I can get three or four days of food for my family of four on my regular bike with no problem (I also have a cat). I live somewhere where I ride past half a dozen super markets on my regular commute, so stopping at the shop is no big inconvenience.
I can stand at any corner in any city in the USA and count the percent of cars that stop vs the percent of bikes that stop. Bikes about 1 of 10 will stop. Cars at least 4 of 5 will stop. So, cyclists, 10% compiliance. car drivers, 80% compliance.
As for license plates, I'd like both cars and bikes to obey the law. The only way I see that happening is cameras and scanners. For that to stop bikes requires the bikes to also have plates.
Yes, quite unfortunately. That reeks to me of wishful thinking.
Maybe that was a sensible thing to think in 1926, when the closest things we had to "an artificial replica of human intelligence" was the automatic telephone exchange and the mechanical adding machine. But knowledge and technology both have advanced since.
Now, we're in 2026, and the list of "things that humans can do but machines can't" has grown quite thin. "Human brain is doing something truly magical" is quite hard to justify on technical merits, and it's the emotional value that makes the idea linger.
Being in a train certainly improves safety, but being kind of slow is not very safe when you're forced to share the road with cars going at least twice your speed.
high quality heavy 18650s weigh about 2 oz. 190 of them would weigh about 24 lbs. Throw in another 6-10 lbs for bms, wiring, casing and errata and it's not that bad.
I don't know if this figures into the engineering formulas, but an e-bike needs to be stronger due to the higher speeds and power levels. On a human powered bike, if you're hauling 150 pounds, you're probably going pretty slow.
My friends who have e-bikes go through a lot more "consumable" parts such as chains, tires, brakes, cogs, and bearings.
I live in Berlin and strongly prefer the bike over the bus because buses are slow and unreliable. I wish we had a lot more bus lanes and aggressively towed cars blocking them. More subways would be even better though.
When I was in Mexico City I was blown away and inspired that their bus lanes were actually physically separate from car traffic, sometimes they were even elevated a foot or so alongside car traffic. It made the buses so much faster! I wish bus and bike lanes in the USA were equally separated from car traffic. Different color paint and intermittent bollards don't cut it.
If something is worth doing, it's worth doing right and physically separate bus lanes is doing it right.
Bus lanes are usually not a budget problem. The problem is car centric laws and regulations that make it hard to impossible to take space away from cars.
Nonsense. The infrastructure in much of the US is already there. All you need is willingness to enforce it. All you need maybe is a bit of paint. Police could actually make some money.
I should have specified Political Power. There will always be a degree of cooperation, but they should not be so easily exchanged. More checks-and-balances, less winner-takes-all.
Sure, societies that don't have the concept of currency. The inhabitants of the Sentinel Islands for example.
Some other societies have different ways of measuring authority and delegating power, but in general currency is more efficient and if they have to interface with the rest of the world then money will be critical. That's why money is usually a proxy for power.
Is it even possible for money to not be power? Like, how do you separate purchasing power from influence power? Purchasing is a very easy route to influence.
Or they communicate in languages we cannot understand.
Even among human languages the sounds of some languages sound all the same to humans who are not native speakers of that language.
Chinese for example has a million words that all sound like "shi" and other tonal languages like Vietnamese are also indistinguishable to English natives etc. Japanese people treat R/L the same.
Elephants and dolphins have been known to assign unique names for each other.
Octopuses and other cephalopods communicate by changing the color of their skin, EVEN WITH SOME OTHER FISH! BBC's Blue Planet has an episode where an octopus and a grouper fish coordinate via color to trap prey.
Ants and other insects communicate via pheromones and "smell".
Are you seriously going to stick to a human-chauvinistic stance that only we have a "language"?
"For over two decades, Professor Toshitaka Suzuki dedicated his life to studying the Japanese tit — a small songbird native to Japan’s forests. Through years of careful observation and experiments, he discovered something incredible: these birds use grammar-like rules and combine sounds to form meaning, much like how humans use language."
I'm familiar with this case. The "language" of the birds is so profoundly primitive (it's limited to 2 word combos where the meaning is just the meaning of both words). Here's a good blogpost about it.
If we're going to be able to have a meaningful discussion on this, first you will need to provide for me the definition of language under which you're operating.
I mean there are space physicists who don't understand dark matter, etc.
I think this is a "qualia" issue: Like for example biologists can find out what kind of light frequencies the eyes of a mantis shrimp can receive, but we'll never know what it FEELS like to be able to see a zillion times more colors.
You can see this happen with human languages too: Ever walk around in a different country? your brain doesn't even register the sounds other people are making.
It turns out that the fact that mantis shrimp have 12 different color receptors in their eyes means they can see... 12 colors. They can't combine the input from the different color receptors into a spectrum like we and other vertebrates can. Their eyes even perceive different things in different regions of the compound eye. It's a surprisingly limited visual system for all its supposed extra capabilities compared to ours, which to your point makes "seeing like a mantis shrimp" even more inscrutable from our POV.
For anyone else whom the above awnsers absolutely nothing without googling what defines the boundary - A more verbose version of the above comment is that they communicate only simple, situational signals (like warning cries or information for action) and not using a symbolic, rule-governed system capable of abstraction, past and future tense, and infinite combination.
Of course, with all generalizations, this is sort of a lie, but no - whales, chimps and cephapods don't meet the official bar.
Notarizing any wishes against some medical procedures in case a sudden accident ruins your ability to dissent prevents doctors from being forced to keep your body alive as long as possible.
That doesn't apply to Alzheimer's disease directly though. If you don't want to live when your conscious life is limited to short flashes of awareness among a deeply terrifying melange of visions of the past and hallucinations, DNR laws don't in any way force or even allow doctors to euthanize you. You can persist in this state for many years without ever triggering a DNR check.
A terribly long winded article that ignores that we already have all the building blocks for carbon neutrality (for some time already), what we lack is not new ideas, we lack political will to spend a lot of money now to improve the world for our grandchildren. Inventing a better clothesline might feel like a nice game, but it is irrelevant compared to replacing fossil heating, transportation, and electricity.
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