Unless your EV is powered by 100% renewables and you completely avoid plastic products somehow you're probably still consuming it in some way. Ethical consumption isn't really possible in today's world, unfortunately. Nearly anything you touch is the result of slave labor or human rights abuses somewhere.
> Buying as ethically as you are reasonably able to do is better than not trying to buy ethically at all.
I'm not suggesting at all to do the latter - merely pointing out that the GP comment seemed to be under the impression that purchasing an EV vehicle was avoiding saudi oil. Many people are under similar impressions about their consumption choices. Being aware of the consequences of your choices is just as important.
Its avoiding a lot of Saudi oil. A 25mpg car over 150,000mi will go through 6,000gal of gasoline. That's ~308 barrels of oil just for the energy of moving the car.
A car will have ~400lbs of plastic parts. You'd need like 3.9 barrels of oil to make that plastic. Both a gas car and an EV will need this plastic.
You're going to use almost 100x as much oil driving the car around than the plastics in the car. A 100x reduction in oil use is significant. Quit pushing lies about how EVs still use a significant amount of oil, as if they're pretty much the same. Either you should be aware of the falsehoods you're suggesting or you need to be informed.
And no, the energy generation for an EV isn't anywhere near as significant as the oil use for burning in an ICE. In most modern grids a lot of that energy is going to come from locally produced natural gas, maybe still coal, some nuclear, and a decent chunk of renewables. Burning oil isn't that massive of an overall electricity source.
It's still significantly reducing the amount of Saudi oil and support of global oil prices to drive an EV. The inability to make a perfect choice shouldn't mean you can't make any choice at all; if you're needing to pick either product A or B but product A is knowingly worse than B despite B still having some bad externalities you should probably pick B!
You'd have to really look deep to find oil for the electricity generated in my area. Practically have to talk about the insulation on the wires in my home or the lubricants on the turbines. It's practically all natural gas, wind, and solar powering my EV.
Whether or not someone is allowed to distribute creative works without the permission of the author, the point of copyright, is and will contribute to be independent of the technology used to do the distribution.
I don’t disagree with the ruling. IA is not lending their copy that they purchased. They are lending a copy of their copy. While that copy is lent out, they are still free to, I.e. read the copy in their possession.
That’s technically true. But frankly it seems like such people have a giant stick up their ass. The digital version would be infinitely more accessible, while still maintaining effectively 1-1 access restrictions. I’m not even sure if they’re _is_ a physical IA library one could go to. For all I know they’re in a vault somewhere. Even the USD isn’t backed 1-1 with physical tokens. It seems patently ridiculous that books be held to this standard in this day and age.
No, that’s not why they lost. The reason is because they effectively lend it to many people simultaneously, and implement no controls on getting it “returned” (deleted) by the people they lent it to, while even being aware that some of them don’t “return” it.
The technicality that they keep a copy of the book while it’s being lent isn’t really at issue here at all. It’s not because there are two copies, it’s because there are three or more copies, given to two or more parties at the same time. It has become “distribution” in the eyes of copyright law, beyond the lending analogy.
Even if they did what you described they would still lose. There would be no way to implement a control to prevent an additional simultaneous copy. It's not a technical issue, it's simple impossible inherently.
I don't know why companies keep trying this. MP3.com, Aereo, etc. The precedent is clear.
Again, speaking about the wider CDL initiative (one digital copy lent for each physical copy) and not their National Emergency Library, the Internet Archive do implement a DRM on that digital copy, so for the reader to make additional copies of it is not trivial. Regardless, from where do you get a requirement to prevent (with 100% certainty) the reader from making additional copies? When a person borrows a physical book from a library, they could photocopy the entire thing, then return the book they borrowed to the library and still have an additional copy that they made. Does that make library lending illegal? How is that something that can be blamed on the library in the first place?
The question isn’t whether it’s technically possible, the question is whether they even tried, and one of the reasons they lost is not just because they didn’t try at all, they instead looked the other way when they knew the borrowers didn’t “return” the book.
my point is that even if they did try, the outcome would've been the same and CDL was doomed from the beginning. their inane emergency CDL plan simply accelerated this outcome
Maybe, but that’s speculation, and others have won fair use claims. The decision in this case explicitly cited the defendant’s lack of effort to control their loaned copies while being aware of infringement.
