In my local council draft bike plan there's some interesting stats: canterburyconnects.com.au/…

Section 11, page 71, cyclist crash types at intersections:

Unfortunately I can't find a link to the study they got that from in the draft plan.

The take-home is that being hit from behind happens, but much less often than moronists failing to give way.

meeting places are bad, is the point I see

Tautologically speaking, collisions can only happen at meeting places :)

oh bugger - you out-pendanticed me!

:) that's rare

so - if bike/car intersections were reduced then collisions would be reduced too.

yep, and that's (one of) the principle behind replacing traffic lights and signposts with roundabouts. One thing with motorways/freeways too - by reducing intersections they reduce chances to crash.

The scary one is "driveway/sidewalk" crashes. They show up in the stats despite very few cyclists using footpaths so it means that per kilometre, the footpath is probably even more dangerous than the most dangerous intersection.

Now I'm up to point 10 in my 1000+ word submission on the draft plan. Some of which will need to be edited out coz it's not helpful to point out cvertain bureaucratic failings quite so bluntly... I need a polite way to say:

I realise that the overwhelming majority of cyclists ride both things, but a significant number of non-cyclists are upset about that and it contributes to the "cyclists break the law" sentiment that directly causes cyclist deaths. You can undo a lot of positive sentiment very quickly through what seem to planners like minor matters like this.

Charitably inclined cyclists and pedestrians think you're incompetent or stupid, those less charitable take it as evidence that you're of the same mind as the Baird State Government.

...(the state government has harsh new laws and is using riot squad and other police to wage a crackdown. Leading to stuff like someone being ticketed $500 for "reckless riding" by doing a trackstand)

@Mσᶎ I like a good roundabout. But they're scarey for turning right, and you do have to put trust in the fellow road users that they're awake and not useless.

@Criggie We have lots of little ones here, where you could just as easily have 4 give way signs. They're nice where the main traffic flow changes a lot. Turning right IMO is just as bad at give way or stop signs, although those are rare here (I get the impression Oz design rules suggest roudabouts instead of 4 way signs)

The trust thing... everywhere, though. The number of nose-to-tail minor accidents I hear about scares me when it comes to "if I take the lane, will the moronist behind me even notice, or will they plough into the car in front of me"

There's another pile of plastic shards just up from work right now, from someone "not seeing" a vehicle coming from their left.

I still wonder how to ask planners to remove/not install their "cyclists dismount" signs that are widely flouted and correspondingly cause anger in the group that they're designed to placate. They're almost always installed at sites where there's already conflict between cyclists and pedestrians. But since they only advisory cyclists who know that ignore them, and cyclists who don't know that mostly ignore them because they're stupid.

So you end up with the original angry pedestrians going "we complained, and yay now we have signs. But those lawbreaking arseholes are ignoring the signs and breaking the law and this is not good enough", but now joined by a new class of "but the sign says, and you're ignoring it, all cyclists break the law and cyclists are evil".

I quite like "please ring bell" signs, because it reduces the number of "I hate the peremptory/angry bell ringers".

@Mσᶎ it's an aluminium frame

imgur.com/gallery/WGHVQeQ

poor bastard

@ynnekkram bugger, should probably not weld it back together then.

Looks as though Blam has found sustainability.SE... sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/5243/…

What makes you think its Blam?

Blam's spelling is normally better, and I thought he was American, so the units and stuff are weird

penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

@Mσᶎ yeah, that's what I'm afraid of

@Batman I don't think it actually is, as he normally doesn't bother varying his persona like that. But the whole "I'm an alien" schtick made me wonder whether he was trying.

Either way, it's a user I'll be ignoring because it takes any attempt to help it learn as an opportunity to insult people. We get some of those errors here, but people normally take to comments much better. I have one answer where I very directly said "your assumptions are wrong as follows..." and listed like four things that I disagreed with... and the OP accepted the answer pretty quickly.

nope, not accepted, just heavily upvoted: bicycles.stackexchange.com/a/34748/7044

I have but one vote to give....

Technically not true, since you can vote on multiple answers...

I wish elections were like that. "VOTE FOR EVERYONE!"

@SuspendedUser In Australia you get to rank candidates (and some are pretty rank to start with). It's like multiple votes, but using numbers. I'm told the US regards that as too complex for its citizens (that's true, and also I am taking the piss by repeating it).

