You may want to read the Appeals Court ruling that overturned his conviction 3-0 because the government lied.
But also consider the point that everyone has a reason why their exact situation is different than the other sides when the outcome is the same. They would say for example that Kimmel was simply deplatformed because he also spread misinformation.
There’s no way out until everyone agrees it is the outcome that matters rather than doubling down because their ideology is so correct that it is beyond contestation and the other side are enemies destroying democracy rather than rivals.
They would not. I love Kimmel, but it turns out the story of the gunman is now much more layered and nuanced than "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them..." In Kimmel's defense, this was a developing story at the time, but it is not untrue, in hindsignt, that Kimmel spread misinformation.
Nothing Kimmel said in the quote you provided is untrue. His statement is about their actions in response to the event, not anything to do with the actual sentiment of the shooter.
I guess you didn't follow updates to the story. I turns out that someone who was a "huge Trump supporter" in 2020 can develop romantic feelings for his trans room mate in the intervening five years since -- and feel a different way on issues.
Only by stretching the facts to distortion can anyone claim the gunman was one of Maga's own in 2025.
I think you might have been a little harsh on Walter. Perhaps the answer is more of a "yes and no" depending on your point of view. It does seem like inflation/deflation kind of canceled each other out before moving off the gold standard.
> It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the founders of the Fed as a relatively rare phenomenon associated with wars and their immediate aftermath. Figure 1 plots the US price level from 1775 (set equal to one) until 2012. In 1913 prices were only about 20 percent higher than in 1775 and around 40 percent lower than in 1813, during the War of 1812. Whatever the mandates of the Federal Reserve, it is clear that the evolution of the price level in the United States is dominated by the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 and the adoption of fiat money subsequently. One hundred years after its creation, consumer prices are about 30 times higher than what they were in 1913. This pattern, in varying orders of magnitudes, repeats itself across nearly all countries.
Not my area of expertise and no skin in the game, just wanted to point this out.
I am harsh on Walter because he tends to argue in bad faith in order to support some weird pro-business libertarian world view. He's super active on HN (as am I) so I have argued with him and there are multiple times he has said things that are outright dishonest (like once claiming that incompetent workers immediately get fired from corporations, a post I can't find quickly but is in my history somewhere, or trying to paint me as some alien-believing UFO fanboy which I am not).
So when he makes absolutist statements like "there was no inflation in the US before 1914", which is a typical springboard for libertarians to start complaining about the federal reserve and propose some idiotic Ayn Rand nonsense, I have trouble not being literal here.
There is nothing wrong with being a UFO fanboy - anyone that is not these days is psychotic. There have been so many leaks at this point, if you don't believe that's dangerous.
You're all waiting for Trump to claim it or something? It's already been announced.
Kind of off course for this convo, but no I do not think that recent "evidence" of UFOs is very compelling. Feel free to believe what you'd like but I do not think it's extra-terrestrials.
Even if we do some phenomena that we cannot explain as of right now, that does not imply aliens, it only implies that there's something we can't (yet) explain. A lot of the videos that were being hailed as smoking guns seemed to be a combination of camera artifacts and just optical parallax and stuff like that. It doesn't pass my metric for aliens yet.
The thing is, I would absolutely love to be wrong on this. It would be insanely cool to be part of the first humans who found extra-terrestrial life, so if anything I'm biased in favor of these things being aliens, but as of right now I am not convinced.
Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.
I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)
Well the point of wearing a mask is mostly to protect vulnerable people, and to slow the spread of a disease. These protests are also about protecting vulnerable people. And, I would argue, to slow the spread of a disease.
It is still an ongoing research topic if wearing masks against an airborne virus that primarily spread through aerosols does anything beyond a psychological effect of getting people to distance themselves and reducing spread that way. Airborne virus are notarial at spreading in places like planes, trains, busses, subway and buildings that recycle air. Meta studies looking at the effectiveness of early measures against covid pandemic points strongly towards shutdowns of mass transportation and borders, rather than masks, as being effective. Airports being particular problematic since travelers sits closely packed in a metal tube for hours.
This is incorrect. Masks reduce the spread of airbone diseases, by capturing the majority of small particulates emitted from coughing, sneezing, or simply breathing.
