Class 1 e-bikes: Pedal-assist up to 20 mph. (Bill 1557 reduces to 16 mph)
Class 2 e-bikes: Throttle-assisted up to 20 mph. (Bill 1557 reduces to 16 mph; Bill 1942 requires license plate
Class 3 e-bikes: Pedal-assist up to 28 mph; riders must be 16 years or older and wear helmets; (Bill 1942 requires license plate)

In order to be classified as an eBike (aka bicycle) the peak motor power cannot exceed 750 watts, except for "cargo bikes".

I use a regular bike, and hope to do so for a long time to come. But I do see older folks use eBikes, and of course the ubiquitous food delivery guys and young whipper-snappers. I am sure at some point I will also want to transition to the eBike.

The proposed laws mostly seem common sense to me, except for the requirement for a license plate on Class 2 eBikes. That seems pointless and excessive...maybe just a way to fund the program with extra $$. If bicycles are to share the same infrastructure and rules, they should be going the same speed.

As others have pointed out you can certainly get more powerful , two wheeled, electric vehicles. Just don't call them 'bikes'. They are mopeds or motorcycles or scooters. Already have rules for those, and they belong exclusively on the roadways, following normal auto regulations

The "Nuclear Weapons Data Center" part is a bit gratuitous. But overall the voters of each town/county get to decide what they want built/not built. If they feel "juice is not worth the squeeze" on this deal, then it's fine. Not enough jobs, too much water usage, too much traffic not enough tax revenue, etc then Lawrence Livermore will have to improve their offer or find somewhere else. Does Ypsilanti get tagged as a bunch of YIMBY's now? Or is it that you can only be name-called a NIBMY for certain things Weapons of mass destruction data center bad, 20 story apartment building good...natural gas power plant bad, solar field good...and so on.

No jurisdiction should be obligated to build stuff they don't want. Use your local government reps to decide, if they are way off base with what the electorate wants get signatures and bring it to a ballot. The rest of the peanut gallery outside of your town can pound sand.

Among the many comparisons of the AI boom/data center build out, one that comes to my mind is the FOMO hiring of Covid by the tech companies. Facebook starts throwing money at devs and hiring like crazy so Google feels threatened and follows suit. Then Microsoft, Square, Salesfore, etc.

Now in past few couple they find out they really don't need that headcount and whammo (and blaming AI instead of their own, human, executive miscalculation)

At best the executives leading these firms are like 51% accurate on their macro-economic and future business need estimations. So no big surprise they aren't going to do a good job planning for AI/datacenter needs, nor details like source of power and water.

Just follow what the other person is doing and you should keep your VP job for awhile longer.

Dang it editors, I thought the country unit of measure on Slashdot was Liechtenstein.

So how many Liechtenstein's will this natural gas electric power plant be able to support?

This ^^^^

And we've had years to watch Ukraine War playout. If the current administration didn't have such a stick up their #%!$ about Ukraine and Zelensky such a deal would have been well underway.

Instead we have Russia making waaay more oil blood money due to increase oil prices due to economically unbalanced fight of expensive US weapons against Iran woodframed drones

Also seems like Iran can shut down the strait and they don't even need or have an aircraft carrier battlegroup. Asynchronous indeed.

This. Anduril is already a day late and about $10 billion short. Go to Ukraine, make a deal to trade some of the expensive US-weapons that they need for some air defense scenarios, and get a zillion anti-drone weapons in return. Battlefield tested. Complete no-brainer unless the goal is to funnel billions to various military industrial complex firms....old money ones and new money ones.

Also where does the other $1.5 trillion in defense spending going? More littoral combat ships? More nukes? Let's join the 21st century.

This is the sorta thought that makes me nervous. Inasmuch is I am afraid that maybe people in the Administration have the same wrong-headed idea. There are multiple, knowledgeable sources, that point out that the US is an order of magnitude away from having the facilities to be able to ship crude (let alone refined products) in any meaningful way to replace that coming out of the Persian Gulf. Keep in mind even Saudi Arabia, with a coast along the Red Sea, doesn't have terminals nor pipelines on the Red Sea with enough capacity to do much.

I wonder if the admin's 3D chess players thought that taking Venezuela would somehow be able to make up for this Mideast war fiasco...even though Venezuela can only ship 1 million barrels daily.

The US does have substantial domestic oil infrastructure...in theory if things stay bad I could see the president trying some war powers type s--t and declaring all US oil must stay in the US at some set price. Price controls...by a Republican president. I saw the Chevron CEO dance around that question in a news story, and I'd be curious how Republicans especially those in oil states, TX, NM, LA, OK, AL, WY, etc would feel about price controls...but so far the prez has been able to keep those folks licking his boots.

Not willing to bet my $ on it, but there does seem to be a pattern where the administration will spout BS on tweets, FoxNews, etc Mon-Thurs saying how everything is getter better, will be all resolved, then on Fri-Sun they do the crazy s--t like attack an oil tanker outside of market hours. The next week they rinse and repeat. And yeah, i don't understand this stock market at all, except that maybe traditional stock trading has migrated to the BTC scenario where there are small number of firms but with large equity holdings who simply cannot sell or trade out, so a sort of price floor is established. I dunno...seems like oil shock will be with us the rest of this year and that can only drag all other sectors down. AI is ...whatever that is...but not super investible. I'm a space nutter but would stay far far away from SpaceX IPO. I guess I stick with oil stock and Wal-Mart and hope for the best.