There is a certain pleasure in ranking the scum last, slightly counteracted by the pain of having to rank them at all. Do I put "Arseholes Party" ahead of "We're All Wankers"? Luckily now in federal elections we can just stop numbering when we run out of candidates that we actually want

I won't disagree. That's why I think a system where you could just vote for multiple candidates would be better. High likelihood of electoral failure. Americans are dumb in general. I was discussing with a coworker today that it's the most likely factor in explaining why they are also fat.

Voting systems are a whole giant world of weirdness and excitement. There are systems that seem really cool to smart, involved voters... like the people who get excited about voting systems... and just don't really work that well when used by people who mostly just want to vote and get out of there.

vox.com/2016/4/28/11518804/…

That was the article that got the discussion started.

The Australian preferential systems (we have minor variations in every election) are magic for informed, interested voters because they can rank the Peoples Front of Judea ahead of the Judean People's Front and so on. But in practice every political party has to hand out "how to vote" cards at every voting place because the great majority of voters turn up going "I wanna vote Party Party" and have no idea what numbers to put where.

Sweet Jeebus. The only thing saving you is multiple parties then. Because we have the same thing here, except there are only two parties.

@SuspendedUser Yeah, I read that. There's a "sugar tax" discussion going on in an Aotearoa news site I frequent as well, which covers similar ideas from the opposite angle.

I hate the gays, so they says Ima 'publican. I need to fill in all the 'Publican ovals before they steal our babies!

The point I took away from that article is that most people fail to realize that weight loss is a very simple matter of counting calories.

It's really all that matters.

@SuspendedUser Fine! I have but one vote to give, per question/answer/comment. Doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

@SuspendedUser yeah, preferential voting breaks the two party limit by allowing someone to vote Green for president, then put the Democrat second thus avoiding the whole "taking votes away" problem. The flip side is that sometimes we get 10+ candidates for a local representative and there are people who register parties purely to steal votes - for senate elections especially, since the whole state votes as one electorate and we get the famous "tablecloth" ballot with 100+ candidates.

Granted. I would have also accepted "I love you Moz, so I voted for you."

@SuspendedUser Yup, so you bought the most common fallacy and the article has failed, even though you're allegedly a smart reader.

o rly?

All calories are not equal, and the simplistic in-out=gain equation only works when you get into the really, really fine print.

@Mσᶎ SPLITTERS!

That has been proven false by numerous people on Twinkie diets.

Simple example is the famous celery one, where there are calories in it but it takes more work to digest it than your body gets calories out of it (whether that's actually true or not is an interesting question, but conceptually such a food could exist)

Or imagine you eat some kind of hormone powder. It's got calories, sure, but the effect on your body is largely unrelated to the calories. If the hormone kicks your system into high-activity mode (adrenaline, say) you will likely burn way more calories than the nominal calorie value of the powder.

Could. The likelyhood of any person eating enough of it to unbalance their numbers significantly is also highly unlikely.

Wow, that's a lot a reaching to give fat people a big blankie to cry on because they can't properly track what they eat.

The point is more that what someone eats is part of a complex relationship between multiple factors. Diets often fail not because the calorie restrictions don't exist, but because the dieters body goes into "famine mode" and their metabolic rate drops, reducing their calorie burn rate.

I'm astonished by how fast super fat people loose weight once they make changes to their lifestyles

50 kilos / 100 pounds off in a year is enormous.

even if its 10% of the starting mass, its a lot.

I'll grant you that there is a rate below which you metabolism will slow down, however, it's far and away not the reason most diets fail (at least not here in the states).

@SuspendedUser a lot of fat people can easily lose weight if you give them the time and money to modify their diet, that's very true. But in the USA for example a lot of effort is devoted to preventing them from having the time or money, while blaming them for not modifying their diet.

yah - plus theres the difference between weight loss, and fat-> muscle

doing exercise tends to build muscle which weighs more than fat.

I put on some old pants the other day ready for messy garage work

and they were tight on my calves.

@Criggie It's definitely possible. I have one friend who went from ~130kg to ~80kg, but that was a lifestyle change (from watching TV to running marathons) facilitated by an income in the top 1% and a fact-based environment where "the doctor says I'll die if I keep doing this" was seen as a truthy thing that could be acted on, rather than bullshit put out by a self-interested so-called "scientist" trying to sell him something.

