Maybe by 2070 we'll know better than to bet on the gradual improvement of society.
That's pretty much what Jacob T. Levy said. But I don't think he's predicting that people will figure this out.
"We'll all be subcontractors" - no, because there are real advantages to working for a company, for you and for the company! Ronald Coase, etc.
The draft one hedges her bets nicely: she's pro-forced military service but doesn't actually go as far as saying it'll come back, (and, as usual for American policy discussions, makes no reference whatsoever to the experience of every other country which has abolished the draft).
The "driverless vehicle" one is insane - the idea that we need bus drivers because otherwise people would feel free to behave antisocially on buses. Can't help feeling this woman hasn't been on many buses.
Or maybe she's only been on school buses.
2.3: But she bases this theory on an anecdote!
I ride the bus to work every day, and mostly people do behave themselves on the bus. Every once in a while there is misbehavior. It has happened that the bus driver notices this and admonishes the miscreant. Sometimes this works to some extent. Other times it doesn't.
It just occurred to me that on subways the driver plays no role in enforcing proper behavior in the cars.
Maybe that's why you have more groping on the subway, at least that's what I read.
4 last is what I was going to say. Thanks, peep.
I'm less optimistic about the subcontractor thing. You can still boss your subcontractors around, to an extent anyway. And it's no accident that there's this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/business/economy/gig-economy-workers-contractors.html
Not sure why bosses and subcontractors and power and control are mutually exclusive. Certainly Uber drivers don't think so.
Can we have an Uber subthread? Does anyone have a good source on how the strike went?
Most of these people are either insanely optimistic or living on a different planet. The reason "Why we do..." is that someone, somewhere is making a shitload of money out of it. In 50 years time there will be new ways for those people to do that, many of them concerned with privileging wealthy victims of climate change. A few of the concerns expressed at the link will indeed drop off the map because they are no longer sufficiently profitable. Levy seems to be about the only one talking sense, which is alarming in itself.
I exclude the anti-abortion rant from the above: it isn't worth addressing.
It just occurred to me that on subways the driver plays no role in enforcing proper behavior in the cars.
The RMT union, which represents Tube drivers, has nevertheless actually argued against driverless Tube trains on the grounds that the driver is essential for public safety. (For the cost of a Tube driver you could put an armed police officer and a trained paramedic on every Tube train. The average Tube driver is paid roughly the same basic salary as the average nuclear submarine commander, though a submariner does also get bonus dive pay.)
It also argued against getting rid of bus conductors on the grounds that a bus driver alone would not have the courage to intervene in the case of unrest on a bus.
9.1: Almost all of them aren't making a serious attempt to predict the future -- it's just another way for them to argue for their cause.
The possible exception is Peter Singer who apparently genuinely believes that people are getting better over time.
10.3: Are there bus conductors on all buses in London?
The buses in Sodor are sentient and collect their own fares.
By 2070, people will stop searching for Bigfoot because technology will exclude the possibility. They will instead search for proof that Bigfoot could have existed in the 20th century.
1. Yeah, Levy and heebie are right, and all of the rest of the responses need to be judged through that lens. History is contingent, and the future where abortion is unthinkable is one available option, as is the future where nobody eats meat.
I'm not very sanguine about the world 50 years from now. There is an awfully strong constituency worldwide for the concept of letting everything burn. In the style of Vox, here are some "Why did we ever ..." questions:
-Why did we ever care about the climate in the formerly habitable equatorial area?
-Why did we ever permit Palestinians some measure of self-governance in Greater Israel?
-Why, outside of certain technical areas, did we ever care about factuality?
-Why did we ever make abortion available to poor people?
-Why did we let working people vote for non-approved candidates?
You can see where I'm going with this.
Haven't read the Op/s yet, so I'll chuck my own first.
Why did anyone think the PRC model ever had a chance?
Why did anyone think large land mammals could be saved from extinction?
The RMT union, which represents Tube drivers, has nevertheless actually argued against driverless Tube trains on the grounds that the driver is essential for public safety.
