Since when? I sincerely do not understand that point about snow.
I've lived in Canada (not southern Ontario) for most of my life and everyone had (and still mostly has) FWD. 4x4 was only for people actually going off road...
I don't get how this is now a "must".
it's a perceived must. when running "all season" tires year round the AWD inspires more confidence, and most people don't even know winter tires are a thing. Plus 4x4 only helps you start moving, but once you are, every car still only has 2 wheels to turn and 4 to stop, which are quite possibly more crucial in snow....
4x4/AWD makes slides in snow/slush more controllable as you spin around the center of the vehicle and have two extra drive wheels to regain traction with.
Couple years ago I was driving through Arizona during a massive blizzard. Everyone's doing 15, and I'm doing 50 - taking things slow and careful because of the traffic.
I had people in vests standing out in the road waving at me trying to get me to slow down! And I'm going "What in the hell are you doing out in the road!? Don't you know this is a blizzard!"
I would rather drive my rear wheel drive Camaro with its snow tires in a snowstorm than my the pickups I've borrowed over the years with their all season tires. It's quite the thing to remember that you need to drive like an old lady suddenly, even though you're in a big bad 4x4 pickup.
Surely that has nothing to do with the weight distribution and handling characteristics that result in the pickup and sports car having different ability to create traction out of whatever friction coeficient is available. /s
Snow tires don't really stand on their own merit unless you're constantly encountering the conditions the snow tire people use in the commercials to magnify the difference. The biggest reason to get snow tires is simply that then you can run a "pure" summer tire rather than an all season the rest of the year. The second biggest reason is dry road performance.
> AWD inspires more confidence
Stop and work backwards and ask yourself why that is rather than doing the Principal Skinner "no everyone else is wrong" routine. In practice, all seasons on an AWD car result in less slipping around than snow tires on a FWD car. Heck, if the difference where anywhere near close everyone rich enough to have a new car would probably have snow tires because the dealership or tire shop would be able to make that sale. The reason they can't is because in people's experience they're just not necessary.
Stupid internet circle jerks about stopping distance are not the pain point or performance bottleneck for the average user. The degree to which you can enter/exit a side street that has snow plowed in front of it, navigate a steep and poorly plowed driveway, park in an unplowed space, cross the slush between lanes on a main roads or highway, those are what "real users" care about and they're where AWD shines.
>but once you are, every car still only has 2 wheels to turn and 4 to stop, which are quite possibly more crucial in snow..
These trope needs to be taken out back and shot. Regardless of your tire type the amount of traction available in snow conditions is such that "not being stupid enough to come into a situation too hot" is the dominant factor in overall outcome in braking/turning situations. Snow tires are an incremental improvement, not a categorical one. And the difference between a wet road and a snowy one is very much a categorical one.
AWD is the right choice for the statistical average person or "casual user" who's snow experience is dominated by somewhat plowed, somewhat churned snow/slush roads and is already driving incredibly conservatively. If you're driving on a frozen lake all the time like in the tire commercials or live somewhere rural and drive on a ton of fresh snow, by all means get the snow tires. But most people aren't, in that category they're better served by some random crossover and not thinking about it. And if you are one of those people, then spend a little more and get something with studs for all the ice you're inevitably also encountering.
> Stupid internet circle jerks about stopping distance are not the pain point or performance bottleneck for the average user.
Uh, it should be? The ability to confidently stop is far more important than to go. If you can’t get going, you’re not in a wreck. If you can’t stop, well…
You also missed another key reason to get snow tires: many (most?) vehicles do not come with AWD even as an option. Telling someone to trade their Civic in for a CR-V just so they can get AWD isn’t sensible, when they could mount snow tires and get a significant traction boost.
>Uh, it should be? The ability to confidently stop is far more important than to go
First off, this is the principal skinner "everyone else is wrong" take.
Second, it's just not how things work in practice. In practice what happens if you have a FWD car that can't "just go" you wind up driving way harder to make up for it. Stuff like hitting hills at speed and trying to take on-ramps at the limit of traction because you are having to work around the limitation of being unable to actually put power to the ground when you need to. Say nothing of all the sketchy situations that happen at the margin of that (backing down a hill you couldn't go up, getting stuck less than graceful merges, etc).
