Many high protien diets, including Atkins prohibit foods which are known to lower the risks associated with heart disease and cancers.
This is not true. Listen to the Cheerios ad. The foods are linked to lower overall colesterol levels which are thought to be a major factor in heart disease. Of course we all know that lower overall colersterall is meaningless as compared to the good/bad ratio and trigliceride count. What they don't say is that Cheerios is horible for the good/bad ratio and nasty for the trigliceride count. Modern science sais Cheerios gives you a heart attack. They don't put that in the adds though since it's unlikely that would help sales.
Here is the key point on the Atkins diet: it may help you lose weight, but it is unhealthy. Too many people associate weight loss with health.
I have heard lots of people who assume the Atkins diet is unhealthy because it may do some thing or another but to my knowledge no one has ever shown that it *IS* unhealthy. The same assumptions that say it is unhealthy lead people to believe that you would gain weight on Atkins, quickly. The science of nutrition is full of vast oversimplifications and baseless conclusions. The people who tell us Atkins is bad for us sound a lot like the people who told us the world was flat. They assume it is and view any attempt to verify it as dangerous and foolhardy. I'm not saying I know the answer, I suspect that there are issues with Atkins for some people and that there likely are modifications to Atkins that would improve it. What I am saying is that the answer isn't known and the people who stand up and say they know are full of crap. They suspect, they assume, they do not know.
And a doctor or nutritionist is who can tell you how your body might react best to certain foods. But there are some general rules you can follow first. And you can get that info from somewhere other than Slashdot.
Some doctors and nutritionists will guide you in the right direction, others won't. The situation has gotten much better since Atkins's recent massive press attention which embarrassed the hell out of the industry. Many aren't just blindly telling everyone to eat lots of bread and pasta anymore. I believe the answer is different for everyone. I also believe the doctors and nutritionists have no way of knowing which answer is right for which person. They just don't have tools that can figure it out yet. There are some general guidelines they have but you can get them from books and I feel that the guidelines are wrong just as often as they are right. I think people's time is probably better spent reading a book like The Zone or the Atkins diet and their money is probably better spent on silly things like a ball chair than on a nutritionist.
Then I started watching them closer. They cheat, and they deny it to themselves.
I've watched thin people. They cheat too, often quite dramatically. They just think they have earned it since they are thin.
We went to Paris for a week this year. The only fat people there were tourists, and they stuck out like sore thumbs.
So the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" are skinny eh?:)
Do you suspect that it is because people in Paris get much more exercise than people in, for example, New York? Do you suspect that they lack the modern conveniences that make us Americans so fat? Or do you suspect that it might have something to do with the eating patterns, maybe the fact that in France they haven't had a government cramming bulk manufactured, prepackaged, sugar-starches down their throats and calling it nutrition for the last 20 years. (for the record I don't actually consider the French "surrender monkeys":) I was simply quoting a very funny line from the Simpsons. On the contrary I consider France one of the greatest military forces of the last millennium.)
I think people can do little things to tip the balance one way or another but often people's balance is way off and they need big changes in order to make any progress. The little bit that willpower can accomplish can mean the difference between gaining weight and losing it for some people while for others it means the difference between gaining weight fast and staying the same weight. There are bigger forces at work than the quantity of food we ingest and the litt
Actually. I've enjoyed reading people's posts. I'm convinced the experts don't know much about weight gain and weight loss. The science that has been done seems full of assumptions and inconclusive studies. The recent tests showing that the Atikins diet actually works while all modern science says it shouldn't shows just how far they have to go in figuring out even the basics. I'm interested in hearing what has worked for people who, like me, sit all day. That way I can try them and see if they work for me too.
Another thing I'm convinced of is that there is no one answer to the problem. Different people digest different foods differently. A low carb diet that works well for some people can cause weight gain and even be life threatening to others (gout/kidney issues) while a high carb diet that works well for some people can cause weight gain and even be life threatening to others (diabetic/hypoglycemic.) Adjusting your diet isn't as easy as reading something and following it. You need to pay attention to how your body reacts to different foods. Like any complicated black box system you need to try lots of different inputs and look at the results. A knowledge of the different variables and what effects they have is a big help but you can't get all the answers from a book or a simple formula. For example, if you end up lying down finding it hard to find the energy to breathe after eating high-carb foods (like me) you may have trouble with them and may want to work on limiting your intake. Don't poke too much fun at the guy who tries one meal a day. The thinnest I have ever been was after a period where I only ate one meal a day during college. I don't think it would work for me now because I am in a different place in my life (I have a refrigerator now that constantly has food in it) but it could work for some people.
Similarly gyms, running, biking, swimming all work for some people and not for others. I have an extremely tall torso and short legs. For me, running is a lousy option, my body isn't built for running. It's hell on my joints and I don't burn a lot of energy. Swimming is much better for me but I don't have anywhere to swim. Most people live where biking is more likely to kill you than the health issues associated with being fat. Gyms bore the hell out of me. Try standing facing a corner for about half an hour while you have something important to be doing and you will feel the way I feel in a gym. I haven't quite found the answer that's right for me, I'm still in lousy shape, although I have stopped gaining weight and I think I'm slowly losing it. I get a lot more exercise than I used to now that I have a house and have yard work to do. Back when I lived in a condo complex I found it very hard to get exercise.
The one suggestion that everyone seems to agree on but doesn't come up much in discussions like this is salad. Salad is awesome food and a great balance for what we seem to have too much of in our diets. My favorite is Applebees Steakhouse Salad. I love that thing. Yea, it's got a bunch of steak which a lot of people would whine about but I love it. One thing I have learned about salad is that iceberg lettuce (previously my favorite) is the fast-food equivalent of lettuce. It has almost none of the good stuff that lettuce is supposed to have, it's very bland, and it doesn't last well. It gets brown and bitter and slimy very easily where the other lettuces seem to make more consistently good salads that are better for you.
Another thing I have taken to is cottage cheese and fruit. It's an old family thing, my grandmother used to eat it. Cottage cheese, like yogurt, mostly tastes like what you put in it but it has fewer carbs and more protein. Take half a can of fruit cocktail and half a tub of cottage cheese and in about 20 seconds you have a meal. It's great for when I am deep in code and don't want to interrupt my progress.
As to your last comment, a lot of thin people like to take credit for their being thin and credit it t
The states should all get together and collectively sign a deal that sais we won't take any money from this federal departement or any federal money that has fredom restricting requirements in it.
The basic strategy the federal government employed here was to use money to bypass the fact that it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to pass laws that do these things directly. Forcing censorship on Schools and Libraries is way outside the bounds of what the federal government is allowed to do. They get arround this by not requiring states to do these things directly but by tying these things to money behing handed out. Of course, ripping money out of a state with income tax and then not giving it back unless they comply is a powerful force of extortion that states don't typically resist. It's all very sneaky and underhanded and very effective. The only way to resist would be on a national organized level. States would have to band together and refuse to accept the tainted money. The temptation would be wildly strong to go back of the agreement after it was made so the agreement would need strong teath.
