EngManagerIsMe

I don't think that's an assumption (it's certainly not one for me). Bikes are great, most folks could use bikes. Some folks cannot, and we should ensure our spaces are available to all of us.

And I deal with a similar issue in my own life -- not due to a disability, but due to another form of discrimination. Believe me, I'm well aware that spaces aren't designed for everyone. If I gave the impression that bikes were the only or universal option, then of course I apologize!

I'm not sure I'm weird. I've been here 35+ years at this point, plenty of folks bike, plenty of folks public transit, plenty of folks drive.

Putting on a pair of snow pants over my jeans and a waterproof shell over my jacket takes... 1 minute? and protects me from basically all our weather.

I've lived here 35+ years. I mean, May-September can be nice, though these days that's smoke season.

Of course. I explicitly tried to say this -- bikes are fantastic, small cars like this are ok too (though, building for cars carries a lot of externalities with it).

Nah. It's easy enough to chain up to any ol' bike post. It's a midsize cargo bike. My wife's bike takes a bit more work, but she's got the whole bucket at the front going on.

I live in Seattle, riding in the rain is not really a problem. A halfway decent outer shell protects you from the rain.

I carry my kid on my bike. My wife's bike has a whole box up front that could carry two kids. (Mine has a long tail with a captain's chair on it.)

I can carry shopping easily. I've carted something like 6-10 cubic feet of soil on it before. Cargo bikes are made to carry stuff.

Ebikes can go as fast as you can pedal them, and will stop assisting you at 28mph. I've regularly hit 30mph on downhills, and here in Seattle you can treat stop signs as yield signs. In practice, because I don't have to stop every block and because I can take paths and other shortcuts and I don't need to find parking, trips under a couple miles are generally faster on the bike than in a car.

I live in Seattle, it's cold and rainy all year long (more or less). I still prefer using my bike over a car (though I have no problem with small car that replaces big car.)

Right? I sold mine, getting rid of that car was a huge sigh of relief. From parts shortages to labor shortages to weird manufacturing defects that no one could correct to the "overpromise and underdeliver" attitude of the company...

The car was cool for a few years, and then it became deeply irritating. We got a Volvo, and holy shit the Volvo had better tech.

Cute!

Mine said, "I 9 U!"

But I see what they were trying to get me to do, cute.

Hamburg's busses don't have coin boxes or sell tickets/fares? You don't have any mechanism that requires swiping a card, tapping a device, showing a card/ticket to an operator, or otherwise proving you have, in fact, purchased a fare?

In Seattle, we tap our cards on something that looks like this: https://seattletransitblog.com/2011/06/28/dont-tap-orca-here...

It's pretty quick, but on the busiest bus routes it slows things down.

Edit: Reading up, it looks like they don't really have those things, and rely on a combination of very infrequent inspectors (which do slow things and cost money) and the honor system.

I'm glad that chemists are researching this. We should also stop using plastic wherever possible.

Let's start with single use packaging of things. WAY too much stuff relies on cheap, disposable plastic that could be shipped/packaged in another, more sustainable material. It will mean more expensive, harder to handle materials, but if we can at least use materials that biodegrade, are fully recyclable, or are inert (e.g. glass), we'll save future generations a massive headache.

They all got laid off. Waypoint is no more.

Waypoint and sometimes Motherboard were incredible. It's sad to see them disappear from the space.

Agreed. This is actually a "why public systems fail" critique approaching from the left -- we assume systems need a cost to function correctly. For something like transit, collecting fares involves:

1) Systems and equipment to issue and collect fares -- boxes, kiosks, scanners, currency handling, staff to collect and deposit currency, arrangements with payment providers, educational materials about paying fares, websites with instructions on how to pay fares (often in multiple languages)

2) Systems to enforce fare payment -- humans, typically, to police the fares

3) Systems to analyze fare rates -- are fares too low, too high, are they being paid at the correct rates, do we need to publish new content on how much fares are changing this year

4) Queues to pay fares -- entering a bus or train requires a turnstile, tap, or other impediment that slows access

5) Systems to ensure everyone has access -- either fares price out the poorest, or we provide means for the poor to get reduced and free fares. Provide systems for workers to get fares subsidized through their workplaces.

