The transition

It seems the vans were full of barrels of gasoline and the vans were sign written up with false copies of a legitimate fuel delivery company.
So either dodgy gas thievery or some attempt to cause a large fire at the base.
If it was simply fuel theft why would you meet up at the fence of a highly policed and cctvd US/RAF base.
In plain sight I guess.

I dont want to keep this going but it just keeps getting weirder, one of the gang rang the police himself and the ten men the local saw were undercover cops chasing them around the woods.

At some point someone is going to say this is the script off a 50s heist comedy.
 
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I learned a new word today. Always good to be learning.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro-masculinity :

Petro-masculinity is an analytical label to describe a variety of masculinity associated with the petroculture and fossil fuel industry, including both the workers in the industry and promoters of the industry in the large social and civic space. Though petro-masculinities have existed as part of different fossil fuel industries, the analysis of them became important in the late 2010s as the connection of masculinity cultures with climate denial.[1]

The widespread use of the term in scholarship and public discourse started with Cara Daggett's in her 2018 paper "Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire" argues that petromasculinity connects male identity with various issues of power such as colonialism and extractivism.[1][2]

Petromasculinity tends to emphasize several different types of cultural performances of masculinity, including:

  • The importance of the "bread winner" role of men in families[3]
  • Images of muscular male bodies.
  • Symbols of economic power of men and nostalgia for fossil fuel technologies, such as cars that consume lots of fossil fuels as opposed to greener alternatives.[4][5] Often these fossil fuel vehicles are depicted as loud and belching large amounts of black smoke.[6]
  • War, military action[4][7] and other violence[8]
  • Environmental protection as being "feminine" behaviors[9][10]
  • Denial of the severity of climate change.[4][3][1] or other kinds of environmental destruction.[9]
Together, these narratives have become aligned with far-right and authoritarian politics in much of Europe and North America,[4][3] and is advanced by influencers in masculinity culture, such as Manosphere influencers Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.[11] Legal researcher, Monica Iyer argued that the use of these kinds of narratives in public discourse has changed the legal possibility space around climate action.[7]

Some scholars have begun evaluating how femininity has been used for similar rhetorical effect in the communications of the fossil fuel industry.[12][10]
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Thats pretty true, the connection with petroleum is new to me.
Did Steam get the same followers, there is nostalgia for it.
Tbh, speed, kws, 0-60 and racy styling has become the marketing for EVs.
 
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2025.
 
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In California the largest bike ownership is around the UC Davis area. It is flat and a college area with great infrastructure. Then it is the SF Bay Area. Then coastal southern California. Rural inland areas have the lowest bicycle ownership and usage with long distances and no infrastructure. What is interesting is it parallels political leanings.

As for Petro-masculinity, Vaseline is petro-jelly. So are guys walk with it into a bar, macho?
 
Roamers said:
Who da thunk, more rural areas with longer distances to travel have lower bike ride rate than overpopulated, congested areas. I guess we can guess who's RIGHT thinking.
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I don't know.

The nearest Wal-Mart and traffic lights from me are about fifty miles. We are far from "overpopulated" but are often "congested" on holiday weekends. But there are a lot of cyclists out here and for the population a lot of cycling infra and more is coming.

And we have a small bus system that is bike friendly and can haul your bikes at no charge. So that round trip to Wal-Mart becomes feasible in a day with a combination of bikes and a bus ride.
 
Mr. Coffee said:
The nearest Wal-Mart and traffic lights from me are about fifty miles.
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Not sure if that is an example that concludes higer/lower % of bike riders.

Another data point. We are in central coastal Maine for a couple of weeks. We went to Walmart (38 miles away) yesterday. On the trip to the town, we saw 4 cyclists riding together. Actual came across the same group on return trip going opposite direction.

Still says nothing about % of riders being high or low. Based on 2024 election result we were in Blue country.
 
That's a hard thing to measure precisely and an even more difficult thing to compare.

Two thoughts, though:

Just eyeballing vehicles at the grocery store and post office, I see about ten percent of them having either a rear rack or a tailgate pad. While not conclusive, you could easily argue that around ten percent of the folks here both have bicycles and ride them often enough to have a rear rack or tailgate pad installed.

I ride most every day. But I also tend to ride either very early or very late in the day and in out-of-the-way places. With all that on a typical day I will see perhaps a dozen other cyclists. If I go someplace busier on a nice day I might see fifty over two hours of cycling. Given the geography here and how many popular places there are to ride, I could easily argue that on a typical weekday there are at least two hundred cyclists out and on a busy weekend many, many more than that.