It's doable but I haven't seen anyone in government lately who is good enough to get something like this done. Until that time comes, the federal government will probably keep using this carrot and stick approach that they have used for years.
In the past this tying of things to federal money has been used to create 55 MPH speed limits, drunk drving laws and I think abortion clinic rules recently. Does anyone else know what this has been used for? I'm interested.
You are assuming that these libraries and schools will be using comercial filtering software. That's the wrong way to go about it.
The law is extraordinarly lax in what it requires the institutions to install (IANAL but I have read most of CIPA.) It basically sais you must have filtering software that blocks stuff. Not all stuff, not some percentage of stuff, it just has to block stuff. SquidGuard and derivitives like Dans' Guardian are great options for these institutions. They are open, not just in the source but in the blocklists. They offer full control over the block lists, they are plain text so you can read them, edit them etc. There are places that serve out updated block lists that you can auto-update from. You have the ability to put in local files that override what comes from these servers (explicit allows and denys). It's really great and FREE in both sences of the word which is important for things like Schools and Libraries.
Comercial filters are wrong for Schools and Libraries. They absolutely shouldn't use them and it should probably be illegal for them to use anything where the block list isn't examineable. How do you know if they are filtering ideas that it is illegal to filter unless you can see what they are filtering?
I agree. C C++ and Java are bad options. I'm a Perl programmer so I'm biased when I say this but I would start with Perl.
Perl is arguably as simple as BASIC but much more powerful when you get into it. The compiler is friendly and spits back nice error messages. The learning curve is gentle, you can get simple things done quite easily. It has libraries that let you extend it to do almost anything. And best of all, it's concepts and syntax bridge well into the rest of the programming world.
It has loose variables which makes it conceptually easy to start in (and "use strict" for when you are doing real work.) It's interpreted so it's easy to write something, then run it and see what it does.
print "Hello World\n";
actually prints hello world. It's a complete program. Perl is able to run parse the output of other programs easily which makes it great for extending other programs to get somthing done.
It runs well on the currently popular Windows platform but is at home on the *nix's which will likely be popular when a young programmer enters the work force. It also is a great platform to develop web-based apps in which makes it easy to write things that they can show off to anyone in the world.
I like what I have heard about Python. It seems like a good powerful language. It's probably another good place to start but I would start with Perl.
Since you got me thinking about it again I'll put forth another argument:
Why do people want to do away with cars? Is it because the want to be safe to walk around? do they want cleaner air? less noise? prettier landscape? The real answer to all of these problems is not the impractical pipe dream of doing away with cars. The real answer is to move out of the city. Cities suck, they are loud, smelly, dangerous, ugly places to live. Get a lawn, some neighbors, some woods out back. It's like getting rid of cars, only practical. The only problem is once people move out of the cities we need to *build more highways* so they can travel back into the cities where they make their money.
I don't know about you but I need space of my own. Somewhere where I can control the environment, be alone, have piece and quiet. I love being able to sit in the back yard on a clear night, look up at the stars and listen to nothing, nothing but the little critters that are up at night and an occasional car driving by out front. It's a great thing. I just got my house last fall and I am *so* happy to be here. I'm lucky though, I live up hear in pretty New Hampshire and work for a company 70 miles away. The lucky thing is that I've only had to go down about 5 times. I telecommute. Most people can't do that. Everyone I know who lives around here and works has a long drive. I did when I bought the place. It was totally worth it though. I'd make that 70 mile commute to be able to come home to this place.
hehe. I'm surprised people actually read these posts.
Again, Just because someone other than you made the numbers up doesn't make them true.
You seem to be arguing that roads take up too much space. Compared to what? Train tracks to your house? Walking paths? Bicicling paths? What would you replace that pavement with? What is your superior alternative solution to the transportation problem?
I will also point out as I did before, most of the pavement in the world is back roads. The problem is that we don't build enough *highways*. Higways take up verry little of the space designated for roadways. They are much much more efficient use of space than back roads and driveways. You could do away with 80% of all roads if you just pull the last mile of road out (see, I can make up numbers too) but then how to you get the groceries, heating oil, packages, utility trucks, school busses, ambulances, fire trucks, and you to/from your house.
Many people think that because most of the road they drive on is highway then most of the roads must be higways. It's a perception thing.
That's a strange definition of "low density American suburb". I live in what I would call a medium density suburb. It's probably around 5% asphalt. If 65% is covered in the densist of cities like downtown Los Angeles how could you call something with only slightly lower concentration a "low density suburb".
(insert standard quote about statistics and damn lies here)
Yes, good debate. I don't think this thread has gone too far. It's a shame slashdot stories are a ghosttown ten seconds after the've been posted.
I agree. It's rare to get anything more than stupid jokes and 30 second posts. I like the email notifications of responses, it keeps me replying to things. If more people turn that on, we may even have good discussions here!
for those that actually live in a city, I think very few need to use a car for daily living. In New York, for example, less than half of households even own a car, even in our car-centric culture (that number would be even smaller if car-sharing programs were more widespread, or if the city didn't put so much of its time into moving cars around quickly).
This is a great example of how, when it makes economic and logistical sense, alternatives naturally assert themselves.
90 out of 115 million households are in a metropolitan area
Yes, but no other metropolitan area is like New York. As of last year I would have been concidered living in a metropolin area since I lived within the city of Manchester, New Hampshire. I lived about 1.5 miles from the nearest store without any sidewalks between me and them. When I first moved there I was driving 50 miles to my job and my wife was driving 30 to hers. We were about a half mile from the the highway that you would take if you went from one to the other so our commutes were about as small as they could be. There is *no way* we could have done that without a car. So just because 90 of 115 million households are in a metripolitan area doesn't mean 90 of 115 million households live where people can do without a car.
In fact, almost no one in Manchester can get by without a car. It's rare for people to live close to where they work and there is no public transportation system (and because of the density, investing in public transporataion would be economicly devistating.) You need dense, large cities like New York's to make living without cars viable and I really hate cities that dense. Cities like New York are also very expensive in other ways. It costs a lot to pile that many people on top of each other.
But, even if 100% of road construction was paid for by gas taxes, what about the marsh area that now has a highway running through it? Doesn't that have value? It's not just car drivers who pay for the loss of that-- everyone pays. What about the neighborhood that was destroyed to put in a highway?
True, there are costs associated with travel by car but there are costs associated with any form of travel. My argument isn't that the cost of cars is low, it's that it is the most efficient method available.
so, IF the cost of all these things, and whatever I've missed, was estimated, and if the gas tax was increased accordingly, THEN I would be perfectly happy to see people driving around in their cars.
I agree. Gas taxes should reflect the total cost of transportation by car. I also agree that train transportation should reflect the total cost of riding by train. None of these $1.25 tokens to ride the subway while the trains are operating at 85% losses. Pay the $10 each way. It gives people a false sense that trains are eficient.
$0.15/mile is nuts.
It's actually not. The $0.35 counts gas which the $0.15 didn't. It would only be $0.22 with the gas I did in my math. I also was figuring a resonable passenger car, 20 MPG and about $20k purchase price that would last 200K miles. That's $0.1/mile for the car and $0.05 for maintainance/insurance etc. ($10K over the life). The $0.35/mile is meant to make sure the guy driving the $50K SUV that get's 10 MPG isn't losing much money by driving it for work.
