They originally thought she was 25 to 35, and she's 58. They originally thought it was an accident, and now think it is murder... by a guy who is basically a retiree.

Murder for hire, I could maybe believe, but in the absence of a lot more detail, this is kind of stretching credibility here.

The Baird system was just an evolution of the Nipkow disc from the 1880s. It took more than 40 years for someone to make it even somewhat viable for some reason, but if you include mechanical transmission, I'd argue that it was invented in 1883.

But practically speaking, I would say that the 100-year anniversary of TV is in 2027, 100 years after Farnsworth transmitted the first electronically scanned TV signal.

The Marconi system (1930s) was an improved version of Farnsworth's system from 1927 (as proven by patent lawsuits).

Only because the industry makes sure they can't be easily traced back to them.

So what? In exchange, you're not:

• Chatting around the water cooler about sports, TV, movies, politics, etc.
• Sitting idle in meetings that you shouldn't have even needed to be at, but are required to attend.
• Scheduling longer blocks of time to pick up your kids from school (near your house) and drive back to the office.
• Trying to ignore the people talking in the next cubicle while you're trying (and failing) to concentrate.

So you likely spend more time doing useful work, or at least not less. And if that's not the case — if you're one of the people who is distracted more at home than at the office — then your productivity will decrease, and at some point you'll either choose to return to the office or get fired.

The behavior you are describing tends to be either a no-op or a self-correcting problem on a case-by-case basis.

Then such a law needs to apply to all bikes, not just e-bikes. Otherwise, it is unreasonably targeted.

Also you'll need to figure out how to mandate a visible identification tag on a bike. At any size that would be readable from a distance, this would require substantial modifications to the bicycle that go far beyond what most people would consider reasonable. The limited space between the tire and the seat is reserved, by law, for a reflector or rear light. Do do what you're proposing without harming visibility would basically require all bikes to have a full rear fender or luggage rack.

It's just not practical.

You're missing the point. The point is that if the ban is because e-bikes weigh more, then such a ban is arbitrary, because it unfairly targets one type of bike for weighing more without targeting other types of bike that can weigh more.

It's a folding mountain bike.

My mountain bike folds in the center, and weighs 50 pounds. Your Google search does not negate my actual real-world example.

It assumes nothing. The rider will exert force on the seat and handlebars at the moment of impact proportional to a significant percentage of the rider's weight. The difference in weight between an average female teen and an average male adult is almost guaranteed to increase the force of the impact by far more than a ten or fifteen pound difference in the mass of the bicycle itself.

And unless the person who gets hit is either lying down or a small child, there is no "sailing past you on inertia". First you get hit by the bike, then you get hit by the rider, because they're both going in the same direction.

Finally, I'm pretty sure most of the severity of injuries in a bicycle-pedestrian collision comes from the pedestrian hitting the ground, not from hitting the bicycle or the rider.

Maybe that's independent, but their methodology is s**t. They lump together accidents, DUIs, speeding tickets, and citations as "incidents". Here's the problem:

• Fast != unsafe. Driving fast when children are playing nearby is unsafe. Driving fast on a stretch of road with almost nobody else around is not. Both are offenses that could cause a speeding ticket, yet one makes you a bad driver and the other just makes you a fast driver.
• Cops consider means when deciding to ticket. When a cop pulls you over, if you're going down the road in a Pontiac (minimum 15 years old), they're going to assume you're poor, and they're more likely to give you a warning than a ticket that you might not be able to pay. When they see you in a Tesla, they're going to assume you're rich, and give you a ticket every time. This is just human nature.
• Tesla FSD beta drives over the speed limit frequently, and it is almost impossible to keep it from doing so, yet leads to far fewer accidents than human drivers, on average. But every time it does, you're at risk of a ticket.

These factors mean that tickets and citations (which might even include parking violations) are a largely worthless metric for driving safety and should not be included in the totals.

No, they don't. Fewer than one in five Tesla cars on the road have FSD beta available. It is not only possible but quite easy to believe that the drivers of the remaining 80% are enough worse than average to make the company's safety look bad in spite of the 20% who have it.

The way I see it, there are basically four groups of people who buy Teslas:

• People who really want to save the environment. These are rare.
• People who think they will save money over the long run by driving an EV. These are also rare.
• People who bought the cars for safety reasons. This likely doesn't extend much beyond the 15 to 20% who paid or currently pay extra for FSD, plus maybe a few who paid extra for enhanced autopilot back in the day.
• People who want to own a fast/expensive/nice car. These people are statistically much worse drivers than average.

So no, higher accident rates or higher fatal accident rates don't suggest that Tesla's numbers are faked. They merely reflect the bimodal distribution in the sorts of people who buy Teslas.

Sorry, to clarify, I meant insurance companies and the overall cost.

