and if you had an
| equivalent of the FAA for say, hand car washes, either they
| would basically do nothing at all, or it would be so
| onerous that suddenly the only people that can open car
| washes would be megacorps. That might mean we still have
| widespread inexpensive car washes, but it would come at the
| cost of tilting the economy towards big business and away
| from small owner operators which is a net negative IME.
| nradov wrote:
| Ironically there are really severe restrictions on car
| washes in some US states now due to water use limits and
| the environmental impact of runoff. It's really tough for
| a small operator to open a new car wash in California.
|
| https://www.vlses.com/2024/03/06/navigating-californias-
| wast...
|
| The regulatory overreach has driven up prices so much
| that a lot of my neighbors have gone back to washing
| their own cars in their driveways.
| wat10000 wrote:
| You definitely need to account for enforcement, not just
| pretend your rules will magically be obeyed, when making
| your decisions. But I don't see why the situation would
| be so dire that you can only choose between a free-for-
| all and destroying all small business. Licensing and
| inspections go a long way, and there are plenty of
| industries like that which haven't been taken over by a
| few megacorps.
|
| Consider air pollution from cars, for example. It starts
| with the manufacturers who are required to meet certain
| standards. But individual owners can and do modify their
| cars to break the rules. Despite this, air pollution from
| cars has been dramatically reduced with a combination of
| regulating manufacturers and regulating individual car
| owners with emissions testing.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Rallye stopped the insanity when Henri Toivonen burnt to
| death.
|
| Alone it probably would not have done it, but the sanity of
| Group B (or lack thereof) had been in question for a while:
| earlier in the same season Joaquim Santos lost control of his
| car after avoiding a group of spectators (who'd routinely play
| chicken with cars) resulting in 3 deaths and 30 injuries.
|
| And the previous season Bettega had died on the same course
| Toivonen and Cresto lost their lives on, and Vatanen was
| gravely injured in Argentina.
| andrepd wrote:
| Tbh Group B had a problem of crowd control, not with the cars
| themselves.
|
| Those Lancias hnnng
| macshome wrote:
| While that was a problem, the larger one was that the cars
| were too fast for the tires and safety equipment of the
| time.
|
| In a 13 month period there were three fatal accidents that
| were down to drivers losing control and crashing on their
| own. The last two coming in successive months. The repeated
| accidents killed off Group B and the nascent Group S that
| was supposed to replace it.
|
| Modern WRC cars much higher cornering speeds than the Group
| B cars because of advances in tire technology. They aren't
| as fast in a straight line, but they are massively safer in
| the event of a crash.
| masklinn wrote:
| Group B absolutely had a cars problem, 3 of the 4 accidents
| mentioned were not crowd related, there was literally no
| close witness (only a video from far away) to Toivonen and
| Cresta's accident.
|
| The Lancias were some of the worst offenders to the cars
| issue, but not the only one: many drivers complained that
| the cars had gotten way too powerful to be safe in Corsica.
|
| And safety equipment was lacking and not consistently
| applied, for instance fuel tank skid plates were usually
| left off on asphalt tracks like corsica, which is likely
| how Toivonen's lancia instantly caught fire when it went
| off the road.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > who'd routinely play chicken with cars
|
| I've never seen this, but can only imagine the stupidity of
| these spectators. To solve that, I'd have been in favor of
| awarding bonus points to drivers not avoid these "chickens"
| masklinn wrote:
| > I've never seen this, but can only imagine the stupidity
| of these spectators.
|
| Unless you're 50+ you could never have seen it because it's
| long stopped. But watch old videos of group b and you'll
| see it, it was insane.
| joshu wrote:
| this is why i am afraid to drive my 1962 lemans racer in actual
| race conditions...
| jcgrillo wrote:
| that's what a 1992 lemons racer is for ;)
| pushedx wrote:
| increased severity of disease from new pathogens is one result
| of climate change
| nradov wrote:
| Really? More severe than, let's say, HCoV-OC43 or "Spanish"
| flu?
|
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lpm.2022.104111
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Yes, much more severe. Covid alone had a higher fatality
| rate than Spanish flu. 2012 MERS had a 30% fatality rate.
| Ebola strains in Zaire and Sudan have had fatality rates
| over 50%.
| nradov wrote:
| Nope, much less severe. COVID-19 had an infection
| fatality rate way lower than 1%.
|
| https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2022.114655
|
| As for those other diseases there is zero evidence that
| climate change has made them more severe. It's not
| _impossible_ but we simply have no reliable evidence of a
| causal relationship one way or the other.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There
| is a lot of resistance against improving things just because.
|
| Well no not just because. I really care about the environment
| but it is getting a bit exhausting. In Holland everyone has to
| move away from natural gas meaning everyone has to buy hugely
| expensive heat pumps and insulate their houses more to deal
| with the lower heat output.
|
| ICEs are getting banned from city centers so you need to buy an
| EV which is messy to charge if you live in a flat, we have to
| drag all our empty plastic bottles back to the shop now and
| can't even crush them to save bag space. New environmentally
| friendly paints scratch much easier. Lead free solder causes
| solder joints to break earlier meaning more frequent purchases.
| Plastic bottles now have their caps attached in an awkward way.
| Prices are constantly rising due to environment levies making
| it more expensive for citizens but companies are still raking
| it in and producing stuff they know it's harmful like PFAS.