And highways themselves are destructive to cities and natural areas.
So are train tracks, bicicle paths, monorails, and walking trails. Unless we dig tubes to travel in (not the worst idea, but very expensive) we are going to have to take up space on the land for traveling.
It is a myth that a city with enough roads to handle traffic would be all roads and space left for buildings or people. It's just silly when you think about it, if there are no buildings, noone will be traveling there the roads don't need to be there. There is a balance somewhere inbetween.
That article was before the FX came out. They are trying to claim the speed crown from ATI with the GeforceFX chipset. From what I've seen they win in the benchmarks but when you compare the image quality it looks like they aren't doing the work they are told to do. The GeforceFX's 4xAA images look crappy compared to the ATI's 4xAA images.
NVidia's cards just seem to do less with more. They make more noise, more heat, use more power and do a worse job rendering. They just need to engineer a better chip. Instead, they put money behind developing benchmark cheats. Not only is it disshonest and immoral which can ruin a companies moral, it's bad business because you are throwing money away which puts you further behind your competition and closer to 3Dfx's fate. In the mean time Matrox! comes out with the first 256 bit memory bus GPU, ATI comes out with the second and later NVidia releases a dud of a chip with a choking 128 bit bus.
I have been a huge NVidia fan. I have a TNT, TNT2 Ultra, Geforce 256, 2x Geforce2 GTS's and Geforce4 4600. Back in the Geforce 256 days they were doing everything right. I'm really dissapointed with the turn the company has been taking lately though. They have squandered their early success and ended up in a really tough position. More companies need to learn from ID's example. Keep it lean and strong and stick to your core competency and you'll stay on top.
Yea. I even put it in Word to spell check it because it didn't look right. It didn't turn red so I figured I was wrong. My spelling instincts suck.
I have written a few posts that raised hard questions and got modded down as overrated after being modded up for being insightful or informative. The slashdot crowd seems more and more to like the quick, lame joke instead of the well thought out commentary.
It's not my sig yet. I was testdriving it. I think I'll use it though.
Controversial != Overrated. Reply if you disagree, I'll read it.
I think it's awesome that Futuremark has come out swinging on this one. NVidia has obviously cheated horribly on these benchmarks. ATI aparently has also taken the low road on these but not as low as NVidia.
NVidia is losing. Their chips and cards are worse than ATI's. What's worse than that, though, is that they are still trying to pretend that it's not the case. They need to seriously sit down and work on their designs but instead they are pissing money away working on cheating on benchmarks. That is a really bad sign for a company. It means managament is diverting money away from becoming successful twords appearing to be successful. A mentality like that is disasterous to the real value of a company.
SELL! SELL NOW! Buy again when they have fixed their mangement and design issues.
Contravertial != Overrated. Reply if you disagree, I'll read it.
I'm no lawyer but I can't imaging a company could sell a device with an advertised commercial skip function and then remove it later. I would believe that they are considering removing the feature from *future* ReplayTV's. That would make sense.
The comercial skip feature feature is great! It doesn't work so well on a lot of the high-budget teenyboper shows with quick cuts and no blank frames inbetween the shows and comercials but so far it has worked perfectly on the history channel every time. It also doesn't work well on shows with a lot of mostly black frames like Angel and Buffy. It doesn't skip the last comercials in a show so you do still see some comercials even if it works flawlessly. Comercials are so much less annoying now though, that I don't mind seeing a few.
The barriers for entry into the PVR market are lowering. It's time for some new blood in this arena. I've had a ReplayTV for a while now and I'm impressed with it but it's been a few years since the Tivo and ReplayTV first came out and there hasn't been much advancement since.
Where are the PVRs that can encode to and play MPEG 4? Where are the PVRs with a DVD drive that will also rip and store audio CD's as MP3's? Were are the PVR's that can burn their shows to a DVD or SVCD? Where are the PVRs that can stream shows to/from a PC in a nice standard format (the Replay's mpeg2 files are messy, most programs don't like them and it can't play mpeg's that it didn't create.) These are all things that are so easy that you could almost hack the existing machines to do it and yet it hasn't been done. Are these companies so afraid of being sued that they won't even try and give consumers what they want?
the point of the link I posted was to refute your claim that cars are most economically efficient.
Yes, but it does so by arguing that bicycles are more economically efficient than cars. My point is that this is an invalid argument. Bicycles cannot replace cars so it doesn't matter. It's like arguing that bread is more economically efficient than meat in supplying calories. It is, but it doesn't matter. You can't replace meat with bread because meat does more things than just supply energy, things that bread can't do. The same is applicable to the arguments in the link. Cars are the most economically efficient way of accomplishing the things that cars do. Bicycles are the most economically efficient way of accomplishing the things that bicycles do. Bicycles are *not* the most efficient way of accomplishing the things that cars do since they can't do what cars do.
The debate comes where there is overlap, the place where either cars or bicycles could be used. The rest of my arguments are showing that for the most part, this overlap is currently balanced correctly. Since most people need to own cars the expense of purchasing and maintaining them gets largely factored out of the economic efficiency equation. It is left to a debate between the added time, discomfort, and effort of riding a bicycle versus the expense of gas and wear and tear on a vehicle.
Looking at a 20 mile journey. It would take about a gallon of gas at $1.50 plus it would take about half an hour. By my math it costs about $0.15 per mile to own and maintain a moderate passenger car. That makes the total cost for the trip about $4.50. The cost of traveling using a car versus a bicycle lies somewhere in-between the $4.50 and $1.50 since a lot of the cost of the $4.50 would be there regardless of whether you used the car or not. Biking at 15 MPH (assuming no hills) it would take about 1.3 hours. This also doesn't count the time to cool down, catch your breath and possibly shower depending on what your reasons for travel are. If the question is, is the 45 minutes you save worth the $1.50 - $4.50 cost the answer is usually a definite yes unless you make very little money (like in 3rd world countries where people make very little money and not-surprisingly ride a lot of bicycles.)
You may argue that the cost of the roads isn't included but most road maintenance is paid for by gas tax therefore it is already rolled into the expense of the gas.
The very reason kids even need to be carried around town by their parents is that they can't drive cars and there aren't any alternatives. If streets were bike-friendly, or if there were adequate public transportation, your kids could get where they need to go on their own. The fact that children in car-centric areas are so dependent on their parents for transportation is an often-used argument against cars.
My parent's didn't need to drive me around to places because of all the dangerous car's on the roads. They needed to carry my around to places because they were too far to bike to. All your arguments are based on dense city living. Most of the world is not dense cities. When I was growing up I couldn't get anywhere without a car. I could bike anywhere I wanted but it didn't help. There was nothing within reasonable biking distance. Getting a car and a drivers license was huge because I could finally go and do things. The same is true for most people who live outside of cities.