The exact amount of effect mask wearing had on the spread of COVID may be interesting to study, but probably the most significant factor is whether people were actually wearing masks (e.g., in America, they weren't, not really, but in Taiwan, we were).
For something like cotton masks, the effect is somewhere in the range of 10-20% reduction of aerosol virus, and that is only for a very short time (minutes) while the mask remains dry and not saturated (which is why studies generally describe them as having an marginal effect). After that the rate of virus becoming aerosol increase back to the same rate as without masks. Those masks are not rated nor designed to prevent airbone viruses from becoming aerosols.
There are diseases that primarily spread through droplets where mask are more effecting in addressing coughing and sneezing. COVID was initially thought to be such diseases, but was later found to primarily spread through virus aerosol. This is why the recommendations to address covid was significantly changed in the later part of the pandemic.
In order to address medical problems you got to use the right tool for the job. In the same way you do not use antibiotic to treat viruses, different masks are effective at different diseases. In order to filter respiratory aerosol viruses that remain airborne for a long period of time over extensive distances, you need the kind of masks that generally comes with their own air source. Indoor ventilation and avoiding crowded spaces demonstrated a much better result than cloth masks could ever perform.
> Lest we all forget, the messaging coming out the the White House at the beginning was "masks are ineffective"
If I recall correctly, at the onset of the covid pandemic the general guidance was to not rush to buy masks with the goal to prevent a supply crunch that would impact first-line responders.
This guidance was quickly switched to a global recommendation to wear masks so to prevent and slow down how the disease was spreading, so that healthcare services could respond to the demand.
This all happened in the first few weeks of the global pandemic.
as someone who was wearing a respirator before the pandemic was even acknowledged by the government -
The original CDC statement was something like "masks have not been shown to be effective for the general population". It was technically correct, but if you weren't reading defensively you'd come away with the impression they were stating a negative suggestion rather than the null suggestion (ie nothing). So despite being technically correct, most people would consider this a lie, especially if they were misled by it.
It was definitely a black mark on the CDC response - they should have been honest with people that there simply weren't enough respirators, delay the statement by a day if the healthcare system needed more time to destock Home Depot.
But how that statement gets dragged out as an example of the government being deliberately wrong, to imply that it must have been prudent to do the opposite of what they said is also terribly misguided.
One key aspect of the initial guidances regarding facial masks were based on the assumption that covid was not easily transmissible, which was proven to be false. Once that fact was acknowledged, the whole world pivoted towards widespread adoption of masks and lockdowns to hinder spread.
> It was definitely a black mark on the CDC response (...)
To be fair, the initial criticism towards mask adoption were based on what little they knew then. As the pandemic progressed and observations in somewhat controlled environments started to trickle in, the focus shifted to prevent a supply crunch that affected first responders. I recall that there was also a period where health officials admitted masks were effectice, but regular people would only wear them wrong thus they wouldn't work, which was also dropped.
What matters to keep in mind is that this adaptation took place in a timespan of a couple of weeks at these start of the pandemic. Thus, it's not possible to use this to justify any anti-mask and anti-prevention militancy.
"masks have not been shown to be effective for the general population"
and something like:
"we do not know if masks are effective"
What was said was readily misinterpreted as "masks have ... been shown to [not] be effective for the general population", especially by a science-illiterate population reading with a non-individualist perspective. Whereas the second directly acknowledges the lack of understanding in an evolving situation.
I've said this before but I'll bring it up again - people get tripped up about Covid because they don't understand it was truly novel. We have never, ever had a situation like Covid and honestly we probably won't in our lifetimes.
Our common knowledge about how things should go or what recommendations are correct just does not apply. Nobody knew anything about anything. We had to figure everything out on the fly.
The result is that yes, we were often wrong and our guidelines were a moving target. This isn't like Polio or Measles - public health threats we understand. But, just because we changed our minds or were wrong doesn't mean anybody was lying. It means that we made mistakes.
And, doing super low-risk things like masking, even if we're not 100% sure it works, makes a lot of sense. Nobody dies from wearing a mask. So even if we think there's a chance it could save some lives, it makes absolute sense to recommend it. I mean, it's not surgery or medication.