Tell me. Whether or not thanks to RMT, the DLR (driverless) carries a guy in the last carriage to intervene if things go wrong. On the occasion I'm thinking of the doors of my carriage started to close before I could get off, as I walk very slowly due to disabilities. I did what I usually do on such occasions which was to hold out my stick in the door so that it couldn't shut. Left to itself, the door would have gone through its open, wait, close cycle again and given me plenty of time to get out; however, the "conductor", who couldn't see me, chose to override it, so that the door closed again before fully opening, hit me quite hard and threw me onto the platform floor, fracturing a couple of vertebrae.
Public safety my arse.
18.2: AIMHMHB, my mother had a similar incident getting out of a bus in Tel Aviv. She broke her hand.
19 to 17.
18 sounds awful. I hope you can sue.
I don't think 401(k)s are going away but I like that they are getting hate.
Lately I've been thinking about how they suck up a lot of capital that could be invested to build up local economy, and ship it to Wall Street. And that money never comes back, because by the time it finally becomes available to beneficiaries, they've moved to Florida.
20: As soon as I'm legally able to, I'll boycott Israel on her behalf.
22: Once Florida goes under the waves, lots of problems will get better.
Are there bus conductors on all buses in London?
Not any more - they lost that argument.
I like the "Why were we so scared of China?" one; just read a good piece about what a chaotic mess the Belt and Road Initiative is turning out, because apparently China is even worse at having a unified foreign policy than the US, except that in the US it's split by organisation and in China it's split by province.
I've been thinking about how they suck up a lot of capital that could be invested to build up local economy, and ship it to Wall Street. And that money never comes back
...what do you think Wall Street is doing with it, exactly?
Apparently, investing it all in California and New York.
And surveillance contractors in China.
Yeah, there is certainly no evidence that Wall Street is sending any of that money here.
There are still conductors on the legacy Routemasters on the 15.
Its just another way that the rural areas are always subsidizing the big cities!
25.2: link? (My impression actually is it's divided by organization as well, because a huge number of parastatal organizations are essentially involved in foreign policy.)
Please forgive my monomania.
But the investments also allow SoftBank to carve out regional winners through consolidation. For example, when SoftBank's Vision Fund invested almost $8 billion in Uber, it got two board seats and the ability to implement corporate governance changes that altered Uber's power dynamics. Following that investment, Uber retreated from Southeast Asia where it faced intense local competition from Grab. This made Grab the indisputable market leader in Southeast Asia.
I have no prediction about either ridesharing or SoftBank in 50 years.
24 I've been saying since November 2001 that we should give Florida back to Spain. Among the many other problems that would solve, they'll think up a savvier name for the Redneck Riviera.
I think the drug war one is right, but for reasons the author just vaguely alludes to at the end (the opioid bodycount) rather than the lefty shibboleths filling most of the piece. I think new drug synthesization will permit (if it doesn't already) production, at scale and efficiency, of chemicals so well-balanced between addictiveness and lethality that the problem will be impossible to address other than as one of mass public health; that law-enforcement responses would be akin to treating epidemic flu with jail sentences.
that law-enforcement responses would be akin to treating epidemic flu with jail sentences.
We'll probably do that too.
however, the "conductor", who couldn't see me, chose to override it, so that the door closed again before fully opening, hit me quite hard and threw me onto the platform floor, fracturing a couple of vertebrae.
Holy shit. When was this?
...what do you think Wall Street is doing with it, exactly?
Chopping it up, rebundling, and selling it to each other, siphoning off commissions each time.
One thing bus drivers do here during peak congestion is entreat passengers to distribute themselves more efficiently/make way for people alighting/hop out the front door and reboard at the back. In principle though that could easily be done remotely, with a large degree of automation.
|| The latest from Rushan. 50 years hence this sort of thing won't be going on, right? |>
No. There won't be any Uighurs left in China.
"Yeah, there is certainly no evidence that Wall Street is sending any of that money here."
Mortgages? Business loans? Student loans? Auto finance?
I don't think 401ks do that.
Student loans: government, mostly, aside from for-profit predatory institutions.
Auto-finance, mortgages: I don't know the extent to which local banks count as "Wall Street sending money here". Certainly local banks are probably parking their money on Wall Street, but that's not the same as saying that Wall Street is investing in Small Town USA.
