sLaUgHtEr

:^)

Daryl Davis. The main message to take away from his work is to get to know people. I’m commenting on an anonymized forum. I will generally never know if I’m about to speak with an adult, a child, a paid actor, an expert, a liar… I’m not going to use him as an excuse to not say anything. Generally discussions on social media seem pointless when it comes to changing minds, given that there is even less room for empathy than in a real life conversation, but I think they can be informative for people who are not directly involved but are rather just scrolling through to get a feel for others’ opinions. And there’s always a chance you come across someone who has never critically examined their stance and remains open minded enough to do it now.

Plus, I’d love to know! I’d hate to trigger someone by saying something like “another ~10,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest were clear cut today because you can’t stop eating burgers!” So I just need to know what phrases to avoid. It’s a shame to never know :^)

Do you have a preferred term that helps you disassociate from the cruelty your lifestyle inflicts behind closed doors?

As always these things are complicated. I do not claim to represent any group stance, but the way the animal is treated very much matters to me. How can I argue in good faith against something like Cooperative Payún Matrú, a goat herder’s collective, in the Andes? Their animals are truly free roaming. The animals’ lives are not constant suffering. It’s more sustainable than the way many of my vegetables are grown.

I don’t understand this claim. Almost all of the criticism of Obama that I see is about his drone strike policies, and a significant majority of the positive things I read about Obama these days are that he was so well spoken and don’t you just miss it. I know that’s anecdotal, but I’m curious how your experience has specifically differed.

I don’t think it’s stupid to be swayed by the hundreds of millions of dollars being used to control the conversation and steer us in the direction they want. Media sources are increasingly centralized, candidate choices are tightly controlled, “scandals” are only published when it’s time to get people angry and emotional and push them to make a rash decision in an upcoming election; otherwise they’re covered up. The people who are aware of how rigged everything is—and I think that’s a lot of them—are still stuck in the mindset of voting for the lesser evil, because that’s the best you can do in an electoral system where the people don’t decide the candidate. I think pretending that elections are some sort of fair fight prevents us from finding common ground.

Where we differ is the idea that you have to be dumb to be manipulated. I don’t think so. I think some people are; I think some people bury their head in the sand; but being manipulated comes from being social. It’s natural to believe in other people. It would be very hard to form connections with other people if you couldn’t trust them. And we’re in an arms race with advertisers, politicians, newsrooms and PR firms where they keep coming up with new ways to pretend to be a trustworthy voice in our lives while our actual connections with our neighbors become more and more distant.

Well, then they are. The point of both articles is that people are being manipulated. It is hard not to be manipulated.

Would you consider an article about billionaires, Super PACs, and Russian election interference to be implying that U.S. citizens are too ignorant to vote for their own interests?

Depends—do you often hire companies to perform construction or renovation on houses you don’t own?

Why, do I owe you something?

You can phrase that any way you want—a gay man owes you nothing, a black man owes you nothing, a bisexual biracial woman owes you nothing—and I’ll disagree. We are a social species, we live in societies, and we owe one another a lot.

Thats the same way of thinking that said that gay men werent real men.

“A ___ man, any ___ man, owes you absolutely nothing” is the mindset that allowed white men to stand idly by during the black civil rights movement, black men to let their sisters struggle on their own, straight men to let queer men suffer, on and on we go. It’s what lets Chris Rock and OJ Simpson punch down at other black men. It’s what lets McKinsey consultants and stock brokers and millionaires and billionaires keep doing work that harms their communities and others. So I’d ask you about the company you keep. But I don’t think the platitudes are helping us here. Let’s think smaller. Small like “is my maxim of choice helping here or am I hurting people by thinking and acting this way in this specific scenario?”

