The article “Teenagers’ accidents expose e-bike risks” published on July 30 is a master class in victim blaming. We are provided several examples of someone riding an e-bike who is then injured or killed when being forced to mix with motorized traffic.
The problem isn’t e-bikes, the problem is that we have chosen not to provide safe routes for people to get around on bicycles. E-bikes magnify this failure by making it easier for more people to ride.
E-bikes can also lead to the fix: as more people ride bicycles, there will be more pressure to build safe routes for people to get around on bikes. More bicycles means fewer cars on the road, reduced Carbon emissions, and less road congestion.
We need to stop blaming our children for our failures and get to work.
I am a successful IT professional. I got my start in the 90s, answering phones at an independent ISP and getting folks online with their new modems. This was a great age when folks had a choice of any number of Internet SERVICE Providers who could help them get up and running on AT&T’s local telephone infrastructure.
To this very day, I use the DSL option available from the local Internet Service Provider (Sonic) over AT&T’s wires. I use this despite the fiber optic cable AT&T has hung on the pole in front of my house. Fiber would be so, so much faster, but I’m not going to pay for it until I have a CHOICE of providers, like Sonic, who has always been great about answering the phone and taking care of my Internet SERVICE needs.
Competitive services were the foundation of my career in IT. I believe they were a strong foundation to get Americans online in the first place. Competitive services are, in my opinion, REQUIRED, if you want to get Americans on to modern network technology today.
The scooter proponent answered that since the scooters are a handy way to save car trips, San Francisco can continue its efforts to convert car lanes to bike lanes, where the scooters could safely scoot apart from pedestrians. That sounds great to me. The helmets, though … as I pulled up to the office, I emailed in a brief opinion. I then hung back from going into the office for a couple of minutes to catch the very end of the show. I’m glad I did. Michael Krazny closed with this:
We’ll leave it there! Well, except for one more comment about helmets that I want to read here, from Daniel, who says: “We should revisit the helmet requirement. Helmet use is a cultural convention. For example, they don’t wear helmets in Amsterdam or Copenhagen, which makes bicycling even easier in those places. It is safer to wear a helmet when riding in a car, yet we wouldn’t expect anyone to wear a helmet as a requirement to ride in a car.”
I think it would be nice to see these scooters in Peninsula suburbs, where we tend to lack good “last mile” transit options, and where there are fewer pedestrians to upset. Rental electric scooters sound like a better option than rental bikes in a lot of cases because they’re cheap to deploy, require less knowledge to ride, and require less storage space. And I suspect that the helmet requirement is probably unworkable.
I think the El Camino BRT could be a great project to transform El Camino Real from a ghetto of 1950s strip malls into the sort of place where people would go to enjoy shopping. Maybe. Anyway, the news that a dedicated lane from Santa Clara to Palo Alto could make the bus faster than cars excited me. I’ll try to be at the Sunnyvale meeting this evening, and I also submitted my own enthusiasm to our governments via Transform’s handy link:
I used to commute along El Camino from Mountain View to Palo Alto. I switched to the bus out of environmental concerns. El Camino has the best transit service in the county but it still took 2-3 times longer to take the bus than it would have taken to drive. Now it sounds like you could get BRT running on El Camino FASTER than cars? YES!! If the cars get slowed a bit that’s not such a big deal, especially since any driver going any distance knows that Central Expressway / Alma is a much nicer car trip. Even though I now live 1.5 miles off of El Camino in Sunnyvale, if there were excellent transit services I would be tempted to hop on the 55, walk, or bike to enjoy the transit corridor, especially for trips up to Mountain View or Palo Alto or Stanford Shopping Center. What a pleasure it would be to not have to hassle with parking, traffic, or the Caltrain schedule. If it were sufficiently fast, I would totally use that as a commute option up to Menlo Park.
Also, I’d probably be more inclined to visit Santa Clara.
A test view of a plugin I wrote to view Flickr photos on a WordPress site.