This is actually a perfect example of the difficulty of scientific communication to a large audience. You need to communicate concise easy to understand guidance about complex topics. Asking “are masks effective” isn’t a simple question and the answer is, it depends. The first part is “effective at what task”, the second is “to what extent”, third is “in what situation”, fourth is “with what risks and tradeoffs”. I’ll be talking about the non-N95 masks unless specifically stated, to avoid any confusion.
Masks are not very effective at preventing an uninfected person from contracting Covid when in proximity to someone infected with Covid. The masks do not form a seal around the mouth and nose, allowing significant amounts of air around the mask when breathing in, as well as not being able to prevent being infected through the eyes. They do provide some protection, including possibly reducing the severity of the infection if contracted while wearing the mask, but that is not their primary benefit.
Mask are effective at preventing the spread from an infected person (either asymptomatic or symptomatic) to others. Breathing out directly into a mask allows the material to catch and trap the majority of the virus carrying condensation, and what gets out around or through the mask is slowed down significantly, allowing the droplets to be pulled down by gravity before traveling as significant distance (or fog up your glasses). Especially when combined with social distancing, this is very effective at prevent the spread of the virus. This is the masks primary benefit and is effective when there is large scale adoption, so that people that have the virus but are not aware, don’t unknowingly pass it. Its effectiveness comes as an aggregate effect similar to herd immunity, rather than an individual effect, since the vast majority of transmission comes from people unaware they are carriers.
Mask come with risks. People tend to touch their face more while wearing masks, and contracting the virus by touching your face is a primary infection mode. People tend to relax other more effective protection methods when wearing a mask, both unconsciously and due to a false belief in the protective capabilities of a mask.
So, in March we had a situation where we were running a shortage of masks. We had people wearing masks (either homemade or surgical) because they believed the mask provided good protection from contracting the virus, which is not true, and may cause people to engage in risky behavior that would put them and others at more risk. We also didn’t have enough masks to be used for their actual benefit of “herd immunity”. The assessment was that non sick people wearing masks was likely to put the individual at greater risk, and deplete the resource from places it was needed, without providing a medical benefit to the individual greater than the risks. In March, the average non sick person should not be wearing a mask.
After several months, we had a situation where we did not have a shortage of masks. We had a situation where the public has been educated through awareness campaigns on how masks work, like the “My mask protects you. Your mask protects me” campaign, so people are less likely to use the masks incorrectly and put themselves and others at greater risk. The assessment is that high compliance of mask wearing will have a greater positive effect through “herd immunity” to outweigh the risks and tradeoffs. But make no mistake, the risks are still there. In that case, the average non sick person should be wearing a mask.
If you don’t understand the underlying medical complexities of the situation, it seems like they can’t both be true. And when an expert organization is trying to provide a clear, short, easy to understand list of recommendations from analyzing and evaluating all those data, they can’t go into to a 45 min presentation every time. Dr. Fauci even tried to add context in March. He talked about how the masks don’t provide protection in the way people think they do, how it can cause people to put themselves at greater risk, both through a false sense of protection and other behaviors like face touching, and how masks primarily protect you from infecting others, not the other way around. If you go back and look at his quotes at the time, he consistently tries to bring that additional context into it, but since it is a complex issue of competing risks and benefits, it’s hard to convey how masks can be good in some cases and bad in others.
> Dr. Fauci in March 2020. “When we get in a situation where we have enough masks, I believe there will be some very serious consideration about more broadening this recommendation of using masks. We're not there yet, but I think we're close to coming to some determination. Because if, in fact, a person who may or may not be infected wants to prevent infecting someone else, one of the best ways to do that is with a mask, so perhaps that's the way to go.” [1]
> And of course his 60 Minutes interview. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”
I’m thin but I agree with you, I don’t have to think or try to be this way, I just am. I do probably have healthier habits than average. But still, it comes naturally to me. I would feel awful and exhausted if it took willpower all the time just to maintain my weight.
For those who are curious, there's some anecdata online that extended fasting (days or weeks) can reverse this disease.
I can't find much published research on it to be fair, but I think the science in this field is lagging behind people's personal experiences.
