r/fuckcars / Not Just Bikes / Urbanists / New Urbanism / Car-Free / Anti-Car - People and grifters who hate personal transport, freedom, cars, roads, suburbs, and are obsessed with city planning and urban design

Jesus H Christ.
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering and I took several nuclear science electives. I like nuclear energy. But I received so much "base load" gaslighting that I started to doubt my own understanding of the situation.
Click to expand...
That's because you're a retard that doesn't understand the situation.
Here's the last few days worth of energy use for the contiguous US (Europe has a similar profile):
U.S. electricity overview (demand, forecast demand, net generation, and total interchange) 4-7...png
See that wriggly line? That's the load. See how it never drops below ~375,000? That's the baseload.
Now, some things you can move around to smooth the peaks, or make them fit your generation profile. Charge your phone when the sun is shining, eat only salads if the wind has dropped. But a lot of things can't just be switched off - the Internet, steel mills and hospitals spring to mind - and if you like living in a civilized society you probably want them. Indeed, some of the shit you like will make this situation worse. Electric buses for commuters, for example, get charged up at night when people don't use them and power is cheaper: They are the exact opposite of solar power and add to that baseload.
The US needs a minimum of 375GW just to retain the ability to wake up in the morning and get shit done.

Go play with your bicycle pump.
 
Last edited:
Xarpho's Return said:
Other than his videos which make things up and the implication that he doesn't live in Amsterdam-Centrum and bicycle everywhere like purports to, has Jason ever blatantly lied that much?
Click to expand...
It's your generic "appeal to authority" tripe. Maybe he is an electrical engineer, and maybe he designs really nice circuit breakers for model trains. Doesn't mean he knows jack about power generation, because he clearly doesn't.
 
quaawaa said:
Who needs farms anyways when you can have rooftop gardens?:
Click to expand...
These are deeply unserious people, with their amateur hour rooftop gardens so they can put the produce on the trains.

All true train autists know that the current meta is to put the gardens directly on the trains themselves.
 
Aldeland said:
Feel free to ask me anything, I do better when prompted than off the top of my head.
Click to expand...
Would it have been better for the Surfliner to be run using surplus Class 43s now that they're beginning to be withdrawn from service?
SwiftBucks said:
Really would like to see the walkable city advocates do a full year in Nippon. 20 minute walk to the station, every day. That means when it's cold, rainy, snowing or humid as fuck. Then waiting on the platform, which isn't air conditioned, ever. Then the shitty train ride and another 20 minute walk to work.
Click to expand...
Now me, personally, I love having to leave the house almost two hours before my shift starts to get the bus because they only run once every two hours, though if I wanted to stay in a little longer I could get the train one and a half hours before my shift starts but then I also have to spend 15 minutes walking from the station to my job. And I have to leave 45 minutes of pay on the table every day because the idiots in charge of the place changed my hours so now I have to leave early so that I can catch the last train home or else I'm waiting outside the gate for up to and sometimes over an hour for an Uber to show up. It's about ten minutes by car.
quaawaa said:
Food should be delivered by train:
Click to expand...
Just put a 2'3" gauge network across the whole town, that will be perfectly safe for cylists and pedestrians and nothing will go wrong at all.
 
CEO of Gay said:
Watch them suddenly argue that grade separation of different modes of travel is a good thing, actually.
Click to expand...
I have no problem with this, so long as they're also going to do all the grade work with nothing but muscle power (and bicycles to haul away spoil).
Screenshot_2026-04-15-12-40-20-42_e4424258c8b8649f6e67d283a50a2cbc.jpg
Come on lads, put your money where your mouth is.
 
Vesperus said:
It's your generic "appeal to authority" tripe. Maybe he is an electrical engineer, and maybe he designs really nice circuit breakers for model trains. Doesn't mean he knows jack about power generation, because he clearly doesn't.
Click to expand...
Didn't this guy work in Taiwan for a bit? What was his job back then?
 
quaawaa said:
Jason went on an anti-nuclear rant and denied the existence of base load power:
View attachment 8856215
Source (Archive)

If you have a nuclear reactor capable of covering for a solar farm at night and when the weather is bad, then you don't need solar at all. It's just an added capital expense and it would be cheaper to just have nuclear to cover the base load (since it has a near-zero marginal cost) with a few gas peaker plants for unexpected demand.

Jason even admits that peaker plants are required in his solar world:
View attachment 8856231
Source (Archive)

But as European power prices show, renewables plus peaker plants is very expensive because the fossil fuel plants have to recover all their costs over a short window (instead of amortizing them over every watt sold). You also need an entire duplicate grid's worth of gas/coal plants in order to not have blackouts whenever the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. A nuclear-based grid only needs enough peakers (or surplus nuclear capacity) to account for unusual fluctuations in demand, not supply, and therefore is much cheaper.
Click to expand...
This is possibly his most retarded take of all time, which is pretty huge considering how many retarded takes Jason puts out every week. Unlike him I have actually worked in a power plant, up in the control room where there's a constant readout of the provincial grid. The base load is not tiny and can't be handwaved away. A single electric arc furnace at a mini-mill is an entire town's worth of kettles, only it starts and stops multiple times per day, round the clock. HE is the one with the outdated script because most renewable wieners now admit that solar and wind don't work at night or on calm cloudy days and are coping with extravagant ideas about giant batteries and huge pumped reservoirs.

this is what happens when people confuse 'ability to make slick YT videos' with 'expert on the subject'. He's not even close to being the smartest urbanist but he has all these people licking his nuts.
 
The whole "base load is outdated" is a constant narrative among the renewable proponents because it throws a massive wrench in their plans when you look at the numbers. They'll kvetch and squirm and just never mention any numbers when they're pretending that their planned transition is oh so easy. When you look at the numbers you realise that the problem is pretty severe.
 
Meriasek said:
Another public transport strike in my city tomorrow. Third or fourth this year, I don't even remember. Sucks to be someone who doesn't have a car.
Also sucks to be someone who has a car and needs to be somewhere in the city center for something because parking sucks there.
Click to expand...
Almost every time I take the train, it's late or cancelled. At times I just decide to not bother at all and drive
 
I used to drive a lot and haven't since 2010.

But cyclists are annoying too.

Especially when they bike without a helmet against traffic

do you mexicans actually think a backwards LA Dodgers cap protects your head
 
I got the perfect plan. We build free-to-enter gyms where all the apparatus actually charges energy (Dynamos in the gym bikes n shit) and then let the people come in to get swole and give energy to the city. Foolproof.

That's what reading r/fuckcars sounds like to me
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom