For urban environments I 100% agree, but e-bikes and public transport can’t help farmers* get their produce to market. I don’t know much about this truck, but if it can fill a similar niche as the Japanese kei truck, I think it’s great to provide people who actually need a pickup with an alternative to the F-150+ behemoths currently available stateside.

*Yes there are some urban farms that totally could operate via ebike/other form of micro mobility, however most farms, even small ones, are located >10 miles outside urban centers, usually in areas only accessible by roads and highways that are currently very dangerous for non-motorized transportation modes. Fixing this problem would take decades and hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars even if the government were fully on board with the transportation network and/or land use changes necessary to allow for a true car-free society (which of course they aren’t). I’m not such an idealist as to poo-poo a significant short-term improvement to the “oversized working vehicle” problem.

Somewhat amazed they’ve rebounded this much given the VW emission scandal some years back. Guess it wasn’t that brand-damaging after all.

There’s also a severe shortage of medical professionals ever since covid in all fields all over the country (but especially in rural and rapidly-growing areas). Good luck actually getting a medical appointment, and even if you can swing one standards have been weakened so that what would normally be a visit with a doctor (or the field’s equivalent) is now a nurse practitioner or other less-educated title. If you want a “real” medical professional you need a referral, and again, good luck getting that appointment scheduled. Everyone working in medicine is overworked and burned out. Unless you’re actively bleeding out, seeking medical attention, especially routine checkups and preventative screening, doesn’t feel worth it anymore.

I’m not too surprised to see cancer deaths being one rare area that’s decreasing; besides strides in treatment, most cancer sufferers are older and thus wealthier and also have Medicare, plus they also probably already have a primary care physician from pre-shortage. The hardest-hit in the medical care shortage are the young and people who have recently moved, and find themselves running into the wall of “no one is taking new patients.”

While I appreciate the effort, how is this not an inevitable losing game of whack-a-mole?

At no point has Gmail ever said “we’re no longer allowing you to send/receive emails to/from Hotmail” or has Yahoo said “we’re maintained by a single volunteer who because of real life stuff can no longer continue so we’re discontinuing our email service.”

But this literally happens with instances all the time.

I’m a fediverse supporter (obviously, that’s why I’m here), however what you’re looking for requires a critical mass of users that the fediverse (at least the Lemmy side of it) will never achieve as long as two very critical problems persist:

1. sign up is confusing. People are used to clicking “create an account,” inputting a user name, password, and maybe an email, and then BAM they’re a user. I realize the whole instance thing is the entire point, but no one wants nor expects to have to do significant research and make a decision about how they want to interact with a social media site before they’ve even started using it.

2. the site (or at least lemmy.world) is sooo slooow. Basic functions like loading images take me back to the dial-up era of “click the image then do something else while it loads,” which is downright ridiculous in the 2020s. Again I’ve stuck with it because I want to support the fediverse, but 99% of users won’t.

And no, these aren’t “features not bugs” unless you want to keep the site small and homogenous.

Read the article: they were indoor only cats

Broken clocks…

Wear a face mask at the airport, and you’ll never get a surprise facial recognition photo again.

The article seems a bit scant on details re: why people are leaving. Is it because the youth are unsatisfied with the quality of life available in the country? Are they seeking a more western-style way of life (perhaps one that’s more secular)? Is this yet another case of younger generations getting pushed out because they cannot find success in a place where all the good homes and jobs are tightly clutched by the older generations? Or is there something completely different causing the mass migration out of the country? The article mentions “the economy” but that could mean so many things, especially when much of the world is also still struggling with post-covid fallout in one way or another.

Unfortunately Idaho has really incredible geology and ecology. The panhandle is nestled in a beautiful mountain range with lush pines and scenic towns like Wallace and Sandpoint. The southern regions have their gems too: Craters of the Moon for instance is one of the best western parks you’ve never heard of. Idaho is a gorgeous state, and it’s a complete shame how insane “libertarian” politics have turned it into a horror show.

Agreed. I tried to adjust to Celsius when I moved abroad from the US, and my biggest issue with it was actually in temperature control. I lived in a tiny studio apartment with an in-wall A/C unit, so I had really accurate, nearly instantaneous control of the room temperature except that often it would be too hot at one temperature setting but too cold if I reduced it by a single degree (Celsius). Had the system been in fahrenheit I would have had around three times as much sensitivity to control, which would have been perfect.

Interesting note: the journalist managed to avoid using pronouns entirely when referring to any non-binary individual during the entire article (with the exception of when they included quotes from others who did use the singular “they” pronoun). I wonder if this is AP standard or the journalist’s preference. Either way I’m impressed; it’s somewhat difficult to do in English without sounding incredibly clunky. Which is too bad, as it’s not true of all languages (Japanese for instance makes it fairly easy to avoid gendered pronouns if so desired).