If there's evidence to the contrary let me know, I'm not trying to spread misinformation. It's just one of the things I consistently recall reading over the years.
https://prolonlife.com/ sells a prepackaged fasting-mimicking diet. plenty of reviews online about the subjective effects on energy levels and soforth during the fast.
I didn’t like it. day 2.5-3 will put me back into the headspace of food scarcity and even knowing that the next meal was sitting in the box and that this is temporary … it was a mental challenge for
me. if you’ve never experienced food scarcity, it can be all-consuming and seriously warp your cognition and emotional baseline.
Personally it is a strange thing. Diffcult to do over 24 hours but easy over a few days. Once you get over the head space of "im hungry must eat!" It turns into "im hungry, oh well".
But this is a sample size of 1 and results definetly vary wildly between folks.
That's not an eating disorder. Just because you're cold doesn't mean you need to put on a sweater. Learning not to let minor discomforts bother you builds discipline and character.
Anorectic are very dosciplined and proud of their ability to not eat. Hunger not being "well so what" is normal healthy biology. It is not just discomfort. It is biologcal mechanism to prevent very real harm.
Yhe issue with anorexia is that it works as cycle - if ypu have genetic predisposition, starwing affects metabolism, your discomfort about food gets worst and you are in it.
Fasting is great because you live off of your muscles. Keep at it and you will loose so much muscle, you will develop an eating disorder. The stomach and intestines are muscles too.
My understanding is that if you are healthy and you fast, it's great.
If you are actually ill and fast it's still great but it only hides your illness and you are on a very bad path (eating disorder)
Even cutting back a couple hundred calories a day can leave you absolutely exhausted, in my experience. Even just increasing exercise by a couple hundred calories a day without eating more is also incredibly exhausting, after a few weeks it becomes thought dominating second-by-second.
If you're going to fast, especially extended fasting, it would serve a person well to drop carbs and sugar and get into ketosis, at least for a while, so your body can start burning fat more effectively. If you've never done this before, it can be an uncomfortable process, with a lot of headaches, mood swings, etc. Making sure you take in enough electrolytes (sodium, magnesium, and potassium) will help a lot during all this, and during longer fasts.
I cleaned up my diet about a month ago, and have accidentally done some 24 hour fasts when I was busy and it's been fine. By the time I do eat, I'm really not even hungry, though my stomach may be growling a bit. The first time I ever did this, I had horrible headaches and felt miserable for a while, but subsequent times have been easier.
Good sleep maters too. Bad sleep will throw your hormones out of whack. I'm extremely hungry when this happens, and crave all the wrong things. Knowing what's going on helps a little.... just a little.
I find all this much easier than just trying to cut back by 200 calories with what I normally eat. It's all about hormones.
Exhaustion is in people's heads to an extent, but I think you're lying about your energy intake and/or activity level. If you do three 36 hr fasts per week then you're effectively only eating 2.5 days per week. Consuming 1500 kcal/day on non-fasting days equates to only 3750 kcal/wk total. Running burns at least 90 kcal/mi even for a small person so if you're doing 35 mi/week that means >3000 kcal/wk just from exercise, plus at least 7000 kcal/wk for basal metabolism. At that rate you would therefore be losing about 2 lb/wk of fat, which is an unsustainable for more than a few weeks at a time.
As a point of comparison I'm a large man and fairly active with endurance sports so I have to consume about 3100 kcal/day (with no fasting) to maintain body weight.
Every time the New York Times publishes a health-related article, the comment section is filled with comments just like this: just self-congratulations without any useful takeaways for anyone else, and zero self-awareness that would enable them to realize, hey, not everyone is like me.
Whenever one feels tempted to utter “it’s all in your head”, my advice is to take a step back and reflect on how little I know about the circumstances of others, and then, you know, maybe just keep it to myself.
Behavioural patterns are heavily influenced by hormonal balance and as such, success-rates of different self-help strategies (diets, fasting, resistance and/or endurance training) are highly individual. This also extends to addictive behaviours.
"Hormon-typical" individuals have an easier time shaping their behavior because they don't face imbalances that complicate adherence. For them, sticking to a program is trivial. Combine that with lack of reflection, and many of these individuals delude themselves into thinking their success of following simple programs (which are simple in design, and only difficult in adherence) is somehow an accomplishment worthy of note. Low-empathy individuals, in particular, often interpret this as evidence of their own superiority, while dismissing others as mediocre.