| Housing is super expensive because environmental impact reviews
| limit the amount of new construction and the government put
| even more on hold due to too much nitrogen compounds.
|
| All these things are just expensive and more hassle and I can
| imagine people are getting a bit frustrated. It's like it's
| never enough. It's with good reason sure but I can understand
| people feel like they're getting the short end of the stick.
|
| I personally don't even own or need a car and I live somewhere
| now where I don't really need heating and we can still just
| dump our bottles in the plastic bin in the street here. So I'm
| pretty ok with everything. But yeah I feel people's pain.
| afh1 wrote:
| None of it matters when China is burning coal like crazy and
| 99% of all ocean plastic comes from Asia.[1] Europe is mostly
| costly virtue signaling.
|
| [1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/06/90-of-plastic-
| pollut...
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Measures like ICE bans still improve the local air quality.
| afh1 wrote:
| True. All of the measures mentioned have local benefits,
| with a price tag attached. Global impact is less clear
| cut.
| jeltz wrote:
| Not much. Banning old ICE cars does but modern ICE cars
| does not pollute that much more than electric. A lot of
| the pollution comes from the tyres.
| choult wrote:
| If everyone keeps using everyone else's use of fossil fuels
| as a justification for their own, then no progress will
| ever be made.
| afh1 wrote:
| When your waste is irrelevant vs that of your neighbor,
| paying a high price to do your insignificant part is
| simply inefficient. If people _really_ cared about a
| _global_ impact, the approach would need to be radically
| different.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you reduce your waste, you have the high ground to use
| as leverage to coninve others. It's not a hard concept
| xethos wrote:
| Your six year old source itself states that in 2017, China
| stopped the import of foreign garbage. Meaning plastic
| pollution will have dropped in the _six years_ since your
| source was published.
|
| More importantly though, it wasn't even necessarily China's
| waste. Rich, Western nations like the one you're (likely)
| commenting from have sent their plastic waste to China,
| where it ends up in the sea. And you use that for
| justification that "using less plastic doesn't matter", and
| that it's "mostly virtue signaling".
| jeltz wrote:
| Nah, it is mostly local plastic from what I can tell. And
| I come from a country which is a net importer of waste,
| not exporter. And China is not the issue, it is mostly
| the Phillipines. We cannot solve this other than by
| payibg for and forcing a couple of countries to solve
| their issue.
|
| https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-
| plastic...
| __m wrote:
| Yeah let's not compare per capita or historic
| responsibility, or their huge investments in renewable
| energy, I don't want to lower my first world lifestyle.
| jeltz wrote:
| Per capita plastic pollution is highest in a handful of
| Asian countries, but for CO2 you have a point. Plastic
| pollution is caused by just a couple of countries.
| otherme123 wrote:
| It's not virtue signaling. Europe acknowledges that we are
| already good enough to keep basing our growth in fossils.
| But developing countries deserve some slack with fossil
| usage while they converge.
|
| Indirectly, by requiring cleaner cars for example, there's
| a push toward China designing clean engines if they want to
| sell in Europe. In fact China is already selling a decent
| amount of cars in Europe.
| robomartin wrote:
| > It's like it's never enough
|
| I know you didn't mean it this way, yet the irony is exactly
| that (out of context) bit: It will NEVER be enough.
|
| What I mean by this is that this is madness. We cannot and
| will not EVER even make a dent, much less reverse, planetary
| scale with even the most extensive set of these ridiculous
| non-solutions.
|
| The exercise necessary to understand just how insane this has
| gone is ridiculously simple. Have a look at this chart:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/wbHptnf.png
|
| Now, imagine that on Monday we magically erase the United
| States from this planet. All of it. People. Buildings.
| Machinery. Power plants. 400 million ICE vehicles.
| Everything. It rolls back to prehistoric conditions.
|
| Far more dramatic than switching to heat pumps or everyone
| driving EV's, right?
|
| What will that accomplish? Erasing the US from the planet?
|
| Nothing. Because this will only represent a 14% reduction in
| CO2 contribution at a planetary scale.
|
| With 86% emissions still in place, nothing will reverse.
|
| OK, let's magically ERASE (highlighted because this is far
| more severe than not using plastic straws, or whatever other
| madness we might choose to compare it to) half the world. So,
| 50% of our emissions go down to 0% on Monday and all of these
| countries --entire continents-- magically roll back to
| prehistoric non-human era.
|
| What happens then?
|
| Nothing improves. Nothing. Not even in 10K and maybe even
| 100K years.
|
| The fact is that there's nothing humanity can do about this.
| We cannot affect change to planetary scale conditions. We
| can't even control reasonably local conditions and we are
| allowing lunatics to dictate policy while pretending that
| this will actually have an effect...despite it being
| mathematically impossible. It is a matter of physics, not
| feelings or opinion.
|
| We know, without one shred of uncertainty, that if ALL OF
| HUMANITY evaporated from this planet tomorrow it would take
| 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to reduce by 100 ppm.
| We know this from 800K years of highly reliable atmospheric
| sampling data from ice core samples.
|
| We are living in an "Emperor Has No Clothes" scenario, and
| those of us who are saying "He is naked!" are mostly being
| laughed at by the lunatics who want to pretend he is actually
| wearing something and those who, devoid of even an minimal
| attempt at critical thinking, blindly follow them.
