He forgets the part where because of emissions requirements the C15 can't be driven in that scourge the people the author defends call "low emissions zones".
Stick a petrol version of the engine in (Peugeot XU instead of XUD) and convert it to run on propane. There you go, now the exhaust is just water and carbon dioxide, and you don't die from breathing it in. No CO, no HC, and not really any more NOx that was in the air it sucked in.
This is why forklifts run on gas, instead of petrol or diesel.
We could have had incredibly clean air in our cities 25 years ago, if the government hadn't decided that pushing "scrappage schemes" to get people to buy "cleaner greener diesels" was cheaper.
If you want to live in polluted areas there are plenty of places available on Earth for that, I believe most people would rather not. Low emissions zones are mostly in very densely populated areas where the impact of pollution is higher, not sure why you consider that a scourge.
People who don't live in France may not know why low emission zones are so stupid: it's not about how much pollution your car emits, but how old it is.
So you're not allowed to bring a 20 years old car even if it's small, light and as a result doesn't pollute that much (because of its low fuel consumption). However you're allowed to bring in your brand new SUV even if its emissions are much higher. In fact it doesn't matter how much your SUV pollutes, it's recent so it's "fine".
Do you know you usually drive 20+ cars? Poor people. Do you know who loves restrictions on old cars? Car manufacturers.
Perhaps I'm a plumber going to work on a house in a LEZ? Perhaps I need to deliver something? Perhaps deliver to the airport (!) inside the LEZ.
There are all kinds of reasons why someone might need to take a van into an LEZ, if you think for more than about quarter a second.
This is primarily a reason why you shouldn't drive a vehicle from the 1970s, as the article suggests, and why LEZs need practicality not to drive service inflation inside the area.
Every emission zone regulation I'm familiar with distinguishes between private and commercial vehicles for exactly this reason. The French zones for example divide vehicles into categories. Private vehicles are set a base category/range, and commercial restrictions are usually the next category looser.
CO2 is a bit of an outlier in the groups of pollutants emitted by a car. Modern cars will emit way less of the other pollutants that are directly unhealthy for humans to breathe (NOx, CO, particulate matter, etc.).
I know the thread is mostly for fun, but only considering CO2 is a bit misleading when accessing how environmentally (un)friendly a car is.
Which will get you into London's Low Emission Zone (LEZ). Not the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), though.
Besides, I think the point is really that we should be making and buying vehicles more like this (in the positive aspects) rather than that we should all drive 40 year old Citroens.
If the EU cared about this so much they wouldn't have allowed all car makers to buy one another until all cars cost €25k for the base model. Maybe, maybe that's the issue that prevents people from updating their cars which emit a lot of stuff they don't like.
You seem to have an axe to grind about something completely unrelated to the article here. Since you brought it up, though, if you're going to be one of the thousands of people driving up the road outside my house every day then, as a member of a family with multiple generations of life-threatening asthma, the fact that you're required to do it in a car with strictly regulated emissions is an unalloyed positive as far as I'm concerned.
This thing will be so old that the owner just needs to apply for a "historical" car license and then those eco-zones are irrelevant.
But yeah, the author's wrong on so many things. Starting with putting his stuff on mastodon in the first place. Or not withstanding that the same people he cheers on, are outlawing diesel engines.
Tbh though, a lot of the latter was fueled from US-industrial anti-diesel propaganda.
In the former Yugoslavia maybe. But in the former USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, that isn’t even remotely true. The US was critical in supporting anti-USSR resistance, either directly with money or symbolically (“Tear down this wall”)
The image of the good guy USA had (at least in eastern Europe) has less to do with how they treated other countries and more with how they treated their own citizens.
Yes, which is why we have two houses in the legislature and there are limits on the number of seats in the house and electoral college votes. No polity should be able to procreate their way to political dominance over a peer polity nor should they be able to incentivize law breaking for the same purpose.
And more on point to the subject, imports should be tariffed so that there are not wage benefits to importing products from overseas. It's major bullshit for a country to say "you must have all these employment standards, safety, wage, retirement, health, holidays, etc." for any business in their area and then go and buy competing goods from outside their area with completely different labor standards.
Because the french agreed to those terms when they entered the European Union, that they would negotiate their trade deals together, and a qualified majority is sufficient to make these deals.
They're also free to leave at any time.
"Destroying the agricultural sector" is stupid hyperbole, especially given the small quotas in sensitive parts of the agricultural sector.
Creating good smartphone software is not easy. Only Apple has achieved it. Google is close. The rest are so far behind in the race they think they are leading.
Because there was arguably no need for a third option. The current duopoly only exists because it was seen as risk-free, and propping up an alternative was seen as uneconomical.
> Creating good smartphone software is not easy.
Yes, but it's not rocket science either (and even if it were, the EU has both rocket scientists and a space port).
Maybe it's been too long for people to even imagine it, but European companies were fully capable of developing a smartphone OS and running an app certification platform (there were no app stores yet, as the industry was very fragmented) less than two decades ago.
I would argue MS did with windows phone, and Palm and Nokia did too. BlackBerry as well, but less flexibly.
They weren’t commercially successful because of network effects, which I think matter less when your back is against the wall to migrate away from the duopoly.
Android is open source (decreasingly, but still). A reasonable starting point would be forking it and adding replacements for the proprietary Google Play services, app store etc.
Gobally Android also has a much larger market share than Apple. (Yes the US is the opposite, it is an outlier.)
It can be done, but a few things are needed: money. A lot of money. And competent project managers / architects / visionaries.
The money problem is the sticking point; even if you can find investors, if you don't have guarantees of sales you're boned. Actually, this is the other problem: Android is not profitable per se, you don't get an "android license fee" on your bill if you buy a new phone. It's the tie-in with Google's services (default search engine with ads, app store, etc) that make it work. And even without those, Google is a company that originally made money off of ads on webpages, they could do whatever they want outside of that because their primary source of income was so reliable.
Android is a solid basis for a homegrown solution. We just never had the need to build one just yet. What Google and Apple built was convenient. But it's not as irreplaceable as some might think.
That is not a problem of Android but of the hardware and funnily enough much of that is not produced in the US. I think we could cobble together a working phone in a short time and iterate upon that if it is necessary. Hardware has advanced sufficiently that we don't need the latest greatest to have an okay experience.
This has happened because the party that rules Spain has ties to the dictatorship.
This goes so far that one of the ministers of the government met in Spain with Delcy Rodriguez, bringing her a few briefcases of something that hasn't been explained yet, despite her being subject to a travel ban in the EU.
Of course this is a progressive government so the EU said absolutely nothing about it.
reply