>You also missed another key reason to get snow tires: many (most?) vehicles do not come with AWD even as an option
I don't think that's anywhere near true for the US market.
There was an anecdote that went something like "a 4x4 will just get you stuck worse then a 2wd" =)
And, like you said, people think that an AWD car will stop faster. No, it'll just start moving faster, more traction doesn't make the brakes better or the road any less slippery.
I owned a single 4WD car and it was super fun in the winter, but... when it's icy, you're most likely moving faster than you would be with a 2wd, which again results in some heart palpitations when you're trying to stay on the road =)
I remembering driving in a near-blizzard in Connecticut one night (got caught out in it; this wasn’t on purpose), and feeling like this explanation was the only one that made sense. I had a Pontiac G6 at the time, which was a fairly boring FWD sedan. Having learned to drive in Nebraska, I was decent at driving in snow, so I tootled along at about 25 MPH. I was being passed by SUVs and trucks, and then felt vindicated from seeing many of them off the road a few miles later.
I would’ve stopped to help, but I was concerned that if I lost momentum, I wouldn’t get going again.
Yeah..h as someone in Upstate New York, one of the snowiest places in the country. Snow tires are really what you want. AWD is really nice. BUT end of the day, if you can only go 30 you can only go 30. What really saves you with AWD is when you are dealing with tracks through the snow, AWD makes that a lot easier without spinning out.
> who exist only in the minds of people seeking to validate a purchasing decision.
Don't forget the people who just want to sneer at other people in ill-considered condescension! Plenty of that from the "the world outside the Bay Area and NYC isn't real and none of those people exist" folks.
Nitpicking, but I don't see your four-letter word example as convincing.
Thinking is the very process from which we form words or sentences, so it is by definition impossible to _not_ think about a word we must avoid.
However, in your all caps instruction, replace "think" by "write" or "say". Then check if people obey they all caps directive. Of course they will. Even if the offensive word came to their mind, they _will_ look for another.
That's what many people miss about LLMs. Sure, humans can lie, make stuff up, make mistakes or deceive. But LLM will do this even if they have no reason to (i.e., they know the right answer and have no reason/motivation to deceive). _That's_ why it's so hard to trust them.
It was meant as more of an illustration than a persuasive argument. LLMs don't have much of a distinction between thinking and writing/saying. For a human, an admonition to not say something would be obeyed as a filter on top of thoughts. (Well, not just a filter, but close enough.) Adjusting outputs via training or reinforcement learning applies more to the LLM's "thought process". LLMs != humans, but "a human thinking" is the closest regular world analogy I can come up with to an LLM processing. "A human speaking" is further away. The thing in between thoughts and speech involves human reasoning, human rules, human morality, etc.
As a result, I'm going to take your "...so it is by definition impossible to _not_ think about a word we must avoid" as agreeing with me. ;-)
Different things are different, of course, so none of this lines up or fails to line up where we might think or expect. Anthropic's exploration into the inner workings of an LLM revealed that if you give them an instruction to avoid something, they'll start out doing it anyway and only later start obeying the instruction. It takes some time to make its way through, I guess?
Consider, too: tokens and math. As much as I like to avoid responsibility, I still pay taxes. The payment network or complexity of the world kind of forces the issue.
Things have already been tokenized and 'ideas' set in motion. Hand wavy to the Nth degree.
Yes. On a plane which is designed to be a good glider. I highly doubt a 767 is designed to be a glider.
It's definitely not impossible (after all, it was done successfully!), but certainly a very difficult (and undocumented) one on such a plane.
I don’t think there’s much connection between a plane’s ability to do a sideslip and how well it glides. A sideslip is just what naturally happens if you apply opposite aileron and rudder inputs. I think the issue is just that it’s a rather acrobatic maneuver to perform in a large passenger jet.
Yes an airliner is not designed for it and could easily get into a deadly spin when doing it. Especially engines out because you have two huge surfaces blocking airflow. A glider can do it pretty naturally because of its extremely low stall speed.
Since a sideslip increses air resistance by essentially flying sideways, if I didn't know that it has been done, I'd say it might even break apart a (long, thin) plane that wasn't designed for it. And it still might, but at much higher speeds than close to landing.
