If you're nearby any moderately busy road it's not the engine what makes noise but the tires and then air going around the car. Engine/exhaust noise is a problem but easy to solve
> Engine/exhaust noise is a problem but easy to solve
It's easy from a technical standpoint but practically impossible from a human one. The vast majority of people simply don't notice or care that some large percentage of vehicles are intentionally modified to be louder than the legal maximum. Police won't enforce it, and most citizens barely register the noise as present, much less a problem.
Banning ICE vehicles altogether may very well be the only thing that actually gets the problem solved, since that actually has more momentum behind it than enforcement of existing noise regulations does.
I'm not sure "large percentage" is a statement I'd agree with, my searching skills are failing me, do you have any kind of source for that? I'd be shocked if it was over 5%...
I live near a medium-busy street. I haven't seen actual numbers but it wouldn't surprise me if at peak hours there are over 100 cars passing per minute.
If 5% of those are overly loud, that's an average of a very loud noise every 3 seconds, and most of them will take somewhere between 5 and 10 seconds to come and finally go away. If you don't think that's large, we have very different noise thresholds.
I guess "large" is subjective. 1-5% is the ballpark I have in my head based on experience, which qualifies as "large" to me when I get passed by thousands of cars a day.
The hard numbers I'm aware of are about motorcycles, which have much higher rates of illegal modifications than other vehicles. This source documents a bunch of other sources, with estimates ranging from 40-70%:
People that purposefully install loader than necessary pipes on their vehicles ought to be forced to stay awake by having a marching band play nonstop in their bedroom until the loud exhaust pipe is removed
Yep, there are plenty of ICE vehicles that are quite. A large number of cars/small trucks that are loud are designed that way because the roaring engine noise sells the car.
Yes and no at the same time. Tire noise is significant which is also a function of vehicle weight, speed, and tire design. You tend not to notice the tire noise as most of our interaction with cars is in places like parking lots where engine noise is much more pronounced.
Depends what we are talking about. In Europe, uber EV moped drivers are sooooo much nicer than the regular ones. Most of our interaction with cars are on side walks, along moving cars.
Umm each plane cost way less than 1.7 Billion. A F35A can be purchased for around $80 million. The 1.7 trillion figure is the cost of research
& development, purchasing about 1700 aircraft, and sustaining them for 57 years. So that includes fuel, spare parts, upgrades, pilots, etc, for almost 60 years.
To further elaborate on this, it’s something like a few tenths of total GDP over that period.
Now, depending on how you look at it, you can consider that either a huge number or eminently affordable - I think both are true - but I think it’s a reasonable price for the roles the aircraft is designed to fill over that period.
The cost of each product must include a host of costs that fall outside of the simple manufacturing cost of each. These costs are myriad: R&D, engineering, tooling, maintenance program development, documentation, testing, re-designing, etc, etc. Thus the only fair assessment of the cost of each aircraft must be calculated as COST_OF_PROGRAM / NUMBER_OF_AIRCRAFT.
This phenomenon has been discussed ad nauseum when pricing the development cost of a new pharmaceutical drug. ALL of a pharma's annual corporate research and development costs must be divided only by the number of new drugs that year. Only THAT accurately accounts for the actual cost of developing each drug, given the number of drug candidates that fail during gestation.
Military hardware is no different. Many bids on new contracts fall through. That expense is part of the cost of doing business w/ the military. In fact, if all of Lockheed's many expenditures (productive and unproductive) were divided by the number of its shipped products (w/ cost proportionate to sale price), the actual cost of each shipped product would be substantially higher than is reported. This is an age-old game played by every government contractor to hide the true extent of how much each of their products finally cost the taxpayers. (Not to mention the practice of hiding the high fraction of cost-plus contract overruns in that business.)
For a military, non WW2 plane, 1000 aircraft is a lot. The US government plans on buying around ~1700 F35 and US allies have orders for another ~1000 F35. Overtime I would expect the number of orders for f35 to keep going up.
China has built a couple HTR SMR[1] and is also currently building a PWR SMR[2]. And in the United States, Nuscale is looking to have the UAMPS project starting to supply energy in 2029[3].
Public health officials should tread carefully otherwise they risk alienating large segments of the population. Which would inturn be bad for public health.
Already happened. The resistance to a lot of the public policies in NA (both US/Canada) during the pandemic is directly due to instances of overreach such as this.
In Australia the government has largely lost control of the population. They tried to lock down hard and faced resistance but every time they try to crack down harder or enforce the rules more, they get bigger protests.
Now they have just given up entirely and even the most minor restrictions and requests are largely ignored.
Do you live in the same Australia that I'm living in? Because that's not what I've observed at all, at least in Victoria.
For better or worse, the vase majority of Australians have complied with whatever restrictions and mandates that governments have put in place. VIC and NSW, which have borne the brunt of cases and broadly mandated vaccination, have ~95% of people aged 16+ vaccinated. People have generally complied with lockdown restrictions and requirements to wear masks.
Despite the media attention they garner, the protests involve a small minority of people. Victoria didn't see any significant opposition to lockdowns until the later half of this year. Most people seem happy enough getting paid $700 a week to sit at home and play Xbox.