Business Loans: I have no idea, but I have the idea that it's hard to get one, and that it's local, again.
Yeah, 401ks are for betting on loaded mutual funds.
401ks are generally a mix of stocks and bonds, aren't they?
Also if you have a setup where everyone's retirement savings are invested locally then you have a setup where pretty much no one in a poor part of the country can get a loan for anything because poor people don't have many retirement savings. Also a setup where the local economy going down impoverishes everyone with a job and destroys their retirement savings too.
46: Usually, yes, but it depends on what your job and management company offer. If they allow it, you can sink it all into eclectic web magazine futures.
46: most companies offer age-appropriate mixtures, so the younger employees get put by default into a high-growth fund that is all stocks. Before I ditched the market earlier this year I had mine invested in a Vanguard index fund. ajay, I don't get your desire to go slumming into silly arguments like this at all. How does it not bore you to tears?
Sure, I'm not saying there aren't benefits to diversification and that access to national capital markets isn't a good thing. But, those benefits come at a pretty high cost that isn't well addressed by the way 401(k)s are structured in practice.
I live in a small city in a rural region, and what I see is capital being exported to prop up the price of equities in the S&P 500. If that money wasn't being sent away, maybe it could be invested locally to redevelop our local brown field into a green industrial park. And then the regional economy could take advantage of the multiplier effect as this type of project brought jobs and economic growth.
But instead, the laws and industry are structured such that we are incentivized to stash our capital with Wall Street, and there are not good options that would provide people with the opportunity to use that money to invest in building up the local economy. So a steady stream of our capital leaves the region, we loose local autonomy, local jobs don't pay well, and when the kids grow up they move away to New York.
Let's just not get into why we're engaging in pointless arguments here. That kind of self-awareness seems unhelpful.
Have any of the lawyers or the Philadelphia crew heard of, or come across, a law professor called A\my W\ax?
I'd be interested in triangulation, so to say.
Yes, but I'm not placing the context, I'll know it once I google. My non-specific memory is that she's terrible, but I may be remembering a terrible story she was associated with where she wasn't the terrible bit.
Just googled, and yes she is terrible.
I don't know her as an attorney, though, if you know what I mean. I know her because of the internet flap about her terribleness.
41 Bite your tongue.
Nearly a decade ago, I was involved in some class action litigation over securitized second mortgages, and one of the other parties in a related case thought it would be a neat idea to bring an expert in securitization to explain the local benefits of this sort of thing to a jury full of Midwesterners. That's the Jesse James southern midwest, not the Robert LaFollette Paul Wellstone northern midwest. There was no sign that the jury was impressed.
On cross-examination, the expert admitted that he'd retired in his late 30s, having made a killing on Wall Street, and that he was enjoying doing nothing at all.
Jurors were quite generous with the punitive damages.
Another story from that trial -- I don't remember if I told this at the time -- while a different defense expert was testifying, the plaintiffs lawyer made a bullshit objection so he could approach the bench. As the objection was resolved, against him naturally, he muttered to the judge that he didn't like how the expert was looking at jurors. A few minutes later, he had another objection: while they were all up at the bench arguing it, the judge was only watching the expert. A middle aged man. Who was flirting somewhat theatrically with some young women on the jury. She read him the riot act, in front of jurors, and indicated to the lawyers that she wasn't absolving them of responsibility for their witness' conduct either.
I'm just glad I didn't have to learn this lesson from my own screw up.
Don't lead the jurors on by flirting with a bunch of them. If you have honest intentions toward a respectable, single juror, express your interest to that specific juror under oath.
There is a 401K-esque plan where you invest locally -- it's the Employee Stock Option Plan. Part of your compensation is stock in your employer. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, but they have a tendency
Outside of the 1%, everyone's biggest asset is their job, in the sense that you expect more return from that than from anything else. The second largest asset is usually the home.
So suppose you're a coal miner in a coal mining town. Advances in fracking and solar energy make coal uneconomical. You lose your job. Then your house, a convenient commute from the mine, loses its value. If the rest of your assets are in your employer's stock, or are a few rental properties you bought in your own town, you're triple screwed.
