It really doesn't take that long if the laptop is hot. Happened to me quite a few times, and I was usually getting up at least once every couple hours, usually more.

Tables/desks also allow you far better posture.

Far better posture than what? The whole notion of 90-degree upright posture being good for you Victorian-era pseudoscience. Sitting upright at 90 degrees is actually the most demanding position your back can be in. Your muscles have to constantly work to balance you against gravity. A 135 degree reclined position, such as in a recliner, is much better for your back than a 90 degree upright posture or a 70 degree forward slouch (e.g. your two typical "table positions"). When you're reclined, the chair takes a lot of the weight off your back.

The whole concept of there being a "correct posture" is generally considered a myth today. There's very little correlation between static posture and the presence of back or neck pain. We're not bridges or columns designed to hold a fixed geometry; we're built for motion. Your body tells you what posture is best for you by your level of comfort/discomfort. Pain means "change positions, blood flow is dropping, tissues are tired". It has nothing to do with "your spine is misaligned" or anything like that.

The one catch to sitting reclined is that your neck is looking more down, usually more than is comfortable for long periods; most people prefer their laptops somewhat elevated. For me, I have a footrest, so my legs are up and bent, and it's up from my thighs to my knees. Laptop trays / lap desks, which often have some padding at the bottom, also add some extra height.

Why do you assume it's a mistake? Maybe Chunder is a Dutch person whose space bar is sticking and they're trying to type something like "regarding the trees", "to the trees", "toward shooting the breeze", "priced in trees", "chug trees", etc.

Do they? I thought most people literally use them on their laps. I do, certainly. Why get a laptop if you're just going to use it sitting at a table as if it were a PC?

I've also gotten this condition, BTW (after getting sick of it, I got a laptop tray, and that solved the problem), though on my thighs, not by abdomen (I sit using a laptop - laying down to use one sounds difficult?). Patterned just like that kid's. I didn't have a name for it before, now I do. I'm not sure why you'd have to go to the hospital to figure it out, as it's very obvious what's causing it - you leave a hot thing on one part of your body for a long time and then it turns red; it's not exactly rocket science to put two and two together.

ED: I just looked it up; about 80-90% of people use them on a table, 10-20% on their lap, so I guess I'm in the minority. *shrug*

ED: US disabled trip type % link didn't post: link.

You're from an anti-car city

This is a deeply foolish statement, frankly

"Hey AI, is London a pro-car or anti car city, and if so, how much?

By global standards, London is considered one of the most anti-car (or transit-first, car-restricting) megacities in the world.
While urban planners usually describe it as “transit-oriented” or “people-first” and critics often frame it as a “war on motorists,” the outcome is the same: driving and owning a private car in London has been made deliberately expensive, slow, and inconvenient compared to using public transit or active travel....

Please be fucking serious in this conversation. You live in a city that has tried to deliberately make life hard on motorists.

I clicked on your link and it said: car 58 minutes, public transport: 49 minutes, walking 2hr17 minutes, cycling 40 minutes

Google is punking me :P TL/DR, what you see depends on what time you're clicking the link, because right now it says to me 42 driving, 49 public transport, walking 2hr17 minutes, cycling 40 minutes.

At best, your argument becomes "transit is faster than car by public transit only during peak hours in one of the most anti-car major cities on Earth which is, I must say, a really damned weak argument against cars.

I find the time by car is usually an underestimate and the time by public transport an over estimate.

Boy, let me tell you about my experience with delays from being just minutes too late from public transit stops (or being on time but they left early), including literally having to spend a night sleeping in an airport in Japan because I just barely missed the last train off the island. Funny, a car has never done that to me.

Your average European city's public transit commute times are worse than Los Angeles's, a city whose transit is famous for traffic.

Cool story.

Why are you so deeply anti-fact? You know you can literally just google things, right? The average commute time in Los Angeles is only half an hour. Again, this is a city famous for traffic. Let's just randomly pick European cities and look up their average public transit commute times. Here's the cities I randomly picked (if you want more, name them and I'll look them up for you if you can't google things yourself):

Istanbul 72-77 min
Rome 52-54 min
Paris (Île-de-France) 47 - 52 min
London 46 - 50 min
Barcelona 48 - 50 min
Madrid 48 - 50 min
Manchester 43 - 45 min
Birmingham 44 min
Venice 42 min
Nice 40 min
Stockholm 34 - 36 min
Prague 32 - 35 min
Warsaw 31 - 35 min
Berlin 31 - 33 min
Hamburg 29 - 31 min
Munich 27 - 29 min
Amsterdam 25 - 30 min
Vienna 25 - 28 min

Yes, cars are faster. And it's not remotely shocking that they are.

