Re 3.: Electric bicycles are all over the place here in Germany. We use them all the time to get around in our small (but rather hilly) town. They are particularly popular among older people (who are now spending much more time outdoors, getting some exercise - the benefits are definitively outweighing the costs of rising numbers of bike accidents).
But look at the prices, particularly of those container e-bikes! You can get a decent used car for that money (yeah, for how long, you might ask). And I'll always prefer a standard e-bike plus trailer for flexibility.
On the way home from Pittsburgh we drove through Amish country. You may know the Amish are a (surprisingly large - estimated 80,000 in a two-county area in Ohio) Christian group in the US that largely rejects modern technology. So I was surprised to see many on electric bicycles! Sure, if you've already accepted bicycles into the community as a non-disruptive technology, it's not that much of a qualitative change to add a battery to them I guess. But I did have a "huh" moment.
Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants" (which is, as Paul Kingsnorth has remarked, basically a religious text) has an interesting chapter "Lessons of Amish Hackers". Kelly describes the Amish approach to new technologies as follows:
1. They are selective. They know how to say no and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ignore more than they adopt.
2. They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3. They have criteria by which to make choices: Technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4. The choices are not individual but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.
On #7, the CDC MMWR masks evaluation, one of the tells of the politicization of masking is that the authors of study say they looked for "MMWR publications pertaining to masks from 1978 to 2023." There weren't any such publications before 2020. "77 studies, all published after 2019, met our inclusion criteria."
Viruses, of course, did not get bigger in 2020, and our breathing didn't change in 2020 either.
Re 3.: Electric bicycles are all over the place here in Germany. We use them all the time to get around in our small (but rather hilly) town. They are particularly popular among older people (who are now spending much more time outdoors, getting some exercise - the benefits are definitively outweighing the costs of rising numbers of bike accidents).
But look at the prices, particularly of those container e-bikes! You can get a decent used car for that money (yeah, for how long, you might ask). And I'll always prefer a standard e-bike plus trailer for flexibility.
On the way home from Pittsburgh we drove through Amish country. You may know the Amish are a (surprisingly large - estimated 80,000 in a two-county area in Ohio) Christian group in the US that largely rejects modern technology. So I was surprised to see many on electric bicycles! Sure, if you've already accepted bicycles into the community as a non-disruptive technology, it's not that much of a qualitative change to add a battery to them I guess. But I did have a "huh" moment.
Kevin Kelly's "What Technology Wants" (which is, as Paul Kingsnorth has remarked, basically a religious text) has an interesting chapter "Lessons of Amish Hackers". Kelly describes the Amish approach to new technologies as follows:
1. They are selective. They know how to say no and are not afraid to refuse new things. They ignore more than they adopt.
2. They evaluate new things by experience instead of by theory. They let the early adopters get their jollies by pioneering new stuff under watchful eyes.
3. They have criteria by which to make choices: Technologies must enhance family and community and distance themselves from the outside world.
4. The choices are not individual but communal. The community shapes and enforces technological direction.
Excellent!
On #7, the CDC MMWR masks evaluation, one of the tells of the politicization of masking is that the authors of study say they looked for "MMWR publications pertaining to masks from 1978 to 2023." There weren't any such publications before 2020. "77 studies, all published after 2019, met our inclusion criteria."
Viruses, of course, did not get bigger in 2020, and our breathing didn't change in 2020 either.