These systems are really inefficient. I mean, they might be run efficiently, but their existence is itself an inefficiency. If we believe transit is useful and valuable, we could simply pay for it once in taxes. Cutting out all the fare maintenance systems would save a huge amount of money, which could be spent on maintenance, comfort, cleaning, additional routes, etc. and the experience would be much nicer (hop on/hop off whenever you need).

Lawns have been in the targets of environmentalists for decades.

One, we can do both.

Two, lawns are the biggest agricultural crop in the US. Especially when you consider sod and seed.

Lawns are basically wastelands, supporting little to no biodiversity. Removing them does material good to the surrounding area.

Killing your lawn is the best thing you can do. There are SO much better things to do with the space than host a lawn (which is effectively a desert).

If you need something green to walk on there are plenty of herbal/clover mixes that produce flowers for insect life. Alternatively you can build raised beds and plant flowers and vegetables. Or native wildflowers. Or trees.

Getting rid of my lawn was the best decision I've made w.r.t. to my land.

Or that farming is the only productive use.

If the LA River is any historical precedent, yes.

Nah. That only works if you are logged in. It's trivial to delete and account and make a new one. There's nothing particularly special about one's account (and, in fact, I regularly delete mine and create a new one so I don't get too attached to the 'number going up' on the karma.)

The "Orange Hellsite."

And Twitter is the "Blue Hellsite*".

Both are bad, both still show up in my browser history. I don't know why.

Wood in the ocean will float for a long time, eventually sinking and storing that carbon. It will be broken down over a very long span, and the CO2 will enter the hydrocycle and eventually be released as a gas. Probably on the order of millennia.

That said, it's not clear what impact smothering the ocean floor would have in the habitats there, nor how we would get the wood to sink reasonably rapidly and stay sunk -- we don't want massive logs floating back up and hitting ships.

I (personally) believe we are better served by heating the wood in an oxygen free environment (pyrolysis). This produces a charcoal like substance and energy, we can bury the biochar or use it as a soil amendment to achieve the same result (hundreds to thousands of years of sequestration) and get energy out of the process.

Interestingly, many forest stands are actually overpopulated with trees. Removal of organic matter helps the existing trees grow taller and more healthy, improves the habitat for other species and animals, and can result in a more biodiverse, healthier forest less vulnerable to parasites and invasives. It can also reduce the severity of forest fires.

Source: I manage forestland in the PNW for the purpose of habitat restoration, and was surprised to learn how removing tree mass from a system can actually improve the overall health and biomass of a system.

Probably worth considering pyrolysis before burying it. By heating the wood and baking it into char you get a few nice benefits:

* You produce biochar, which is almost pure carbon, and therefore you are only sequestering the weight/volume of the carbon, not all the water and other stuff.

* Biochar can be used as a soil amendment to improve microbial cultures and store carbon for hundreds or thousands of years

* You can produce energy in the form of heat or wood gas

* You can produce wood vinegar, which may have some agricultural or industrial uses

I think there's a nascent industry in converting biomass into biochar and sequestering it, but it would be very interesting to see it done with forestland more generally.

Trees gather up a ton (sometimes many tons) of carbon during their lives. When they die and begin to decompose, fungi and bacteria return most of that carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2.

If we could find a way to prevent that, then those trees could be used as machines to pull CO2 out of the air and store it, preventing it from being a greenhouse gas.

There's a part of me that loves this and there's a part of me that finds this sorta sad. Not pejoratively, just, evocatively for me there's a sense of sadness in the ephemeral nature of this installation.

I have a really complicated relationship with nostalgia -- on the one hand I love it and seek it out but on the other hand I love seeing people create new things.

Left handedness used to be about 2% of the US population. Now it's about 12%.