It's not WALKING that's dangerous, it's cars. The same is true for cycling
That's not true. Cycling is dangerous with or without cars. You are moving fast with no protection. This is one of the reasons cars are so much better. They are expensive but very safe considering the rate they get you places. Most of the expense of the car is this safety. If you think about it, a car without any of the safety measures is basically a motorcycle. Motorcycles are much more economically efficient than cars until you count all the death an ma
Yea. Just not when it's winter. Biking is dangerous when you have good traction. It's suicide on ice and snow.
I just posted a link claiming that the true speed of an automobile is five miles/hour and all you have to say is "bicycles are very slow?"
Bicicles are slower than cars. Can bicicles sometimes get some places faster than cars? Absolutely! That's why bike mesengers use bikes. In flat, densely populated areas with outdated road systems where you aren't carying anything heavy and you are in good shape bikes can often get you there much faster than cars. That's a lot of if's though. Cars can cary much more cargo than a bike, they can cary infants safely, they can accelerate much faster, they can handle long steep hills with ease. They allow you to arive at your destination, cool, calm, and not exhausted.
Yes, they are dangerous-- but so is the alternative
Bicicles are dangerous, much more dangerous than cars. In a car you are surrounded by a safety cage and strapped in. You can hit things at very high rates of speed and still survive. Bicicles don't give you protection from anything. That's not their job. Bicicles also cause wear and tear on the body. Yea it might seem better to get the excersize but eventually you won't be able to use one. My wife has joint problems with her knees. Using a bike every day would be exteremly painful and eventually destroy the knee. Bicicles are also bad for boys. Biking too much can destroy your ability to have kids. Usually surgery can fix it but do you really want someone cutting around down there?
In the end bikes work for a few people, cars work for just about everyone else. That's why a few people bike and most people use cars. Maybe there are a few people who could use bikes instead of cars but not enough to eliminate the need for cars or gas stations or oil or highways. As a society we can't function without cars. It's as simple as that.
There would be many more transportation related deaths if people rode bikes instead of driving cars to work. Imagine the carnage of a vast sea of bicicles on a highway when one falls over in the fog! It would be especially horrible if we tried to mix cars and biciles. Since we need cars we would either need to share the road between cars and bicicles or we would need to build two sets of roads everywhere. We can't get them to build one set of properly sized roads to places no less two.
Why doesn't your office open more locations?
Beacause it doesn't make economic sence. I work for a small specialty company. There are only a few employees and only two who live in my state. If the option came down to not employing me or openeing an office nearby I wouldn't have a job. The good part is I work from home, only going to the office when I need to. I only make the 70 mile drive occasionaly. By the way, that 70 mile drive doesn't take me 14 hours, it takes me about 65 minutes so that 5 miles/hour number seems a little off.
a walmart surrounded by a parking lot rather than several smaller stores, but is that something we really want?
Yes. Absolutely. A walmart in a town means greater prosperity for thousands of people. They get their basic supplies in an amazingly efficent (inexpensive) way. When asked if they would rather pay more for the same stuff in a quainter store, the population choses to keep their money by shopping at Walmart. Most people see walmart as the destroyer of economies. It's not. My inlaws live in northern New Hampshire. Until recently there were no Walmarts nearby and used to be apauled when we tried to buy things up there. Everything was very expensive up there but the only way to get things for a resonable price was to drive an hour and a half. Not a great option. Now that Walmart has a few stores up there they can get things at a resonable price. It's made things a lot easier for people up there.
Just because the source of the information has an agenda doesn't make the information wrong.
My basic premise is that you need a certain population density to make light rail economicly sound.
This is obviously true.
Everyone loves to imagine how awesome not having to drive would be. Trains can't be nearly as nice as people dream they will be and it's very expensive to try. People never want to pay for it either. They expect public transportation to be cheap or free because it's "soo eficient". How eager would you be to take that train to work every day if it cost you $50 per day. How about if you still had to drive to the train station because you don't want to live next to loud, dangerous train tracks. What about if you now had to take a cab from the train station to work because your office is too far from the station to walk.
Everyone dreams of walking out their door, getting into some magic thing and getting dropped off at the door at work. This is not how public transportation works. This *is* how cars will work some day. All we need to do is figure out how to make computers drive cars. They can pick you up, drive you down the highway while you eat, read, sleep, whatever, then drop you off at the door and go park themselves. This is the pipe dream we should be following, not trains.
Bicicles are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year. Bicicles are eather very slow or very dangerous. My english teacher in high school died just falling off of his. Falling off a bike or getting in an accident at any decent rate of speed can easily kill you.
We live in a specialized economy. We need to travel long distances to get to work. To get to my work's office on a bicicle would take about 3 hours. What is te economic impact of everyone only working a 4 hour day.
Bikes are certainly cheaper than cars but they only fill the needs of a very small population of people. How good are they at carrying your kids around town? Bringing your groceries home. Going to visit the relatives for christmas. Going to the beach. They are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year.
People want money. If it could really save them lots of money, they would do it. It's just not realistic.
What I am saying is that Carless doesn't work well anywhere and that light rail transportation only works well in a few large markets like West Europe, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, New York and LA?
You seem to take cars for granted. If you wanted to replace all the functionality that cars provide you would need to get something that could go from anywhere to anywhere carying people and supplies, travel short distances or long distances quickly and efficiently. Something instantly availiable when needed (especially in emergencies.) Something that will protect you even at high rates of speed (how many train/plane accidents end up with only minor injuries)
It's hard to imagine anything that can do all that isn't a car. Too many people assume that everything not invented in the last 10 years is stupid. A *lot* of time, money, and thought has gone in to replacing cars. The fact is the only thing that has succesfully replaced cars is newer better cars.
(I wasn't logged in when I posted this the first time so I'm reposting)
I will say that in London, trains don't suck. Trains need a certain population density in order to be economicly efficient. London is one of the few cities in the world that has that density. From what I understand, London is an excelent place to do trains. Most cities, especially US cities, don't have that high density that makes rail a good idea. I think there are only about 5 cities in the US that should really have rail.
Sorry for the emphatic writing (troll). Bad rodes piss me off! The root of why the roads are bad is that everyone assumes there is no way to fix the problem. Because of this people who assume there is no way to fix the problem piss me of.
Maybe it shouldn't have been moderated as high as it was but I was serious about everything I wrote.
Personal trains like Taxi2000 are like cars but they need complicated proprietary track to run on instead of simple versitile universally usable roads. It may work in isolated pockets of cities but it doesn't solve all the problems that roads do like carying heavy freight and carrying oversized loads like pre-fab houses and doing troup transport. It's an interesting idea but it doesn't strike me as practical. It's a complicated, incomplete solution for a simple problem. Just build the roads big enough to handle the cars that drive on them. It's not complicated. It's not hard. Just do it.
Examine the ecanomic impact of the 50 extra cents of fuel they used to do that trip versus the cost of spending a day hauling the groceries back and forth by hand. The ecanomic impact of the SUV versus the MiniVan versus the sub-compact is neglidgable in comparison.
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Many high protien diets, including Atkins prohibit foods which are known to lower the risks associated with heart disease and cancers.