So you see such comments a lot, because many people are "hormon-typical" and also low empathy. See any discussion about diet, fitness, Ozempic, etc.
Sounds like anorexia behavior. Those people do sport a lot, eat a little, right up the the moment the cumulative body damage is just too much. Pro-ana forums are full of people who live on very little calories and are at complete denial about health harm they cause to themselves.
That feels like the incorrect framing, the burden of proof is on the initial claim. That'd be like saying "I've heard online that leprechauns live on the moon. I haven't found published research on it, but I think science in this field is lagging behind personal telescopic experience. If there's evidence to the contrary let me know, but I've read it online a lot." and treating that like it's proof of moon leprechauns.
It's not exactly the same, as there are studies, there just haven't been a lot yet, since a lot of the study around it is new, although fasting has been practiced for thousands of years. There is no money in fasting, so the number of organizations willing to fund the studies goes way down.
> In conclusion, current evidence suggests that intermittent fasting in patients with NAFLD is a feasible, safe, and effective means for weight loss, with significant trends towards improvements in dyslipidemia and NAFLD as illustrated through non‐invasive testing (NIT).
If someone has NAFLD, they can either sit around and eat cake for 20 years waiting for the science, or they can try doing some fasting, which is very low risk (assuming they don't have other issues going on), and find out very quickly if it works for them. Sure, it's an n of 1 in that case, but who cares, if they are the test subject it only matters if it works on them.
I'd add to this that the carbs should be kept low and the diet having quality foods outside of the fasts. Eating aforementioned cake during a feeding window every day is going to leave a person miserable, burning muscle, and still leave the hormones all screwed up. Insulin needs to be controlled and lowered. Fasting does that quickly, but don't abuse it during your meals on a regular basis.
From what I've read elsewhere, fasting can help in the early stages to reverse it, but once real damage occurs that sticks around.
There may be some medical benefits to periodic fasting, especially for people with excess adipose tissue. But in terms of "no harm" the Memel et al paper you linked doesn't seem to mention anything about loss of lean muscle tissue. This can cause serious harm for some patients — especially older patients with the "skinny fat" body type — by leading to sarcopenia (higher musculoskeletal injury risk) and endocrine dysfunction (muscle is a glucose sink). Loss of muscle can be limited to an extent by doing resistance training and maintaining high protein intake during non-fasting periods. But overall there are still a lot of unknowns in this field.
A lot of that would be covered under the “other issues” I mentioned. Obviously, consult with your doctor first.
In terms of muscle loss, from what I’ve read, muscle loss is more of an issue for low calorie carbohydrate based programs. When fasting there might be some muscle loss when at the very start, but then it tends to preserve muscle, and like you said, adequate protein intake and resistance training can mitigate that.
Those, like Peter Attia, who saw muscle loss from long term keto and fasting over several years, weren’t using fasting as a medical intervention. He was already metabolically healthy, but maintained a pretty extreme fasting protocol in an effort to gain longevity benefits, effectively experimenting on himself based on some results of early studies around the benefits of fasting for longevity.
The general theory now seems to be making the fasts much less frequent once healthy. Maybe only a couple times per year.
I’m sure this area of study will continue to evolve slowly.
From your chosen quote, it doesn't seem to indicate that fasting specifically changed things, but fasting being an "effective means for weight loss" was the bit that really mattered. I don't see anything to divorce the two - general weight loss and improvement to the FLI.
> Available evidence suggests that any form of caloric restriction may be beneficial and specific forms of IF should be tailored to the individual.
Also important to notice that once the liver is damaged it's not recommended to fast:
> Additionally, it is important we investigate the possible risks of fasting in patients with cirrhosis, which is currently not recommended.
Yea I partly agree I guess. I am a cyclist in NYC and there are definitely "e-bikes" that present more like motorcycles and people drive them over the Queensboro Bridge bike path which is like 3 feet wide. It's crazy. I'm surprised I don't see more streaks of blood on the concrete there to be honest.
So I would like to see better e-bike laws that make it illegal to have a machine that's too heavy and/or fast, and to issue court summonses to people operating those machines in bike lanes. That seems fair. It's a clear hazard, it's a selfish use of resources, and if everyone did it they'd just close the bike path altogether because it'd become unusable.