The local area I refer to has two small towns and a couple of much smaller hamlets. The total full-time population of the area is something under four thousand. So those two eyeball estimates plausibly line up. So I'd put the ballpark guesstimate at about ten percent of the population here rides a bike at least once a week. And a bunch of hard core folks ride their bikes most every day.
 
We have a Tesla in the 'family', my friends son has bought a Y model 2024.

He loved it for two hours until he realised gunning it eveywhere tore through the battery.
Now he wants a charger at his dads house and is hinting at his girlfriends dad to get one.

This has turned into quite a palava.
Hes only got a 60 amp feed to his house and it turns out the neighbour is wired to his street feed after the fuse.

So they need seperate feeds 80 amp each because she wants to get a charger fitted as well.

Then they took the front off his fuse box and it fell apart, like some kind of plastic rot, new box reqd.

Hes looking for help with the costs, green investment and all...see how it goes.
 
Everyone here knows me as an advocate for e-bikes, as the most efficient assisted transportation means. Meanwhile, I perceive the electric car as one of the biggest idiocies ever invented by the humankind.

The hybrid car, yes. The electric car, no.
 
Stefan Mikes said:
Everyone here knows me as an advocate for e-bikes, as the most efficient assisted transportation means. Meanwhile, I perceive the electric car as one of the biggest idiocies ever invented by the humankind.

The hybrid car, yes. The electric car, no.
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Can you please explain your thesis? Because I personally draw a different conclusion.
 
Yeah, I like the idea of a built in battery charger and range extender, but holy crap theres twice as much to go wrong in a hybrid.
If we had a modern grid and 2 min to 80% chargers everywhere..oh and the enormous power supply for them all, then EVs with safer and lighter batteries are a no brainer.
His Model Y has 330hp in a family car.

The electric motor is near as damn it perfect.
 
Chargeride said:
Hes only got a 60 amp feed to his house and it turns out the neighbour is wired to his street feed after the fuse.
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If he runs a dryer in his house from a 60A feed there is stuff you can buy on Amazon that solves his problem. Basically you make sure the EV can only charge when the dryer is not drying stuff so it doesn't require additional amps, it just shares amps with the dryer.

But the key observation is if he charges at night when his draw is otherwise low he has a lot of amps to work with and should have no problems, even with just 60A.
 
Mr. Coffee said:
Can you please explain your thesis? Because I personally draw a different conclusion.
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I will draw a parallel first. Since the advent of digital cameras, any good camera had to be a large and heavy DSLR. At some time, the "mirrorless" emerged, showing the camera didn't need to be an SLR. Moreover, the technological progress has proven a lightweight smartphone could do the things almost as efficiently.

The electric car is conceptually still a Mr. Carl Benz 1885 invention with over 100 years of improvements as the ICE car. It is heavy. It is totally inefficient. The electric car needs at least 65 kW (or a way more) motors to operate, while we do with 0.75 kW max with the e-bike. An electric car requires at least a 60 kWh battery while we e-bikers only recently have got a 0.8 kWh one. The waste of precious material, pollution on the manufacturing, filled wasteland.

You can refuel your ICE or a hybrid car in a few minutes. You cannot do the same for the EV. Fine if you are a homestead owner (especially with a renewable energy source such as solar) but people in the cities cannot enjoy the same. They need to rely on the recharging stations, and recharging takes ages. There are many recharging systems, which makes the matters even worse.

I wonder if someone has ever calculated what electric energy output would be necessary if all cars, buses (and possibly lorries) were electric. Where do you get the electric power from? At what efficiency? Nuclear power? Fossil fuels? Solar? Wind power? Hydroelectric? Has anyone calculated that worldwide ever?

The electric systems become even more inefficient in the winter. You know what the winters are. The Californian do not need to worry.

You can repair an old ICE car. An old electric car goes to the landfill.
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The hybrid greatly increases the efficiency of an ICE car and reduces the pollution. It is as autonomous as an ICE car. No need for the special infrastructure. I'm scared to think we are all forced (in the EU) to switch to electric cars. It has already caused a collapse of several large automotive concerns, and it will be only worse.
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I have got rid of my junk ICE car and never look back. Fortunately, I live in a country of a great public transportation. And own e-bikes.
 
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I can see your point, but...

You are comparing the efficiency of a large motor vehicle that can carry four people and a bunch of stuff to the efficiency of a single e-bike. Which is not an apples to apples comparison. Arguably EVs are much more efficient than ones that burn stuff (best estimates put EVs at about 85 percent, and an ICE vehicle at about 15).