While it could be that somehow we've got an epidemic of left-handedness that blossomed in the 1920s, what's much more likely is that we've gotten more accommodating and understanding of left handed people, so there was less incentive to fit the mold of right handed folks.

I'm sure there were people who were alarmed at that rise, who felt that we didn't really need left handed tools and accommodations for the "2% of people who are left handed", but when you made those things available, we stabilized at about 12%.

Antidepressants and ADHD meds are, imo, in a similar place -- we've increased our understanding, we've increased our accommodations, we no longer force the people who experience those maladies into the stress of acting 'normal'.

Once you remove demonization, of course diagnosis are going to skyrocket. When it's no longer a scary thing to admit depression, ADHD, or autism, it becomes easier to get evaluated and care for them. I experience depression, I am on an SSRI, it helps me a TON. Historically, I might have been involuntarily committed or been told to "deal with it". I guarantee you I would not be as successful as I am now if I didn't have the support I do.

(Similarly, I expect you see a lot more people being "out" in the LGBTQ+ community as a result of a similar phenomena. Once it's no longer criminal or "get lynched" territory, we see numbers of gay and trans folks increase.)

These things seem like fads. They usually aren't, they are usually the case of a particular mode of people being pressured to be silent and invisible. When you remove that negative stigma, the revert to the mean can be dramatic, but it will stabilize at a new normal level.

most of them are very decent people and don’t do nasty things.

That's not really the bar though. Police officers have exemplary powers, being the manifestation of the violence of the state. They must be held to a standard above "decent people".

And being personable and friendly is not the mark of a good cop. A good cop needs to be willing to stand up for the right thing even if their peers are doing something wrong. That has been documented to be exceptionally rare in the police.

Friendly, approachable police officers are still involved in systematic injustices too -- as long as the justice system punishes the poor and minorities more than others, the police are part of the problem. The police intake people into the justice system, and knowing this if they are targeting poor or minority people they are engaged in systematic problems.

So a friendly "nice guy" cop can still be a problem.

The first uniformed police force came about in the 1850s. Prior to that, police forces weren't the central utility they are today. Yes, there were guards, but their roles, responsibilities, and behaviors were quite different.

I posted a bit of history in a sibling comment, but it's not technically wrong to say that the 1800s was the century in which we got the police forces we have today. (But yes, obviously there were other institutions that predated them.)

Uniformed police are a relatively recent invention.

In the US and England, the police evolved predominantly out of a desire to socialize the costs of protect the capital interests of the wealthy. This was protecting warehouses and such for the north/Europe, and slave patrols in the south. (As, at that point in history, the slaves were considered property, not people.)

Over time, the police merged -- some from slave patrol origins and some from protecting trade -- into uniformed organizations per city. Some directly trace their origins to slave patrols for sure though.

Other parts of the world saw police evolve from things like shire reeves, the night watch, etc. All of which were considered pretty unpleasant responsibilities -- people would be required to put in a portion of their time as night watchmen, however the wealthy could pay others to take over their shifts. The evolution from "I'll pay you to take my shift because I'm too rich to work the night watch" to "I'll pay for the night watch to protect my stuff" to "wait, what if we had everyone pay for the watch to protect my stuff" is typically the path things went outside of slave owning societies.

Edit: Responding to the Rome post here, because I apparently cannot create more posts right now:

The Romans had a few police organizations, but they were either slaves (who in turn acted as slave patrols) called the Vigiles. Those weren't widespread across Roman cities. They were a small one time thing, eventually absorbed into the military. Mostly they were firefighters.

The Cohortes Urbanae were a similar unit, explicitly part of the military that policed the city of Rome. They were more like riot cops than crime fighters though.

Otherwise, in Roman populations they had night watches like most other European cities. A group of people who were charged with keeping the peace overnight. This was considered a deeply unpopular job in Rome, and was typically given to slaves to perform. The Triumiviri Nocturni, if you want to search for more information.

But none of these are police forces -- they are either night watches pushed to those who had no other choice or they were military units. Using a military to keep the peace is very different from a police force.