It's not unheard of for airliners to use a sideslip when landing in a crosswind, so I don't think structural strength is likely to be an issue at landing speeds.
They do not say it was hard. There is a difference between being hard and requiring 0.5 second more of thinking, which can and does disrupt the reading flow.
Exactly this. I actually think it’s exactly the opposite of assuming your audience is a stupid: it’s respecting them enough to do the work yourself instead of offloading to them. I’ll die on the hill that 19th century referring to the 1800s is fundamentally unintuitive.
By this logic, having a car in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Taking plane in 2025 is "just completely unreasonable". Use of AC unless life threatening circumstances is "just completely unreasonable". Wasting rainwater and use drinkable water to wash your car (or yourself, actually) is "just completely unreasonable". Eating cashew/almond or other highly water intensive crops grown in a dried out area (California...) is "just completely unreasonable".
Note that apart from the rainwater one, I do none of the above, so I'm not even pleading for myself and my "way of life". I'm just showing how easy it is to boldly state that "it is obvious, we just all have to be reasonable" while, in fact, _not_ being "reasonable" yourself.
Yes! I'm not sure what the your intended upshot here is, but those absolutely would be beneficial changes in behavior and are perfectly in line with prevailing recommendations of ways behaviors need to change to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, and related recommendations more broadly in line with environmental conservation and public health.
Far from a counterpoint, they testify to the reasonableness of the request in this instance, of stepping away from factory farming, because it belongs to a class of similar and well respected recommendations. Getting people to actually change their behavior is an important issue, and the purpose of recognizing it should be to reckon with it in a serious way rather that use it to tee up complaints about hypocrisy that seem to imply the futility of doing anything.
The thing is, I'm not arguing against the fact (yes, the fact) that doing this would beneficial. I'm saying that stating how "simple" and "reasonable" are these actions is missing the point.
Again, not a personal attack, but do you follow all of these actions (I could add more similar ones)? Do you own or use a car? Have you ever taken a flight? Went on a cruise? Ate cashews or almond milk? If so, why are you doing this? Why are you (to use the terms stated by OP), so unreasonable, unwilling to do so simple things for your children?
I'm not saying that any action is futile, but that the cost (monetary or otherwise) to take them is _vastly_ underestimated and basically swept under the rug with arguments of reasonableness and simplicity.
And, just to restate, I am not defending my own lifestyle, it's not an emotional argument to make for me.
I might have missed something, but I don't see anyone suggesting such changes are easy. If anything, I feel like I'm seeing opposite arguments, imploring people to understand that we're working against human nature.
My concern is that both sides are frustratingly obvious and are corrections in search of someone or something to be corrected. I don't think that anything you're saying is strictly wrong, but I think it's baffling to offer in this context where it seems to be a counterpoint in a room full of people who already agree with it (except for maybe that I-want-my-cheeseburgers-at-any-price guy). This is what I mean about Learned Sage comments, and I think the fix is to cover your bases with charitable interpretation.
Not sure what's your point though. I do think people will always do "some" unreasonable things, but doing all reasonable things at once and as much as we can is probably not smart so we should at least discuss it. How large should a burger be? How many times per day should you wash your car? What temperature should you use for your AC? Don't know, but if someone tells me they eat 1kg burger at each meal, they wash their car 3 times a day and they put the AC to 15 in the summer I would tell them they are not reasonable and that they can enjoy life better if they change a bit their habits.
This, I absolutely agree with.
Yes, there are small things you can do which (collectively) _can_ have an impact.
I'm arguing against : "So you know you are killing us in so many ways, and you can't be arsed to eat less meat? Aren't you supposed to care about us?"
You can replace "to eat less meat" by basically a thousand different "reasonable" things. Does that mean that _literally everyone on earth_ is willingly "killing their children and not caring about them"?
I really dislike those arguments patronizing everyone. They achieve nothing -- actually quite the contrary, at _best_ they do nothing for someone who do not feel targeted, at worst they turn people against your cause. There's a difference between stating that each of us can and should take action because those are needed and saying that everyone not doing X is a child killer. If someone suggest that I should stop drinking almond milk, I would consider it. If they introduce this by telling how ashamed I should be and how my children will hate me for this -- but not for long since they will soon be dead anyway because of me -- well, maybe I'll just ignore an otherwise perfectly reasonable and fact-based suggestion.