|
| There are legitimate and worthy reasons for which we should
| clean up our act. Climate change and saving the planet just
| happen not to be among them. Because it is impossible without
| violating the rules of physics.
| robomartin wrote:
| For once I would love to see those downvoting pushback
| against the cult of planet-saving to present an argument
| against the facts as presented.
|
| Take that chart and explain how erasing 14% or even 50% of
| emissions can save the planet.
|
| Then explain how heat pumps or banning ICE vehicles --which
| is insignificant when compared to erasing massive modern
| civilizations-- is superior to erasing entire regions of
| the planet.
|
| You might not like what I said. That does not make it
| wrong.
| usrusr wrote:
| Even if tomorrow a giant space-maid robot came by and
| stole much of our atmospheric CO2 we'd have to eventually
| make do without fossil fuels. Because if we continue
| they'd all be oxidized to the lowest energy state (CO2)
| one day. Giant space-maid or not. Is it that terrible to
| start a little earlier? Inconvenient, sure, I'll give you
| that. Massively inconvenient.
| panstromek wrote:
| You're using facts about the magnitude of the problem to
| justify inaction towards solving it. That just doesn't
| make any sense.
| robomartin wrote:
| > You're using facts about the magnitude of the problem
| to justify inaction towards solving it. That just doesn't
| make any sense.
|
| No. I am telling you that there is no way we can solve
| it. Doing so requires violating the laws of physics and
| science in general. That's what does not make sense.
|
| What is clearer proof of the fallacy than knowing
| precisely how our planet behaves without humanity on it?
|
| We know this. Accurately.
|
| It takes 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm change in
| atmospheric CO2.
|
| Nothing. Absolutely nothing we do can improve on this
| rate of change. I've seen politicians claim we can fix it
| in 20 to 50 years. Does anyone challenge this nonsense
| when uttered? No, of course not.
|
| They are claiming we can accelerate a planetary scale
| problem by a factor of ONE THOUSAND or more and nobody
| bothers to ask "How?" or "Where is the energy going to
| come from?" or "How much additional pollution and damage
| will the proposed process generate?" or "Are you
| insane?".
|
| We desperately need to start talking about reality and
| leave these fantasies behind.
| mcphage wrote:
| > It takes 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm change in
| atmospheric CO2.
|
| > Nothing. Absolutely nothing we do can improve on this
| rate of change
|
| Trivially false--humanity has already changed the CO2 ppm
| by larger, in a shorter span of time. For the most part
| without even noticing.
| robomartin wrote:
| > Trivially false--humanity has already changed the CO2
| ppm by larger, in a shorter span of time. For the most
| part without even noticing.
|
| You are trivially confused: The time, energy and
| resources required to emit these gasses is insignificant
| when compared to what it will take to capture them back.
|
| That's the problem, and that's what most casual observers
| refuse to think through and understand.
|
| Go buy a 10 kg bag of fine flour. Walk around your home
| or office spreading the stuff everywhere.
|
| Now clean up every single particle.
|
| Easy to make a mess. Not so easy in time, energy and
| resources to clean it up. That's the problem.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| I didn't downvoted you but can add some thoughts on what
| you said:
|
| - erasing the USA from the map would very surely reduce
| some other countries emissions (world factory...). One
| could argue it would also remove a leader (literally) in
| consomptionmania and that would give space for other
| countries lifestyle inspirations.
|
| - by "saving the planet" people mean many different
| things, arguing against this expression won't bring much
| discussion. For me it's mostly preserving access of the
| ressources that made humanity so bliss: diverse fauna,
| diverse flora, clean air and water and a bit of minerals.
|
| - your chart is about CO2e but it's just a part of the
| equation. I deplore organizations and govs tends to focus
| on those levels, they're often not only a cause but also
| a consequence. Ecologie is a vast, domain.
|
| - I agree banning ICE is ridiculous, just a bit less than
| the 90's moto "remove you wall charger when not in used
| to SAVE THE PLANET". Those measure are politic (to secure
| car usage while oils keep draining) and economic (many
| new car sales, new infrastructures for charging).
| toss1 wrote:
| The charts and data you cite are not an argument to do
| nothing.
|
| They are a very strong argument to immediately commence CO2
| removal (and ironically, one of the arguments against it is
| that it might let the CO2 polluters 'off the hook' for
| reducing their emissions).
| lttlrck wrote:
| He did not say "do nothing".
|
| > There are legitimate and worthy reasons for which we
| should clean up our act.
|
| What _is_ the very strong argument to commence CO2
| removal in the face the charts and data?
| robomartin wrote:
| > They are a very strong argument to immediately commence
| CO2 removal
|
| You do realize that removing CO2 will require massively
| more energy than what went into adding it to the
| atmosphere, right?
|
| In other words, unless you know of a way to violate the
| laws of physics without consequence, the concept of
| viable CO2 removal is a bad joke of tragic proportions.
| Anyone proposing this should be instantly laughed off the
| stage.
|
| This is a fantasy. Which is why every single proposal for
| CO2 removal has failed as the scams they actually are.
| hgomersall wrote:
| That's not true. You've got a requirement to reduce
| entropy but none to pack it back into energy dense fuel.