(eventually this will happen to Silicon valley, where the economy is not very diversified and owning stock in your employer is very fashionable).
And the third largest asset? Laydeez.
Anyway, the coal miners mostly all lost their jobs before coal mining became uneconomical because it stayed economical due to lots of mechanization.
Tactically, it seemed counterproductive that the coal miners cooperated (at least by default) with the gas people in avoiding a tax on fracking (Pennsylvania tax) and attacked the environmentalists. Because it was the fracking that really killed them here.
There is a 401K-esque plan where you invest locally -- it's the Employee Stock Option Plan. Part of your compensation is stock in your employer
Myself working at a tech company in 2001, let me introduce you.
In 2001, I was working for Duke. I didn't get any stock, which is just as well since they aren't even smart enough to take bribes from parents when Wake Forest is.
The local public gas utility in Omaha had a very nice pension plan safely invested. Then it got bought by Enron and everybody got fucked. Which is the kind of thing a 401k can prevent. Still, the 401k has a certain element of setting-up the worst paid and educated employees to fail and then telling them it's their own fault.
Meanwhile, I was reminded today of when it was revealed that Mitt Romney had an IRA worth over $100 million. Because its really important to our retirement system that such accumulations be allowed to compound, tax free.
All-you-can-eat sushi bars will be unthinkable in 50 years, because edible ocean fish will be nonexistent, or at least prohibitively expensive. Maybe there will be a reality television show where people can watch 2070's equivalent of Logan Paul or Kendall Jenner waste fish on camera.
I think the concept of "fish" will prove very flexible.
We get a really good deal to invest in our stock but I sell it as soon as I can for the reasons above.
I've wondered if there's some finance person making money on 401ks because there is an infusion of buyers at regular times when payroll deduction happen, so they manipulate the prices upwards on those dates and sell into the new stream of forced buyers to make a profit.
That's why 1/15th of the people get paid on the 1st and the 15th and another 1/15th is paid on the 2nd and the 16th, and so on.
I also think the end-of-life one is plausible, but for cynical reasons related to the eyewatering costs aging populations will impose on health systems.
We've been eating people! Sushi Green is people!
Luca Brasi "sleeps" with the "fishes".
"Freshwater sushi" is Fredo.
I assume they'll be able to make artificial fish muscle like they're making artificial beef-like product? I haven't heard anything about it.
In 2070, people will completely misread "Barney Miller," because by their standards, Abe Vigoda look healthier than the rest of the cast.
76: Maybe they'll run out of seaweed?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0m_50jyTik
This is going to be better.
The stats on this are quite something.
68: farmed fish, I think. So no tuna but plenty salmon etc.
56: thanks, LB. I just had a conversation with her, which left me with the distinct feeling that she thinks Boadicea was a far left radical.
84: yes, that's the one. Thanks. Sorry for not looking it up.
83: I never get to have conversations like that with people. Not a rare opinion, though, I would think: strong woman in leadership position, anti-empire... I can see how people would class her as far left if they didn't think too hard about it.
And killed a shitload of civilians, of course.
32: grab is indeed the winner, I've deleted uber from my phone. the huge benefit is that it can get you taxis offering a flat rate as well as cars. I somehow end up calling the comfort cab booking line often though, I don't know what I'm doing there. habit.
Are there good Uber alternatives in London? Grab (and Lyft) don't seem to operate here, and Hailo is rubbish. (Last time I tried it, in central London, it estimated 45 minutes until a taxi would arrive. A superior alternative would simply have been a notice saying "all our taxis are in a big car park near Holborn. You want one? Walk there.")
Or that other thing from the Harry Potter books, the Underground?
Boadicea would have voted for Brexit.
Of course she would. She was an uneducated middle-aged woman from Essex.
Julius Caesar was basically nothing but a very vigorous Robert Schuman.
When I bridge the Rhine it stays bridged.
60. "ESOPs"
Buying your employer's stock* has the giant disadvantage that when your company goes under, you lose not only your job but the stock in it you've purchased also becomes worthless. There's a reason why you diversify your investments.