Cars are only faster if they are provided with truly colossal amounts of infrastructure

Exactly how much do you think public transit infrastructure costs? By the time they gutted it, California's HSR project was projected to be $231,3B, aka $287M per km. Sure, California is expensive (environmental regulations, seismic concerns, mountains, etc), so let's look at France, probably the cheapest HSR builders in Europe per unit throughput. The London-Lyon corridor - LGV Sud-Est - cost €4,65B to build (would be about €8B today). 409km, so €19,6M/km. Traffic equivalent of a 6-8 lane highway. A 6-lane greenfield highway in Europe costs €12-20M/km. So even the French don't beat road costs with rail.

You think everyone in a city lives at a hospital? *eyeroll*

What are you talking about? Do you think I've had difficulty getting to the local hospital? Do you think my elderly relative (who can no longer drive) does?

Hey, remember just a moment ago the discussion about how when you were looking at public transit during the day you were getting times slightly better than the cars, while when I was looking at them in the evening, they were well more than cars? Yeah, try telling a 3 AM medical emergency to wait until the buses are coming more often, then walk during your medical distress to the bus stop and wait there.

Per kilometer, cycling injury rates are much higher than car rates even if you take bike-car collisions out of the equation (also, injuries are disproportionally among the inebriated, just like car accidents).

So 75% for cars, 2% for bicycles...

https://www.gov.uk/government/... [www.gov.uk]

For the love of YHVH, develop some actual reading comprehension. You completely misread section 5.1 of your own link. The report states that 76% of all DUI-involved vehicles were cars - not that 75% of car crashes involve DUIs. Cars make up 80%+ of all traffic on the road, so of course they make up the majority of DUI vehicles (base rate fallacy). If you look at chart 7 in your own link, only 11,8% of cars in fatal crashes had drink or drugs recorded as a factor. Over 85% of fatal car crashes involve sober drivers.

Furthermore, a ~15% alcohol factor doesn't bridge the gap. Per billion passenger kilometers, the serious injury rate for cars is 13-19, while for bicycles it is 520 -650 (~35-40x higher). Even if you removed every single alcohol-related car crash from existence, cycling would still be over 3000% more dangerous per kilometer.

Trauma registry data shows that 60-80% of serious cycling hospitalizations are single-bike crashes (slips, potholes, falls) with zero cars involved. Because, believe it or not, falling off a bike at 25 km/h onto tarmac easily breaks a collarbone, whereas a modern car protects its occupants from serious injury in the vast majority of impacts.

Look, cars created the suburbs.

Look, no they didn't. I grew up in Suburban London. The suburb and its railway station

What are you talking about? A commuter rail town is not a "suburb". And they do not behave functionally the same. A rail line lets a city expand outward as spokes, linear expansion proportional to the number of lines. Anything off the lines adds significant transit delays to get to the lines, so city growth is linear. Vehicles do not suffer transfer delays and roads scale down more than rail, so cars offered quadratic scaling, cities scaling in all directions. This created a large area of low-density areas for housing, allowing people to live at lower density, with larger homes and gardens - the suburb.

Seriously, are you actually going to argue that the UK is doing well on this front?

You mean the common one? No one here calls vans, lorries or motorbikes "cars"

Well, good for you there?

I like how you shifted the goal posts from freight to commercial traffic

Please make up your mind whether the thing you're wanting to oppose is private traffic, commercial traffic, or passenger vehicles regardless of traffic type, and then get back to me.

it's all the same infrastructure that they use. The lower the utilization rate, the more expensive construction and mainetance becomes per unit traffic.

And yet congestion is also considered to cost the economy a lot of money.

Because it slows down people from getting to where they need to be. Kicking cars off roads is the ultimate possible form of "slowing down cars".

False. Driving is about as represented in the disabled as the general population (60-80% of trips), but is essential to large classes.

False. TFL publish this data.

Look at this - classic reply from you. Shouting "false" first, but *then* taking an interest in the data. UK 60%, US 75-84%.

Maybe in the future try actually checking the data first before reaching your conclusion?