| toss1 wrote:
| Not true at all (or only in limited circumstances that do
| not apply
|
| First, it was not the original energy expenditure that is
| the problem. The problem is that the CO2 _CHANGES_ the
| solar energy exchange equation, by allowing ~the same
| amount of solar energy to the earth 's surface, but
| _REDUCING_ the earth 's ability radiate that energy back
| to space. That newly captured energy _VASTLY EXCEEDS_ the
| original energy that went into adding the CO2 to the
| atmosphere. That original energy spent has almost zero
| impact on climate change.
|
| Next, capture requires none of the things you say.
|
| -- Carbon capture can be done by 'farming' high-uptake
| organisms, which has extreme leverage for energy
| expended. Examples include iron-seeding of water to make
| algae blooms, planting high uptake trees, etc.
|
| -- Carbon capture can be done by accelerating natural
| chemical processes, e.g., exposing rocks that react with
| water and CO@, or crushing those rocks and spreading them
| on fields (iirc, Google just contracted with a company
| doing exactly that)
|
| -- Carbon capture can be done by enzyme-driven processes
| that make the desired reactions happen with minimal
| artificial energy input
|
| -- Even if you want to use a chemistry that requires
| direct energy input, there is zero requirement to recover
| the original highly complex and energy-dense molecules
| previously used for fuel, it only needs to make a
| compound that can be captured. Still requires less energy
| than original used.
|
| -- Even if you insist on producing new molecules as
| energy-dense as the originals, there is vastly more
| energy available via non-CO2-outputting sources, such as
| solar, wind, etc. which often produce surpluses. Again,
| the energy of the process has almost zero to do with
| promoting climate change.
|
| So, _NO_ , it neither a bad joke, a process that requires
| breaking laws of physics, at fantasy, or a scam.
| nradov wrote:
| There is no valid argument for CO2 removal. No matter how
| you slice it, emissions reductions are more cost
| effective than removal. If we wreck our economy in the
| process of trying to prevent global warning then the net
| effects will be even worse.
| toss1 wrote:
| Of course, rapid emissions reductions would be best.
|
| However, there are still two very solid arguments for
| capture, even if it has greater costs.
|
| First, even if we somehow make emissions go to zero next
| Monday and forever after, the CO2 already baked into the
| atmosphere will still cause massive warming for
| centuries, and this will cause massive ecological
| disuption. Only removing the carbon (and/or implementing
| sun-blocking technologies) will allow a fast enough reset
| to pre-industrial levels and avoid such damage.
|
| Second, it is extremely unlikely that we could make
| emissions go to zero in anything like the required
| timeframe. Even if somehow 100% of the people and
| politicians became convinced and decided to start next
| Monday, it would be decades before we approached zero
| emissions. Replacing all the fossil-fuel technology will
| not be instant. Thus, again, capture and sun-blocking
| tech has a definite role in rapidly repairing the damage.
| tzs wrote:
| Arguing that we cannot affect change to planetary scale
| conditions is an interesting argument, considering that the
| problem people are trying to address is a change to
| planetary scale conditions that was caused by humanity.
| robomartin wrote:
| I can understand how that might sound nonsensical. Here's
| where a simple thought experiment might help understand
| the difference.
|
| To clarify, we should note that I have never --ever-- in
| my many comments on this subject denied the genesis of
| the problem. It is clear as day that we contributed a
| massive amount of CO2 and other gasses to the atmosphere.
| Let's get that out of the way. This isn't about denial of
| that fact.
|
| Thought experiment:
|
| Take an warehouse the size of a Home Depot (approximately
| 10K square meters or 100K square feet).
|
| Seal it. Nothing new comes in or goes out. Air, water,
| nothing.
|
| Make a 1 cubic meter pile of wood in the center of it and
| light it on fire.
|
| Let it burn out.
|
| Your job, now, is to clean it.
|
| The energy content of 1 cubic meter of wood is in the
| order of 3 MWh.
|
| How much energy will it take to clean 100% of the gasses
| and particulate matter generated by the burn and
| deposited on every square millimeter of this warehouse?
|
| Of course, this question is impossible to answer, other
| than to suggest it will take a lot more than the energy
| expended to create the problem in the first place. This
| is a basic principle in physics. Right? You cannot use
| less energy to reverse a process.
|
| Another way to describe this principle is that it is far
| easier to cause destruction than it is to reverse it. It
| is much easier to implode a building in Las Vegas than to
| clean it up and build a new one. Etc.
|
| Humanity burned fossil fuels with incredible energy
| content per cubic meter. Massive, unthinkable amounts.
|
| This is how we caused change.
|
| And it will take massively more energy to reverse these
| changes.
|
| And to do so quickly, it will take POWER. Massive amounts
| of it. Energy is power over time. It is easy to talk
| about energy and lose sight of this. Cleaning that
| warehouse to reverse the effects of the burn will take
| orders of magnitude more time than what it took to burn a
| cubic meter of wood.
|
| And so, my argument is not at all misaligned with
| reality. Yes, we did this in a very short period of time.
| And yet, no, we cannot and will not fix it in anything
| even remotely resembling a human lifetime no matter what
| we do. If humanity ceases to exist it will require 50K to
| 100K years per 100 ppm drop. If we still exist, even if
| we implement the most draconian of changes, nothing will
| change. Not one bit. In fact, it is far more likely that
| atmospheric CO2 levels will continue to rise.