* Not the same thing as exercising options, of course. Those can be lucrative under the right circumstances, but then, so can a roulette wheel.
I was living in fear the day of the Lyft/Uber strike because I did NOT want to end up in a jam and have to use Lyft/Uber for the first time ever.
I haven't used either in a couple of years. And I picked my brother up at the airport to stop him from using them once.
Is it still true that Uber and Lyft aren't turning a profit yet, and are subsidizing the rides?
If you don't count all if their expenses, they make a very good profit.
81 I typed an answer, but then got distracted and didn't hit send. I think we're rounding the corner on this, that the legal loopholes that let white men abuse Native women with impunity are going to be closed, and the systems for better law enforcement response/coordination are being created. Our lege had a bill this just passed session that passed our Rep house with a very strong majority; an idiot Rep senator held it up in committee on racist grounds, but this was ultimately beaten back, and the thing passed, again with strong Rep support.
It'll help Daines in 2020 to play a role, so I think the stars will align for now.
And once you've decided that Native women deserve the protection of law, maybe that's hard to backslide on.
102: Thanks. Which reminds of my other voxicle I forgot to post:
Why did anyone write off the United States?
Is it still true that Uber and Lyft aren't turning a profit yet, and are subsidizing the rides?
Uber is making a massive loss overall, but in a few cities, like London, it is making a profit. I don't know about Lyft.
Well, perhaps the strike was their least unprofitable day yet!
Back in the day, before Amazon was making a profit, there was a DOS attack on it and I recall that joke.
I would have thought Uber would lose money in places like London that already have trusted cabs everywhere they have to compete with on price, and make money in places like Pittsburgh where in 2010 it was impossible to find a cab of any sort unless you were in a 4-block region of downtown or you made a reservation 12 hours in advance.
Shows you the power of... network effects? Density? Something.
Cabs here really do suck something awful.
Honestly, the ubers kind of suck too. The one time I tried to get a ride downtown, the driver asked me to cancel unless he could take me to the airport.
She was an uneducated middle-aged woman from Essex.
Worse. She was Normal for Norfolk.
I don't spend much time in London, but my experience of Hailo contradicts ajay's. We've always found the efficient and reponsive, AND they have the knowledge.
I would have thought Uber would lose money in places like London that already have trusted cabs everywhere they have to compete with on price
But London black cabs are ferociously expensive and their drivers legendarily racist and unpleasant, and infamous for taking out-of-towners on unnecessarily long routes to rack up the fare. Their main customers are people who get other people to pay their fares for them.
Also there's no evidence that black cabs are feeling any pressure on price from Uber - if they were, they'd be cutting their fares to compete. (The meter sets a maximum price, not an obligatory one.) They haven't.
AND they have the knowledge.
The last time I took a black cab in London it was to the Globe Theatre, probably one of the five most famous buildings in London or indeed England, and I had to tell the driver where it was. The myth of the Knowledge is a marketing tool; nothing more.
It's not marketing. It's just that some pass the test based on the streets of Liverpool.
I think U2 wrote a song about that.
We built this city with no street names.
108: You described the cab situation perfectly. It was awful. I really do appreciate the change that ride sharing services have had: it's nice that I know that if I get drunk somewhere far from home, I actually do have a safe way to get back.
I wonder how price-sensitive people are in our market. I understand that in some places people use Lyft/Uber as their daily mean of transit, which still strikes me as somewhat batshit, but I would think that's relatively rare here. If either one lessens their subsidies, in theory the other one will pick up slack--but eventually they have to make a profit and raise their rates as well. And most drivers drive for both, so a change in rates will probably equalize quickly. Ditto if a new competitor enters the market, as capital requirements are low. Everyone's strategy is to become a monopoly but that can't really be economically possible*. So in the long run (once VC figures out what their strategy should be) prices will go up, driver numbers and availability will go down, and it'll still be better than waiting for a goddamn taxi.
There's an additional added wrinkle that Uber has an office here, have done very visible testing with driverless cars (as have some competitors), and have been in conflict with the mayor about how good a corporate citizen they are. I could imagine that'd affect local ride subsidies.