That's just another excuse. You are rolling eating healthier into losing weight.

fair enough

If someone has enough money to buy food and be fat, they can just as well eat less of that food, have more money and probably still be healthier for being lighter.

yep - need to develop a dislike of tasty things, like junk and sugar

Not as healthy as they could be eating a better diet to be sure, but healthier.

@SuspendedUser no, I'm saying that cheap food tends to be high in sugar and low-gi carbs, so if someone is "working poor" they're unlikely to have the time and cash to find and eat better food. The whole "blame the individual" nonsense isn't plausible when you're looking at population effects. It's like the people who tell african-americans to "get over it" when they observe that racism is a big thing in their lives.

look up "food desert" sometime.

@SuspendedUser so you need to support efforts to make healthier food available and affordable, so those people can get that food.

I understand the concept, but again, you are missing the point that it boils down to calories burned versus calories in. Those people are eating enough cheap food to stay fat.

@Criggie if they also developed wings they could avoid the poverty trap of needing a car to get a job that barely covers the cost of the car. Evolution has made us monkeys that like sugar and salt, you can't just wish that away.

They could just as well eat less of it, and be less fat. Trying to attack all the issues at once takes power away from those folks

They fall back to blame foods available to them rather that trying to understand that the base reason they are fat is because they eat too much. Sure it sucks that healthy food isn't available, but that's a different problem.

@SuspendedUser they don't have that power. There are so many things that are scientifically proven to be true, that you're eliding by your little "calories in vs calories out" chant that it's tenditious nonsense.

ObligatoryXKCD

remember they're adults

@SuspendedUser ok, try this: in order to get enough non-calorie nutrients to stay alive, they need to eat enough of the available food that they exceed their basic calorific needs.

they get to make their own life choices.

can't control what other people choose to do with themselves.

@Criggie yeah, the choice to be born poor is a common mistake. Pity so many people make it, really.

Ahhh, now I see the point. So I have to eat these 4 Big Macs to get enough iodine in my diet. One of them just won't do.

Considering the price of the average big ol' bottle of multi-vitamins vs 5 extra McDonald's meals a week, I feel the need to call BS.

@SuspendedUser people are not born as empowered, informed individuals. They are babies who are brought up in a particular set of circumstances, and grow up in a community.

Expecting someone to reach adulthood and magically reject everything they've ever know, and leap straight into your personal worldview, is unreasonable.

Are you really suggesting that an obese 17 year old in a Boston ghetto should turn round on the day of their 18th birthday and say "I am no longer a poor, fat, black kid, I am an empowered, self-aware adult and I shall do my own thing".

I am not expecting that. What I expect is that clear information be provided and the waters not muddied with targeted propaganda. "Food desert" is an issue of health, to be sure, but it is unrelated to the fact that he is obese because he consumes too many calories.

@SuspendedUser I don't understand how someone in a food desert can get these "healthy calories" that you keep talking about.

If you are saying, "He's ignorant, and it's not his fault." It might be best to try simplifying the problem, rather than rolling it into a seperate one.

I never said "healthy calories". :)

The problems are not simple, and can't be addressed in isolation. There are a number of scientific disciplines that study these things, and a great deal of knowledge that comes from the full range starting from basic biochemistry right up to population-level epidemiology (and that's just the meat puppet part).

And that's the whole point. You seek to roll multiple problems into one and all it serves to do is keep people ignorant.

@SuspendedUser yeah, it's Me that's keeping people ignorant. I am the one who makes poor, white US citizens vote against their own interests, for example.

If you read up on some of the studies into this you'll quickly find that actual people don't react as though a single factor can be isolated and varied independently of everything else in their lives. So when scientists or politicians come in and do experiments, they have to take that into account. That's where we get cohort studies, for example.

All Americans vote against their own self interests, regardless, because neither party has anyone but their own interests in mind.

I don't eat vitamins or suppliments. They're relatively uncommon here.

@SuspendedUser that statement, in itself, is a political choice.

wait - is this about food, fatness or politics ?

@Criggie they're all interrelated

Oh sweet jeebus.

For example, food labelling laws. Try telling a politican that food labelling laws are a simple matter of consumer information and see how far you get.