100% This. I (re)discovered local theater years ago and would highly recommend it. The quality of the product is typically really fantastic. Even the seemingly smaller, theater productions leave me wondering why the leads aren't on Broadway or Hollywood already. As the OP noted, this is a place for adults, so the viewing atmosphere is 100x better than going to the Cineplex. There aren't that many productions every year, sadly a lot of companies permanently closed after pandemic.

I'm not much into Broadway musicals, nor dance, nor opera, but I will add that adding one of these to the calendar once-ish each year has also been pretty positive. Indeed almost any live performance (stand-up comedy, plays, musicals, dance, opera, symphony, live music, esp cover bands, ...even magic ) has been a substantial value IMHO. Mix and match with different friends, makes for great date night(s).

** did watch Hail Mary in theater. For me going to the theater hasn't been completely written off, but maybe only going 2-3 times per year max depending on what is showing. And definitely avoiding the weekend/teenager/cineplex combination...that is a nightmare to sit through.

Come to the USA where health insurance fraud has been institutionalized to the tune of hundreds of billons of dollars annually. United Health Corp anyone?

An ambulance trip to an ER in the US can easily cost you the same amount as a heli from Everest base campâ¦thats the fraud.

btw i got my finger stitched up in Lukla at the Swiss clinic couple years back for $50â¦donated much more than that but still stands as the best, least expensive experience in healthcare I've ever hadâ¦in Luklaâ¦Nepal

Subject is the question. Where is DOGE on the big stuff? The Pentagon wastes more every month in fraud, waster, and abuse than USAID spends annually. But somehow charity gets the axe and Ratheon keeps getting multi-billion dollar contracts, no strings attached. Can anyone put aside the woke distraction and look at the serious problems?!?

Thx for heads-up on that book, I will pick it up. Agreed, the Altman/OpenAI narrative reads like common saga of "Road to hell is paved with good intentions". Many a politician has walked that path.

This. My take is that OpenAI started as a lab of sorts, but then their research started showing real results. But, Altman isn't really a great businessman...look at his Wikipedia page. It's basically Y-combinator, get first investment opportunities in a plethora of start-ups, some pay-out, rising tide you are rich. As a visionary he sucks...this erotic business is almost certainly his idea. As a leader he sucks, his previous leadership fired him and walked out, only to be reinstated by Micro$oft to have a patsy to protect their interests. And as a hiring manager, he also sucks, his CFO, Friar, has a bad track record, his product person Weil, is mid at best. Then pay Jony Ive a billion dollars to do something with smooth edges ?!? All of them look the part but are basically in that category of execs that fail upwards. I expect they have nightly dreams about imposter syndrome

Missing from all of this is an actual plan to sell stuff and make money. They have been able thus far to get investment money thrown at them, but now there is competition. And new paradigms where other firms are figuring out ways to solve for bottlenecks in NVIDIS gpus, memory, power use, water use...land use, etc. All the time Altman has been making speeches and pushing the AGI narrative and random bs like erotic ai, whatever.

Anthropic meanwhile figures out a chart about what current AI can do, and then begins to monetize that. To the extent that they are the only firm in living memory that has willingly passed up fat tax dollars from the US government. They are also more focused only on those places current AI can be sold for money. Legal, business finance, management, and yes computer programming. There are likely dozens of lesser known firms also targeting specific industry verticals like OpenEvidence for medical clinicians. OpenClaw and better iterations of same idea...where is OpenAI in any of this?

tldr; OpenAI was first, but they are being quickly surpassed by others. Their leadership is a joke, no vision, nor business acumen, just the usual VC glad-handing that got them this far but likely not much further. Now the pressure is on from their investors and just now they are trying to focus on an actual business rather than a $300 billion vanity project. But probably too late.

This is one reason the private companies have been able to surpass NASA in spaceflight

NASA plans for big, long term, missions. Then every 4 years (or really 2 years with new Representatives installed) the plans get changed even after development and build has started. Can you imagine if this was a office building...every 2-4 years new architect comes in and scraps parts already built, or tries to repurpose. "Instead of a 30 story office building we will be making a 7 story hospital." The structure would become a monstrosity...and ergo is NASA, I dunno how to fix this given politics and govt budget stuff. Maybe if they were able to just get no strings attached, no need to pass an audit, no reason money like the Department of Defense they could do longer term, expensive projects

Agreed. I will confess to having the algorithm lead me on time sucks. Example, looking up how to fix ice maker on my fridge, stuff YouTube has been historically pretty worthwhile. In the recent past, perhaps I also ended up watching several, people slipping on ice, falling into swimming pools, and bad driving YT shorts. I'm only human.

But within the past, heck 90 days, YT shorts is almost entirely AI slop. It has effectively cured me of clicking on any YT short that isn't one of my real, life, human-based, subs. It's one thing I hadn't considered, which is that instead of taking over completely, the AI online stuff might be de-selected away by consumers.

Anyway, thanks AI-slop, you've helped to reduce my screen time.