Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

It obvoiusly doesn't apply here, because UK and all that. But if this were the US, GP would be very much correct. It's been to court... all the way to SCOTUS even. Once something is disposed of, it's fair game unless there is a local ordinance saying otherwise. You might get charged for *trespassing* if you invade someone's private property to go dumpster diving. But if it's not on private property... or if you have permission from the property owner to go through their garbage... there is no theft. Also, there is no 4th ammendment when it comes to your trash. So if you put the waste chemicals from your home meth lab in the trash bags on your curb, yes... the police can pick it up and it is evidence, no warrant required.

I dunno... at this point, it's not like ChatGPT would give *worse* advice than whatever you might get out of HHS. I would take medical advice from GPT before I would trust 45/7, RFK, or Oz to tell me that the sun is warm or water is wet. If you're taking advice from an AI, there's at least a chance... actually a fairly decent chance... you'll get the right answer. But even if it were only batting .300, that's still better than raving loons ranting on about how vaccines cause autism, ivermectin can cure everything from COVID to a stubbed toe, and if ivermectin can't do it colloidal silver can.

I don't so much see AI as a Stack Overflow replacement, per se; but as more of a research assistant that will correlate things like Stack Overflow with the official documentation, my own code, and the code of the other developers at the company. It's fantastic at pointing me in the right directions. But I find that I have to repeatedly tell it to review and cite its sources. And the code it generates can be a decent starting point, but has always needed a lot of work to make it production-ready. It's far too obsequious and inclined to telling me what it thinks I want to hear versus the truth. And biases itself towards fast and east solutions that may come back to bite me in the ass later. So I'm very wary of its solutions. But for troubleshooting and figuring out what the problem is in the first place, THAT is where I've found that it shines.

That's the press doing its usual lousy job of communicating science.

The predictions aren't absolute, they are sets of scenarios for which probabilities are calculated. The longer we drag our feet, the more the set of plausible outcomes narrows. Take Syria -- Syria was a wheat exporter in 1990, but since 2008 or so has been unable to grow enough wheat to feed itself because of climate change when it had become dependent upon imports from Russia and Ukraine. This was early enough that likely we could not have prevented it even if we heeded early warnings in the 1990s when the current scientific picture solidified. We're not going to lose the entire planet in one go, it's going to be one vulnerable population after another.

It may seem like the climate crisis has completely fizzled to you, living in a large, wealthy, and heretofore politically stable country, but it is catastrophic for the people who have got caught. That's how the climate crisis is going to unfold: the rich and comfortable will be able to adapt to the continually changing status quo by moving their financial assets and supply chains out of the way, although you may be paying more for coffee.

At this point it's a matter of degree; we can't avoid problems now like countries being destabilized by climate change and generating millions of refugees. The question is how fast and how big a problem we'll have.

It seems pretty plausible that sub-recreational doses of psychedelics could reduce anxiety, but we have to be mindful that anxiety evolved in our species for a reason. Like inflammation, it’s a natural and critically important protective process that gets out of control in modern lifestyles. It’s unpleasant but pharmaceutically banishing it could leave patients vulnerable.

One of the biggest risks psychedelic therapy will expose patients to are the therapists overseeing their treatment. Psychedelic therapy has an appalling track record of abuse by therapists, including both sexual and economic exploitation. Advocates for psychedelic therapy claim it will “open you up” and I think they’re absolutely correct. But there are other ways to say “open you up” that mean the same thing but set off alarm bells: becoming more suggestible and compliant for example. If the therapist uses psychedelics himself he may have “opened himself up” to some bad ideas about therapist-patient boundaries.

Likewise people microdosing to enhance creativity should exercise caution. Psychedelics absolutely can in some instances unlock creativity by turning down excessive self criticism, but those criitical facilities play an essential role in the parts of the creative process that come after coming up with out of the box ideas. Self reports of microdosing effectiveness should be taken cautiously, due to their potential negative impact on metacognition. Those might be like the drunk who feels more confident driving after a few drinks.

