The UK is such a mess, as a country. It always was, but since Brexit, it’s gone downhill even further.

Yeah, that was the word I was looking for.

The times between the magnetic reversal have historically been anywhere between 10k years and 5.45 million years. These numbers are so far apart that the average means basically nothing.

Random just means that we don’t have enough information to make a prediction. Dice aren’t truely random. If we perfectly knew their initial state, the exact state of the table and the state of every air and dust molecule in between, we would be able to 100% predict every dice roll. But we don’t so we can’t and thus we call it random.

Independent also just means that we don’t know the connection. Every dice roll impacts the state of the world and thus impacts the next dice roll. They aren’t truely independent. We just don’t have enough data, understanding and calculation power to see the connection (contrary to e.g. the stacked/counted deck).

In regards to magnetic reversal we know the time between reversals is anything but consistant and predictable, and we have no mechanism by which we can predict when the next one is going to happen. Since we know neither the mechanism nor the factors, they are random to us.

A good example of this concept is the Monty Hall problem (you know, the one with the goats and the car behind doors).

The placement of the goats and the car is random until we open the doors. That doesn’t mean that only when we open the door will whatever is behind the door manifest into a car or a goat, but it means we don’t know what’s behind the doors.

Monty Hall knows what’s behind which door, so to him it’s not random what’s behind the door, and if he was to choose the doors, he’d always find the car.

So according to Bayesian statistics: Until you know something, it’s random and until you know the connection it is independent.

It’s the fallacy of throwing dice.

Even if there hasn’t been a 6 for 30 throws in a row, your cance of the next dice roll being a 6 is still 1/6.

Much less than the fuel for the car, likely even less than the electricity for an electric car.

Road bike tires (the only kind you should use for commuting on paved roads) last between 2500 and 6500km. If you don’t skid while braking (which you shouldn’t ever do anyway) and use the correct pressure it’s easy to push that figure towards the top of the bracket.

Disk brake pads last between 8000 and 16000km.

Tubes last between 1500 and 8000km.

The chain lasts between 3000 and 5000km, and shifting correctly makes them last a lot longer.

If you shift correctly and replace the chain in time, the sprocket never wear out. I had a road bike from the 70s that I used quite heavily for about 10 years and it still had the original sprockets and shifters.

Pedals, cranks and bottom bracket also only fail if you abuse them (e.g. never shift).

Which leaves the pull wires (for breaks and shifters) and the grip tape, which both last very long and are very cheap.

All other parts only break when abused or in an accident.

So if we say you are commuting your bike and it’s 50km per day, 5 days a week without counting vacation and stuff, then that’s 13 000km.

That means:

• 3 sets of tires (6x€16)
• 1 set of brake pads (1x€7)
• 3 sets of tubes (3x€10)
• 3 chains (3x€10)

Prices are name-brand products from Amazon.

That’s €163 in total. You could probably even go cheaper than that, and 50km per day is quite a lot as well. If you take care of your bike, you can push the components much farther too, since I only took the average values.

A more likely value if you are careful while riding and maybe only commute 20km/day, you probably won’t have more maintainance cost than €40-50/year.

This is about energy expenditure while moving. So unless you are doing maintainance while on the bike, it doesn’t factor into the number.

Wasn’t there a quote about bicycles and fish?

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-dangerous-doors/

Non-functional outside handles are just as bad as non-functional inside ones. Not always is the person on the inside able to open the door on their own.

“Nobody’s going to notice. Who would listen in on satellite communication? Nobody would be able to afford the equipment.”

If they’d compensate anyone who’s work they benefit from fairly, they wouldn’t be a trillion dollar corporation.

That’s a common miscalculation.

Having a smaller car can easily save you $200 per month or even more depending on how much you drive. People are routinely spending an extra few $10k to buy a bigger vehicle (or spend an equal amount of money for a truck lease), and after that they say they couldn’t afford to spend $200 to rent a truck for a day.

The thing is that you often don’t see the cost of a large vehicle (or of any vehicle in general). While you drive, you don’t pay for anything. Infrequently, you pay for a whole tank of gas, and once a month you pay for insurance, and even less frequently you pay for maintenance. And value depreciation is something you don’t even see at all, it just occurs.

All of that is more or less hidden cost. When you get into your car you don’t go like “Ok, this drive down to the super market will cost me X$ in fuel, Y$ in insurance, Z$ in maintenance and Q$ in depreciation”.

