Making Bryant a bike boulevard was beyond stupid. Bryant is a relatively busy through street (IIRC, it is a former streetcar line and is a current bus route), and yes it is a common car alternative to Lyndale.

And yes, I understand the "utility" argument of riding on Lyndale or some other busy street because that's where the $widget_store is, but it makes less sense if the trip to the Lyndale business is more than 2-3 blocks. If it's 8-10 blocks, cutting a block east or west to a much less traveled, safer street makes so much more sense.

I work as a SMB consultant and we run into a fair number of small business owners really intent on managing their employees "behavior" (web browsing, emailing, occasionally down to installing and running commercial spyware).

I get why some situations (harassment of other employees, strong suspicions of financial crimes, corporate espionage, etc) may warrant this, but so often it seems like they're trying to manage behavior instead of managing the results of their employees work.

If you have an employee who is supposed to produce a given work product, wouldn't it be more effective to actually focus on the work product (quality, quantity, etc) and not on whether or not they buy stuff from Amazon during work hours?

If your employee can't produce the desired work product then you have a business-rational reason for firing them. If their work product meets the stated goals, then why do you care what else they may be doing provided it is not a detriment to the rest of the business?

At the end of the day it seems like a kind of paternalism that is focused on controlling people, not managing their work.

Cycling seems fairly safe to me if you wear a helmet and you choose your routes to avoid cars.

Here in Minneapolis I notice what I would call a lot of "aggressive" cyclists -- people who run traffic control devices (stop signs, lights, etc) and get dangerously close to traffic that might otherwise change speeds/lanes/turn/etc very quickly. From the cyclists I talk to, it almost seems like cycling is taking on a political component, too, which seems to contribute to aggressive cycling or at least an aggressive attitude.

The other thing that kind of amazes me are the people who INSIST on cycling on a busy through street (like Lyndale through South Minneapolis) instead of moving over just a block on either side and riding on a nearly empty residential street, like Garfield or Aldrich. Or the bike racing gear wearers who insist on riding on the parkway instead of the bike path 25 feet away, in spite of the fact that the parkway is a single lane and the parking cutouts along the parkway are pretty narrow -- if cars are parked in the cutouts there's precious little room to pass a cyclist.

As long as people insist on riding in traffic and people kind of a jerk about it, it doesn't surprise me that there are conflicts a cyclist will lose simply based on mass.

I had a 42" Sony LCD rear projection TV until about a year ago and there was no way that was "big enough" at 3m viewing distance. With letterboxed content (most movies), the shrinkage in vertical size was enough to make it even smaller.

I replaced it with a 70" Sharp and for about the first couple of days I was like "this may be too big.." but I'm now completely used to it and I don't think it would be a problem to go even larger in this space.

...Or worse, with bifocals?

When something like this becomes available, it'd be awesome even if it was only used for watching a movie on an airplane, but I worry it would be worthless for people who have an eyeglasses prescription.

Or are you saying that the fault lies with US citizens for not taking below-minimum wage jobs payed under the table?

It kind of boils down to "Why won't blacks work?"

Racism is a canard -- I can't believe that someone who is "racist" would reject an English-speaking, native-born African American for a low/unskilled job yet be perfectly willing to hire (at some risk), an illegal immigrant who can't speak English.

What's really damning is that people may be rejecting blacks specifically because they make poor employees based on actual experience.

From a macoeconomic standpoint, there clearly is a demand for low-skilled labor, otherwise millions of illegals wouldn't be here working. While some employers may be engaging in mere economic discrimination (wanting to pay less for labor), in aggregate if there was a demand for N units of work for W units of wages, there still should be employers wanting to accept some lower level of additional employment for the same amount of wages (ie, hiring some differentially lower number of native workers for the same amount of pay, just getting a lower total amount of increased production from the reduced number of hires.

I do think that blacks are mostly rejecting work because of low pay, but the problem is they are competing with people from the third world with drastically reduced expectations ("Wow! Food and water that won't give me dysentery!"), which is one of the big reasons to reject "open migration" -- nobody, including the middle class, can compete with people willing to live lifestyles only marginally better than third world.

But there is also a sense that they won't work.

Urination has a public health and sanitation objection tied to it, as well as exposing the genetalia in public.

Breastfeeding is the feeding of a child and it does not expose any genetalia; you're more likely to see a nipple at the Oscar awards than you are when a woman breastfeeds in public.