No doubt these drugs have tremendous potential to treat extreme crippling anxiety. They probably even have nootropic potential. But their beneficial effect s come by suppressing natural mental processes that serve important purposes, and the promising results we have come from self reports or clinical reports from advocate researchers. I’ve been following this because I’ve been interested in experimenting with psychedelics for years, but what I have learned has convinced me to hold off until there is evidence and protocols for safe use that would persuade a skeptic.

In general, I would agree. But "most favored" clauses are not exactly as uncommon as you probably think. In fact, the US government itself insists on "most favored" terms in most GSA and other procurement contracts. So they're hardly ones to talk. Instead of targeting the company, because we don't like Bezos these days; we should target the behavior and ban those clauses... everywhere.

No good deed goes unpunished.

It wasn't just DeCSS. There was also RSA, which either the Clinton or Bush... it's been so long I'm uncertain on the timelines... DoJ claimed was "munitions," making the PGP guy an "arms dealer" under American law. And t-shirts with the RSS algorithm printed on them were definitely big back in the day. I had one myself... RSA in perl in the shape of a dolphin... bought on Thinkgeek and worn, like many others, openly on the streets of San Francisco for quite a while before either I lost it it or wore out. Some people even got RSA in tattoo form. Tech, even the rank and file, was more apt to take a dim view of outside interference in its business back then.

I mean... it's probably sitting in his GitHub account somewhere. The security and sharing settings on those can be kind of obtuse. And it's a microsoft product, so you can count on it to be about as "secure" as a slice of Swiss cheese even if the user did everything right.

Or, really, he should have just some GPL code himself, that way he'd be obligated to open the code.

I see Ofcom has a form for submitting complaints.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/make-...

You know what to do and how to do it!

> color does do something

Yes. But in this case, the color RED does NOT. You may recall that a couple of decades ago, there was a flirtation with making fire trucks and other emergency vehicles a certain shade of yellow-green that looked like you just drank a glass of Nickelodeon slime, chased it with a florescent highlighter's innards, and then vomited the whole mess back up. But that color wasn't random. Actual studies were done. And that neon green puke color is actually MORE visible to the human eye and MORE attention-grabbing to the human brain than red is.

But there was a mass backlash and now fire trucks and other emergency vehicles are red again... because tradition. Red == NFR. Puke-green == functional.

Also, BMORG has gotten awfully snooty and hostile and contradictory toward the attendees over the years.

The last year I went was the first year you had to create a "Burner profile" online in order to justify to them that you are worthy enough to be allowed the privlidge of buying a ticket... only available online and through their purchasing system. Or... if you were special and connected to a certian set of politically powerful theme camps, you could be allowed to buy a ticket through them. But everyday joe and jill with no connections and no history of attendance? Forget about it.

Fun fact: Before that year, you could simply pop up to the Upper Haight, walk into Distractions, and buy a ticket with cash; no justifications, no proving to some "more burner than thou" asshole that you're worthy, no hoops at all. Just plonk down the cash, and go.

And yeah... the quality of the crowd and event dropped dramatically that year; to the point that certian thinks that happened that year soured me on the idea of going back for a good number of years. And even though I do, now, occasionally get the idea in my head that I might want to go back... the idea of working that much for my vacation, while paying nearly 4x just to BMPRG for the privlidge to do so, and getting a less fun and more hostile event? Yeah... no thanks.

And then there's the whole: Bring everything you need to survive in the desert for a week. BUT... don't bring it in a car! Oh, no... there's a penalty fee for that. Just ride the Burner Bus with nothing but your clothes, tent, and sleeping bag. Other people will take care of you. And also... don't you dare rely on anybody else for anything. Practice "Radical self-reliance!" If you rely on anyone else for anything, you're a parasitic sparkle pony who doesn't deserve to be there and should just die. But don't you DARE expect to being your week's worth of everything you need to live in the desert in a dirty, stinking, CAR... you monster.

One of my neighbors whoâ(TM)s in his eighties wound up switching to a recumbent tricycle because he had balance issues. Which sucked. But the tricycle is awesome and probably would be comfortable for you to sit on.

Nevertheless, you should ride what works and is enjoyable for you. The point is not to punish 80-year-olds by forcing them to ride bikes they arenâ(TM)t safe on. I have an Azore city bike that I really like. Wouldnâ(TM)t mind still being able to ride it at 80.