Having said that, that's not what the city is doing. They're fixated on cyclists running red lights and stop signs, not distinguishing between different kinds of bikes. Bikes, and e-bikes, are safer than cars for everyone around them. We want to encourage people to bike more and drive less because they're so much safer. (Remember a bike isn't like a car -- if a cyclist hits a pedestrian, they're gonna get hurt too!) For this reason, many states allow bikes to treat red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yield signs. So NYC's sudden shift in policy, to me, feels backwards.
It sucks because if safety was really the major concern the mayor could have just built more and safer bike lines -- which was what he promised to do, made a plan to do, and then just didn't.
> They're fixated on cyclists running red lights and stop signs, not distinguishing between different kinds of bikes
Absolutely agree this is silly and cities should be encouraging cycling.
> We want to encourage people to bike less and drive more
assuming you meant to flip this?
An e-bike that can even do 20mph comfortably is much closer to a moped than a bicycle, partly due to weight, and partly due to "ease of speed". Obviously a person can easily cycle 20mph, but it just isn't the kind of thing you do on in a crowded area. Very different when it is just a throttle. So grouping them in with bikes, rather than mopeds or similar, is just extremely silly
> An e-bike that can even do 20mph comfortably is much closer to a moped than a bicycle
There are pedal assist ebikes hitting the market that are nearly indistinguishable from a road bicycle and weigh as much as a kitted out steel touring bike (i.e. ~35-40 lbs) and can comfortably do 20 mph.[0] I don't really think that's treading any sort of line of being close to a moped.
Also there are absolutely people riding analog bikes capable of having an average cadence of 15-20 mph who ride with reckless abandon on crowded mixed-used paths in cities - so maybe you don't do that, but there's a pretty large subset of cyclists who are doing that because biking is more of a sport activity than strictly pragmatic form of transportation. Bad bike path etiquette extends beyond ebikes
Getting a pedelec bike to 20mph takes real effort unless cheats are involved - it's not really a moped. However there needs to be some honest classification that's global to handle the new spectrum from traditional bike to full on motorcycle and everything in between.
Depending on the country the motor cutoff is 32km/h, which means that speed is more accessible to your average rider than on a classic bike. And the elephant in the room is how compliant many e-bikes really are. Some even advertised how easy it is to remove (raise?) the limit.
Where I live I find cyclists to be the most reckless participants in traffic, way more than drivers and pedestrians. Cyclists never have to take even the most basic course even just in school to learn legislation or general rules. They always act like they own the road whether on the sidewalk among pedestrians, or on the street among cars. E-bikes just made this worse because everyone can cycle above their natural capabilities now.
But it's also clear that the "blast radius" of a cyclist is usually very limited compared to the damage a car can cause even with banal actions like opening a door at the wrong time. So I understand why their behavior is tolerated compared to when drivers to the same.
Also, reckless behaviour is self-limiting to some degree with bike-shaped transport (and scooters) as crashing tends to hurt a lot, whereas car drivers don't have as much skin in the game.
I don't completely disagree, but as a regular cyclist with maybe only slightly above average fitness, I can drop the hammer at an intersection and be at 22mph in 10 or 15 seconds. I also own an ebike with a throttle and it's not substantially faster off the line than my muscle, it's just easier to sustain high speeds.
> Absolutely agree this is silly and cities should be encouraging cycling.
They should be encouraging cycling, but not by making red lights a free-for-all.
I once lived on the corner of a pretty busy cycling street by the beach in Florida, with a stoplight in the intersection outside my window. We had these gigantic "trains" of cyclists regularly just blowing straight through red lights, because there typically wasn't a lot of traffic coming from the cross street. I remember one occasion where a car was entering the intersection from the cross street (car had the green light, major street had the red), and a huge train of about 20 bicycles at full speed ran the red light and slammed into the side of the car with a loud "thump thump thump thump thump thump..." Total wreckage. Busted bicycles all over the street after they fucked up, and the cyclists had the nerve to be irate. If I hadn't run out and started recording, the car driver probably would have been assaulted by these raging hotheads.