Wow. It is hard even to add a post here.
I loved the old interface. I also loved that when you added new layout options to the old interface, they were OPTIONS that users could turn on or off.
I like that you could browse photos with annotations, click on a photo for a larger view, look over the metadata, &c . . . then click through the photostream or set.
Back when I joined in 2005 I was wary that Yahoo! might eventually do something stupid to what was really a very nice, well-designed interface for managing photos. My main assurance is that there would still be an API . . . I guess I will have to brush off the old API . . .
Really, you should give users the option to use the interface they like. This feels like instead of sitting down with users, seeing how they use the site, figuring out how to make it work better, you brought in some jackass designer who sighed that the site looks oh-so-2005, and decided to replace it with a mashup of Google Image Search (which is a terrible UI, by the way) and the Facebook header image (which wastes space at the top of screens which are getting shorter and wider but at least looks kind of neat.)
Please respect your existing users, many of us who have been paying you real, cash money for years now, and give us at least the option to enjoy the user interface we loved about your site.
This drives me insane. Part of the challenge is that most software dictionaries are unaware of the word “colocation” and are happy to offer “collocation” as an alternative, but that is wrong wrong wrong wrong and it makes me a little nuts every time.
So, here is some explanation I just sent to the NOC and copied to the Sales team of a “Colocation Provider” who keeps sending me messages from something called “Collocation Status Report”:
Dear NOC:
A collocation is a statistic used by linguists to determine the
frequency with which words and phrases are found together.
On your contact information page, there is an option to contact Sales
about “Colocation”
Assuming that you are indeed in the business of Colocation, and not
actually updating us on the status of word frequencies, please fix the
name in your outgoing envelope from “Collocation Status Reports” to
“Colocation Status Reports”
From a survey I just filled out regarding a business trip to London:
Internet access … kept dropping packets, and I had to keep logging in to it via iPass. Don’t gouge customers, just let them on. This is seriously trivial, low-hanging fruit, which can make all the difference in the world esp for an international business traveler avoiding mobile roaming charges.
I would without hesitation stay at a more mediocre hotel that could deliver hassle-free, reliable Internet service, and the hassle-free starts with avoiding the damn tariff screen and just letting your guests on … guests who will appreciate this no-nonsense convenience far more than whether the staff have been properly trained to smile, &c.
I gotta say … we seem to “get this” in America … I’ve stayed at plenty of budget motels which offered complimentary, hassle-free, reliable Internet access. Though, I don’t recall having the same pleasure at a hotel in New York, where you could get free Internet in the lobby, but had to pay for it upstairs in your room.
For many of us, network access is kind of like tap water: we take it for granted that it should just flow, and not require one to jump through hoops to pay an additional $20/day. If there’s a business hotel chain that has figured this out, let me know, because my loyalty would be easily won.
Via Facebook: “Guys, I finally wrote a letter to the Boy Scouts to resign my Eagle Scout rank, and sent it along with my badge. It was hard to do but I can’t continue to the associated with an organization that has become so discriminatory and bigoted toward gay youth & leadership.”
As a former Boy Scout who never made Eagle, I am impressed by those that had the dedication to put in the hard work to attain that rank. I am not surprised to hear that my college friend, Dan Wright, made Eagle, and I am proud that he did.
Two decades on, it takes some integrity to renounce the hard work and proud accomplishment of youth, in the name of those youthful values. Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Courteous, Kind, and Obedient to a code of Universal morality which affords equal respect to all people.
Dan did well in his younger days, and he’s doing right now. Sometimes the label which you have earned just doesn’t fit on the heart within.
Anyway, since Patrick White saw fit to publish his name, face, and contact information alongside a racist cartoon in a newspaper, I dropped him a line suggesting that something might be amiss, and he wrote back saying that no, he was proud to stand by his cartoon, so I shared my own feelings with him:
It is good to cheer on your sports team, but I suspect that if the sports team mascot when you were growing up had been a buck-toothed, squint-eyed Chinaman in a big peasant hat, that you might think twice about printing a Chinaman cartoon in the newspaper. If you were to have such respect for Chinese people and culture, perhaps Indians merit the same sort of respect.
