I haven’t watched much of Linus’s stuff, but his behavior in the three Linux challenge videos reminded me of the way Conan O’Brien would act with his staff. It struck me as an off-putting blend of arrogance, entitlement, and impatient senility.

I just watched that Linus tech tips video where the guy uninstalls critical system components by accident while trying to install steam.

First the GUI for the package manager refuses to do it, then apt gives him a warning that he’s going to break his system. It even makes him type “Yes, do what I say!” but he’s too much of a clown to read the warning messages all over his screen. He even smirks at the camera about how silly it is that he would need to type such a thing before he proceeds to mess everything up.

People were trying to defend him, saying that the system shouldn’t have allowed him to do it or that the warnings should have been flashing and shooting rainbows out of the monitor or that a robot arm should have come out and started honking his clown nose to let him know he was doing something stupid.

I get by pretty well just using my bank’s website. If you need the bank’s app for something like occasionally depositing checks, maybe you could keep your old phone in a drawer with your checkbook.

I think the takeaway here should be that meat heavy diets are worse for the environment than you might realize.

The takeaway should not be that cars are only barely worse than bikes.

When you power your bike with your legs, you burn energy. That energy comes from food. Producing and transporting the food to you has a climate impact. Cycling has a climate impact.

Riding a short distance vs riding a long distance is irrelevant. Both systems require an amount of energy per unit of distance. Because the energy is supplied in different ways, there is a different total amount of carbon emitted of per unit of energy. For ebikes, that amount is lower than it is for traditional, human powered bikes.

Here are a couple sources, dickface:

https://www.ebikes.ca/documents/Ebike_Energy.pdf

https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-environmental-impact

A watt hour is equal to 0.86 nutritional calories. My estimate of 40 watt hours per mile converts to about 35 kcal. Estimates of the energy taken to pedal a bike are about 30-40 kcal/mile. That checks out!

1 kilowatt hour is equivalent to 860 kcal.

1 kilowatt hour from a coal power plant generates about 1.0-1.1 kg of CO2.

For a typical Western diet, studies suggest that the average emissions associated with food production and transportation can range from about 0.5 to 2.5 kg of CO2 per 1,000 kcal of food consumed. (0.4-2.1 kg of CO2 per 860 kcal)

The ebike generally has a smaller environmental footprint than the analog bike, as most sources of power produce less CO2 than coal power plants and most people eat more meat than necessary, putting them in the higher range of the food CO2 production range.

Unless you’re vegetarian, a traditional bicycle will have a higher carbon footprint than an ebike, due to how inefficient it is to grow and transport food when compared to production of electrical power.

Ebikes are way more efficient than electric cars, too. I calculated that my bike uses about 40 watt hours per mile, compared to about 250-350 for an electric car.

I’m sure this will draw some criticism but I’ve found duck.ai to be extremely helpful in troubleshooting minor issues with my Linux mint installation and recently with accessing and understanding SMART hard drive diagnostic data. It’s very helpful in figuring out which commands could be useful in the terminal and in understanding exactly what each terminal command is doing. Of course finding answers in forums and manuals is still relevant and important but as a beginner, this has been a fast and easy way to get advice.

Cool form factor, if it can run Linux.