Yup, love the adrenaline rush, the simple "get up with this heavy shit on you" on it.
After running for a decade without any spectacular performance to speak of and constant weight issues, one year of powerlifting 2x a week - not only is every single health metric better with less running, possibly the best they've ever been, at a point where they should be declining; my running is hitting PBs as well.
Levelised Cost of Energy is the highest, in the entire developed world, in the UK, which has enough wind and solar installed to entirely meet needs today.
It is NOT cheap, it is cheap for sellers, because they account on the basis of a MWh being equally useful all the time. It isn't. There are TWh-scale shortfalls in winter because, and a medieval peasant understood this, a shortage of ambient energy is what winter is, and it's worth paying energy penny you have to avoid its worst effects.
Business is not better. I've worked in the chemicals industry, and conferences in Europe have been like a wake for the last decade. I've overseen large orders go to China because, I could not give a shit how much it cost, the European green alternative - for delivery within Europe - could not guarantee timeframes, due to reliance on renewables. The Chinese shipped product could. That is your "cheap".
You can buy uranium from Russia, Kazakhstan, Mali, Canada, US, Australia, or the sea if you really want to, all of those have large reserves, and store multiple years' worth more or less by accident, modern industrial processes actually struggle to make sense at the low volumes nuclear requires. Bringing that up as a problem is just not honest.
They're absolutely dual use, which is why the greens have always been against them.
But that's like trying to prevent cow rearing by outlawing mince. You don't rear a cow for mince, you rear it for steak. The customer will pay for steak pretty much whatever.
My country just had ~180 GWh of lost load from wind, in winter. That's not even a 1-in-5 event, that's a multiple-times-per-year event, and it's billions in cost to the economy. Industry is dead, I've personally seen steel orders go to China because even if renewables were free we could't handle delivery estimates of "lol idk", and nor can anyone else. I just can't comprehend the levels of denial around this, as if my and literally everyone with industrial experience is irrelevant. Data centres want SMRs and that's the easiest, most trivial task to time-shift around I can imagine. Electricity that is not reliable is not the same product, it is not even a comparable product, in no other field would it be treated as such, and if you can't provide an actual monetary estimate for turning it into a reliable product, not just "iT's gEtTiNg cHeApEr BRO", you should not be in this conversation.
More efficient, but much more expensive. I'm sick of people handwaving $100 per kWh. That is two orders of magnitude off where it needs to be to do anything more than virtue signal.
Meanwhile multiple grids are now paying renewable to curtail, because guess what, the variability is correlated (it's the exact same damn mathematics we used to fuck up the entire global economy in 2008, which is why I'm so surprised people are handwaving that too, but whatever). If you want to minimise cost without relying on gas to save you on dark still days, you want a cheap use for the surplus, round-trip be damned.
> The most common angle of attack is territorial: "get off _my_ road".
Yeah, but why do you think it's your road when in a car, especially when the same attitude exists in places without the tax, or with drivers cars that are exempt, or hell, if you've just not bothered paying it? My bet is it's nothing to do with ~£100 of tax, and everything to do with not wanting to admit you were misled by advertisers into thinking spending tens of thousands of your hard-earned cash on something you thought would give you effortless, fast, convenient transport.
To be fair, bicycles probably did lead to more marriage breakups. Certainly in the UK they're considered a key part of emancipation. No longer, as a woman, is your dating pool limited entirely to the boys in your village. And if the boy you did marry turns out to be an angry drunk - well. Bicycles aren't fast, but they're faster than walking. And they're cheap.
And the latter, if we're honest, is the real reason for bicycle hate. The banker or tech bro on a carbon frame is both conspicuously consuming more than you and actually spending less than you. Much less. And, in a city, going faster. Hell, the homeless guy with three steel tubes lashed together might be too. That should be a right wing dream - a private investment, low regulation, small business friendly, with rewards going to the individuals who work harder.
But sometimes, we're just not nice people, and we don't like having our egos punctured.
Think I'd put money behind a separate machine, but one that just delivers you the brick at hand height, rather than a continual bend-down/place/pick-up cycle. I would say "Brick Butler" or if a startup... Brcklr, the device is free, but the bricks have DRM and post instagram stories as you lay them.
After running for a decade without any spectacular performance to speak of and constant weight issues, one year of powerlifting 2x a week - not only is every single health metric better with less running, possibly the best they've ever been, at a point where they should be declining; my running is hitting PBs as well.
The downside, I'm a bore about it.