• 1 Post
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2023

help-circle


  • 100% agree that it’s horrible wording, but the linguistics nerd inside my brain just has to say: that’s not the passive voice.

    Passive voice would be something like “a store was smashed into” or “a car was driven into the store”, where the grammatical subject is the semantic object. It can be used to avoid saying the subject of the sentence, who’s doing the action, but in this case they keep the active voice and just change the subject from a “driver” to a “car”.

    On another note, it’s also telling that the article first comments on financial damage, then that the driver is unhurt and the car is damaged, and only after that does it say that the store-owner and the two customers were unharmed.





  • While this generally gets a little chuckle from me, it really needs to die. It’s as old and untrue now as ‘ubuntu is just for noobs’, etc. I have never broken Arch with an update. I have broken it with changes I’ve made actively, but never just an upgrade. If you want to say the install process is unintuitive, or that the lack of defaults for practically anything you actually use is debilitating for new users, or overreliance on AUR is unsafe, or any number of other valid points, fine. But it doesn’t just break everything constantly.



  • I was going to ask you, but then figured I could do my own research and just ask if you think it’s reasonable. According to Our World in Data, the WHO says 4.2 million people die every year from outside pollution. Again according to Our World in Data, road transport accounts for 11.9% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Obviously, that’s different to health-affecting pollution, and it might pollute more in places where people live compared to something like electricity generation which would likely be further from population, but it’s the best I could come up with. So that would mean we could attribute ~0.5 million deaths per year to road transport. According to Movotiv, there are 1.2 billion vehicles, 70 million daily driving trips, with an average distance of 15 km. That means a total annual distance traveled of ~383.25 billion km. So there’s 0.0035 deaths per year per vehicle, or 286 years per death per vehicle, and 1 death per 91,250km. That doesn’t sound right, and I blame the Movotiv statistics, unless I made a mistake. 300km/year for the average vehicle sounds ridiculously low, so something’s not right. I don’t have time to find the issue or better stats right now, but I might have a look later. In the interim, do you think my logic stacks up, or do you have better statistics?