Or the sugar tax, it's purely a public health measure and nothing to do with politics at all. I don't know why people are so upset about the idea of taxing high-sugar food, or restricting the size of high-sugar drinks. Do they not want people to be healthy?

Sure, taking away ignorant people's freedoms to protect them is usually the correct answer.

Especially if it makes the government money in the process.

@SuspendedUser whose freedom is restricted when food has to be accurately labelled?

I was talking about restricting the size of high sugar drinks.

@SuspendedUser that's an irrelevant side effect of a process designed to help people make better choices using price signals.

I think we can part ways once you start talking about restricted freedoms as irrelevant.

@SuspendedUser are you saying that restricting the size is not only a pure health measure?

I am.

And by part ways, I mean end this particular conversation :)

@SuspendedUser you're the one saying that things exist in isolation, and that interdependencies don't exist. I'm giving you examples of things that are complex and have multiple factors to consider. You keep instisting that things are simple.

We moved to being just two extremists talking past each other again, it's not productive. I do, however, appreciate the attempt.

I'm struggling with the idea that a person can be an isolated individual making single choices based on single factors. Too you, that seems to be the obvious default for everyone. So I'm giving you examples of simple, single decisions based on single factor, to show that even you don't actually believe that that's possible.

@SuspendedUser we start from dramatically different premises, so that's always going to happen.

Yep. And up to a point, it's entertaining and sometimes educational.

Here's one - instead of restricting things, require enablement of things.

Imagine any place that serves food must provide clean drinking water to patrons with their food purchase.

Not just for people who come in off the street, but paying customers.

Done.

Unrelated, I am pretty sure Blam != LittleAlien. I just don't feel down in my junks that he has the creativity for it.

You want a coffee - buy it. You want a pie - buy it. You want a pie and fizzy drink, buy it.

you want water with your pie - help yourself to the water over there

Yick. Who buys coffee?

@SuspendedUser You mean, there are TWO dickheads on the internet ?

What if they get to gether and replicate ?

@SuspendedUser yeah, I think it's unlikely. It's just that it was so poorly done and the arguing so immediate that it just felt as though "Blam is bored, Blam go stir up recreational argument" and the whole "but physics" just reminded me of the "I have an engineering degree, I can math" thing that Blam does.

I think the dickheads on the internet rule is similar to our bike rule. n+1

then there'll be a whole GENESIS of dickheads!

yeah, and the answer is generally one of "and you're wrong about the maths" or "it's not purely about the physics".

oh "but physics" is endemic in people who have some qualification in the field.

same for But Maths for people who did anything above the minimum.

Brazilian.

Oh crap I have photos of my prototype repair trailer

let me post them

Wait wait wait. Moz are you implying Phil is a dickhead?

@SuspendedUser observing, dear chap, observing.

I admit to being a dickhead, at least sometimes.

My first concert ever, embarassing as it is, was a Phil concert. My mum took me.

@SuspendedUser I don't know whether it's worse that you saw them, or that your mum took you.

To be fair, I think I was like 11 or 12.

And at the time I thought The Brazilian was the ABSOLUTE STUFF

I'd have to timeline it, but I think it was after Genesis broke up.

Oddly enough, I think the first protest my mum ever went to, she took me along (I was 12). Just going traumatised her almost as much as the embarrassingly awful cause and events of the actual protest.

I like screwing with small scale protesters.

Especially when they block the sidewalk I am trying to ride on.

My mum is very mainstream, conservative (in the personal sense rather than politician capital-C Conservative) and despite being a teacher I think has only gone on strike once or possibly never.

@SuspendedUser now you're really just taking the piss.

"Hey, do you realize that if you all spent this time teaching safe sex in schools, rather than protesting, you could probably stop like 10% of these abortions?"

Abortion protesters piss me off. All they do is make people who are already in a shitty situation feel worse. There time could be FAR BETTER spent elsewhere and have a much better (even by their standards) effect.

I miss working in a school

@SuspendedUser can you imagine the change in mindset required to decide that preventing pregnancy is a better way to prevent abortion than punishing women and killing doctors? It'd probably be easier for them to accept that Jesus would abhor what they do (but forgive them anyway)

@Criggie I missing going into Hagley High and talking about bisexuality to kids while trying desperately to stay inside the tight little boundaries drawn for us by the school. Being bi was technically legal but even the progressive Hagley people were not entirely comfortable with it. They were getting pushed by the kids, though.