Oh agreed. I think we’re talking past each other to a certain extent. I certainly don’t think that we can expect billionaires to ever be the ones to help. Andrew Carnegie’s act of giving most of his stolen money back under very specific directions on how to use it, after repressing wages and worker actions and literally having people killed his whole adult life, is considered a high bar for them. They have an addiction of some sort. I think it’s obvious if you read Carnegie’s journal—he talks early in his career about how his success has been beyond expectations and he’ll only need to work a few more years and then he can just travel the world on that nest egg and be a business consultant. Lol.

But still some disagreements. Religions have been around for a long time, but they’ve come in quite a few varieties. Christianity in most implementations is very top-down authoritarian in nature. I don’t think that’s something “the people” decided on and then elected to hand over autonomy to meritocratic leaders, and I think this is evidenced by the many other religions that do not work the same way, like Earth Lodge religion, Malagasy spiritualism and spiritual warfare, Mahayana Buddhism, or even subsets of Christianity like Quakers that eschewed hierarchy. Unless there is something in our blood that makes certain “races” of people think differently, then it’s cultural. If it’s cultural, then the loudest voices shape it the most.

No, I think within Christianity and Christian territories people established themselves as rulers by co-opting the desires of humans to have some greater story such as religion that helps explain their lives. Likewise, I think senses of entitlement and beliefs in justice were co-opted. Reinforcing the notions of justice by constantly emphasizing its importance in your culture explains away many of your despotic actions. It provides a shield that slows the tide of revolt. Your political enemies are simply getting what they deserved; the people starving must be unrepentant sinners. In the U.S., the people who are directly responsible for so many people having less than what’s needed for a comfortable life are able to avoid scrutiny precisely by focusing on how those people deserve so much more. They do! It’s true! They know it, and hearing someone admit it feels very liberating! But listening to those voices allows billionaires and their mouthpieces to coax people into believing in their twisted idea of what society should look like—that instead of being entitled to live a good life, people should be entitled to pursue a great one.

I think the proliferation of billionaires points to a cultural problem, but not a grassroots groundswell of belief in billionaires. Too much of culture is asserted surreptitiously through native advertising in the news and PR in our newsfeeds. We haven’t adapted quickly enough—we still think these voices are our peers. We don’t realize how few voices there are, or how many parrots repeating them.

Supporting a business that hurts your peers is value neutral in your mind?

Agree on point #1, but on point #2 I lean toward “yes they can”. Billionaires’ constant PR campaigns that they conduct to avoid having their heads chopped off are what normalizes a society where people are okay with looking the other way when confronted with such unimaginable wealth disparities. There are limited resources, and the ones that are being hoarded are what will help. Obviously we the people have to do better, but intrinsic in the discussion of why we suck so much at helping one another is the fact that this culture was crafted and nurtured by the people it benefits.

The parallel between how little MBA-types understand about processes and how incapable their AI pet projects are of performing said processes seems so obvious in hindsight.

My point is exactly what I wrote! I know it’s a lot, I overcompensated.

Or are you saying they do this for the feeling only and regen is a byproduct

Yes. I said it’s designed this way to feel like a normal car. But it’s a very elegant solution! Far better to do it that way and re-capture some of the energy than let it leave the system, like heat from brake pads.

I’d say applying a little drag to regen on an ebike going downhill will be more beneficial than allowing the riders to go as fast as possible downhill

That “drag” is braking!

They could still turn it off

Like letting go of the brake lever! Far simpler than adding a new always-on brake that you have to manage separately.

but why would I do that?

Because sometimes you want to go full speed down a hill because it’s the most efficient way of moving forward! If you slow down, you have to pedal more later. If you slow down and save some of the energy, you still have to pedal more later, because you can’t save all of the energy from the hill, you can only save part of the energy.

There’s a maximum speed you feel comfortable going on steeper descents, and you manually brake to manage it. That’s the only time regen makes sense on a bike.

Also, because we’re not talking about drag that only exists on the hill. This system exists at all times in a hybrid, and if you implement it on a bike, you’ll be coasting less on flat ground too any time you stop pedaling! Why would we want that? Would you brake in a hybrid when you’re on flat ground to “save it for later”? No! Braking, and engine braking, slow you down.