I didn’t claim similar, and it seems like we’re losing the point here. Mine is that your claim at the top, that the problem had to do with having two copies, actually has nothing to do with why they lost. The problem, as the judge described, is that they didn’t put the “C” in CDL, and looked the other way when then knew it was missing, and then tried to claim fair use for something that clearly isn’t fair use. They didn’t lose because the judge is being pedantic about how many copies there are, they lost because they’re actually squarely violating existing copyright law.
Do you think it would have made a difference if they bought three copies of the book and then shredded two of them? That way they would have the original they scanned, their digital version they copy to lend, and the loaned digital copy.
The entire article is about fair use and how what IA is doing is not fair use. I would like the IA to exist, but I agree with the ruling that their fair use argument is nonsense. It's not a derivative work.
In the case of a physical object needing to temporarily go digital, it needs to be sent digitally and the records kept, and of course the physical copy has to be kept.
In the case of the GPL there's no physical copy and thus there's no need to consider how to move from one form to the other.
To require that a physical object never be used digitally is bad for society.
And also it's a lot easier to copy a digitally borrowed book than it is to copy a physically borrowed book.
There are practical differences between the two, which mean that the law probably should treat them differently. I expect a lot of HN have difficulty dealing with that because they think "but they both contain the same information".
It reminds me of people trying to encode books into prime numbers or the digits or pi or whatnot to "get around" copyright. Fundamentally missing the point.
You cannot even read an ebook without copying it from storage to RAM, to CPU cache, to video RAM, and so on; by your thinking, all owners of ebooks commit multiple instances of copyright infringement every time they read an ebook.
One of the main reasons I choose to shop at Aldi is that when I am in the store, I feel like the customer vs. feeling like the product at Kroger. Shopping at Kroger (or Walmart, etc.) feels like I am being assaulted.
Yep, one of the Walmart heirs is big into biking and they have apparently sunk a whole lot of money into trails and amenities in NW Arkansas.
There are some other good things happening here and there in that area, like Fayetteville getting rid of arbitrary, expensive, parking requirements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUhOFUQDLQk
I have a class 3 ebike (28 mph). I found the 5 mile commute exhausting even though I wasn't exerting myself much. Mentally exhausting, I guess. It's trivial once - it's a grind doing it 2x every day. This is in San Francisco. I'm in good shape, I run 4-5 miles a couple times a week.
I think the worst part is a stop sign every block.
As you’ve highlighted: it’s the infrastructure slowing you down. That’s why cities need to build good bike infrastructure, so it’s safe and easy to ride around.
I used to commute by (ordinary) cycling and this is a huge part of it. It's stressful navigating on urban roads through taxis and vans who seem to see you as the equivalent of a preachy vegan on wheels and drive like complete arses as a result. I've been literally run off the road by people who either can't be bothered to check their mirrors or have some creepy notion that cyclists "deserve" to be scared off the road by their aggressive driving. The only deterrent seems to be wearing a camera because they know it's the only way they'll ever have a chance of facing prosecution for it.
I'd never dream of telling someone else how to live their lives, I'm not one of those moral crusaders who endlessly harrass people about giving up their cars in favour of bikes. I just don't want to get mowed down by Billy Big Bollocks because he's too important to wait ten seconds to overtake safely.
That depends on road conditions and layout, typical traffic, weather, general health (need decent balance, eyesight, hearing, ability to ride over potholes, enough toughness that a spill isn't life-threatening)...
>general health (need decent balance, eyesight, hearing
That’s a pretty uncharitable reading of their comment. It is obvious we are talking about people that are already physically capable of riding a bike and are discussing a specific distance for a commute.
Well, that comment is quite absolute in its assessment of a five mile e-bike commute as "trivial". It brooks no exceptions even for stoplights or congested traffic conditions. It is not at all obvious to me what assumptions I am supposed to make when reading it, and its ancestor comments do not establish context as to what assumptions to make either.
Even so, I tried to find common ground by merely softening the "trivial" language to "often doable" rather than contradicting. Because clearly it will sometimes be "trivial".
So, I disagree with your assessment of "uncharitable". And I am taken aback that there is so much bitter contention over this issue when it seems to me as though the important thing is that e-bikes have made commutes much easier in general.
