Amusing Planet

> There is no way for a human to operate a car safely over a mid to long period of time.

My observed injury rate per vehicle mile, per trip, or per time spent, in a car is much lower than the same rates on a bicycle. Incidentally, my largest injury on a bike was due to street car rails, so thanks public transit for making the roads less safe for bicycling. I can't count the number of times I've tripped while walking, resulting in mostly minor injuries, but nevertheless more injuries than I've sustained in automobiles (not counting violence from siblings). Lack of safety restraints on public transit mean more minor injuries from sudden stops as well.

> Cars are too big and too heavy

Autorickshaws are much smaller, lighter, and more fuel efficient. Plus they're cute!

> Infrastructure demands are too great

Infrastructure demands for cars scale. You can use cars if you can get fuel to enough fueling stations and have cleared trees and other obstacles from paths. Pavement is optional but encouraged. Parking lots are nice to have, but any cleared space works. You don't get a lot of speed, and probably not much fuel efficiency, but it works. Paved roads are nicer, and they get built because they're useful. Of course, busses and bicycles like paved roads too (paving for bikes requires a lot lower standard too).

If you can't get fuel to fueling stations, there's things like wood gasifiers[1], although gasoline and diesel are much more scalable if the infrastructure is…

Remember (the few that are over ~~600 years old might??:) )
Gutenberg invented movable type and a publication explosion followed. Heretofore books were hand copied, with errors etc. A medieval ~Xerox room was full of scribes - hard at work. A Xerox salesman who promised to double the speed of your copying - he walked in a hulking slave with a whip - all the monks visibly and hurriedly sped up.
Back to Gutenberg, https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.html the Authors fought printing presses, they fought even lending libraries. Books were often chained to the shelves to limit access as well as theft.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-chained-libraries.html

So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up.
MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!

Basically the difference is that the mural is bigger and probably has the building owners consent, but in terms of aesthetics it's a tossup. Most murals seem to be abstract visual noise that is scarcely better than average graffiti, and on the other hand some rare graffiti is far above average. And then there are the murals with a message, which often end up looking like Soviet propaganda posters (or in fact murals, since the Soviets were big on murals too). Huge images of some local leaders linking arms with workers to deliver symbolic world peace or some tacky saccharine sweet bs like that.

If I'm being honest, a lot of these Soviet murals actually demonstrate superior technical skill and aesthetic understanding than the murals in my town (many of which aren't worthy to hang on a mother's refrigerator): https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/10/the-forgotten-soviet-era-murals.html

> In the United States, vehicles with tires carry twice as much freight as vehicles without them. Tires have an outsized role in individual transportation: The vast majority of Americans commute on tires, outweighing all other modes by about fourteen to one.

Another way to look at this is to see the pitiful state of the rail network on the continent: the most efficient way to move goods and people over land, severely underused.

The article's author is very excited about tires, but it would be good to balance the stoke with the health and environmental impacts such mass usage of tires has. Rubber dust and microplastics polution in urban centers and along transport corridors contribute to a range of negative health impacts.

Not to mention, where do discarded tires end up: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/01/worlds-biggest-tire-graveyard-in.html

Just for wonder's sake. Do you think it could be possible for a system of underground waterways to basically be pushed uphill by a natural dam breaking and the pressure of the Mediterranean sea forcing the water to sort of gush uphill?

Similar to [https://www.amusingplanet.com/2018/02/why-is-water-pouring-out-of-this-tree.html] (just a quick Google search, maybe not the best article):

> "In the Estonian village of Tuhala, there is a well that starts spouting water after a heavy downpour. The well happens to be placed just over an underground river. After rain water floods the river, water pressure builds to the point that it shoots up out of the well, sometimes up to half a meter high. This continues for a few days. During this time, more than 100 liters of water can flow out every second."

Or this can be adapted to mechanized crops where it makes sense. Greenhouses where small fragile minihouses of 4x3 meters, made of wood and glass 100 years ago, used only in countries with harsh winters. Nobody in their right mind would use a tractor to work on them. Today they can be seen from the space and are mechanized... where it makes sense to do it. They turned a desert into a huge production of fresh vegetables: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/the-greenhouses-of-almeria.html .

Agrivoltaics could be something or nothing. But don't dismiss it because it today isn't already perfect for everything. Ten years ago the cost of the panels alone would make this projects 100% infeasible.