That said, I have noticed that increasingly people are not bothering with the more tedious requirements such as wearing masks and checking in. I wouldn't say anywhere close to "largely ignored" though. I get the impression (from people I know) that it's mostly due to fatigue and risk habituation, rather than alienation.
Australia _has_ had pretty good compliance but I don't think they have control anymore. I don't think any state has the power to pull another lockdown, it just wouldn't go down with the public. When I was in Melbourne last week, mask rules were frequently ignored, QR codes entirely ignored and the majority of non essential businesses did not check my vaccine proof. I also had business owners tell me how they hate the government forcing them to check the vaccine proofs.
Vic tried to pull tighter restrictions which resulted in mass protests and the PM saying something along the lines of "The people have had enough of restrictions", after that restrictions have been going away.
I love my 2017 Ford Focus RS! It has a touch screen but besides for that there's no lane assist, automatic breaking, or any other driver assists. I also love that it is a manual, however some people may not like that. Also they only made it from 2016 - 2018 and used ones are expensive. But check it out if you want a modern, fast, manual car with minimal digital none sense.
That is exactly what people are asking for and it is super selfish. Asking everybody to hunker down to assuage people who continue to be afraid.
Sorry. Life is short. I’ve sacrificed 1.6 years of it for something I’ve never been afraid of. I’ve played by all the rules, but enough is enough. It is super selfish to insist we continue to live this way. We aren’t living, we are being kept alive… life was meant to be lived.
I don't care about myself but the social isolation of kids was pretty bad. I hope we can get back to where they can fully interact with each other again.
Machismo? Dude. 1.6 years is a non trivial amount of my life. I’ve already put my career on hold because of this, sacrificed my daughters well being, and a bunch of stuff. I got the shot. I’m fully vaccinated. How much more do you expect from me in order to protect people who don’t want to get vaccinated?
The only person who truly looks after my well-being is me. I can be selfish. I deserve to have my actual normal life back. My 2019 life didnt revolve around worrying about stopping the spread of exactly one very specific disease.
If y’all want to hide under the bed at home until some undefined end date… go for it. But forcing society to do the same with you is incredibly selfish.
Totally agree with you, after both of my shots are done. I have been vaccinated, my parents have been vaccinated. A major percentage of the country is vaccinated. Even if after vaccination, I can get covid, then I am willing to take the risk of dying. What else am I supposed to do? How many years will we be in this state. Let's just accept that this is harsh truth about humanity and move on.
Excess mortality rates aren’t relevant at all to the lethality of the delta variant in children relative to prior strains. Overall mortality isn’t even asking the right question, and it’s a very poor proxy even for the lethality rate of SARS-COV-2 (contingent on pervasive testing). And that we’ve eliminated influenza deaths is no argument that influenza is no longer lethal.
Unless Australians are an order of magnitude more vulnerable to COVID than elsewhere in the world, those numbers are more the result of low test rates missing infections than anything else.
In the US, the CDC estimates an actual mortality rate of 0.6%, compared to the ratio of cases/deaths of ~1.6%.
Australia has had an order of magnitude fewer infections than elsewhere in the world. We have come close to eliminating its spread altogether several times, so it should come as no surprise that the proportion of deaths is higher than somewhere else that has failed to contain the illness.
How does that follow? How deadly a virus is for any given individual should be independent of how many other people got it (outside of situations where the health care system is overwhelmed and can't provide adequate care - but that'd make the numbers worse for the US, not better).
If the virus is under better containment, those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions. Thus death rates when looking at the entire length of the pandemic are likely to be higher.
Delta is the first time Australia has seen widespread infection in healthy people.
> those more likely to be infected, are more likely to be comorbid with other conditions
I'm not totally sure that's the case - it's at least something you can't just aver as self-evident. I'd guess that those most likely to be infected early on are going to be people who travel or those who come most into contact with them (service & tourism workers).
But I also think it's a moot point. In the context of this thread - which is about how to move forward once we've accepted that containment is off the table, and especially about the risk that poses to the healthiest members of society (kids) - it doesn't make sense to cite numbers that you yourself acknowledge overstate the risk of COVID by being biased towards the most unhealthy members of society.
Australians now have to post a sign on their door saying they are in quarantine. People are not allowed to travel within the country. They locked down a state of 1.3 million people with 5 hours notice because of one case they said was from a pizza box.
They are also building giant quarantine facilities, indicating they are gonna do this for the long haul.
Australia is hardly a model country for how to handle an infectious respiratory virus.
What you sound like is a deluded and emotionally post-justifying case of Stockholm syndrome. There is nothing normal or in any way ideal or worth romanticizing about the measures you describe, or their absurd over-reach for increasingly minuscule justifications that have moved goal posts to a degree that moderate rational analysis and weighing of risks reveals as somewhat demented. How sure are you that so many people in your state so whole heartedly support such a normalization of social control on the flimsy clinical pretexts you describe.
Calling actions decisive doesn't spare them from being badly decided or indeed even oppressive. Decisiveness first requires solid reasoning, not just a defense that rests on an action simply being decisive.
