Could we just make Weird Al the Democratic presidential nominee instead?

…says the guy that thinks there’s going to be a brokered convention that picks somebody other than Biden.

Every definitive trait has some counter example that still counts because people “feel” it’s good enough.

There’s an aphorism in statstics / science: “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” I feel that the distinction between genuine off-road-capable SUVs and crossovers/tall cars/glorified station wagons or minivans is useful, even if it isn’t completely definitive. Generally speaking, if it’s a unibody vehicle it probably isn’t very good off-road, and therefore doesn’t really deserve to be called an “SUV.”

So does a 2wd “suv” (by your definition) then get declassified?

A 2WD SUV is less general-purpose, but I think they still have enough potential to count (think desert-racing prerunners, which are often 2WD but legitimate off-road vehicles).

Plenty of large “tall station wagons” are unibody. About the only legitimately capable offroad 4x4s I know of that are unibody are the Jeep Cherokee (the old one) and maybe something like a Suzuki Jimny (edit: nope, even that tiny thing is body-on-frame).

(Consider the difference between a (unibody) Toyota Highlander and a (body-on-frame) Toyota 4Runner, for example: only the latter is a “real” SUV, in terms of being capable off-road.)

I am sure there’s a real distinction

Body-on-frame with a pickup truck chassis vs. unibody construction.

“Israeli structural intransigence” is also not “the United States.”

I have no idea what “MBFC” even is, but just in general as a matter of principle, fuck decorum. Tone arguments are nearly always the first resort of the disinformation-peddler being called out on their bullshit.

The disease was already in 1 in 5 dairy samples before any even basic tests of if the disease could survive pasturization were published. The disease could mutate to survive…

Sure, in the same way volcanologists could mutate to survive being submerged in lava.

I don’t know why people got so riled up over it. Like you gotta pick a camp and defend it. Are EVs and hydrogen cars that polarising??

I think there are two main factors:

1. Differences of opinion among people legitimately trying to find the best solution (e.g. because they assign different amounts of importance to tradeoffs between batteries vs hydrogen, such as slow charging vs difficult storage).

2. People pushing particular technologies in bad faith because they’re more interested in perpetuating the business model they already have than pivoting to what’s best in the long term (e.g. fossil fuels companies greenwashing with “blue” or “grey” hydrogen, BMW wanting to keep making internal-combustion engines, etc.).

Frankly, hydrogen has enough challenges associated with it that it’s easy to assume anybody advocating for it falls in the latter group.

The main advantages being that you get better range and you can refuel in a couple of minutes instead of an hour.

I still think biofuels or synthetic liquid hydrocarbon fuels burned in normal internal-combustion engines are better at those things than hydrogen ever will be, while also being much more convenient in terms of reusing the infrastructure and vehicles we already have.

The only way in which hydrogen is really superior is that it emits only water vapor, rather than the traditional pollutants like NO_x, VOCs, and particulates that ICEs burning even carbon-neutral fuel would continue to emit, but that mostly matters in urban areas where battery EVs beat out hydrogen anyway.

In other words, I just don’t think there’s any niche where hydrogen is the best solution. Long-haul rural trips are better suited to carbon-neutral bio or synthetic liquid fuels (or, you know, trains), and short urban trips are better suited to battery EVs you can just charge at home (or, you know, bicycles).

From https://solaredition.com/green-hydrogen-production-paths/ :

Only “green hydrogen” (4%) is actually good. For the other 96%, it would be better to just use the source hydrocarbon as fuel directly.

In other words, for the most part, the entities pushing hydrogen are mostly engaging in greenwashing bullshit.

See also:

• https://www.greenbiz.com/article/truth-about-hydrogen-latest-trendiest-low-carbon-solution

• https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/pictures/HydrogenProduction_CGEP_FactSheet_052621.pdf

Exactly: it makes sense only if you have an excess of clean electricity to electrolyze it from water, and even then the best thing to do would be to immediately (at the point of production) use it to synthesize a liquid hydrocarbon fuel for easier transport and storage (which also has the benefit of letting it be burned in existing ICE cars).

Before mine, too. I just read a lot. 🤷

Carbon is what matters, but not in the way the hydrogen-pushers want you to think:

• It doesn’t matter if the fuel has carbon in it, if the carbon is part of the short-term carbon cycle. Biodiesel, for example, releases no net greenhouse gases even though it has lots of carbon in it.

• The dirty secret of hydrogen is that the vast majority of it is made by cracking fossil methane. (My previous comment about combining hydrogen with carbon to make synthetic liquid fuel charitably presupposed it was made the right way, by electrolyzing water with solar power, but most hydrogen production is not like that)

In other words, anybody telling you that hydrogen is better for preventing climate change than biofuels – despite them containing carbon – is trying to hoodwink you.

The entire premise of hydrogen is dumb.

We would legitimately be better off combining it with CO₂ to make synthetic gasoline and just use it with normal vehicles and infrastructure.

Gasoline is a finite resource

No it isn’t. Crude oil is finite, but gasoline could be synthesized from other carbon and hydrogen sources (up to and including CO₂ + H₂O + solar power) if you really wanted to.

No, under normal circumstances, the part of the plant that isn’t burned eventually also decomposes and the carbon continues in the cycle. You’d have to explicitly do something to prevent it (e.g. sink it in a bog) to make it net negative.

but kei cars aren’t street legal for most consumer purposes in the US

Speak for your own state.

And I’m surprised cargo ships still run mostly on novelty sized diesel engines. Would be interesting to throw a small ultra safe nuclear powered engine on one of those or even just enforcing better fuel use instead of spamming low grade MDO.

It’s a real shame that NS Savannah was designed as a weird half-passenger, half-cargo hybrid that made it uneconomical to operate. It’s even more of a shame that protesting by hysterical anti-nuclear fearmongerers got it banned from ports and scared off anybody from building more traditional cargo ships with nuclear propulsion.

You say that as if Americans don’t want kei cars, but we do. Even rural off-roading Youtubers (who would probably be revealed to be ultraconservative if they didn’t keep their politics out of their videos) love things like Suzuki Samurais and Subaru Sambars.

Welcome to the being a sub