The largest disabled demographic has trouble walking or standing. A bus trip (let alone a walk) requires walking to the stop, waiting outdoors in variable weather (sometimes without a bench or shelter), boarding and getting seated, and walking from the final stop to the destination.

Yes, and?

Are you fucking serious? Have you ever actually been friends with a disabled person, as opposed to them just being random scenery around you? One of my best friends where I used to live had cerebral palsy. Saying "Yes, and?" to the notion that she would wall all the way to a bus stop, wait outdoors (possibly without a bench or shelter) board and get seated, then walk all the way to her destination, is frankly insulting. FYI, she drove most places - her car was fitted with hand controls.

And yet my elderly relative take the bus and train.

Great for your elderly relative to be in good enough shape for that? Nice to know she's not disabled to the point that that is taken from her. Not so nice to know that your city is so hostile to vehicle traffic that it's her only practical option.

A trip is full of uncertainty - broken bus ramps,

I suppose you have numbers on how frequent that is... or are you jut inventing problems?

Why yes, I do! (once again, you don't bother to check things).

In the Netherlands, 11% of bus boarding devices and 25% of automatic wheelchair ramps were broken in a test study. Assistance was inadequate in 14% of trips and on In 8% of the journeys wheelchair users could not travel by bus at all.

In NYC, nearly 25% of wheelchair passengers could not board buses in a study, jumping to 50% in certain boroughs. Even when the lift functioned, there were delays on nearly 50% of trips due to equipment hiccups or driver difficulties.

In London itself, early audits of the fleet showed 20% of ramps failed to deploy. TfL has been working to improve it, but they still get hundreds of complaints annually and remain a major reason why disabled users get passed up at stops.

The fact that you've been angrily pontificating all this time about how easy buses are for disabled people and you didn't even know how high ramp failures are... I mean, it's certainly a statement about you.

Cars deliver door-to-door, with climate control

I kind of forgot how deeply wussified the car addicted are! Climate control!

Got it, misery = good. Maybe you should add spikes to the bus seats as well.

Honestly, I notice this consistently with you people. The more of a hair shirt it is, the more miserable you are, the holier thou art. Exhausted? Great! Took forever? Great! Too hot or too cold? Better! Raining? Even better! Blizzard conditions? Superb!

Get over your cult of misery.

(And once again, a lack of climate control comes down hardest on... drumroll... people in poor health)

Oh yeah I forgot it's impossible to it down when you're on foot.

https://www.medicalsupplies.co... [medicalsupplies.co.uk]

Your notion that the disabled should be walking kilometers per day, and it's okay because they have a seat, is frankly spectacular.

Bikes are flat out for the vast majority of the disabled.

There's a chap round my way who rides a trike.

Great for your friend. Now make him represent "the vast majority of the disabled". And I love your solution that it's okay that he just have a seizure alone on the street if he's wearing a high-viz vest.

(And yes, I'm well familiar with epilepsy, I was married to an epileptic for over a decade)

So the solution is to be rich enough to be chauffeured everywhere and/or have no independence?

You do know what Uber is, right? Among many other things.

And again, this reflects the choices of the disabled, given their health conditions. This is data, not moralistic posturing.

Yes, that's called research on frontier science, on the very bounds of our understanding of the universe.

If it wasn't like that, we wouldn't be referring to dark energy as one of the great unsolved problems in cosmology.

but those seem to be limited to modelling weather similar to that within the collection period

What are you even talking about? They're not Markov models.

It might be unknowable, but we also might, through future study of ultra-dense states, end up with agreement on a cosmology model that explains the Big Bang and does not have it at some invariant t=0 of the universe.

There is zero accounting for the value of time saved in commutes,

Compared to WHAT? Londoner here, and I'm a bit mystified as to what you're trying to say, frankly.

You're from an anti-car city and you're complaining about the state of driving in it? Yeah, that's what happens when you're in an anti-car city. Even in London, I just picked two random locations. By car 30 minutes, by bike 40, by public transit 68 minutes, and by walking, 2 hours. I'll do this as many times as you'd like, it'll almost always come up that way.

Your average European city's public transit commute times are worse than Los Angeles's, a city whose transit is famous for traffic.

Yes, cars are faster. And it's not remotely shocking that they are.

zero value of the healthcare advantage of being able to reach a hospital quickly at arbitrary times from arbitrary locations,

We're talking cities here, not arbitrary locations.

