I understood Matthew’s position as “this should be discussed in the Workstation WG first”, not as a “no”:

in favor of the process outlined above (tl;dr: talk to the Workstation WG, and if that does not come to a satisfying outcome, file a Council ticket for next possibilities).

Post

It also seemed more likely that they would promote KDE without demoting Gnome.

But was there a follow-up on that (e.g. in the Workstation WG)?

The UFS storage inside an Android smartphone is basically an SSD. Both use flash memory, so it’s reasonable to expect that they have similar failure modes. But I’m not sure if you could diagnose such a failure on Android.

I have seen multiple (quality) SSDs with unrecoverable read errors after a few years. All of them had plenty of spare area left. Maybe some kind of retention issue?

I would argue that any majoritarian electoral system (winner-takes-all), including ranked choice, incentivizes large parties. There is some nuance between them, but I don’t think that ranked choice can fundamentally solve that issue. Sure, you can enter a protest vote, but will it really change anything? I think that parties need realistic changes at gaining (some) power in order to be viable in the long term.

Would you mind explaining how introducing ranked choice voting would substantially help smaller/additional political parties? I always find it confusing how much Americans focus on the presidency and ranked choice voting when it comes to breaking the party duopoly. At the end of the day, there is only a single president and he/she will probably always come from one of the largest parties. The presidency somewhat inherently limits the influence of smaller parties.

What I would focus on, if I wanted to increase the number of political parties in the US, is the House of Representatives. If proportional representation (e.g. biproportional appointment, party lists, MMP, …) was introduced there, it would allow smaller parties to hold real power. (With biproportional appointment, the seats are distributed according to party voter share while also ensuring regional representation). Do you know why this hardly ever comes up in the context of the US?

You’re right that the calories burned while riding the E-Bike would also need to be considered. The site you linked gives 220 kcal/hr for “Motor scooter, motorcycle” and 630 kcal/hr for “Bicycling, 12 - 13.9 mph, leisure, moderate effort”. This corresponds to 1960 kcal / 100km excess calories for biking (at 75kg weight). Going slower than that (which I certainly don’t do ;-) ) somewhat reduces the difference. But then the E-Bike is faster and you somehow have to account for that… I’m sure that people have written scientific publications on such considerations. My napkin math certainly doesn’t have that level of rigor.

Overall there’s certainly better ways to reduce your CO2 footprint than switching from a bike to an E-Bike. But perhaps E-Bikes are better than their reputation.

Of course it was patched in all affected Debian versions: https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2014-0160

I agree that the comparison between the two is quite complex (given the many side effects). But I was interested in this question and have done a few back-of-the-envelope calculations on the ongoing CO2 emissions:

Regular Cycling:

• The caloric consumption of cycling is approximately 2300 kcal / 100 km [1]. Or 2.7 kWh / 100 km.
• The CO2 footprint of 1 kcal is approximately 1 (vegan) to 3 (meat-heavy) gCO2/kcal [2]. The average is approximately 2 gCO2/kcal.
• This yields 2.3 kgCO2 / 100 km for a vegan diet and 4.6 kgCO2 / 100km.
  • The result is in the same ballpark as the Guardian article [3] at 2.5 to 3.5 kgCO2/100km.
  • The 96 kgCO2 for production [3] would correspond to 0.5 kgCO2/100km over the 19200km lifetime [3].

(Motor-only) E-bikes:

• The energy use is about 2 kWh / 100 km (3.3 kWh per 100 miles) [4].
  • But pedal-assisted commuter e-bikes only use 0.7 kWh / 100km (1.1 kWh per 100 miles) [4]??
  • This also seems quite high compared to the 2.7 kWh / 100 km above, given that human muscles are only about 30% efficient [6].
• With the US carbon intensity (0.368 kgCO2/kWh [5]), this yields 0.736 kgCO2/100km.
  • This result is much lower than the Guardian article [3], probably because it doesn’t include manufacturing.
  • The 165 kgCO2 for production [3] would correspond to 0.86 kgCO2/100km over the 19200km lifetime [3].

Based on this, it seems quite plausible that an E-Bike is significantly more efficient than a regular bike, even if the rider is a vegan. But, both are way better than all types of cars and even public transport.

References

• [1] https://www.canyon.com/en-ch/blog-content/advice/calories-burned-cycling/b24062022.html
• [2] https://bitsabout.me/en/the-carbon-footprint-of-your-diet/
• [3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2021/sep/23/why-arent-more-big-bike-firms-tracking-their-environmental-impact
• [4] https://sites.google.com/view/ebikestudy/results
• [5] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity?country=~USA
• [6] https://www.germanjournalsportsmedicine.com/fileadmin/content/archiv2017/Heft_9/Standard_EN_Boening_Wirkungsgrad_Muskelarbeit_9-2017.pdf

The article says they are aiming for 1W in the next couple of years, which can probably do it.

They won’t magically improve the power density by three orders of magnitude. They’re just trying to defraud their investors.