It is far from accurate. Yeah the obese flag is most of the time correct

You're literally contradicting yourself there. And given this article is on obesity... if BMI says you're obese, you probably are. It's in the 70s for overweight, which again is not bad.

If your BMI indicates obese, you should definitely check. If it says you're overweight you should probably check. Here's a study:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a...

You can see the correlations between body fat % and BMI. It's a pretty good correlation and the variance is small enough to be useful.

It does not account for body shape.

Yeah yeah man on the internet with a BMI of 30 is actually built like a professional athlete, despite having a sedentary job. It must be the other 95% of the population who are obese.

It does not account for sex

Neither does body fat percentage. It's not like you have to have the same threshold for men, women, people of different ethnic groups, age and so on. Here's some handy charts for people between 2 and 20 split by gender:

https://www.rcpch.ac.uk/sites/...

But nonetheless if you have no idea about any of this shit, you can probably manage a weight and height measurement, and see if the result is close to 30. If it is definitely go talk to your doctor. That's what BMI is for and it's pretty good at that.

1.5m? That'd be nice.

Indeed.

With all the bUt CyClIsTs ArE aLwAyS bReAkInG tHe LaW shit flinging from drivers, turns out very very very very very few drivers actually obey the rules of the road either. I doubt 1 car in 50 gives me 1.5m as specified in the highway code, and 75% routinely speed in London. Also in my experience about 80% roll through the stop line at traffic lights (illegally) and into the bike box. Naturally the police won't fine them even with CCTV evidence.

Also, when did indicating in a car become optional (it is optional, but advised on a bike)?

Surely a Waymo will be tracking cyclists and know it doesn't have enough room to squeeze through safely in this situation.

Self driving cars will lack the malice of the average driver, that's for sure.

It's a continual struggle everywhere. Here, in Switzerland, the population recently voted to reject a number of extensions to the highway system, preferring to invest more in our excellent public transport system. The job of the politicians in parliament is to implement the referendum the public has voted on.

So what do the politicians do? They commission a study that examines the best places to invest transport money - funny, how it proposes extending the highway system at the expense of public transport. I'm sure none of them are the recipients of any lobbying efforts. /s

We already have a problem: What do you do with people on the left side of the bell curve? You only need so many agricultural harvesters, and even that is increasingly automated.

Factories everywhere are increasingly automated - this is a trend that has been going on for decades. Eliminate factory jobs, and you only need so many baristas and Amazon delivery drivers. So what do you do with people in the middle of the bell curve?

dude what?

There are different charts/thresholds for age and sex, even ethnic groups.

It's not a surprising number for a Londoner. But it is a surprising number for someone not used to driving here I'd say. I mean it's bad enough on side roads of course. It's when you need to do it on the south circular because offloading lorries and badly parked SUVs that it adds spice to life.

I do agree that the advantages from everyone else's point of view is sticking to the speed limit, no rushing and of course giving cyclists the mandatory 1.5m which no drivers ever do. I do question though whether Waymo's approach will work in London. As you say, it's a lot more chaotic and unpredictable.

I agree on the "cultural" problem part, though my own impression is that the insane-level of car-centricity also plays a role.

That IS a cultural problem, and a very very deep seated one.

contrast: I also have a high education and a computer desktop job. I do spend 1 hour commuting each day by bicycle. Here around it's much more bike-able than in the US.

Mine's a little over. The great things are: it's the fastest way to work for me, I need a grand total of 5 minutes of motivation per day to get a decent amount of exercise, being outside is better for me than being inside.

The trouble is "keeping politics out" isn't really a thing, because politics more or less supersedes everything, ultimately.

Politics is what could cause the government to ban disc golf under penalty of death. Not likely today, sure, but if it happens, it's politics that makes it happen. Politics could much more likely get it banned from your local park.

And people are people and you cannot escape that. Sooner or later people chat off topic and someone might mention they have a baby for example. Then /u/babyeatingjim expresses his culinary preferences and suddenly no one's allowed to yell at him to fuck off because baby eating is a political issue now and telling a baby eater to go away and never come back is "political".

When politics goes sour it seeps into everything. "zealots" are pissed off that people are doing the equivalent of banning disc golf from the park because it's played by mostly people on the other side, and of course the "zealots" are also pissed off because bad politics is literally killing people.

Yes you want to shut your ears and keep out the noise, but that's unfeasible when the noise outside is too loud. The problem is not that people "let" politics get into everything, it's that the noise outside IS too loud. You can't shut it out.

Also routine spying, deep packet inspection, fuckery with networks and so on and so forth.

We shall see.

Having driven a lot on London and various parts of the US, I'd say driving in London isn't like driving in America. The roads are small, narrow and crowded. Pedestrians common and allowed, and do, cross almost everywhere. Junctions tend to be much more varied and intricate or of you prefer, bizarre. There's also a surprising number of places where there simply isn't room for both directions and you have to negotiate with other drivers, in ways that will get you to fail your driving test and are not precisely legal.

It'll be interesting to see how they compare with the locals, i.e. Wayve.

That's a lot of infrastructure to maintain. Semi-permanent costs. Why, exactly, would they want to commit to something like that?

BMI is not bullshit.

Statistically it's pretty good. 95% accurate for men and 99% accurate for women when predicting obesity.

Now of course we know every Slashdotter is a muscle bound gym bro rocking 2% with a BMI of 80.

Thing is BMI is pretty accurate, easy to measure with very common equipment and hard to cheat. If you know better and can do better, great, do so. But how many of those 5% for whom BMI is wrong do you think are already taking regular exercise and have some knowledge about what they are doing?

The really daft thing is you're complaining about a system that demonstrably worked. The computer flagged someone who was likely to be obese. Doctor checked to see if you were based on the flag, and then dismissed it. That's the system found it's job. The other 95% of the time of course the doctor would have seen the flash was accurate and followed up.

What on earth is wrong with that?

What do the Russians have to do with panels in the desert won't be as low maintenance as folks assumed? That the deserts people are building solar panel farms in aren't barren dunes?

Do you attribute all inconvenient facts to conspiracy theories to avoid facing problems with your political dogma?

No, you guess poorly, again. What I recognize is the "lower quality" is different than "higher quality". That the two have different utilities.

No, you are simply missing the important point. The people who decide to go to war, and the people who fight the war, are usually not the same people. Often the people who decide on war do so for one reason, but they have to sell the war to the population using a different reason. The former is the state, the latter are the people. In particular, the people that decided to go to war were the state legislators. Basically the leadership of the Democratic political party.

A realignments based on law and order, not racism. The Republican Party did not embrace southern style racism.

Civil rights passed in the US Congress due to the overwhelming support of the Republican Party against Democratic Resistance.

And Robert E Lee swore loyalty to the US government after the civil war. He told people to never rebel again, to be loyal citizens, to never wear a confederated uniform - even in remberance, to never fly a confederate flag agin - even in remembrance. And his publicly stated he would gladly give up slavery to preserved the union prior to the war. He gets not consideration? Why should the Democratic Party get any consideration. They have as much blood on their hands as Lee. The Democrats party's good behavior a century later was none of this blood away, just as Lee's good behavior post war did not.

And let's not forget the Dem Party being behind the klan, Jim Crowe, opposition to civil rights, etc. The Dem Party's overt racists behavior continued for over a century after the civil war.