Posts by Moz
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Hard News: Taxpayers' Union: still…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Waiting for their first “James O’Keefe” moment. ... I'm sure they'd love that
Not so sure. I suspect they're smart enough to notice the transition from the media echoing their garbage to the media mocking their garbage. I hope our media is capable of making the transition.
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Speaker: Shenzen's hire-bike explosion, in reply to BenWilson,
how the bikes get distributed to where they are wanted
In Paris there are men with vans who spend their days lugging piles of bikes around. Environmentally those exact trips are not as good as a bus, but it's better than taxis and much better for the passengers. The scheme as a whole is a big win in a huge number of ways, even with the truckloads of bikes being driven around.
The helmet obsession has largely ruined the bike hire schemes in Melbourne and Brisbane, they linger on but are not especially popular purely because of the helmet thing. Even though enforcement is rare (unlike NSW), it's still more of a risk than most people are willing to take.
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Hard News: Paths and ways, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
maybe have magnets on the forks and a coil that picks up a pulse as it passes them
I might see if I can find some "reel lights" (brand) that someone has discarded because they're pathetic, and fit them wrong the round way, so the light is attached to the wheel and the magnet(s) are on the bike. That might actually work.
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Hard News: Paths and ways, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Oh yes, there are a fucton of battery powered bike lights, even motion activated ones. I have owned a few different ones. The valve cap lights are actually annoying and not at all useful (we have some, but the little watch batteries they use seem like to last forever... they were taken off of the bike and put in a drawer years ago).
What I want is lights powered by motion. Like the dynamo lights I use to be seen by, but going round inside the wheels.
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Hard News: Paths and ways, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
the flash e-motion wheels
That reminds me, I'm still waiting for someone to make bike wheels with motion-powered blinky lights in them. You can get wheelchair castor wheels like that, and obviously skate wheels. But not bike wheels.
Sydney is one of those 25 council areas places, with a state government that is actively ripping out bike infrastructure and trying to punish cyclists (it's working, instead of 10%+ increases very year we had a 5% decrease last year). But some of what's already there is excellent, and some of the new stuff is really good. Minor personal bonus, our local council responded within a month or so to us asking for pram ramps at the top of the street. So now we don't have to fight through cars parked on the footpath to get from our street to the pedestrian crossing over a busy 4 lane road. It matters to us :)
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Jealous!
I might have to do some of the other sort of cycle touring - visit places to ride their bike paths :)
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Up Front: The Up Front Guide to Internet…, in reply to ,
the age demographic might be more limited than online dating.
Hmm... Emma is noticeably younger than I am. Her daughter is at uni, IIRC. The general idea, though, works for me. Go out, do something I find interesting, meet new people, hopefully notice if they're flirting with me.
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http://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/wltm-ii?rq=dating link from Emma above has a transcript, for those who prefer to spend 2 minutes reading rather than half an hour listening.
Her approach does seem to be the correct one, in the sense of getting a partner pout of the deal. The trick is to tweak what you put in to have useful keywords. for the commercial sites I used an obvious neologism that was also a googlewhack, on the theory that smarter women might do the thing and save me spending money to contact them. One did, but sadly we did not hit it off other than agreeing that it was a smart thing to do.
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Up Front: The Up Front Guide to Internet…, in reply to Rebecca Gray,
https://blog.okcupid.com/ has some interesting stuff, but it's not been updated for a while. The "blind date" post second to last is both amusing and somewhat disturbing. That blog does not, however, touch on any of the scary questions but more on the weird stuff they get from the data.
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It is not just the men you need to worry about. I met one woman who waited until it was almost too late to not have sex with her, before informing me that she had recently got herpes and was infectious... would that be a problem? I got the impression she'd lost a moral battle with herself and that meant telling me, but it was a very close thing (for her, not just for me).
I think a lot depends on how many matches you can find on the site. which requires an awful lot of information about people. As MayMay points out via the arsehole-filter, OKCupid is actually very good because they have questions like "when is it ok to rape someone" and "when should you use intimate partner violence" etc, but words them so that arseholes are more likely to answer honestly. But when you have 100 rough matches to start with you have room to filter for things that aren't so easy to discover. Starting with 5 means you really need to date even the "maybe probably not" ones, or give up. In my case, filtering on "rides a bicycle" wasn't possible, but it's also important to me.
I found OKCupid the least awful site, the worst ones were the pay-to-message ones, because as Emma says, men are expected to send hundreds of messages to get a single response. At typically $5-$10 a time that gets expensive fast. And, in my experience, women on those sites don't respond with "so obviously I'll pay for our first date" but with "You pay. Of course, the man always pays". I could easily be persuaded that almost none of those apparently-women were genuinely looking for a partner on the site.
But the commercial sites work to conceal that, and most other, information, presumably so their paid "dating bait" doesn't have to work too hard. I mean, imagine having to know all 300 answers to the random questions someone has answered on OKCupid when chatting with a victim... you'd get it wrong *so* often it'd be impossible. Much better to be "Stella, 29, slim, marketing assistant" with a generic photo... much easier to work with.