You think everyone in a city lives at a hospital? *eyeroll*

zero consideration of equivalent externalities for alternative modes of transport (for example, even independent of cars, cycling has very high injury rates per unit distance traveled,

Certainly in London, the majority of serious injuries to cyclists are caused by cars

Per kilometer, cycling injury rates are much higher than car rates even if you take bike-car collisions out of the equation (also, injuries are disproportionally among the inebriated, just like car accidents). Cycling is a hazardous hobby, per unit distance, period. Furthermore, you're not going to get rid of all vehicles anyway - not everything is commuters.

Trains, tubes, buses and walking are all safer than driving

I don't have tube data (most of it I suspect will be walking to/from the tube), but while trains have significantly lower injury rates than cars (buses only slightly), cycling and walking definitely don't. Cars have ~15 serious injuries per billion km, walking 300-400, and cycling 520-650. Per unit *time* the numbers are closer (cars are still safer), but per unit distance, walking and cycling are much more dangerous, and even when you take out the fraction that are from cars, they're still much more dangerous.

the environmental impacts of powering transit with calories (which is also huge - comparable to cars on a typical western diet),

That's absolute complete and utter unmitigated garbage

Hello Dunning-Kruger.

zero accounting for infection mitigation

You're claiming cars make people healthier here?

Topic change duly noted and read as concession of the point. And FYI, there is zero correlation in the G20 between rates of cycling and lifespan. None.

emergency response times

Motorists aren't emergency responders.

You do realize that they drive on the exact same infrastructure, right?

the new infrastructure restricting cars in many routes on response times

Yes, if you build a bunch of car infrastructure and then force the cars off, that works great for first responders! But that's not actually what you want in city design, now is it?

taming urban rents

People commute all the way into central London from places like Guildford. They ain't doing that by car.

Ooh, a new route to check! Car 51 minutes, rail 93 minutes, cycling 3h 13 minutes, walking 11 hours. I'm sorry, you were saying?

Look, cars created the suburbs. Trains and buses and bikes and feet existed before then, why didn't suburbs? Suburban living was not practical before the car. The lower the population density, the less effective public transportation becomes.

lower consumer prices on goods and services via freight and trade mobility,

Also lorries aren't cars. No one's shipping serious of quantities of freight by car.

First off beyond continuously returning to your restrictive definition of cars, it's all the same infrastructure that they use. The lower the utilization rate, the more expensive construction and mainetance becomes per unit traffic. And secondly, much commercial traffic is in passenger vehicles. Taxis, employer shuttles, meal delivery, package couriers, grocery delivery, medical specimen transport, automotive part "hotshot" delivery, pharmaceutical delivery, florist services, legal couriers, visiting nurses, real estate agents, sales reps, claims adjusters, home appraisers and inspectors, notaries, private investigators, reporters, repairmen, locksmiths, private security, parking enforcement... my god, I could fill the maximum characters in this comment section 20 times over just off the top of my head listing commercial traffic that's done by passenger vehicle.

eased transit for many classes of the elderly and disabled (depends on the specifics)

Driving is underrepresented in the disabled

False. Driving is about as represented in the disabled as the general population (60-80% of trips), but is essential to large classes.

The largest disabled demographic has trouble walking or standing. A bus trip (let alone a walk) requires walking to the stop, waiting outdoors in variable weather (sometimes without a bench or shelter), boarding and getting seated, and walking from the final stop to the destination. A trip is full of uncertainty - broken bus ramps, full wheelchair bays (most city buses only fit 2 at a time), uneven curbs, sudden braking (for someone not buckled in), etc. For neurodivergent people or those with traumatic brain injury or PTSD, buses are about the worst environment they could be forced into. Cars deliver door-to-door, with climate control, carry medical equipment or mobility aids, and offer an immediate place to rest.

And that's for the bus. Bikes are flat out for the vast majority of the disabled.

The biggest difference with the disabled is the driver/passenger split. In the US, for example, 84% of car trips are as the driver. For disabled adults, it's just over 60% - double the odds of being a passenger.

I came here with a simple dream: a dream of killing all humans. And this is how it must end?

"killing mankind" - there's a thought!

Oh, just because a robot wants to kill humans, that makes him a 'radical'?

Wh-uh? I was having the most wonderful dream! I think you were in it.

Indeed. But you have to actually pay for it. Currently, cars in the US don't even come close to paying their own way, let alone subsidizing cycling / pedestrian infrastructure.