What I was trying to get at was that, assuming no deaths are involved, and the only thing you are comparing is the cost outcome, if you have to spend $10 for a million people to prevent one case of some illness, then that only makes sense if it would save treating a single person for $10 million.

Obviously this isn't a complete picture, but it's a decent starting point for nonfatal illnesses.

Otherwise known as "The Cloud is not a backup."

E-bikes weigh from about 45 pounds to 80 pounds. My standard mountain bike weighs 50 pounds. The weight difference is within the margin of error, as the weight of the rider can vary by a much larger amount.

Agreed. This seems incredibly dumb to me.

The reason cars require a license is because they have a high risk of killing someone else. If this were in response to e-bike riders killing other people, these laws would make sense.

But those accidents they talked about both involved kids on e-bikes being hit by cars. Unless they darted out into traffic at a rate that would have been impossible on a normal bike (very unlikely), those kids would have been killed just as dead on a normal bike.

So all this law does is make it more difficult to own a bike that helps you go uphill, without any obvious safety benefit. It falls into the category of "arbitrary and capricious" as laws go, creating an arbitrary distinction not based on evidence, but based on feelings.

Worse, they picked 18 MPH as the threshold above which a license is required. But class 1 and class 2 bikes have a maximum speed of 20 MPH. So this is tantamount to an outright ban on all existing e-bikes unless ridden by licensed drivers, and would require all new e-bikes manufactured just for New Jersey..

In any sane universe, the courts would throw this out, because the net effect is a ban on the commercial viability of e-bikes. If they adjusted their law to be standards compliant and limit it to class 3 bikes (over 20 MPH), then this law would be fine, if only because a lot of other states already have similar laws on the books. It would still be useless, but at least it would be based on well researched thresholds about risk of bodily harm to pedestrians, rather than some number that a bunch of politician pulled out of their backsides.

So IMO, this really is about as dumb as laws get, because it is clear that the people who wrote the laws did not consider the impact on interstate commerce, did not consider the body of law from other states in deciding how to write their laws, and did not consider the state of the market. They then proceeded to write a law based an expectation of a reduction in fatalities that IMO has no basis in reality.

Figure out what politicians voted for this, and vote against them or run against them next time, because nobody who voted in favor of this is competent to hold office.

That may well be true. I haven't put a pencil to it. On the flip side, if true, that means the cost to the healthcare system from the vaccine would exceed the benefits, and that's probably a good point to stop.

The reality of the matter is that bacteria and parasites tend not to respond to vaccines all that well (requiring frequent revaccination to be useful), and with the exception of the occasional rare zoonotic species jump like SARS/MERS/COVID-19, we already have vaccines for most of the deadliest viral diseases already. So what we're left with is things like the HPV virus for reducing the lifetime risk of cancer... maybe.

But then you realize that any virus can cause genetic damage that leads to cancer, not just HPV, and at some point, you end up over-vaccinating, and the immune system's response to the really bad stuff is dampened by overstimulation, and you end up making things worse.

So at some point, it probably makes more sense to acknowledge that trying to prevent cancer by trying to prevent exposure to every mutagenic virus and substance is not a realistic approach, and focus instead on modern treatment approaches that actually have a chance of working.

The point where it started being dubious from my perspective was when the shingles vaccine (which serves a very useful purpose) became a chickenpox vaccine (which, given the 0.0025% IFR, seems to mainly just make the shingles vaccine less important and prevent a few sick days once per lifetime). Pretty much everything after that other than COVID seems like it's out in the long tail where diminishing returns make continuing to spend resources on new vaccines questionable.

The exceptions, of course, are TB and malaria, but only if somebody can manage to come up with a vaccine with a reasonable level of effectiveness in adults. Malaria is probably better treated by mosquito eradication. TB is probably better treated by making rapid at-home tests available, passing laws penalizing companies for firing workers who stay home to isolate when infected, etc. Imagine if you could convince everyone in a few countries to take a free at-home TB test and then get treatment and free sick days from work if they test positive. You'd just about eradicate TB overnight. So even there, non-vaccine approaches may well be a better solution.

Meanwhile, Moderna's tech has the potential for other applications that could be way more useful. And applying their tech to other existing vaccines is potentially also useful, though likely less critical than other areas of research.

Let me clarify a bit. The point I was trying to make isn't that they can't make be profitable without grants. Presumably they could be profitable by raising the prices, assuming the value of the vaccine to the healthcare system over the duration of the patent still exceeds the cost.

My point was that if government grants for vaccine research are in danger of drying up, it makes a lot of economic sense for companies to focus on areas of research that are better supported, rather than take on a much larger percentage of the risk. After all, for every drug or vaccine that works, there are probably hundreds that fail for one reason or another, and those subsidies in the early parts of the research pipeline (mostly given to research universities) make the risk a lot lower.