Fried_out_Kombi

And things like vertical bifacial solar panels can work especially amazingly on grazing land that isn't suitable for crops.

Counter-intuitive as they may look, they actually have a number of benefits:

1. The panels face east and west, meaning they generate peak power in the morning and evening, which corresponds to peak demand => less need for energy storage to bridge the gap between the mid-day peak in production from traditional PV and the aforementioned morning and evening demand peaks.
2. The panels are vertical, which makes them easier and cheaper to maintain, as dust, snow, and rain naturally shed from their surfaces.
3. The panels get less direct energy during mid-day, keeping their surfaces cooler. Turns out cooler solar panels are more efficient at converting light energy into electrical energy.
4. The arrangement lends itself very naturally to agrivoltaics, which means you can derive more yields from a given piece of land and use less land overall than if you had segregated uses.
5. The compatibility with agrivoltaics allows farmers to diversify their incomes streams and/or become energy self-sufficient.

Plus, why do people act like the "incumbent advantage" is some magical advantage? It's a cargo cult mentality, especially in this day and age where all the old "rules" about elections have gone out the window.

I mean, I remember the day where being twice-impeached and a convicted felon would be unrecoverable political death, yet here we are staring down the barrel of a possible second Trump term.

Biden is a historically unpopular president, who is behind in basically all polling in basically every key swing state, and who just had the mother of all "the emperor has no clothes" moments on national television, losing the confidence of his own base. Even Democratic congresspeople are calling on him to step down now.

There is simply no path forwards for Biden to win in November. He's cooked.

As for replacements, personally, I think Gretchen Whitmer is the best choice. Relatively young, good compromise candidate between the progressive and moderate wings of the party, current beloved governor of Michigan (key swing state!), competent technocrat, no significant political baggage, and made a name for herself protecting abortion rights in Michigan after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade.

Is the GOP actually the ones wanting us to replace Biden at the moment? If anything, there's a very good reason to believe the GOP would want Biden to remain: he's a quite unpopular president for whom the overwhelming majority of Americans have concerns about his age and mental fitness. Further, he has a ton of political baggage, and is highly contentious amongst Democrats.

Personally, I genuinely think Gretchen Whitmer (with Pete Buttigieg as running mate) would be much more likely to win in November, at least according to post-debate polling from this leaked internal memo: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

Leaked internal memo with post-debate polling data showing a strong preference for Biden alternatives (especially Whitmer and Buttigieg) in key swing states: https://puck.news/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/SUNDAY_Post-Debate_Landscape_2024_06_30__1_-1.pdf

Exactly. I'm just trying to reframe dumb NIMBY policies like restrictive zoning and mandatory parking minimums as anti-freedom so as to try to get conservative NIMBYs to maybe be just a little less NIMBY.

Absolutely no one is seriously arguing we allow PFAS chemical plants next to kindergartens or that we remove all building safety codes. Just that restrictive zoning (and other NIMBY land use policies) is stupid, harmful, and we should get rid of it.

Exactly. I've seen it with faaaaaar too many tankies and even populist leftists. Instead of advocating for empirically-driven policy that would measurably improve the world, there's a ton of rhetoric about how we just need to punish capitalists/fascists/landlords/neolibs/billionaires/etc. harder to fix the world's problems.

At this point, I think it's just a deep-rooted flaw of the human psyche that we're just inclined towards trying to force our solutions through by punishing those who oppose us, rather than trying to deeply understand the dynamics at play and changing the underlying structure to incentivize the outcomes we want.

And if we fail to address the tendency towards knee-jerk, brute-force, authoritarian "solutions" to problems within our own ranks, we'll meet the same fate as every other revolution-turned-brutal-dictatorship.

If they help to get people out of cars (including electric cars), I see them as a win. Orders of magnitude less impactful than cars.

Parking minimums are legal requirements on the minimum number of parking spaces businesses and housing are allowed to have. The thing is these laws were developed using shoddy pseudoscience, are extremely arbitrary, and developed with maximum (rather than typical) usage in mind, meaning many developments have oversized parking lots, wasting valuable land. Further, old buildings that predate the parking minimums (and thus don't have legally sufficient parking) can't renovate or change usage without being legally required to build new parking, often by buying up a neighboring building and demolishing it to build a parking lot. This exact thing is why so many dense American and Canadian downtowns got bulldozed and turned into parking lots, like in the images below:

Atlanta

Tulsa

Kansas City

For more in-depth information on the insanity and idiocy that are parking minimums, see this video: https://youtu.be/OUNXFHpUhu8?si=KQbU00UPKw5GeNhQ

Just today I saw this list of the largest tram networks in history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_tram_and_light_rail_transit_systems_ever

The largest existing one is Melbourne, at a little over 250 km of tramways. Los Angeles at its peak had over 1700 km of tramways.

Truly insane what we tore up. A crime against humanity.

This is so true for the housing crisis. Conservative NIMBYs will be like "deregulation good!" and "free market good!", but then they religiously show up to any and all city hall meetings to rant and rave about how we need to use heavy-handed regulations to protect "historic" parking lots and the "neighborhood character".

This is how I wanna reclaim that land:

Either that or a buttload of housing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Monopoly