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.

The irony of your sarcasm is it actually *is* horrible.

Water is good - necessary even - but too much water will kill you. Choice is the exact same way - it's entirely possible to have too much of it, as much as that contradicts an ethos buried deeply in the American id.

Lol, so many of the posts here reek of bitter developers who have clearly never worked in the halls of quality software engineering

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.

Intel is simultaneously a.) creating a new GPU ecosystem, b.) implementing their 1.8A process node, c.) developing the "nova lake" architecture d.) perfecting "backside" power delivery, e.) building several new fabs.

That's a lot of spending. Apparently, despite what Reddit thinks, they're not planning on going out of business.

Also, Intel is shipping their "Pro" GPUs now: the B50 is out. 16GB of VRAM and 170 INT8 TOPS at 70W for $350. Level1Techs has a review (yesterday) and it looks like a pretty good product. They're promising SR-IOV with VDI support for this GPU in Q4: so, remote VM desktops with hardware video acceleration at a non-"enterprise" price point, which would be a first.

The Prilukskoye field in Donetsk has 600M bbl of proven oil reserves. In 2013 the Budishchansko-Chutovskoye field was discovered. Reserves are at least 100M bbl based on initial estimates, but no one really knows the full potential because it hasn't been developed.

The truth is that no one knows the full extent of oil in Ukraine. Oil wells that were tapped out in the 70's in Ukraine are later found to have more oil because modern seismology and recover technology is better than 1970's Soviet technology. There is even oil in Crimea, but the scale of that is unknown because Russia invaded Crimea a year after it was discovered.

Here is a map of proven reserves of gas and oil in Ukraine to help you avoid saying stupid things like that again.

That just means Google is now operating in exactly the same manner that Microsoft used to be when they had dominance over consumer device operating systems. Google now has dominance in the mobile market with Android, and is using that to shove Chrome down people's throats. Personally, the first thing I do with any new phone is download Firefox, just like I did (and still do) with new computers. As the statistics show, though, the vast majority of people don't bother to do that so whatever is the default is what they use. The right and fair thing to do would be to stop them from abusing their monopoly power by offering a choice of browsers at time of install, and not favor their own browser in any way. That would have been the thing to force MS to do as well back when they were being sued for abuse of monopoly power after taking down Netscape with the same tactic. Unfortunately, it didn't happen then and it isn't happening now either. So, Google will continue to dominate the market unless and until some other highly disruptive technology comes along to unseat the current smartphone market and gives another player a chance to enter and eventually dominate the market in a similar fashion.

Well then you're stupid. Putin wants to claim the vast oil and gas basins in Ukraine. Putin wants warm water ports, domination over the Black Sea, and a land bridge into Southeastern Europe. Putin wants Ukraine's oil and gas pipelines and all the leverage over Europe that comes with them. Putin wants the mighty industrial base that was Ukraine under the Soviets, where much of the very best of the Soviet Union's technology and industry were created and built. Putin wants the immense bread basket of the Ukrainian plains, as depicted in the flag of Ukraine, and full control of these immense food resources as leverage over dependent nations in Africa and the Middle East. Putin wants the prestige of conquering a neighbor in Europe and making the world accept it.

So stop being stupid.

I wouldn't be fine with that. Someone would probably "buy" something because they wanted to have it available indefinitely. If they later found that their "permanent" purchase was revoked, they might no longer have the option to buy it elsewhere because it was no longer available, even if they did have that option available when they first "bought" the product from the other vendor. It's still a scam in the lying vendor's favour.

Don't argue with that fuckwit. Malcontents like rsilvergun are perpetually enraged by the existence of Amish and other such faith communities that fail to fail.

Yes, you are correct: they are growing steadily, snapping up affordable land when large chunks of contiguous property becomes available. They prefer land that has low value to conventional agrarians; northern state rural property, where winter provides free refrigeration for slaughter. A bonus when it has tracts of hardwood lumber, which they clear (by hand) and use for high quality furniture products.

And the food is crazy. They eat like 19th century landed aristocracy.

Sure. Go have that squabble with someone else. I had nothing to say about whether or not Commonwealth Fusion will ever make an erg of commercial electricity. My comment is limited to the novel design of their toroid.

How have the Amish survived your theory?

I do doubt the even medium term viability of a tech bro utopia, however. Without outside consequences, 95% of the members would end up in dungeon.

This is basically correct. They're using "high temperature" superconducting "tape" to build toroidal magnets. It's a big deal for tokamak design because they can get extremely powerful magnetic fields in a "small" toroid: SPARC is physically tiny when compared to ITER, but expected to produce to higher field strength. This lowers costs, risks, etc.