Well, I knew I’d leave too many loose ends explaining something before bed.

Not quite.

When you coast in a car with an internal combustion engine, you go further when you’re in neutral. Why? Engine braking. When you take your foot fully off the pedal, you restrict airflow to the engine and create a partial vacuum that the cylinders have to work against.

I’m not saying to coast in neutral for higher fuel efficiency. It’s quite the opposite with modern engines that cut off fuel injection when it’s not needed while in gear—and it can lead to increased wear and tear on the engine as well as your brakes fading on long descents. But now you have me covering my ass on every little point, ha. You could look up hypermiling and learn about more efficient driving techniques that way!

Now obviously hybrids have traditional internal combustion engines on board that behave the way we’ve just described. The engineers have also added a level of regenerative braking that is variably applied, even when the engine is not on, so that you scrub speed at a consistent pace. Without this, descending with the engine on or off would feel drastically different, and the car wouldn’t behave as expected at all times. It’s similar to how engineers for fully electric cars have added the “crawl” mode that makes a car idle forward when the brakes are off, even though there is no actual “idle” occurring. It makes the car handle the way you expect it to, and that makes you safer.

It is nice to recapture some energy that is used during the braking process. But only if you need to brake. Otherwise, you’re stealing energy you could be using right now and turning into less energy for later. The process of converting energy into various forms is inefficient, so you will always end up with less than you started, and the more conversions you do the more you lose. Potential gravitational energy to kinetic motion energy is more efficient than potential gravitational>potential chemical>kinetic motion, plus that last step is oversimplified because having the chemical energy turn a driveshaft is actually another kinetic energy conversion compared to gravity turning the wheels directly.

Thus e-bikes could benefit from regenerative braking if the system is efficient enough to overcome the loss of efficiency it introduces via weight and drag, but not from the constant low level capture of energy that would be better used now. Because you don’t get to fuel up an e-bike when the tank’s nearly empty—any toll you pay in inefficiency comes outta your legs and your lungs.

I am not an expert and I am sure I glossed over some nuances.

That’s not really how regenerative hybrids work. Turning linear motion into stored energy produces drag, aka braking, so when you hit the brakes, why not store some of that energy that would otherwise just be lost as heat in the brake pads. They’re not just finding extra energy to store for later while you travel downhill unless you have cruise control on (which is to say, unless the car is braking).

Not really, even in this hypothetically perfect scenario. Either the hill isn’t steep enough to generate any real excess energy from rolling down it (too much drag and you’ll stop rolling) or it’s steep enough that what you collect is offset by how much energy the ride home requires. The more potential energy you save for later, the slower you’re traveling now. And you can never cross the threshold to where it’s helpful. You’re trying to steal energy from a closed loop. It’s the “bowling ball dropped from face level” problem all over again. It can never get enough potential energy from its trip away to come all the way back.

Storing pedaled energy is pointless too.

Let’s say one regular old pedal rotation propels you 10 feet.

Let’s instead store 20% of that energy for later. You now only travel 8 feet.

While we’re converting that energy, we lose a quarter of it due to inefficiencies in the process. So now we’ve traveled 8 feet and stored 1.5 potential feet.

Pedal 1000 times. We go 8000 feet and store 1500 potential feet. Stop pedaling, turn on battery support, we go 1500 feet, we get 9500 total. 500 less than an unmodified bike. That’s excluding additional system inefficiencies like the added weight of the modifications and the mechanical efficiency of the pedal assist. It’s more efficient to just pedal.

It’s a band-aid measure that makes cars behave more like buses, trains, or any other form of transit that takes the mental strain off of the individual. Yet it still uses cars, so we all still get those sweet sweet carbon emissions and ridiculously outsized infrastructure degradation. It’s a step in the right direction but we’re still on the wrong path.