Idaho has the "potato" laws for bikes, and they typically work out pretty well. The laws were made with the observation that cars kill more cyclists than cyclists kill cars. So allowing bikes more freedom in the street is typically better for bike safety.
I don't see how cold this make sense. Pedestrians kill even fewer cars, should they be safer with even fewer restrictions? Perhaps let them walk on highways if more freedom means more safety?
If you design your streets for pedestrian safety that means pedestrians will be more safe. The reason we have so many pedestrian limitations is because we design streets for cars first, and put everything else to the side, making those everything else incredibly endangered.
More curves, lower limits, more stops. Cities that implement more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly design are safer for everyone, cars included.
I am sorry, I don't see how is this explaining how running red lights and stop signs makes bicycles safer. Another example - trains don't take much damage from the cars yet cars suffer catastrophic damage from trains, should cars be allowed to run through train crossing gates for more safety? If we put everything other than cars to the side, it means trains too, right? So why cars have to stop at the crossing gates, should not it be safer to remove any gates and/or traffic signals from the railroad crossings?
The excuse I've heard is that because cyclists need more energy to get back up to speed it's more acceptable for them to roll through lights / stop signs. Seems like pretty weak reasoning to me. But as long as it's a "rolling stop" I think there should be leeway given. It's very different to roll up to an empty 4 way stop and decide to roll through and deciding your "energy needs" trump everyone else trying to leverage an intersection. I'm of a similar belief with cars. A full two second pause at an empty 4 way stop is stupid. There is no safety issue with slowing down, seeing the path is clear and then proceeding.
I've personally run two red lights in the last month or so. Both were late at night where I'm literally the only visible vehicle on the road at a timed (no sensor) intersection where I was waiting for over a minute for the light to change. That's obviously a very different scenario than when you have to interact with other drivers on the road.
Yes, I don't find the "energy to start moving" explanation very rational too but whatever is the reason cyclists want to blow stops and reds, I am just confused how somebody can believe that it makes cycling safer. Especially the one given, that bikes are more fragile than cars, it just does not follow. I would not run a red light in a car for the fear of a side collision and my chances to survive one in a car are so much greater than on a bike.
They don't, my point is that if we design cities to be more friendly to bikes then those incidents go way down. The reason this is a problem is that we hyper-optimize for cars, so pedestrians and bikers are forced into worse situations.
Like, the reason pedestrians jay walk isn't that they're selfish, it's that the streets aren't designed for them and we put far too little crosswalks, with far too little protection. We can make the situation safer for everyone, a win-win.
It's not an us versus them type thing which is where I think most car design conversations go. When we de-prioritize cars, it helps everyone, including the cars.
A lot of things don't have to make sense for them to work. Idaho is solidly in the top half of states safest for bicycles. They are the 18th safest state for bicycles in the US.
You brought up some logic behind this law, so I thought you actually have seen some sense in this. Now it appears to be just the "having such a law in a low population state does not push it to the bottom of the safety so this law is great" argument. One should be able to see the fallacy of such an argument without even looking up what are the safest states for cyclists on top of Idaho and what kind of laws they have wrt stop signs and red lights...
Get on a bike in Boise, Idaho and "blow through a red light" (making sure to stop and yield to oncoming traffic, first). It's not necessarily as small as you might think. And you know, don't ride your bike on the interstate, because that would be totally stupid.
But you know, go downtown, and ride around a bit in traffic, on the greenbelt, etc. And you'll see the cyclists are typically going to make a better decision for themselves and others than cars will.
Like I said, it's fine. If you can't understand it, maybe go experience it first hand.
It could very well be that Idaho cyclists are the next step in human evolution and the laws and rules designed for mere mortals would only hinder their superior decision making, I have never been to Idaho so I would not know. Where I lived though, including such populous states as California and Texas, cyclists don't exhibit any advanced intelligence, they put themselves and others into dangerous situations all the time and fall and crash. E.g. I see someone riding on the wrong way of a double track every single time, usually it's several people riding next to each other and blocking the whole trail, but there are also solo cyclists getting on the left lane in corners. They do collide or slide off the track and fall, but it could be that they are doing something great but impossible to understand on my level of evolution.
