Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

  • 15 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I do worry someone will read the “work for a FAANG” part, and ignore the other two things listed. It’s absolutely not enough to go “welp, I’m just a little cog following orders”.

    Maybe a one-man boycott is the wrong way to put it. Multi-person boycotts are obviously built from individual people. I guess my real point is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution; you actually have to look at the world, look at how you want it to be, and figure out how you can help make that happen from your place in it.














  • Yeah, I know, I’m not arguing against electric now, or even as a concept then. This was an alt-history exercise, remember?

    Batteries could have been standard for a bit longer, but it seems to me that eventually the need to go faster for longer would have forced combustion engines to be a thing. All they had were lead-acid batteries (or primary cells, but that would be dumb) and new more energy-dense chemistries didn’t show up for a long time after. Maybe they could have found one if they really needed, but it’s a tricky science even today, so I’m skeptical.

    It’s possible, I suppose, that infrastructure could have been rolled out for both en mass, but I don’t see an even mix lasting through the whole 20th century. Probably not even past WWII.




  • Or, y’know, there’s a war on and you can’t stop to recharge, or you need to cross a desert, or you just want to do an express route with one vehicle…

    Combustion is just a superior vehicle technology vs. lead-acid electric, assuming you don’t worry about emissions, and that will show up in plenty of contexts. Eventually, lead-acid would go the way of the other workable-but-not-as-nice technologies like crystal radios or black-and-white film.