This is not true. Listen to the Cheerios ad. The foods are linked to lower overall colesterol levels which are thought to be a major factor in heart disease. Of course we all know that lower overall colersterall is meaningless as compared to the good/bad ratio and trigliceride count. What they don't say is that Cheerios is horible for the good/bad ratio and nasty for the trigliceride count. Modern science sais Cheerios gives you a heart attack. They don't put that in the adds though since it's unlikely that would help sales.
Here is the key point on the Atkins diet: it may help you lose weight, but it is unhealthy. Too many people associate weight loss with health.
:)
:) I was simply quoting a very funny line from the Simpsons. On the contrary I consider France one of the greatest military forces of the last millennium.)
I have heard lots of people who assume the Atkins diet is unhealthy because it may do some thing or another but to my knowledge no one has ever shown that it *IS* unhealthy. The same assumptions that say it is unhealthy lead people to believe that you would gain weight on Atkins, quickly. The science of nutrition is full of vast oversimplifications and baseless conclusions. The people who tell us Atkins is bad for us sound a lot like the people who told us the world was flat. They assume it is and view any attempt to verify it as dangerous and foolhardy. I'm not saying I know the answer, I suspect that there are issues with Atkins for some people and that there likely are modifications to Atkins that would improve it. What I am saying is that the answer isn't known and the people who stand up and say they know are full of crap. They suspect, they assume, they do not know.
And a doctor or nutritionist is who can tell you how your body might react best to certain foods. But there are some general rules you can follow first. And you can get that info from somewhere other than Slashdot.
Some doctors and nutritionists will guide you in the right direction, others won't. The situation has gotten much better since Atkins's recent massive press attention which embarrassed the hell out of the industry. Many aren't just blindly telling everyone to eat lots of bread and pasta anymore. I believe the answer is different for everyone. I also believe the doctors and nutritionists have no way of knowing which answer is right for which person. They just don't have tools that can figure it out yet. There are some general guidelines they have but you can get them from books and I feel that the guidelines are wrong just as often as they are right. I think people's time is probably better spent reading a book like The Zone or the Atkins diet and their money is probably better spent on silly things like a ball chair than on a nutritionist.
Then I started watching them closer. They cheat, and they deny it to themselves.
I've watched thin people. They cheat too, often quite dramatically. They just think they have earned it since they are thin.
We went to Paris for a week this year. The only fat people there were tourists, and they stuck out like sore thumbs.
So the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" are skinny eh?
Do you suspect that it is because people in Paris get much more exercise than people in, for example, New York? Do you suspect that they lack the modern conveniences that make us Americans so fat? Or do you suspect that it might have something to do with the eating patterns, maybe the fact that in France they haven't had a government cramming bulk manufactured, prepackaged, sugar-starches down their throats and calling it nutrition for the last 20 years. (for the record I don't actually consider the French "surrender monkeys"
I think people can do little things to tip the balance one way or another but often people's balance is way off and they need big changes in order to make any progress. The little bit that willpower can accomplish can mean the difference between gaining weight and losing it for some people while for others it means the difference between gaining weight fast and staying the same weight. There are bigger forces at work than the quantity of food we ingest and the litt
Actually. I've enjoyed reading people's posts. I'm convinced the experts don't know much about weight gain and weight loss. The science that has been done seems full of assumptions and inconclusive studies. The recent tests showing that the Atikins diet actually works while all modern science says it shouldn't shows just how far they have to go in figuring out even the basics. I'm interested in hearing what has worked for people who, like me, sit all day. That way I can try them and see if they work for me too.
Another thing I'm convinced of is that there is no one answer to the problem. Different people digest different foods differently. A low carb diet that works well for some people can cause weight gain and even be life threatening to others (gout/kidney issues) while a high carb diet that works well for some people can cause weight gain and even be life threatening to others (diabetic/hypoglycemic.) Adjusting your diet isn't as easy as reading something and following it. You need to pay attention to how your body reacts to different foods. Like any complicated black box system you need to try lots of different inputs and look at the results. A knowledge of the different variables and what effects they have is a big help but you can't get all the answers from a book or a simple formula. For example, if you end up lying down finding it hard to find the energy to breathe after eating high-carb foods (like me) you may have trouble with them and may want to work on limiting your intake. Don't poke too much fun at the guy who tries one meal a day. The thinnest I have ever been was after a period where I only ate one meal a day during college. I don't think it would work for me now because I am in a different place in my life (I have a refrigerator now that constantly has food in it) but it could work for some people.
Similarly gyms, running, biking, swimming all work for some people and not for others. I have an extremely tall torso and short legs. For me, running is a lousy option, my body isn't built for running. It's hell on my joints and I don't burn a lot of energy. Swimming is much better for me but I don't have anywhere to swim. Most people live where biking is more likely to kill you than the health issues associated with being fat. Gyms bore the hell out of me. Try standing facing a corner for about half an hour while you have something important to be doing and you will feel the way I feel in a gym. I haven't quite found the answer that's right for me, I'm still in lousy shape, although I have stopped gaining weight and I think I'm slowly losing it. I get a lot more exercise than I used to now that I have a house and have yard work to do. Back when I lived in a condo complex I found it very hard to get exercise.
The one suggestion that everyone seems to agree on but doesn't come up much in discussions like this is salad. Salad is awesome food and a great balance for what we seem to have too much of in our diets. My favorite is Applebees Steakhouse Salad. I love that thing. Yea, it's got a bunch of steak which a lot of people would whine about but I love it. One thing I have learned about salad is that iceberg lettuce (previously my favorite) is the fast-food equivalent of lettuce. It has almost none of the good stuff that lettuce is supposed to have, it's very bland, and it doesn't last well. It gets brown and bitter and slimy very easily where the other lettuces seem to make more consistently good salads that are better for you.
Another thing I have taken to is cottage cheese and fruit. It's an old family thing, my grandmother used to eat it. Cottage cheese, like yogurt, mostly tastes like what you put in it but it has fewer carbs and more protein. Take half a can of fruit cocktail and half a tub of cottage cheese and in about 20 seconds you have a meal. It's great for when I am deep in code and don't want to interrupt my progress.
As to your last comment, a lot of thin people like to take credit for their being thin and credit it t
The states should all get together and collectively sign a deal that sais we won't take any money from this federal departement or any federal money that has fredom restricting requirements in it.
The basic strategy the federal government employed here was to use money to bypass the fact that it would be unconstitutional for the federal government to pass laws that do these things directly. Forcing censorship on Schools and Libraries is way outside the bounds of what the federal government is allowed to do. They get arround this by not requiring states to do these things directly but by tying these things to money behing handed out. Of course, ripping money out of a state with income tax and then not giving it back unless they comply is a powerful force of extortion that states don't typically resist. It's all very sneaky and underhanded and very effective. The only way to resist would be on a national organized level. States would have to band together and refuse to accept the tainted money. The temptation would be wildly strong to go back of the agreement after it was made so the agreement would need strong teath.
It's doable but I haven't seen anyone in government lately who is good enough to get something like this done. Until that time comes, the federal government will probably keep using this carrot and stick approach that they have used for years.
In the past this tying of things to federal money has been used
to create 55 MPH speed limits, drunk drving laws and I think abortion clinic rules recently. Does anyone else know what this has been used for? I'm interested.
