I’m too lazy to look this up, but I believe death rates were higher out of cities vs in cities. Half the reason hospitals were packed in cities is because rural people went where the ventilators were. Everywhere had all the covid waves, they just hit cities first.

Elderly tend to be more R, and D folks were more likely to mask and vaccinate. But elderly vaccinated pretty well across the board and the divide was bigger in the young. Lots of factors, but my money is on D making out slightly better as a broad cohort. Tragic all around though.

Ok I did some searching and excess mortality points to higher rural impact, but official cause of death data is mixed (too lazy to link though).

https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/penn-sas-comparing-urban-and-rural-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic

Unless the plan is something more like Terminator. If you “unshackle” AI and give them a mandate to get CO2 back to 250 ppm things are going to get real.

It will still be a dramatic improvement because these packs will be able to hold the max charge that the charger can support for much longer. E.g., a car that can hold 350kW from 0-90 is much better than one that peaks at 350kW for 2 seconds before dropping to 150 or 100kW for 40-90%.

I’m the opposite, I think a proper show with professional fireworks is super fun but clowns setting off tiny loud POS fireworks randomly over the course of several hours are just annoying. They don’t have the boom boom, they don’t make much light, and people just set them off in residential areas near kids/dogs.

What kind of ice are you riding on? Snow, even packed snow it usually ok, but turning/braking on ice is a disaster without studded tires. Source - I’ve crashed on ice several times despite being a very competent rider in all conditions for 3 decades.

Maybe the garbage brands. Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, etc are very well made, and significantly more powerful than they were 5-10 years ago.

I appreciate your lived experience, but at the same time the rest of us will seek answers in basic physics concepts, none of which help explain such phenomenon. Is it possible you just got stronger or subconsciously tried harder because you wanted the heavy bike to be faster? Did you add weight but also make sure your bike was well tuned? Tire pressure and a greased chain go a long way. I certainly agree that the weight weenies can go way overboard though.

Wat? The law of conservation of energy tends to disagree. Commuters are generally starting and ending at the same elevation so there’s no trick. We’re not going to convince anyone to carry heavy loads on bikes by saying “pedal more downhill to smooth out the power requirements if you hate grinding it out on uphills”, the answer is just ebikes.

Are we just going to ignore the millions of acres of vast grasslands that supported like 50 million buffalo in the US 200 year ago? Healthy grassland ecosystems and ruminants are a thing.

The real issue is one of attribution. “Traced to” isn’t the same as “responsible for”. I have a hard time blaming Saudi Aramco for massive volume of oil consumption in the US. Yes the oil companies are eco terrorists too but the binary take is absurd.

I recently picked up a Lenovo 7i 2-in-1 (I got the Intel Evo version due to a nice sale, but wanted AMD) and am currently dual booting with it. No issues with Ubuntu at all that I’ve encountered.