IME most workplaces have showers. It pays to ask; they can be well-hidden. Failing that, ride at an easy pace in the morning, wear breathable clothes etc. Cycling needn't be any harder than walking (unless you have huge hills or something).
288 karma · joined February 11, 2010
Here's a speech of his touching on this very topic from the '80s.
http://www.michaelkirby.com.au/images/stories/speeches/1980s...
I haven't actually tried this, but it seems easy to grasp and I've spent enough time busting up delimited strings that "surprisingly useful" is plausible too.
The problem, as others have pointed out, is road design and driver attitudes. Going any significant distance involves either riding (legally) on footpaths, or riding in traffic. There's a nice bicycle path along the river, plus some pictures of bikes in doorzones. That's about it for central Brisbane. It's not that hilly but it's definitely not flat. I don't mind riding in traffic, but I say that as a bike racer (albeit an old, fat bike racer) who used to be a courier. Driver attitudes, well, 95% of them are fine, maybe more. There's a small minority who are deranged and vicious and it's socially acceptable to behave that way in a car. It's all do-able, but it needs some unintuitive techniques (ride in the middle of the road in some situations, for example) and, ideally, a bit of fitness. I don't know as I'd recommend it to neophytes.
That helmet laws are the problem is an appealing conclusion, because it's a quick fix: repeal the helmet law. Changing infrastructure OTOH is hard and changing attitudes in harder still. I'd like it to be as simple as repealing a law, especially one where the benefits are so unclear. I just don't think it is.
In terms of the popularity of the bike hire scheme, I can only say that there are a couple of dozen hire bikes out the front of my workplace at the start of the day and it's down to a couple by day's end. I'm not aware of the official figures, but my highly subjective impression is that they're getting used more than when it started. A less convoluted signup process probably has something to do with it, plus the fact that it's a pleasant time of year to cycle.
Agreed, but the article seemed to be arguing that there was demand for a cheap, essentially disposable, bike and that's what I think is a solved problem
It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.
Assuming they're talking US dollars, that's roughly the price of a bike from the supermarket. Granted, it'll be a truly dreadful bike, but it'll be OK as basic transport. I don't understand the emphasis on cheapness. Making cheap bikes is a solved problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think a cardboard bike is cool. I'd be particularly interested to hear about what they've done about things like bearings and attaching tyres.
The green side of it is interesting, as is the idea of an explicitly disposable bike. If it's easier to manufacture locally, or on a small scale or whatever, that'd be something. But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.
Reusable joining link? No tools required. As to the point of doing it, well, I had the QR skewers stolen off my bike once. Stealing a chain makes at least as much sense.
I myself think the problem is precisely the opposite: people do care about the aesthetics of plumbing, and of programming. They just care about it in ways that have nothing do to with how well it works. We, as consumers, care far too much about "pretty" and far too little about "effective".
Well-crafted anything doesn't necessarily stand out, IME. It just works. This is an admirable trait, but it can't seem to compete with "beautiful". It's a shame that making things that work well is somehow less admirable that making things that look nice.
It seems to me, though, that the relative merits pale into insignificance compared to the potential benefits of picking a standard, doesn't much matter which one, and being able to forget about converting between the two.
Nice to see some attention paid to lighting though. It's an important issue for commuter bikes, and one that doesn't seem to get as much attention as it should.
Edit: or whatever age would result in equivalent industry experience
And I really don't get the CF wheels. They're about the last thing I'd want on a commuter bike.
The bicycle I rode to work today has: - a frame made of heat-treated steel tubes brazed together - wheels made of extruded aluminium and stainless-steel wire - rubber tyres
... not to mention all the other bits and pieces; machined hubs, ball-bearings, etc etc.
I would be impressed at a 3-D printer that could produce any one of these things at a reasonable price, let alone all three. Small scale manufacturing of bicycle parts is confined to high-value niche areas.
I'm afraid I don't see much evidence of decentralised manufacturing here in .au, apart from offshoring, which I doubt has much to do with the sort of open manufacturing you seem to have in mind. I imagine things are the same in most Western economies, although I freely admit this is no more than speculation.
To me, his comment is basically "primary, not secondary, source materials please". Where I come from this is a reasonable request.
I suspect, though, that regular punters will be quite keen. I certainly carry my iPhone when out riding; having one device to map, monitor speed and make phone calls is nice.
As for the long distances, I've known people to drive some of the way, stop where it's easy to park and ride the last bit (generally the bit with the most traffic congestion, so it can work quite well).
"Employees at legal outsourcing companies in India are not allowed by Indian law to give legal advice to clients in the West, no matter their qualifications. Instead, legal outsourcing companies perform a lot of the functions that a junior lawyer might do in a American law firm."
Given that they're not giving legal advice, I can't see them assuming the risk of professional negligence claims.
"Smartphones may soon displace some of the estimated 1 billion credit and debit cards in American wallets."
which is a rather different and less drastic change; they're no more replacing credit cards than credit cards replaced money
New torts are invented, albeit rarely. Every so often there's a new duty of care in negligence. There are, I'm sure, other examples and the point is this: the lack of case law wasn't much help to the first defendant to lose on that point.
I'm curious: when have you come across an editor-less unix?The vi-less ones I've come across have generally had some bizarre substitute that uses wordstar keystrokes or something equally obscure...
You raise a fair point, though: knowledge of vi = knowledge of ed which will work even when vi won't (horrid slow link and/or broken terminal emulation).
Lack of case law affords no protection. It just makes it hard to predict the outcome in advance.
Others have found this a surprising claim, so do I. How has it been weakened or erased? Are they talking about different mental elements or creating offences which do not have a mental element at all? The first doesn't strike me as particularly novel, or objectionable.
> This is a slope that we have been sliding down for some time. While ignorance of the law has generally been excluded as a defense in criminal cases, our system of laws is becoming so convoluted that it is almost impossible to know and understand the applicable law.
This isn't a good thing by any means, but the issue of the law being unknown or incomprehensible to laypeople is nothing new. Take common-law requirements. Honestly, how many people read the relevant case law, or even understand its general effect? People have bumped along for, literally, centuries knowing little more than the broad outline of the law.
I'd also point out that "increasingly codified" isn't synonymous with "increasingly convoluted"; common-law rules are often pretty convoluted.
> Thus we are all at risk.
I'd actually suggest that the general level of legal knowledge has improved. Thanks to the Internet it's at least possible to get at the content of laws without access to a specialised library.