You are assuming that these libraries and schools will be using comercial filtering software. That's the wrong way to go about it.
The law is extraordinarly lax in what it requires the institutions to install (IANAL but I have read most of CIPA.) It basically sais you must have filtering software that blocks stuff. Not all stuff, not some percentage of stuff, it just has to block stuff. SquidGuard and derivitives like Dans' Guardian are great options for these institutions. They are open, not just in the source but in the blocklists. They offer full control over the block lists, they are plain text so you can read them, edit them etc. There are places that serve out updated block lists that you can auto-update from. You have the ability to put in local files that override what comes from these servers (explicit allows and denys). It's really great and FREE in both sences of the word which is important for things like Schools and Libraries.
Comercial filters are wrong for Schools and Libraries. They absolutely shouldn't use them and it should probably be illegal for them to use anything where the block list isn't examineable. How do you know if they are filtering ideas that it is illegal to filter unless you can see what they are filtering?
I agree. C C++ and Java are bad options. I'm a Perl programmer so I'm biased when I say this but I would start with Perl.
Perl is arguably as simple as BASIC but much more powerful when you get into it. The compiler is friendly and spits back nice error messages. The learning curve is gentle, you can get simple things done quite easily. It has libraries that let you extend it to do almost anything. And best of all, it's concepts and syntax bridge well into the rest of the programming world.
It has loose variables which makes it conceptually easy to start in (and "use strict" for when you are doing real work.) It's interpreted so it's easy to write something, then run it and see what it does.
print "Hello World\n";
actually prints hello world. It's a complete program. Perl is able to run parse the output of other programs easily which makes it great for extending other programs to get somthing done.
It runs well on the currently popular Windows platform but is at home on the *nix's which will likely be popular when a young programmer enters the work force. It also is a great platform to develop web-based apps in which makes it easy to write things that they can show off to anyone in the world.
I like what I have heard about Python. It seems like a good powerful language. It's probably another good place to start but I would start with Perl.
Since you got me thinking about it again I'll put forth another argument:
Why do people want to do away with cars? Is it because the want to be safe to walk around? do they want cleaner air? less noise? prettier landscape? The real answer to all of these problems is not the impractical pipe dream of doing away with cars. The real answer is to move out of the city. Cities suck, they are loud, smelly, dangerous, ugly places to live. Get a lawn, some neighbors, some woods out back. It's like getting rid of cars, only practical. The only problem is once people move out of the cities we need to *build more highways* so they can travel back into the cities where they make their money.
I don't know about you but I need space of my own. Somewhere where I can control the environment, be alone, have piece and quiet. I love being able to sit in the back yard on a clear night, look up at the stars and listen to nothing, nothing but the little critters that are up at night and an occasional car driving by out front. It's a great thing. I just got my house last fall and I am *so* happy to be here. I'm lucky though, I live up hear in pretty New Hampshire and work for a company 70 miles away. The lucky thing is that I've only had to go down about 5 times. I telecommute. Most people can't do that. Everyone I know who lives around here and works has a long drive. I did when I bought the place. It was totally worth it though. I'd make that 70 mile commute to be able to come home to this place.
hehe. I'm surprised people actually read these posts.
Again, Just because someone other than you made the numbers up doesn't make them true.
You seem to be arguing that roads take up too much space. Compared to what? Train tracks to your house? Walking paths? Bicicling paths? What would you replace that pavement with? What is your superior alternative solution to the transportation problem?
I will also point out as I did before, most of the pavement in the world is back roads. The problem is that we don't build enough *highways*. Higways take up verry little of the space designated for roadways. They are much much more efficient use of space than back roads and driveways. You could do away with 80% of all roads if you just pull the last mile of road out (see, I can make up numbers too) but then how to you get the groceries, heating oil, packages, utility trucks, school busses, ambulances, fire trucks, and you to/from your house.
Many people think that because most of the road they drive on is highway then most of the roads must be higways. It's a perception thing.
That's a strange definition of "low density American suburb". I live in what I would call a medium density suburb. It's probably around 5% asphalt. If 65% is covered in the densist of cities like downtown Los Angeles how could you call something with only slightly lower concentration a "low density suburb".
(insert standard quote about statistics and damn lies here)
Ooh, forgot to reply to this:
Yes, good debate. I don't think this thread has gone too far. It's a shame slashdot stories are a ghosttown ten seconds after the've been posted.
I agree. It's rare to get anything more than stupid jokes and 30 second posts. I like the email notifications of responses, it keeps me replying to things. If more people turn that on, we may even have good discussions here!
for those that actually live in a city, I think very few need to use a car for daily living. In New York, for example, less than half of households even own a car, even in our car-centric culture (that number would be even smaller if car-sharing programs were more widespread, or if the city didn't put so much of its time into moving cars around quickly).
This is a great example of how, when it makes economic and logistical sense, alternatives naturally assert themselves.
90 out of 115 million households are in a metropolitan area
Yes, but no other metropolitan area is like New York. As of last year I would have been concidered living in a metropolin area since I lived within the city of Manchester, New Hampshire. I lived about 1.5 miles from the nearest store without any sidewalks between me and them. When I first moved there I was driving 50 miles to my job and my wife was driving 30 to hers. We were about a half mile from the the highway that you would take if you went from one to the other so our commutes were about as small as they could be. There is *no way* we could have done that without a car. So just because 90 of 115 million households are in a metripolitan area doesn't mean 90 of 115 million households live where people can do without a car.
In fact, almost no one in Manchester can get by without a car. It's rare for people to live close to where they work and there is no public transportation system (and because of the density, investing in public transporataion would be economicly devistating.) You need dense, large cities like New York's to make living without cars viable and I really hate cities that dense. Cities like New York are also very expensive in other ways. It costs a lot to pile that many people on top of each other.
But, even if 100% of road construction was paid for by gas taxes, what about the marsh area that now has a highway running through it? Doesn't that have value? It's not just car drivers who pay for the loss of that-- everyone pays. What about the neighborhood that was destroyed to put in a highway?
True, there are costs associated with travel by car but there are costs associated with any form of travel. My argument isn't that the cost of cars is low, it's that it is the most efficient method available.
so, IF the cost of all these things, and whatever I've missed, was estimated, and if the gas tax was increased accordingly, THEN I would be perfectly happy to see people driving around in their cars.
I agree. Gas taxes should reflect the total cost of transportation by car. I also agree that train transportation should reflect the total cost of riding by train. None of these $1.25 tokens to ride the subway while the trains are operating at 85% losses. Pay the $10 each way. It gives people a false sense that trains are eficient.
$0.15/mile is nuts.
It's actually not. The $0.35 counts gas which the $0.15 didn't. It would only be $0.22 with the gas I did in my math. I also was figuring a resonable passenger car, 20 MPG and about $20k purchase price that would last 200K miles. That's $0.1/mile for the car and $0.05 for maintainance/insurance etc. ($10K over the life). The $0.35/mile is meant to make sure the guy driving the $50K SUV that get's 10 MPG isn't losing much money by driving it for work.