You are correct that you can refuel a car that burns stinky liquids in a few minutes. Typically an EV charge is about twenty minutes, which is far from forever. The big difference is that while refueling your dinosaur burner you have to stand there holding the nozzle. With an EV you can plug it in, go use a restroom, get something to eat, maybe go for a short walk and stretch, and come back to your car fully charged and ready to go. In practice you can almost always make good use of that time. In a lot of cases here we are seeing DCFCs deployed at grocery stores and big box stores, so you can get a charge while shopping or running errands. If you are traveling long distances and aren't superhuman, you'll need to have a significant stop every 300 to 400 kilometers anyhow and all an EV changes is where you stop and how you plan them.

I agree with you that the user experience for recharging often sucks. On the other hand with newer charging equipment and networks it is improving rapidly.

I don't know for the whole world, but the estimates I've heard for the Untied States is you'd need from 0.8 to 1.2 TWh additional electricity, from a baseline of 4.2TWh. On the other side of it, the US oil production and refining infrastructure use about 1.5 to 2.0 TWh of electricity (on top of the fossil fuels they already burn). About half of the petroleum production in the USA is fed into personal vehicles, so I'd reason that the electricity use related to petroleum would go down by about half. So the net cost might be somewhere between zero and around 0.2TWh. Which ain't nothing but is surprisingly small. (Source: The Google).

Yes, you lose some range and have somewhat slower charging times in the winter. But you also use more fuel and pollute more with a gas burner. Neither kind of vehicle becomes unusable unless it is ridiculously cold.

When you say "special infrastructure" you of course are ignoring the literally trillions of dollars worth of infra that you are using to keep that ICE vehicle moving.

What you neglected to mention, though:
  1. An EV is not boiling the planet. Even if your electrons come from natural gas or coal, you are still more efficient and emitting less CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
  2. Petroleum is much more subject to the risk that crazy world leaders will mess up the supply chain and cause unpredictable price spikes and shortages.
 
Mr. Coffee said:
four people
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Pardon me? :D In the U.S., the vehicle single occupancy country?
Mr. Coffee said:
Arguably EVs are much more efficient than ones that burn stuff
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You need to generate the electricity somewhere. What is the overall efficiency in the chain including any losses?
Mr. Coffee said:
you of course are ignoring the literally trillions of dollars worth of infra that you are using to keep that ICE vehicle moving.
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The petrol stations and the infrastructure are already there. Also giving the employment to so many people.

Mr. Coffee said:
An EV is not boiling the planet.
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Where is the majority of electricity coming from? How is the energy input in an EV dissipated? Because it is ultimately the heat.
 
Stefan Mikes said:
Pardon me? :D In the U.S., the vehicle single occupancy country?

You need to generate the electricity somewhere. What is the overall efficiency in the chain including any losses?

The petrol stations and the infrastructure are already there. Also giving the employment to so many people.


Where is the majority of electricity coming from? How is the energy input in an EV dissipated? Because it is ultimately the heat.
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Largely because of the simple fact that one huge fire (e.g. in a coal plant) is much more efficient than millions of tiny fires in engines all over the place, an EV even running off of fossil fuels is about twice as efficient end-to-end as a fossil burner. This is basic thermodynamics.

Yes, the petrol infra is "already there". But it has a nonzero cost to maintain. And in a lot of cases a lot of the infra you depend upon is in countries that aren't your friends. Also, at least here most of that infra is old and nearing the end of its service life. What makes more sense, rebuilding that stuff or building a newer technologically superior infrastructure? I know the oil companies aren't interested in building refineries because they know we won't be burning gasoline thirty years from now.


The waste heat isn't the issue in boiling the planet, the greenhouse gas emissions are. And even an EV that is charged on electrons from fossil fuels produces much lower emissions than a straight up dinosaur burning car.

I'll anticipate your argument that EVs require specific elements (lithium, certain rare earths for the anodes, cathodes, and magnets) with a fairly fragile supply chain that also depend upon questionably reliable countries. What I'd say about that:
  1. It is going to be easier and cheaper to rebuild the supply chains for those materials than it is going to be to rebuild the equivalent petroleum supply chain.
  2. You aren't burning lithiums and rare earths, and they can be recycled so there is an upper limit to how much of it you'll need.
The major reason there isn't yet major infrastructure to recycle EV batteries is that we are discovering that they last much, much longer than previously assumed. And modern (post COVID) EV batteries have about a 0.2 percent failure rate, compared to a 2 percent failure rate for ICE engines in recent years.

At least you aren't warning me of the dangers of Lithium Radiation.
 
I saw an image recently an urban area but of instead of roads there were sheer canyons. There were sidewalks for humans and boards across the canyons for crosswalks. You could really see how much was allocated to cars and how little to humans. Then think of all the acres that are only paved heat islands just for cars. There is no habitat for humans, animals, or plants. As we rebuild we can build toward a move away from a car centric world. Think of a typical shopping mall with three times more parking than retail. That is a lot of useless, unproductive real estate.
 
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