|
| It would be far more intelligent to understand this and
| work on how to live in this reality. The planet will take
| care of itself. And no, humanity isn't going to die off
| any time soon unless we start launching nukes across
| continents.
| corford wrote:
| Fair enough, but how is your argument incompatible with
| transitioning away from fossil fuels and bringing in more
| environmentally aware regulations? It might not
| clean/reverse the damage already done but surely it helps
| to reduce the magnitude of future damage?
| robomartin wrote:
| It isn't. Please note the last paragraph of my much-
| maligned post:
|
| "There are legitimate and worthy reasons for which we
| should clean up our act. Climate change and saving the
| planet just happen not to be among them. Because it is
| impossible without violating the rules of physics."
|
| As for reducing the magnitude of, as you put it, future
| damage, I very much doubt this is possible as well.
|
| Loose quote from a research paper released by Google many
| years ago: Even if we were to deploy the most optimal
| forms of renewable and clean energy sources at a global
| scale, not only will this not reverse the problem,
| atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise.
|
| Part of our reality is inescapable. For example, massive
| forest fires drive more CO2 into the atmosphere than lots
| of human activity. Around the world, there are fires in
| mines that have been burning for centuries (google it,
| you'll be surprised). Etc. We are kidding ourselves if we
| think that a bunch of measures that are but rounding
| errors at a planetary scale will have any impact at all
| in, as I like to put it, anything even remotely
| resembling a human time scale.
|
| There are things we can do (and probably should do) that
| I think are likely to make for better and cleaner life
| all around without the fantasy of saving the planet or
| reversing climate.
|
| One example of this is to seriously address the massive
| pollution created by container ships travelling our
| oceans every day. These ships burn bunker fuel, perhaps
| the worst thing one could burn. The stuff is horrible and
| the pollution it creates goes far beyond just CO2. I also
| learned that they contribute to something called "species
| pollution". They ingest all sorts of marine life into the
| ballast tanks at port A and pump it out at port B,
| transporting species clear across the planet, where they
| can and have done serious damage.
|
| How to address container ships is a subject that requires
| serious discussion. It's a complex multivariate problem.
| Would all-electric ships be better? Massive hydrofoils
| (for more efficient transport)? Wind has been tried, it
| isn't as much help as one might think. Another
| optimization vector would be to eliminate them by
| distributing the production of material goods closer to
| their points of consumption. In other words, eliminate
| container ships (unlikely) or reduce the fleet by only
| transporting materials that cannot be sourced at the
| point of manufacture.
|
| Again, these are complex problems. Their resolution, as a
| first step, requires leaving fantasy-land to then be able
| to discuss, evaluate and address reality. Only then will
| we we able to improve life, clean-up our act and live
| better. The value in these three desirable outcomes is
| self-evident to the point that they do not need to be
| justified by some fantastical imaginary doomsday scenario
| where all life on earth ceases to exist in, as some
| politicians have suggested, a dozen years.
|
| I am all for being far better about how we behave on this
| planet. My problem is with creating a religion out of
| fantasies. Reality does not care about these things and
| keeps moving forward. It's almost like like stock market.
| tzs wrote:
| > If humanity ceases to exist it will require 50K to 100K
| years per 100 ppm drop.
|
| If we don't cease to exist we could do that in a lot less
| time than 50k years. We could do it, and a lot more, in
| under 2k years.
|
| Assumption: we can indefinitely keep producing solar
| panels at a rate at least as high as current production.
| I will call the amount of solar panels currently produced
| in one year an "arseload" of solar panels.
|
| If we produced 1600 arseloads of solar panels (which
| would take 1600 years at the current rate of production)
| and used those to build solar farms in the 5 largest
| tropical deserts, and used the power from those to power
| direct air carbon capture operating at the efficiency of
| current direct air carbon capture (DAC) technology they
| would be removing enough carbon at a rate that would
| reduce the atmospheric CO2 levels from 450 ppm to 280 ppm
| (pre-industrial levels) in 6 years.
|
| If the captured carbon was stored as graphite and spread
| out evenly under that 1600 arseloads of solar panels
| (which seems like a convenient place for it) it would be
| a layer roughly 1 cm deep.
|
| Note that at around 180 arseloads of solar panels
| powering DAC we'd be removing CO2 fast enough to be
| removing about 10% more each year than we currently omit
| so even if we can't manage to reduce fossil fuels if we
| can at least finally stop their growth we can start
| having CO2 reduction in a couple hundred years.
|
| I've not done the math to figure out when a program of
| adding an arseload of solar panel powered DAC to tropical
| deserts every year would actually get us back to pre-
| industrial levels. It's somewhere between 200 and 2000
| years, but I'll leave it to others to figure out where in
| that range it would actually happen.
| deergomoo wrote:
| Reminds me of that old George Carlin bit. "The planet is
| fine. The _people_ are fucked "
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| This is bullshit. We, humanity, made a HUGE dent just in
| the last few decades, albeit in the wrong direction warming
| up our planet to dangerous levels. So we can't revert it
| back? Everybody knows that already, and that's not what
| it's all about. It's not about going back to previous
| levels, it's about damage control and keeping things at
| some survivable level, instead of burning it all to ashes
| within the next few decades.
|
| So please don't make braindead, dangerous and lazy
| arguments that we can't make a difference. We are making a
| difference. We have to stop making a difference if we want
| to survive.