And highways themselves are destructive to cities and natural areas.
So are train tracks, bicicle paths, monorails, and walking trails. Unless we dig tubes to travel in (not the worst idea, but very expensive) we are going to have to take up space on the land for traveling.
It is a myth that a city with enough roads to handle traffic would be all roads and space left for buildings or people. It's just silly when you think about it, if there are no buildings, noone will be traveling there the roads don't need to be there. There is a balance somewhere inbetween.
There are a few factors to properly sizing roa
That article was before the FX came out. They are trying to claim the speed crown from ATI with the GeforceFX chipset. From what I've seen they win in the benchmarks but when you compare the image quality it looks like they aren't doing the work they are told to do. The GeforceFX's 4xAA images look crappy compared to the ATI's 4xAA images.
NVidia's cards just seem to do less with more. They make more noise, more heat, use more power and do a worse job rendering. They just need to engineer a better chip. Instead, they put money behind developing benchmark cheats. Not only is it disshonest and immoral which can ruin a companies moral, it's bad business because you are throwing money away which puts you further behind your competition and closer to 3Dfx's fate. In the mean time Matrox! comes out with the first 256 bit memory bus GPU, ATI comes out with the second and later NVidia releases a dud of a chip with a choking 128 bit bus.
I have been a huge NVidia fan. I have a TNT, TNT2 Ultra, Geforce 256, 2x Geforce2 GTS's and Geforce4 4600. Back in the Geforce 256 days they were doing everything right. I'm really dissapointed with the turn the company has been taking lately though. They have squandered their early success and ended up in a really tough position. More companies need to learn from ID's example. Keep it lean and strong and stick to your core competency and you'll stay on top.
Yea. I even put it in Word to spell check it because it didn't look right. It didn't turn red so I figured I was wrong. My spelling instincts suck.
I have written a few posts that raised hard questions and got modded down as overrated after being modded up for being insightful or informative. The slashdot crowd seems more and more to like the quick, lame joke instead of the well thought out commentary.
It's not my sig yet. I was testdriving it. I think I'll use it though.
Controversial != Overrated. Reply if you disagree, I'll read it.
I think it's awesome that Futuremark has come out swinging on this one. NVidia has obviously cheated horribly on these benchmarks. ATI aparently has also taken the low road on these but not as low as NVidia.
NVidia is losing. Their chips and cards are worse than ATI's. What's worse than that, though, is that they are still trying to pretend that it's not the case. They need to seriously sit down and work on their designs but instead they are pissing money away working on cheating on benchmarks. That is a really bad sign for a company. It means managament is diverting money away from becoming successful twords appearing to be successful. A mentality like that is disasterous to the real value of a company.
SELL! SELL NOW! Buy again when they have fixed their mangement and design issues.
Contravertial != Overrated. Reply if you disagree, I'll read it.
I'm no lawyer but I can't imaging a company could sell a device with an advertised commercial skip function and then remove it later. I would believe that they are considering removing the feature from *future* ReplayTV's. That would make sense.
The comercial skip feature feature is great! It doesn't work so well on a lot of the high-budget teenyboper shows with quick cuts and no blank frames inbetween the shows and comercials but so far it has worked perfectly on the history channel every time. It also doesn't work well on shows with a lot of mostly black frames like Angel and Buffy. It doesn't skip the last comercials in a show so you do still see some comercials even if it works flawlessly. Comercials are so much less annoying now though, that I don't mind seeing a few.
The barriers for entry into the PVR market are lowering. It's time for some new blood in this arena. I've had a ReplayTV for a while now and I'm impressed with it but it's been a few years since the Tivo and ReplayTV first came out and there hasn't been much advancement since.
Where are the PVRs that can encode to and play MPEG 4? Where are the PVRs with a DVD drive that will also rip and store audio CD's as MP3's? Were are the PVR's that can burn their shows to a DVD or SVCD? Where are the PVRs that can stream shows to/from a PC in a nice standard format (the Replay's mpeg2 files are messy, most programs don't like them and it can't play mpeg's that it didn't create.) These are all things that are so easy that you could almost hack the existing machines to do it and yet it hasn't been done. Are these companies so afraid of being sued that they won't even try and give consumers what they want?
the point of the link I posted was to refute your claim that cars are most economically efficient.
Yes, but it does so by arguing that bicycles are more economically efficient than cars. My point is that this is an invalid argument. Bicycles cannot replace cars so it doesn't matter. It's like arguing that bread is more economically efficient than meat in supplying calories. It is, but it doesn't matter. You can't replace meat with bread because meat does more things than just supply energy, things that bread can't do. The same is applicable to the arguments in the link. Cars are the most economically efficient way of accomplishing the things that cars do. Bicycles are the most economically efficient way of accomplishing the things that bicycles do. Bicycles are *not* the most efficient way of accomplishing the things that cars do since they can't do what cars do.
The debate comes where there is overlap, the place where either cars or bicycles could be used. The rest of my arguments are showing that for the most part, this overlap is currently balanced correctly. Since most people need to own cars the expense of purchasing and maintaining them gets largely factored out of the economic efficiency equation. It is left to a debate between the added time, discomfort, and effort of riding a bicycle versus the expense of gas and wear and tear on a vehicle.
Looking at a 20 mile journey. It would take about a gallon of gas at $1.50 plus it would take about half an hour. By my math it costs about $0.15 per mile to own and maintain a moderate passenger car. That makes the total cost for the trip about $4.50. The cost of traveling using a car versus a bicycle lies somewhere in-between the $4.50 and $1.50 since a lot of the cost of the $4.50 would be there regardless of whether you used the car or not. Biking at 15 MPH (assuming no hills) it would take about 1.3 hours. This also doesn't count the time to cool down, catch your breath and possibly shower depending on what your reasons for travel are. If the question is, is the 45 minutes you save worth the $1.50 - $4.50 cost the answer is usually a definite yes unless you make very little money (like in 3rd world countries where people make very little money and not-surprisingly ride a lot of bicycles.)
You may argue that the cost of the roads isn't included but most road maintenance is paid for by gas tax therefore it is already rolled into the expense of the gas.
The very reason kids even need to be carried around town by their parents is that they can't drive cars and there aren't any alternatives. If streets were bike-friendly, or if there were adequate public transportation, your kids could get where they need to go on their own. The fact that children in car-centric areas are so dependent on their parents for transportation is an often-used argument against cars.
My parent's didn't need to drive me around to places because of all the dangerous car's on the roads. They needed to carry my around to places because they were too far to bike to. All your arguments are based on dense city living. Most of the world is not dense cities. When I was growing up I couldn't get anywhere without a car. I could bike anywhere I wanted but it didn't help. There was nothing within reasonable biking distance. Getting a car and a drivers license was huge because I could finally go and do things. The same is true for most people who live outside of cities.
It's not WALKING that's dangerous, it's cars. The same is true for cycling
That's not true. Cycling is dangerous with or without cars. You are moving fast with no protection. This is one of the reasons cars are so much better. They are expensive but very safe considering the rate they get you places. Most of the expense of the car is this safety. If you think about it, a car without any of the safety measures is basically a motorcycle. Motorcycles are much more economically efficient than cars until you count all the death an ma
People bicycle all the time in colder climates.