It's a good thing we're not at war against the Swedish Navy.

It's always a sign of the weakness of a left-wing political argument when advocates for a position overtly or more subtly make opposition to their positions a symptom of or an overt act of "racism".

The debate surrounding immigration is a great example of this. If you are opposed to illegal immigration (that is, bypassing border controls, overstaying a visa, working without work permission, etc) you are increasingly labeled racist, presumably because you aren't really opposed to migrant labor, you're opposed to Latinos.

This is too bad, because I think there are a lot of ways in which easier migration from outside our borders (Latino, or otherwise) has a lot of negative consequences.

One obvious example that seldom gets mentioned is the unemployment rate among African Americans. This figure is often quite high -- 15-20% or more depending on the measure. The jobs taken by illegal immigrants are almost always low-skill, entry-level jobs, the same jobs that young, unskilled African Americans could take.

If you're concerned about African American unemployment, you should naturally be concerned about wage depression and competition for these jobs by illegal immigrants. Isn't supporting a lenient immigration policy which keeps African Americans unemployed the real racist policy?

And then there's affordable housing, health care, schools, and so on, all of which are pressured by large numbers of low-skilled immigrants.

Sure, we're all upset by the crooks in the system (although I would argue that Madoff, Stewart and Abramoff are all distractions, not the real problem), but the rich and the power structure gain by wage depression and keeping the working classes on edge through unlimited low-skilled job competition. High wages and a "seller's market" for labor actually keep pressure on the corporate elite.

You would hope that an articulated train would be modular enough that segments/cars could be decoupled to perform maintenance or swap segments/cars as needed.

It's probably more work than just switching cars in the yard, though, and the segments are probably more specialized so you can't substitute a middle segment for an end/rear car, although I don't know if all existing cars have this interchangeability although visually it looks that way.

...already articulated, they just don't have a flexible enclosure built around the articulation point.

I don't think that having the coupling area enclosed will make the entire train any less articulated than it is now.

While World War II-style ship-ship naval warfare is irrelevant, the Navy remains an excellent way to project power into remote regions without the need for land-based facilities.

It's a lot easier to fly sorties off a carrier deck than it is to fly planes halfway around the world, not to mention providing a platform for command/control, logistics, troops and helicopters. It's fun to read about B-2s flying out of Kansas to bomb Afghanistan, but you won't be flying A-10 missions from Kansas unless you're attacking Missouri.

The downsides are the vulnerabilities of ships generally, but there's a lot of risk mitigation. The principal risk are anti-ship missiles but the Navy puts a lot of effort into anti-missile systems, but few players have the sophisticated anti-ship missile technology needed to even be a threat and fewer still are willing to risk retaliation. Sea-borne and airborne risks are pretty low to near zero.

Is a carrier group expensive? Sure, but so are building, maintaining, staffing and equipping land facilities, and these have a diplomatic cost or may be unobtainable.

I've read that most of the road network in Europe at this time was originally built by the Romans and Roman armies would basically build a fort at the end of every day's march; these forts would be the basis of towns along the road. This meant that the nearest village was basically a day's walk.

I would argue that they didn't have much reason to travel even to the next village. At best they would trade for agricultural products or craft goods they didn't have or have enough of (pottery, animals, wood goods, ground flour maybe, wine or beer). There really wasn't anything else to buy even if they had gold because they wasn't that much else made.

It really wasn't a consumer products society. People made what they needed.

For the same reason you can't go to the IRS web site and fill out your taxes in a web form instead of paying $79 for TurboTax.

Lobbyists in congress said it was unfair that the government would do something that they could possibly make money on.

A lot of evidence suggest that Alzheimer's is "type 3 diabetes", so does that mean that a "good diet" is what we've been told is a good diet since the late 1960s (high carbohydrate, low fat), or is a "good diet" what is suggested by low-carbohydrate advocates suggest, one high in fat and very low in carbohydrates (a ketogenic diet)?

And what kind of exercise? From what I've read, there's not a lot to suggest that exercise has much influence on weight loss, so perhaps just "being active" (walking 2-3 miles per day) is good enough versus engaging in running or other vigorous cardio? And then there are those who suggest that weight training is better.

My sense is we really don't know the answers to these questions very well and there may be huge variations in response on an individual basis, suggesting a strong genetic influence.