But if you rent a car, you clearly see all the cost upfront, so it seems much more expensive.

How much equipment do you need for baseball? Do you routinely carry around the whole field?

Roman roads are amazing as long as you ignore everything that’s bad about them.

There’s literally research on this topic that clearly says that most people count themselves as middle-class, no matter if they are part of the top 0.1% or of the bottom 10%.

This is not made up.

For example: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/10/survey-31percent-of-millionaires-say-they-are-part-of-the-middle-class.html

Even among millionaires, only 8% would characterize themselves as wealthy these days.

Roughly 60% of investors with $1 million or more of investable assets said they are more likely upper middle class, according to a recent Ameriprise Financial survey of more than 3,000 adults.

Of those making more than $175,000 a year, or roughly the top 10% of tax filers, one-quarter said they were either “very poor,” “poor” or “getting by but things are tight.”

Even a share of those making more than $500,000 and $1,000,000 said the same.

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This makes more sense, now I understand what you mean. I think they use “mercedes driver”, because it paints a picture. “Mercedes driver” implies not only “rich”, but also “entitled”, “anger management issues” and “difficulty with following road laws”.

And at the same time it allows the reader (who might share some of these characteristics) to still claim moral superiority over that guy (“At least I don’t drive a Mercedes”).

It is, in fact, a very clever headline that does quite a lot with very little.

It does so using stereotypes and prejudices, and that might totally be seen as despicable. But I wouldn’t call it stupid.

(In fact, labelling him as a “rich driver” does quite a similar thing. His wealth itself doesn’t really matter for the story, unless you want to evoke the connotations of “entitled”, “thinks he is above the law” and “gets away with doing things poor people could not get away with”, while allowing people who share some of these characteristics to still claim moral superiority (“I’m not a rich asshole like that guy”).)

… you do understand that your rule includes anyone who lives by that rule?

You just called yourself a biased idiot.

What about the video makes you think he is not rich?

That’s what any rich and entitled person would say.

A former boss of mine who owned his (very large and expensive) house plus three other houses that he rented out, plus 51% stakes in two companies which were both worth at least €10mio each also claimed that he’s “upper middle class” and that the things he feels entitled to are just what regular middle class people are entitled to.

Architectural solutions only work in places where you ideally don’t want to have any significant amount of traffic in general, because they kill traffic throughput.

If you have an area with high traffic, ideally you want people to drive super consistent 30 or 50km/h.

Speed cameras or section control help with smooth, consistent speed.

Speed bumps and roundabouts cause people to slow down suddenly which kills throughput.

That’s fine in a residential area where you want to get people to instead drive on higher level roads, but it’s really counter-productive on said higher-level roads.

It’s so crazy to me that the concept of speed cameras is something that is still discussed in the US. Here in Europe we’ve been through this discussion half a century ago, and the consensus is super simple:

• Speed cameras are useful to secure hotspots (e.g. in front of schools)
• Speed cameras are usefuk to get people to change their speed quicker after a speed limit change (e.g. when switching from fast rural to slower urban zones, placing a speed camera at the speed change means that people instantly slow down instead of coasting with high speed through the slower zone)
• Section control cameras (also called average speed cameras) are useful to secure longer stretches, but need to be placed at every entry/exit of such a longer stretch. Perfect for higher level roads, not so great for urban areas. In section control zones, everyone (and I mean everyone) perfectly follows the speed limit, often even driving a little bit under it.
• Architectural changes (speed bumps, planters on the road, …) are helpful, but only in places where you ideally want to have close to no traffic at all (e.g. residential streets), because architectural changes kill traffic throughput.
• Any speed camera solution is much cheaper and quicker to implement than architectural changes, and they are also cheap and easy to move, so they can be implemented as quick-fix solutions until a more permanent architectutal solution is put in place.
• Mobile speed cameras mainly exist to create revenue. There are never nearly enough of them to actually be habit-forming and since they aren’t in a predictable position, they also don’t help with securing hotspots.

Any discussion apart from that either comes from a place of massive ignorance (“We are surely the only place to ever try speed reduction measures”) or from bad faith (“I don’t want to pay fines for speeding so I argue that only expensive and slow to implement architectural changes are acceptable solutions, because they won’t be implemented anyway.”)