• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • tf is a chav? This is a thing I do and I’m not from anywhere that has the term “chav”. I’ve seen lots of cyclists do it.

    As with regular cycling, the rider is doing microcorrections to keep the bike upright. You can do those corrections with a lot of leverage using the handlebars, or you can do it with less leverage using your core muscles. Concentrate on holding in your core and you’ll succeed. It’s also much easier at higher speeds (downhill, for example) for the same reason that steering a bike the normal way is easier at higher speeds.









  • Mostly it’s just CYA for google since cycling is more dangerous than driving (due to the people driving), so there’s more surface area for them to get sued.

    But yeah

    • turns and crossings that look safe on a map don’t have very much data on whether they’re actually safe, because google has a thousand times as much information about drivers than cyclists.
    • google sometimes suggests routes that can’t be traversed, legally or at all, by a bike. Same reason.
    • sometimes google suggests avoiding something a bike doesn’t actually have to worry about. This is actually the category of error I see the most: google sends you around something when you could simply walk your bike through it, or ride through it, because you’re not a car.

  • Insurance is, at its core, a reasonable halfway measure towards public control of a critical resource. If you need something only very rarely, but it’s something that needs to exist ALL THE TIME just in case, insurance allows you to pool your resources with other people in the same boat and afford to keep an industry around just in case. Somebody will always be using it right now, and it’ll be there when you need it, because you paid into the pool.

    The problem is, as always, the insertion of capitalism into the solution. If someone has to profit from this set of relationships, the motivation to provide the resource is in competition with the motivation to extract more profit. This is what happened to healthcare.

    Insurance is only a halfway measure because we already have an organization capable of managing common resources that individuals use only rarely but which the public needs all the time: that organization is the government, or the governments at various levels. We manage lots of things this way: fixing roads, stopping houses from burning down, pulling people out of floodwaters, that kind of thing. You don’t need it all the time, but it’s there when you need it because you’re paying taxes to a government that has no profit motive from it. Insurance should only ever have existed temporarily while government infrastructure was debated and organized, but the for-profit industry managed to capture enough of the government to keep itself alive indefinitely.

    In short, insurance isn’t inherently bad, just not meant to be a permanent fix. Capitalism is bad.