You don't have to give a shit about farmers, one way or the other. DST is irrelevant to farming and I really can't fathom how that myth that it is and is kept for the farmers got started. Cows don't read clocks. Nor do pigs, chickens, or sheep. Crops don't operate on clock time either. So neither do farmers. They tend to the crops and animals when the crops and animals need tending to; no matter where the big hand and little hand point.

So really... you *SHOULD* care about farms and farmers. You *DO* have to eat, after all. But they are entirely irrelevant when it comes to daylight saving time.

For some people it's not the hour of sleep, it's suddenly waking up an hour early. I'm one of them. If I stay up an hour late and get up at my normal time, I'll be more groggy and tired than usual for a while. But I'll be functional and more or less normal by the time I get to the office. If I go to bed at my normal time and have to wake up an hour early though... Let's just say I'm not a pleasant person until I'm about three coffees into the day.

Plus, the daylight lasting an hour longer is a bummer in the evenings; causing a 1-hour delay in the beginning of the city's nightlife. That's bad enough on the weekends, when you can at least sleep in the next day. But when the day's fun time starts an hour later, but you still have the weekday alarm to go to work the next day, it puts a crimp in the social life, which is... also... a bummer.

Well maybe schools could just not have such absurd hours that not only muck about with daylight but are actively detrimental to their students' health.

Just HOW many studies have there been about how important a good night's sleep is to a child's, and particular a teenager's, health and ability to focus and pay attention on class? I couldn't begin to guess. But they all pretty much agree that they need more sleep and waking up early adds to the detrimental effects of the insufficient rest.

And yet... When I wasn't in high school, first period started at, and I shit you not, 7:30am. That meant a 5:30am wakeup to catch a 6:00am bus. I can't even deal well with a 5:30 wake-up now as an adult, with access to coffee and even ephedrine. The only way I'm functional at 5:30am is if I've been up all night. If special circumstances like an early flight I have to get up at the butt-crack of dawn to catch necessitate, I pre-stage a 5-hour energy on my nightstand, have the coffee maker all set up to go the moment I'm out of the shower, and have all of my bags fully packed, weighed, and arranged the night before. As a teenager, I was the walking dead that early.

Elementary school was not much better. Classes started at 8:15am. Oddly, middle school was the odd duck out and started at a much more reasonable 9:30am.

Sy yeah... maybe instead of playing shenanigans with everyones' clocks, schools should try listening to the people who actually study and know about childhood development and shift their hours to a later and more reasonable time in general.

What is clearly needed here is an update to the privacy laws. Sure, with a paid account anonymity is not a thing. But OpenAI doesn't need to know my address, eye color, whether I am allowed to ride a motorcycle and with or without glasses. And they sure as shit don't need my license number, which is very useful for identity thieves. This is a drastic overreach to gather WAY more PII than is necessary to deliver the service, and they need to be slapped down hard and fast.

And this trend of "scan your ID in to use this app/service/site/etc" bullshit has been proliferating. And let's be real... they're really gathering that information for marketing purposes just like rave and club promoters do when THEY swipe your ID in those machines that "validate your age" that have been a thing for a couple of decades now. No, that's not made up. A shady promoter actually admitted as much to me back in my raver and club kid days. No one actually gives a rip if you're over 21. Money is money. But they harvest your address when they swipe your license and sell it, along with the club/party you attended and who was DJing.

So this will NOT stop on it's own. We need some jurisdictions that actually DO care, at least a little bit, for their citizenry, to act. Which means that it's the GDPR and CCPA that can fight back against these shenanigans.

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.

Don't see too many cars on walking paths and sidewalks. The number of e-bikes on walking paths and sidewalks has skyrocketed. It's almost as if someone decided being a pedestrian is a sinful activity, and that every walkway must now be infested with morons on wheels.

Then let me get started on mobility scooters.

I'd just like them banned from walking paths. At least once a day I'm getting some crazy asshole ringing his bell as he comes flying up behind me. I'm not a fan of any kind of bike on walking paths, but at least the people on regular bikes have more control. The worst are probably older riders who often seem like they're barely in control. And the three wheeled ones take up outrageous amounts of space on smaller paths, regularly forcing other users on some of the narrower paths I frequent to get to the side of the road.

It's hard to imagine, short of motor vehicles, anything more hazardous to a pedestrian than some stupid prick on an e-bike.

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.

"Mature technology" can mean different things. Batteries hold a LOT of energy which can usually be released very quickly if the battery is damaged. We want batteries with more energy and less volume, so pack that energy tighter. And as time goes on, we get companies which... don't follow every single safety precaution (because that's expensive) in design and manufacture of the batteries, especially because the components of the batteries are made by many companies, then assembled by other companies, then sold to other companies for use in products which were ordered by Apple, Samsung, etc for sale to us. A few battery issues are hard to track back, and companies which ignore safety are usually happy to fold and reform with a different name when lawsuits appear.

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.

And it may prove to be the most prophetic of all ST:TOS episodes. Unfortunately, the C-suite is currently jacking off to it. "No, don't let that pointy-eared freak control the guard's mind! And pass my cocaine!"

News sites have been able to do this for decades; a simple robots.txt file will do this. But no news sites wants this. They want Google to send traffic to them (and only them, but not their competition). And they don't want Google to add any value. And, oddly enough, that's not what consumers want. If consumers wanted to read "nothing but Daily Mail" they can do it... but they don't do it.

There are a lot of problems with the profit model for news sites. The sites are part of the problem; consumers are a large part of the problem; Google is part of the problem. But sites like the Daily Mail have helped create the world that they find themselves in by pushing political narratives and avoiding facts, so I'm not feeling bad for them.

To be fair, when I see a verbatim paragraph on multiple news sites (usually meaning that none of them wrote it), I'm not really feeling bad about their copyright on their "borrowed" content. This happens a lot. And the term "victim" is debatable.

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.