| antod wrote:
| "saving the planet" as a phrase is something I usually seem
| to hear more as a strawman against doing anything at all.
|
| The advocates for taking action are usually talking about
| limiting damage rather than restoring anything.
| skrebbel wrote:
| > I personally don't even own or need a car
|
| This is likely due to similar "annoying" regulation in the
| past, eg making space for bike lanes, investing in public
| transit and giving it more space than cars, and so on. These
| all have been protested using the same kind of vibes as how
| you're now protesting EVs and attached bottle caps. "We can't
| even park by the C&A anymore! Ridiculous! Will this madness
| ever end?"
|
| What I'm trying to say is, when you say "boo climate policy",
| I read "boo progress". Is progress sometimes annoying? Sure!
| Is some of it ill-advised? Yeah also. (Or incorrectly billed
| as progress even). Is it then a better idea to just not solve
| problems and keep everything that's bad now, bad forever? No!
| It isn't! It's a completely show stopper argument. Usually
| with things like these, the annoyances are now, and the
| payoff is in the future. This holds for environmental policy
| just as much as bike lanes.
| briandear wrote:
| What's the exact, quantifiable payoff of tethered bottle
| caps?
|
| And how many degrees will the earth cool down if everyone
| switched to EVs? The truth is that everything related to
| "carbon" has no quantifiable value. It's like tithing at a
| church with the hope that God smiles upon you. How many
| tons reduction of CO2 results in a movement of the
| temperature? Let's be precise because if we are making
| policy on this, the public has a right to know the exact
| benefit. And is the cost of that less expensive than the
| cost of not doing it? What exactly is the cost of not doing
| it? I've been hearing for 20+ years how we are just ten
| years away from disaster. 10 years is just long enough that
| it's a few election cycles -- so the politicians pushing
| this nonsense are rarely accountable for being continually
| wrong. Nothing in Al Gore's movie came true. Ice caps were
| supposed to be done by now. They aren't. So why are we
| still following that religion? It's like a modernized
| version of a doomsday cult: "repent or rising seas will
| destroy the cities with the wrath of a vengeful Climate
| God."
|
| Are we allowed to question any of this? Shouldn't someone
| be following the money to see who is getting rich off of
| this and who is enacting the policies that make those
| people rich?
|
| Without those numbers, how can we determine if something is
| "progress?" We should be focused on real pollution:
| chemicals in the air and water, plastics in the ocean. CO2
| isn't a poison, nor a carcinogen, nor a toxin.
|
| Why doesn't the environmental movement unite behind banning
| high fructose corn syrup? Obesity in the U.S. is killing
| more people than climate change ever will.
| buran77 wrote:
| > similar "annoying" regulation in the past, eg making
| space for bike lanes, investing in public transit and
| giving it more space than cars [...] you're now protesting
| EVs
|
| Feels like you're attacking the weakest interpretation of
| what GP said.
|
| It doesn't look like GP "protested" EVs as much as made an
| objective observation. Charging EVs for apartment dwellers
| is very inconvenient, especially when everyone around has
| the same problem and fights for the same limited resources.
| Early EV adopters were the people who could charge at home,
| most likely single homes with a garage. Just having that is
| a strong hint that their carbon footprint is far heftier
| than that of apartment dwellers. Having an EV doesn't mean
| you care about the environment more than taking the bus or
| bike does. We just settled on the EV, not the bus or bike,
| as the "environmentalist's" badge.
|
| The average Portuguese has half the carbon footprint of an
| average Dutch or Norwegian. Who do you think of first when
| talking abut saving the environment?
|
| On a different topic, you can see how your example of
| improvement is substantially different from GP's, and weak
| as a counter-argument. Improving public transport and
| cycling infrastructure is a give and take. You take some
| convenience from the car driver and give some convenience
| to the public transport passenger or cyclist. But these can
| be the same person so the benefit can be immediately
| apparent and make the loss worth while.
|
| But forcing people to insulate the house and install
| expensive modern heating takes some money out of the
| person's pockets and puts some money into a company's
| pockets. Oh, it's better for the environment, no doubt
| about it. But so is taxing you 30% extra and investing it
| in replanting the Amazon, far away where you don't get to
| _taste_ any direct benefit, but is certainly better than
| what the average person would do with that money. So taking
| a page from your comment, "I should pay extra to save the
| environment? Ridiculous! Will this madness ever end?".
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Ehm no I've always been in favour of public transport.
| That's not annoying. Europe isn't as car centric as the US.
|
| And like I said I'm not against these things. I just
| understand that some people speak up.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > insulate their houses more
|
| regardless of your heating source, this is a good thing. less
| wood/gas burned, less electricity used. I see no downside in
| that. Strange argument to try to make your case.
| switch007 wrote:
| Can cause issues in older properties designed to breath
| plus got to be careful with air flow (even more expense for
| MHVW...)
| 9x39 wrote:
| You might not see a downside if it's not your house to
| renovate. The problem is major home infra like heat pumps
| and retrofit work like extra insulation can be tremendously
| expensive. In the US alone, switching my gas furnace to
| heat pumps would easily cost $25k to match the BTU output,
| and that's without doing any additional insulation.
|
| Sure, being efficient sounds great, but constraints of the
| real world are often unforgiving and need lots of material
| and labor to make change, both of which are increasing in
| price.