When I was younger my school had an Indian Chief for a mascot. The dozens of our Native American students found it upsetting and it took a few decades of protesting before it was finally removed. While one side found it upsetting that their culture was caricatured to cheer on a sports team, fans of The Chief took offense that Liberal Elites wanted to destroy their culture by imposing Political Correctness on their Hallowed Tradition. So, you had folks insisting that they had to insult another culture in order to properly honor their own culture.
Anyway, some years after I graduated, The Chief got to retire. Alumni kept contributing money and people kept cheering on their team as they had before. Nothing positive was lost, and our school has since regained some respect it had lost during its years of overt racism.
You can make fun of me and rationalize printing racially offensive cartoons in the newspaper all you like, but somewhere deep down, you know it is not right, and you know that you are offending people and scaring away potential clients. Most people are too polite to raise a fuss. But this topic means something to me, so I thought I’d drop you a line and encourage you to think things through.
I don’t need to change Pat White’s mind, and I surely don’t need him to manage my wealth. On the whole, the world seems to be taking a step or two forward for each step back. But it sure is weird to see a racist cartoon published in a newspaper is 2012, 40 years after Stanford managed to figure out that American Indians deserve a little more respect.
What I have always liked about Netflix is that it was a one-stop shop that knew what kind of movies I like to watch, and could make smart suggestions. Netflix had a huge selection and could send me just about any movie I could want. The streaming was a nice addition, but you lose a lot of control that you have on the DVDs like selecting aspect ratios or subtitles. Sometimes the instant gratification is nice but what was important wasn’t a red envelope versus a streaming video, it was that one way or another, Netflix would get me movies I wanted to see.
If the streaming is such a fundamentally new business model start a new business and be done with it. Call it Streamstr. Partner with old-fogey Netflix and their stupid red envelopes so their retarded users can stream a few videos. Better yet, be the Netflix I knew and loved so many years: deliver movies I want to me. If I have to pay more for postage or more for some streaming movie that is really “hot” that is totally cool.
But what you are doing right now is some sort of bizarre unsettling brand seppuku. Why is such a great company working so hard to come up with new and innovative ways to scare away its loyal customers?
Netflix used to be about people watching movies. End of story. Movies. Movies. Movies. Its not about picking the winner between VHS and Beta, its about your customers and their love of movies and about your love of getting the movies to your customers. No nonsense, no bull, no false choices. And now? You’re tossing that advantage aside, and I am just as well served by your competitors.
Making the experience more complex for your customers is just plain dumb. =(
Good luck with your brave new spin-off model. It was a nice ride while it lasted.
Last month I “cut and copied” the following letter printed in the Palo Alto Daily News. (Or I think its called the Daily Post now.) Now I shall paste, transcribe and share:
The text reads:
Bike changed a life
Dear Editor: A recent letter on “bikes vs. cars” stated that the over-50 crowd was “not about to go out and buy a bicycle” to replace their cars. Read on. Three years ago, I got in my car to go to an appointment and discovered that I had a dead battery. Frustrated (my wife had our other car) I slammed the car door only to notice right above me was my son’s old mountain bike hanging from the garage rafters.
I got it down — both tires were flat — pumped them up and rode off to my appointment.
Until that moment, I had not been on a bike in 40 years. After three or four blocks I wondered why it had taken me so long to get back on a bike. It was fantastic!
Several days later, I purchased my own bike on Craigslist and was soon riding to and from work — 15 miles round trip — taking the bus on days it was too cold or to dark. I’ve lost weight and never felt better.
After two months, my wife and I realized we could get by with one car, so we sold my car and used the money to put solar panels on our house. I now pay nothing for electricity. We’ve lowered our carbon footprint significantly. I’m 57 years old.