Definitely it should not be patronizing. Presentation was so bad for various important topics (burning fossil fuels, nutrition habits, sex stuff, etc.).
Still, personally I try to let myself challenged even if the argument is patronizing. I don't want to say "I will not do X because you made a patronizing argument!". But for the cases I conclude it is actually a good idea, I will try to explain to the people making the argument "you would have convinced me easier if communicated like this".
I call this bad faith. You're right, living the way we live is unsustainable. That's why almost all species are dying, and that's not yet a consequence of global warming. Now, some things are harder to change than others, and have more or less impact.
Stopping to eat meat/fish is probably the one thing that is reasonably easy, cheap (vegetarian food is globally cheaper), and would have a huge impact.
Well, humans and other omnivores species do need the rapport of animal diet.
And raising cattle dates from the dawn of civilization. It was sustainable tens of thousands of years and suddenly became unsustainable in the last ten years?
In Canada, I see the "new" name along with Gulf of Mexico. Seems like a weird take. Every sovereign island should start naming it a different way, I'd like to see if Google would display 27 names for the same Gulf...
Edit: I'm wrong here. They are doing it based on IP address, not domain for some reason. https://www.google.de/maps will show the parenthetical only when accessing it via a non-US IP and will show just "Gulf of America" when on a US IP even on that domain.
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I don't know why they decided to to do that in Canada. In the UK (for example), it only says "Gulf of America", same with Germany.
That's not the same thing. A more adequate comparison would be to say that you promised 30 people they can have a burger, but can only produce 5 burgers per minute. If everyone show up at exactly the same time, you won't be able to satisfy them all (they'll have to wait). But overall you can consider that the probability of such thing happening is small enough to take the "gamble".
You know, that's the funny thing, it doesn't have to be like a Judge Dredd world.
I live in what we can describe as a suburb: large streets with parking on both sides, 2000 m² single-family properties, ample space for trees, etc.
But at the same time, school is less than 200 meters away. Drugstore on the street corner. Grocery store (a large one) 300 meters away. Public library less than a kilometer away. _Sidewalks_ on both sides of the street. Cycle paths. Buses on the avenues (avenues are large transit streets, streets are smaller and do not go through, so close to zero traffic).
The same way it is unreasonable to think that less car centric cities would solve all our issues, it's just silly to equate "non car-centric environment" to "dystopian cities where people die on the street whenever there is a bit of cold".
The problem here also is that assume everyone in the area would want to shop at THE grocery store.. and send thier kids to THE school...
I dont shop at the closest store to my home because I prefer the layout and selection of one that is further away, i know people that take their kids to schools across town because they are better than the one closest to me. (in my area schools are not assigned geographically, we have open enrollment at all public schools)
Cars give you that option, with out it you have THE store, and THE school... sorry but count me out of that
To be fair, there are actually two grocery stores at walking distance, but I'm nitpicking here. I know this argument very well: "when you have a car, you can spot rebates week after week and reduce your grocery bill!"
That's true, but most people forget to take into account the cost of the car itself. If you spend 10$ in gas and vehicle depreciation to save 8$ on average on your bill, are you really winning?
When I really need to do a big grocery or to find a specific product which my local store does not have, I rent a car from one of the 5-6 carsharing stations near my place (think ZipCar), it cost me 20$ and I can go where I want. Only, I do not have to pay for a car all the time.
Schools are another topic, of course if you live in a bad neighborhood, it might be problematic, but again with a nice public transportation system, it is not an issue (in my home town, _public_ buses have specific routes for students of a given school, dropping them directly next to the school).
We can always devise a situation where you are "limited" by public/active transport ("I am an ER doctor, what should I do if I get called at 2AM on a winter night to an hospital on the other side of the town to save multiple children lives?"). Sure, in these cases, you should take the car. That doesn't mean that for the overwhelming majority of people, car _would_ not be mandatory (assuming a decent public transportation system and walkable/bikable cities).