> Obviously a person can easily cycle 20mph, but it just isn't the kind of thing you do on in a crowded area.
I've seen many road bikes do exactly this on a crowded bike path of pedestrians, scooters, and e-bikes. I've also seen e-bikes wait patiently to pass and slow down when there's traffic. I think proclaiming that e-bike riders are worse than road bike riders is patently false.
So it's not really an "e-bike" problem. It's really a speed problem.
Probably worth noting at this point that the ultimate beneficiaries are people ordering food on various delivery services. In my experience, these overpowered bikes are almost exclusively used by delivery drivers.
I rarely order online (too much trash, too many hostile UX patterns of sneaking in fees disguised as "taxes" etc.), but when I do, I'd really prefer the delivery person would not risk their and others' lives running red lights all the way.
I wonder if Uber/Deliveroo/etc could implement a penalty for doing a delivery - when you are marked as an e-bike deliverer - "too fast". Obviously they have no incentive to do it, but it seems the easiest single action to slow them down
> Bikes, and e-bikes, are safer than cars for everyone around them. We want to encourage people to bike more and drive less because they're so much safer.
All else being equal, yes. But NYC drivers are exceptionally skilled relative to the rest of the country. They're nuts in a lot of ways, but they're also far more respectful of pedestrians, far more aware of their surroundings, far more willing to drive slowly, and far more happy to stop for pedestrians even if they technically have the right of way.
NYC e-bike riders (especially the Citi bikes) are the opposite. They're far less likely to stop, far more likely to be going way faster than is safe, and far more likely to blow through stop signs entirely.
There's a well-documented phenomenon in safety that the "safer" choice in the abstract can actually end up being more dangerous because it feels safer, which leads to riskier behavior. I fear this is what is happening in NYC: incentivizing people to ride bikes doesn't get you 10x as many of the good, respectful, careful bikers you had 10 years ago. It gets you a whole bunch of reckless amateurs who buy the hype that bikes are safer and bike like maniacs. We may well find that that's worse for pedestrian safety than the well-known and well-regulated dangers of cars.
Look, in my neighborhood, in a single weekend, something like 5 people died due to car crashes. One of them was a kid who was killed by a driver who was texting. Some drivers were drinking. Last year, a driver drove into the lobby of a CityMD a few blocks from me and destroyed the entire corner of the building and possibly killed people, I don't know. Just yesterday a car was upside down in the middle of the road on Skillman Blvd.
Even having said that, I kind of agree that it's true that drivers in Manhattan tend to be pretty aware, considerate, and mindful compared to other cities, all the traffic lights notwithstanding. But they have to be -- even just a little bit of distraction and they will kill someone. I can't say the same for the Citi bikers as reckless as they may be. They're far more likely to hurt themselves than someone else, and I'd rather have the reckless amateurs be on bikes than driving cars.
I've driven around Queens a little and bicyclists, even e-bikes, seem to be both rarer and more law abiding than the delivery people on scooters. I haven't driven much, but every close shave I've had there was with a scooter. They're lawless - they ride on sidewalks, go the wrong way on one-way streets, pass cars on the right, pass you then immediately grind to a halt because they need to make a left turn but apparently needed to get ahead of you first. It would be a relief to see them get some consequences and hopefully start to be safer.
> not distinguishing between different kinds of bikes.
The appropriate forums are filled with people outraged on the "ban on e-bikes" that NY State & City are leading the charge for. They were the first to ban non-UL certified bikes, and have proposed and/or enacted several other regulations against over-wattage bikes.
I'm not sure how effective the laws and enforcement are, but NYC is definitely doing more than nothing to get rid of the heaviest/fastest bikes.
They are giving court dates to (regular) cyclists, they are harsher on bikes than cars, and they are stopping cyclists at a higher rate than they stop drivers of cars.
> If the police don't care about the difference, why do you?
Because the police are more often wrong than they are right. We shouldn't be modeling our laws over what's most convenient for police, that's just asking for abuse.
The police also didn't care to intervene in Uvalde. Should we not care as a result? I don't even know what this line of argument is. Some weird appeal to authority?
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> a few years ago when people were being sentenced to prison for memes
are you talking about the guy whose memes tricked thousands of people (of one political party) into thinking they could vote by texting a number?