It depends. For some folks it's small. Others not so much. Abstinence works. Teaching abstinence does not. Just ask Sarah Palin.

@SuspendedUser so hard not to link that back to "reducing calories works. Teaching people to reduce them, not so much".

I think the simple question is "Would you rather a teenager use a condom or have an abortion?"

The whole school sex ed thing is just funny as fuck... once you're a few years out of school.

@SuspendedUser you forgot "or fuck their same-sex best friend"

Irrational answers to that question will divide the protest crowd I talk to, and won't.

I don't think that's a choice.

@SuspendedUser yeah, trying to balance "interesting fact" with "unnaceptable to audience" is a fun game.

@Criggie is that the govt copying Nathan's test results?

And how did you find them - are they using those results?

I actually appreciate the link back.

I dunno - there's no further details sorry

Trying to go back up the chain now.

Wait are these chain tests, or lights?

no these are test results for various lights

I'm trying to ask the person who posted those links where he got them from

hence track back the source-chain.

gw.govt.nz/be-safe-be-seen

albeit while looking like I'm working

The PDF's are linked from that page. The "portland" front light is a bit of a hint

So, our company website is rather shitty, kind of on purpose, because our stable of ultra-developers thinks it's funny.

@Criggie if they got anything from my site, they didn't copy it verbatim I don't think

There's at least a few on there which I don't have on my site anywhere

Our owner kind of hinted it should be better. Out of that, it came out that one of the guys has been directing traffic to some other site that is not ours for interested parties, because it is apparently better done.

@SuspendedUser ours is shitty because we don't deal with the public and the domain is mostly there to host email addresses. So it's a "we make burglar alarm. Postal address. Phone. Goodbye"

gw.govt.nz/assets/Transport/Pix/Cycling/… <-- amusing -0 the $9 vest returns a "excellent value"

the best websites are the ones that tell you something useful

Speaking of which I really need to finish updating my recommendations. Go figure, getting a full time job makes it harder to keep that all up to date!

IE, who would read the sheldon brown site if it was just parts listings for a bike shop ?

Yeah. We really don't need to tell anyone anything useful. I think it's there solely for a web presence.

@Criggie OTOH, Sheldon's site started as "rantings of an enraged hippie" when he couldn't find the information he wanted online. And his bike-sci email list felt at times like "Sheldon vents about cycle product ads"

Everything useful we do is with someone else's data, which couldn't be on a public site.

On the flip side, companies can lose work by not having a web presence at all. Not sure if a shitty old website loses business.

Our owner kind of doesn't care about that.

sus: so post a webcam shot of lower Alaska out the window

@Criggie yeah seriously. If I google your company and your own website doesn't come up, I'm immediately skeptical. If I google it and a crappy website comes up, I just assume they're too busy doing whatever their real job is to focus on making a nice website.

Alaska people only account for like 2/90ths of the workforce.

@Criggie in our case it ha a download link for a pdf which is apparently useful. And people do go there when they want our postal address, so it serves a useful purpose there. Unfortunately they also ring the phone number to ask stupid questions that should be answered by someone who they actually pay.

I am pretty sure that's what we are going for.

let me try that

all 10 google matches are this company, plus the wikipedia link on the right.

cute - my previous three employers also do the same

@nhinkle when I was interviewing here I looked at the website and thought "technology company? Yeah, right" but wasn't so frustrated that I went away. Company has to balance being available with annoying our distributors by diverting potential customers away form them (there's a lot of politics in what distributor info goes on our site)

Our crappy site comes up first, the not our site comes up second

The site I send people to for explaining who I work for does not come up at all

@SuspendedUser somebody mentioned you in the mod chat room the other day. They said something about seeing a comment or flag or something from "some user named 'Suspended User'" which apparently confused them :P

infoq.com/presentations/careevolution is a presentation by the owner.

moz: yeah - the "contact us" page is almost as popular as teh root page, so people lick to find the phone number.

I think I flagged something for removal that didn't have appropriate options, so I had to flag and freetext it

@nhinkle I call that a win for me :)

I thought it was funny. Immediately thought to myself "hah I know who that is"