Yea. Just not when it's winter. Biking is dangerous when you have good traction. It's suicide on ice and snow.
I just posted a link claiming that the true speed of an automobile is five miles/hour and all you have to say is "bicycles are very slow?"
Bicicles are slower than cars. Can bicicles sometimes get some places faster than cars? Absolutely! That's why bike mesengers use bikes. In flat, densely populated areas with outdated road systems where you aren't carying anything heavy and you are in good shape bikes can often get you there much faster than cars. That's a lot of if's though. Cars can cary much more cargo than a bike, they can cary infants safely, they can accelerate much faster, they can handle long steep hills with ease. They allow you to arive at your destination, cool, calm, and not exhausted.
Yes, they are dangerous-- but so is the alternative
Bicicles are dangerous, much more dangerous than cars. In a car you are surrounded by a safety cage and strapped in. You can hit things at very high rates of speed and still survive. Bicicles don't give you protection from anything. That's not their job. Bicicles also cause wear and tear on the body. Yea it might seem better to get the excersize but eventually you won't be able to use one. My wife has joint problems with her knees. Using a bike every day would be exteremly painful and eventually destroy the knee. Bicicles are also bad for boys. Biking too much can destroy your ability to have kids. Usually surgery can fix it but do you really want someone cutting around down there?
In the end bikes work for a few people, cars work for just about everyone else. That's why a few people bike and most people use cars. Maybe there are a few people who could use bikes instead of cars but not enough to eliminate the need for cars or gas stations or oil or highways. As a society we can't function without cars. It's as simple as that.
There would be many more transportation related deaths if people rode bikes instead of driving cars to work. Imagine the carnage of a vast sea of bicicles on a highway when one falls over in the fog! It would be especially horrible if we tried to mix cars and biciles. Since we need cars we would either need to share the road between cars and bicicles or we would need to build two sets of roads everywhere. We can't get them to build one set of properly sized roads to places no less two.
Why doesn't your office open more locations?
Beacause it doesn't make economic sence. I work for a small specialty company. There are only a few employees and only two who live in my state. If the option came down to not employing me or openeing an office nearby I wouldn't have a job. The good part is I work from home, only going to the office when I need to. I only make the 70 mile drive occasionaly. By the way, that 70 mile drive doesn't take me 14 hours, it takes me about 65 minutes so that 5 miles/hour number seems a little off.
a walmart surrounded by a parking lot rather than several smaller stores, but is that something we really want?
Yes. Absolutely. A walmart in a town means greater prosperity for thousands of people. They get their basic supplies in an amazingly efficent (inexpensive) way. When asked if they would rather pay more for the same stuff in a quainter store, the population choses to keep their money by shopping at Walmart. Most people see walmart as the destroyer of economies. It's not. My inlaws live in northern New Hampshire. Until recently there were no Walmarts nearby and used to be apauled when we tried to buy things up there. Everything was very expensive up there but the only way to get things for a resonable price was to drive an hour and a half. Not a great option. Now that Walmart has a few stores up there they can get things at a resonable price. It's made things a lot easier for people up there.
Just because the source of the information has an agenda doesn't make the information wrong.
My basic premise is that you need a certain population density to make light rail economicly sound.
This is obviously true.
Everyone loves to imagine how awesome not having to drive would be. Trains can't be nearly as nice as people dream they will be and it's very expensive to try. People never want to pay for it either. They expect public transportation to be cheap or free because it's "soo eficient". How eager would you be to take that train to work every day if it cost you $50 per day. How about if you still had to drive to the train station because you don't want to live next to loud, dangerous train tracks. What about if you now had to take a cab from the train station to work because your office is too far from the station to walk.
Everyone dreams of walking out their door, getting into some magic thing and getting dropped off at the door at work. This is not how public transportation works. This *is* how cars will work some day. All we need to do is figure out how to make computers drive cars. They can pick you up, drive you down the highway while you eat, read, sleep, whatever, then drop you off at the door and go park themselves. This is the pipe dream we should be following, not trains.
There was a space in your url. The real one is:a l_effects.html
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/facts/soci
Bicicles are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year. Bicicles are eather very slow or very dangerous. My english teacher in high school died just falling off of his. Falling off a bike or getting in an accident at any decent rate of speed can easily kill you.
We live in a specialized economy. We need to travel long distances to get to work. To get to my work's office on a bicicle would take about 3 hours. What is te economic impact of everyone only working a 4 hour day.
Bikes are certainly cheaper than cars but they only fill the needs of a very small population of people. How good are they at carrying your kids around town? Bringing your groceries home. Going to visit the relatives for christmas. Going to the beach. They are completely out of the question in any part of the world where the ground is coated with ice or snow for any significant part of the year.
People want money. If it could really save them lots of money, they would do it. It's just not realistic.
What I am saying is that Carless doesn't work well anywhere and that light rail transportation only works well in a few large markets like West Europe, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, New York and LA?
The space that extra lanes take up is negligable in comparison to the land they supply with transportation.
You seem to take cars for granted. If you wanted to replace all the functionality that cars provide you would need to get something that could go from anywhere to anywhere carying people and supplies, travel short distances or long distances quickly and efficiently. Something instantly availiable when needed (especially in emergencies.) Something that will protect you even at high rates of speed (how many train/plane accidents end up with only minor injuries)
It's hard to imagine anything that can do all that isn't a car. Too many people assume that everything not invented in the last 10 years is stupid. A *lot* of time, money, and thought has gone in to replacing cars. The fact is the only thing that has succesfully replaced cars is newer better cars.
(I wasn't logged in when I posted this the first time so I'm reposting)
Here is a great sight to read with lots of data and studies about why trains usually suck.
http://www.publicpurpose.com/
I will say that in London, trains don't suck. Trains need a certain population density in order to be economicly efficient. London is one of the few cities in the world that has that density. From what I understand, London is an excelent place to do trains. Most cities, especially US cities, don't have that high density that makes rail a good idea. I think there are only about 5 cities in the US that should really have rail.
Sorry for the emphatic writing (troll). Bad rodes piss me off! The root of why the roads are bad is that everyone assumes there is no way to fix the problem. Because of this people who assume there is no way to fix the problem piss me of.
Maybe it shouldn't have been moderated as high as it was but I was serious about everything I wrote.
Personal trains like Taxi2000 are like cars but they need complicated proprietary track to run on instead of simple versitile universally usable roads. It may work in isolated pockets of cities but it doesn't solve all the problems that roads do like carying heavy freight and carrying oversized loads like pre-fab houses and doing troup transport. It's an interesting idea but it doesn't strike me as practical. It's a complicated, incomplete solution for a simple problem. Just build the roads big enough to handle the cars that drive on them. It's not complicated. It's not hard. Just do it.
Examine the ecanomic impact of the 50 extra cents of fuel they used to do that trip versus the cost of spending a day hauling the groceries back and forth by hand. The ecanomic impact of the SUV versus the MiniVan versus the sub-compact is neglidgable in comparison.