I feel like this is a large portion of the missing puzzle pieces. The difference between real world and advertised ICE stats are somewhat padded, but not significantly. You’d expect the hybrids to have a similar degree of discrepancy, but it’s wildly out of range of expectations. It may simply be that the manufacturers are giving idealized stats, since while testing they would have access to their personal charger in a laboratory environment. But in the real world, owners cannot guarantee working/accessable chargers or even that they can charge at home, which would dramatically impact the results of this study.

Or at least, I’d assume that’s the case in the US. I don’t know what EU’s charging infrastructure is like, where the study was preformed.

TBH, the most astonishing reveal from the study for me was that Hybrid owners weren’t charging their vehicles. Unfortunately, the why isn’t covered in the study since it seems to just be hard math and statistical analysis.

Are they just not plugging in at night?

Too frustrated with the battery draining too quickly?

Driving too far for the battery to meaningfully contribute between charges?

Is the extra hardware mass making the ICE that much less efficient?

Laziness from having to fill both the battery and the gas tank?

To be fair, I’m really just judging the EC’s article writer. Not the trustworthiness of EC or the study itself.

When I saw the headline, I thought this was clickbait, since the headline and the linked article avoided quantifying how much CO2 the vehicles said they consumed vs the real world usage.

If you dig into the cited materials, it turns out it wasn’t hyperbole.

That said, I still consider it extremely poor form to omit the information the study was centering its argument around.

Okay, thanks! That was super informative!

Legit asking:

Up until relatively recently, the layman’s understanding of pollution was mostly focused on exhaust.

What caused the general shift in focus to microplastics, and by direct extension tire ware?

The risk is that Mozilla is in a position to add features and stability at a rate that smaller developers cannot possibly replicate. By doing so they risk becoming the defacto standard (embrace/extend). Then they get to dictate what the entire platform should or should not do. And you’re either on board or left in the dust. And if Mozilla decides that moderating a social network is too much of a liability, then we’re at extinguish.

To be frank, I’m so jaded by big players in this late stage capitalist world that I don’t trust anyone I might otherwise be fine with, like Mozilla.

I mean, we all probably said similar things about Google 20 years ago. It was a liked company that brought a lot of cool innovations to the web. Or even relatively more recently with Chrome. At launch it was liked, but now it’s weaponized.

To be fair, there are far, FAR worse players than Mozilla. I might even be so far as to be convinced they have benign interests at heart at the moment. But corruption always follows domination.

I just read the entire article and I don’t see why Mozilla really wants in on the Fediverse. It covers a lot of how it wants in, but not the driving motivation.

My best guess is they want to be the next Facebook/Twitter. They see a window and think it’s not something to miss.

Never forget: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”, even if it’s from a relatively liked company like Mozilla.

Okay, if that’s the case then that is a perfectly reasonable implementation.

I could be convinced that the search engine itself isn’t profiling me.

But if by virtue of loading the ad, the advertiser gains my IP address, MAC address, and a fingerprint based on things like my installed fonts, then that’s not really privacy in any meaningful sense.

Wait… how does that work?

If our searches fund trees, then our searches have to be making them money… and I’m not aware of many advertisers that respect privacy.

Okay, but realistically, how can we prevent this from happening in the future?

We’ve already, according to the article, dodged one bullet; but there’s no reason to expect that it’ll be the only one.

Also, due to the nature of the Fediverse being open source, there’s no way to prevent Facebook or other corporate monstrosities from building their own hooks.

I think we need to be prepared to preemptively defederate from the likes of Google, Reddit, Facebook or whatever. Not just this instance, but the greater Fediverse should have a United policy to reject association with those who would consume us and spit us out.