| danmaz74 wrote:
| on the other hand, with better insulation you don't need
| the same BTU output
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I am sure we can do better and revisit some misguided
| regulations. But in general environmental regulation is
| probably one of the biggest success stories of the last 60
| years. I grew up when rivers were green or blue some days,
| the rivers were dead with an occasional dead fish floating
| by, going into the water was a serious health risk. The
| switch to EV is painful, but once people experience clean air
| in cities again, there is no way anybody will want to go
| back. I was in Mumbai a few years ago and after two days when
| I blew my days a pile of black stuff came down and I was
| short breathed. People complained about unleaded gas and
| catalytic filters when they introduced. Auto companies told
| us the world would go under. Seems ignoring them was correct
| and things worked out for the better
| briandear wrote:
| The problem is that regulations needn't be all or nothing.
|
| Don't throw stuff in rivers. Ok.
|
| Teathered bottle cap. Dumb.
|
| Then there is the whole scam of recycling:
| https://youtu.be/NLkfpjJoNkA
| andrepd wrote:
| >ICEs are getting banned from city centers so you need to buy
| an EV
|
| Why on earth you _need to buy_ a car on a country with one of
| the best rail infrastructures in the world and _the_ best
| bike infrastructure in the world, is beyond me.
|
| So, correction: they are banning _cars_ from city centres,
| not just ICEs. As very well they should.
| briandear wrote:
| I live in Spain, in a Barcelona suburb.
|
| If I want to go to the nearest major shopping center: 15
| minutes by car, 56 minutes by bus. 31 minutes by bike.
| Today I had to buy a large bag of dog food. Why would I
| want to transport that on a bike when I have a perfectly
| functional car? While I'm at the shopping center, I also
| got groceries for the week. Impossible on a bike. I have
| also been feeling ill for the past few days, so riding a
| bike in the cold isn't anything close to fun.
|
| I live 2.5km from the city center of my town. 11 min by
| car, 12 min biking, 37 min walking, 24 min by bus --
| assuming the bus is ready right when I get to the stop.
| Bikes can be fun, but I have four young kids and a wife,
| and it's about 3 degrees right now.
|
| I also have to frequently go to the Circuit Barcelona-
| Catalunya. 19 minutes by car, 2:41 by public transport
| including almost 40 minutes of walking.
|
| This magical fairy-land where everyone has everything they
| need right outside their door is a an assumption of
| privilege that most people do not have.
| andrepd wrote:
| Missed the part where Barcelona is in Holland, but okay
|
| -----
|
| To be more clear: I've lived in places where my daily
| routes took 10 minutes by car and public transport just
| doesn't exist period. And I've lived in places where
| every road for cars also has a bike lane, and you're
| never more than 5 minutes away from a tram or bus stop.
| I'll tell you which one I prefer: hint, it's not the one
| with the 6 lane stroad and endless parking lots
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I was talking about Holland but I don't live there
| anymore, luckily. Where I live there's not so many
| problems. But in Holland it's given rise to the extreme
| right parties.
|
| I don't do bikes though. Only public transport and
| walking. Bikes aren't for me.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Barcelona has amazing public transport though. As long as
| you live within the service area of Hospitalet through
| Badalona. Outside of that it sucks yeah. Agreed.
|
| And yeah Montmelo is really hard to get to. I can imagine
| though as most people visiting the circuit are car
| enthusiasts.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| Do you live in the Netherlands? Because if you would, you
| find out that yes, there are many trains per day between
| the important cities. Not very efficient if you happen to
| live outside the main lines. The number or tracks are
| limited and accidents are frequent in the winter. So trains
| get delayed or cancelled. Not fun when you really can't
| miss getting to the destination on time - say from Den Haag
| to Schiphol.
|
| Its all fun and games when things work out, but they don't
| all the time. And not to mention its really really hard to
| return from shopping at Ikea by train.
|
| Biking, sure, fun, but not so autumn/winter/spring,
| especially in the areas close to the North Sea. The
| humidity and the wind makes the cold not very tolerable.
|
| I could go one for a while.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I luckily don't live in Holland anymore. And the public
| transport there is pretty bad. Overfilled, under
| maintained. The legacy of 30 years of neoliberal policy.
| deergomoo wrote:
| > I really care about the environment but it is getting a bit
| exhausting
|
| I recognise it's a silly, tiny, small-minded thing to get
| hung up on, but it irritates me to no end that if I stop at
| McDonalds to grab a milkshake I've gotta drink it through a
| shitty cardboard straw that disintegrates half way through,
| while celebrities are flying around in private jets
| unimpeded.
| mcphage wrote:
| If you wanted to discredit the environmental movement, I
| couldn't think of a better way than forcing everyone to
| switch to paper straws. And as far as I'm aware, most
| places it wasn't forced, it was voluntary.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| A cardboard straw covered in pfas no less. Definitely not
| an improvement that one.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Saying you don't want more insulation and heat pumps is
| weird. You like higher utility bills? I get that the up front
| investment for it is unpleasant, but the remedy to that is
| government subsidies to encourage homeowners to upgrade.
| ExoticPearTree wrote:
| You're assuming the person who complained has high gas
| bills.
|
| Gas produces much more useful energy than a heat pump can.
| And the installation is much more simpler and space
| efficient.
|
| If heat-pumps would be at least as good most likely they
| would be more successful on their own and there would be no
| need to be forced onto people by the government because
| "think of the environment".
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah that's the thing. I pay about 20EUR in gas per
| month. No way I will ever ever make back that investment.
|
| But if I still lived in Holland I'd pay more, true. Not
| so much more though because I've never had the heading on
| very high.
| justin66 wrote:
| > He often was accused of being a wimp because real men embrace
| risking their lives.
|
| By whom? I bet that's not true (although to be fair, sports
| commentators can routinely be pretty spectacularly stupid). As
| a three-time world champion who won his first one in 1969, I
| don't think there were any people who could call Jackie Stewart
| a "wimp" without appearing ridiculous.
|
| I think there were one or two incidents nearer the end of his
| career when he refused to race for safety reasons and some
| others (Jacky Ickx?) went out. Those guys are friends and I
| think everyone concerned understood the importance of safety,
| so it's... complicated.
| gosub100 wrote:
| What about the false alarms that are done in the name of
| environmentalism? Why is there no accountability for, say,
| plastic straw hysteria, or recycling programs that emit more
| CO2 than just throwing it away? You can't criticize anything
| done in the name of the environment even if it's blatantly
| wrong. Why is that?
|
| Why isn't bringing manufacturing jobs back home part of the
| "green" strategy?
| MoreMoore wrote:
| > Why isn't bringing manufacturing jobs back home part of the
| "green" strategy?
|
| It often is. Then you have the coal/gas lobbies fighting
| against it, as well as any and every politician whose
| constituency includes jobs in these industries. Germany used
| to subsidise solar, then it stopped, which wiped out the
| solar industry in Germany overnight. It's no different in the
| US. This isn't a problem with environmentalism, it's a
| problem with nascent industries fighting change with tooth
| and nail. And paying the media to convince people like you
| that it's the environmentalists' fault.
|
| Do you even remember what the infrastructure bill recently in
| the US even did to invest in green energy and
| manufacturing/jobs for green energy?
|
| Stop falling for it. Stop falling for the lies and
| propaganda. There are people trying to make real change for
| the better, and they're not the ones fighting against green
| energy. Why aren't you able to recognize it?
| kasey_junk wrote:
| You just did. You weren't censored or pariahed.
|
| In the US the incoming president denies climate change and is
| preparing to gut environmental regulation. The new Congress
| is likely to reverse tax breaks for green initiatives while
| simultaneously cutting taxes for the most wealthy and
| dramatically raising the deficit. The judiciary has already
| knee capped the regulatory agencies and is now set to do the
| same for any corporate policy that acknowledges environmental
| issues as a shareholder issue.
|
| The idea that the green agenda is ascendant and dominating
| strains credibility to the point that I can only assume you
| are trolling.
| tzs wrote:
| > I feel environmental regulation is going the same path. There
| is a lot of resistance against improving things just because.
| Only when something really bad happens, people wake up. But
| even often nothings happens.
|
| Also after something gets improved there is eventually pressure
| to roll it back. Similar thing with financial regulation:
| something bad happens, then there is bipartisan legislation to
| try to keep it from happening again, and then maybe a decade
| later that legislation is repealed or weakened...and the cycle
| starts all over.
|
| I'm kind of fed up with it. My current job is slowly winding
| down and I'll probably retire when it ends, but if I decide not
| to retire I'm going to be way more open to jobs that in the
| past I would have ruled out over ethical concerns.
|
| For once I'd like to see what it's like on the side providing
| the screwing instead of the side getting screwed.
|
| So as long as I don't have to do anything that is actually
| illegal, I'm paid well enough that whatever havoc the work
| causes in the economy won't interfere with my lifestyle, and
| I'm far enough from the front lines that the I won't have to do
| things like testify in front of Congress and won't have to
| worry about angry mobs showing up at my house then no problem.
| andrepd wrote:
| What an outstanding way to look at things. Don't you care
| what kind of world you leave your children? This is an honest
| literal question, not even a provocation.
| adamtaylor_13 wrote:
| I had never heard of this, so I did a deep dive and was very
| surprised to find footage of the actual wreck.
|
| Viewer discretion is strongly advised:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YIKU7oul9RQ&t=4m9s
| bowsamic wrote:
| Quite surprised to see that the British Pathe clip on YouTube has
| a direct shot of the dead driver and multiple shots of the many
| dead in the crowd
| bagels wrote:
| Switzerland banned motor racing for sixty years in response to
| this event.
| z3ugma wrote:
| Well There's Your Problem, the podcast about engineering
| disasters with slides, covered this disaster in
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbfSlTIfMig
|
| Episode 45: 1955 Le Mans Disaster
| Syzygies wrote:
| For anyone who ran out of patience scrolling, and prefers their
| information top-down:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_Le_Mans_disaster
| martinsnow wrote:
| There was a fantastic animated short film on YouTube about this
| event a few years ago
| eschulz wrote:
| This 10 minute film on the accident is very well done and
| includes animation to demonstrate the specifics of the wreck in
| detail.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSV8nP0gZkk
| jerome-jh wrote:
| I remember my father born in 44 occasionally talking of this
| accident in the 80's or 90's, well when I was young, including
| the depiction of a child who was cut in half as he was sitting on
| his father's shoulders.
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