* The only irreplaceable part in all this, assuming drivers aren't locked into contracts, is the phone infrastructure. Maybe Apple could do it, but they haven't shown any interest.
Black cabs are subsidised in London: they don't have to pay congestion charge or emission charge, and they are allowed to drive in bus lanes. Minicabs (including Uber) don't get those advantages.
If you look like you might puke, bartenders can usually get a taxi to show up.
That surprises me. "About to puke" must be just about the least desirable taxi customer.
They don't mention that to the taxi. Anyway, it may have changed with Uber, but to avoid trouble, bartenders liked to keep a reliable exit option.
122: The taxi driver doesn't actually let you into the taxi. The driver drags you out of the bar and leaves you to puke on the sidewalk. It's an extra service taxi drivers provide for bars that don't have bouncers.
I'm watching the fluctuations. I blinked and Dara Khosrowshahi just lost a million dollars.
The boadicean judge was actually more fun than one of the characters at this conference, who obviously fancies himself as the Newt Gingrich of Guildford.
The dispiriting thought that occurred to me is that just as there is wingnut welfare now for the more prominent types, there will be in ten years time an academic plague of right-wing underachievers who have learned everything they know from YouTube and who are going to invent their own branch of grievance studies about how the whole rotten system is complicit in not giving them a job.
The academic job market seems, from the outside, to be so terrible and so competitive even at the lowest levels that two things are true
1) affirmative action in any direction is unlikely to lower standards because any of the top 20 or so candidates for any post are perfectly qualified to do it
2) There will be an unending demand for conspiracy theories to explain why perfectly qualified people don't get jobs.
she thinks Boadicea was a far left radical.
Boadicea was a traditionalist fighting against innovative centralists. She was basically Ben Shapiro.
Oh. That's why analogies are banned here.
Ben Shapiro is the Gilligan-Musolini of political thought.
Nicole Cliffe's twitter is bleak enough today that I've sworn off underestimating my drinking when I talk to the doctor just in case it kills me.
If it cheers you up, Jammies just told me that there are several kids named Atreyu at the local high school.
Does that mean the kids were conceived while the parents were watching the movie?
For some reason, I always think Atreyu is the name of the flying dog [googling, I re-learn that the flying dog is a luckdragon named Falkor].
Please, everyone knows it's a flying doobie.
128 He lacks Gilliganian jouissance.
I have a lot of commuter credit stored up that I can only use on Lyft shared or Uber pool or on commuter passes or adding stored value to my transit card. But the shared ride services are so shitty that even though they're essentially free for me it's not worth using the credit- I took one to work a couple weeks ago and it rerouted me through the most congested part of the city to pick up a shared rider and it took ~75 minutes to get to work (direct drive about half that at that time of day.) Considering that they're selling themselves as the future of mass transit and the replacement for city buses, this seems problematic for their business plans.
Also Lyft pissed me off because their app has a bug- I had it set to charge my commuter card by default, but took a regular ride at some point, and it rejected the commuter card because a commuter card is invalid for solo rides and also changed the default card because of the rejection. So the next time I took a shared it charged my regular card and didn't even use up my stored credit, and when I complained to them they said they don't have the ability to refund and charge a different card which is utter bullshit. They said it was my fault for not confirming which card was being charged before requesting even though their app's programming changed the default setting.
I can get to my office in a half hour by public bus using a pass my employer pays for. It's pretty nice.
If everything works exactly right, which is approximately never, I can take a bus to a train to a thing that people argue about whether it's a bus or a train and it will take about 40 minutes. But even when one of those doesn't work well it's almost always better than shared Uber/lyft.
138: My door-to-cube commute is usually closer to 40 minutes, and I have to pay for my bus pass but it's pre-tax. I can in theory get the evening commute down to about 25 minutes, but that involves a high variance strategy that often fails.
|| If you're a job interviewer and you give an interview question that's like "how would I display (infinite data structure) on a monitor," you should probably say if you think the monitor has real number resolution. It turns out having access to uncountable infinities changes the optimal solution for many engineering problems! |>
Tried that. Didn't help. The pigeonhole principle rules the roost.
I had a 30 minute commute in 2006, but now it's a 40 minute commute. They added a ton of stop lights and traffic to my country road, but then they also added a highway access road that saved me some in-town squiggling. No one pays or compensates me for this is any way.
We're trying to buy a house that's eleven blocks from my office, which means I could actually use those rent-a-scooters to commute. But I hate them. Also, I frequently (and unexpectedly) need a car for my job, so I always just drive.
Current driving commute: seven minutes, but no parking provided so it's a crapshoot of street parking that can easily turn seven minutes into many more minutes.
Couldn't you just walk? And like walk back if you need the car.
Probably walking would be fine on most days (and pleasant!). But there are some days where I urgently and unexpectedly need to use my car for work. And I also need the car immediately after work to pick up the kiddo from childcare, which is time-sensitive. Oh, also, I'm an American I LOVE MY CAR LEAVE ME ALONE.
Cycle. You could do eleven blocks in seven minutes on a bike, and no parking worries. Probably wouldn't even get out of breath.
The problem is that bicycle seats crush the artery that let's you penis get hard. I read that on the internet.
Cycling is the most attractive non-car alternative The catch: it's entirely uphill on the commute to the office, and I'm a profusely sweaty person, and I have a job where I have to appear in court almost daily, preferably in a non-damp condition.
So an electric-assist bike could work. Or I could leave home early enough to cool down and freshen up and change into court clothes. Maybe sometime in the magical future.
After Hormuz is closed for a year by the US-Iranian war.
Radpowercycles are half the price of other electric bikes and come with all the accessories included (headlight, tail light, fenders, odometer, speedometer, bell, rack.) I have one of their longtails and will probably buy another standard.
152: on that subject - six oil tankers have apparently just exploded a bit in the Strait of Hormuz.
https://www.ft.com/content/5926a3c8-7536-11e9-be7d-6d846537acab
I commute by bike or bus depending on the weather and similar factors. I'm lucky that my office has a commuter changing room. The bike is 30 minutes from front door to cubicle if I don't have to shower and change clothes due to sweat. The bus is 40 minutes if I do it before rush hour really starts, and about an hour if not.
Despite this, I'm wishing we had a car and thinking of getting one, not imminently but let's say this year. DC's public transportation is pretty good by American standards but there's always somewhere that's a pain to get to, and Atossa is getting harder to carry faster than she's getting good at walking.
I could change in my office, but sponging myself off with a bucket might be too much.
156: Phone booths are a little cramped, but there's always one nearby, and they provide privacy.
154: Curious. Reuters says four? I don't have FT access.
Washington Post says two tankers and that the Saudis are providing few details.
Logically, the next source will say zero tankers.
After that things will get weird.
It's Bolton and a bucket of water balloons.
Yes, it's four. The earlier reports said two Saudi tankers (according to the Saudi government) and four unspecified commercial vessels (according to the UAE), but it now seems that the four tankers reported by the UAE government included the two Saudi-flagged tankers. Not sunk, no oil release, but significant structural damage, whatever that means. The other two were a Norwegian-flagged tanker and a Sharjah-flagged tanker.
Here's a Guardian report. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/12/uae-four-merchant-ships-reported-sabotaged
"Thome Ship Management said its Norwegian-registered oil products tanker MT Andrew Victory was "struck by an unknown object". Footage seen by Reuters showed a hole in the hull at the waterline with the metal torn open inwards."
They speculate it could be an improvised mine, but, really, could be anything. Suicide boat, RPG, missile... it takes a lot of oomph to sink a modern oil tanker.
If it were terrorists one would expect someone to have claimed responsibility by now. Just hitting four tankers at once is quite the recruitment poster.
Four at once (or in the same day) implies either it wasn't mines or someone laid a lot of mines very quickly, I would think. Note that it happened outside the UAE's only oil terminal that isn't choked by the Strait.
I guess Stanley will get cycling a bit sooner.
11: Wrong intellectually shoddy contrarian modernist self-promoter. You're probably thinking of the confusingly similarly named Steven Pinker, the Better Angels of our Nature guy.