Our exemption from type approval will be withdrawn. And then all e-bikes will slip into the speed pedelec class. In other words, all e-bikes would be subject to approval. Manufacturers would have to submit every component to the Federal Motor Vehicle Authority, dealers would no longer be allowed to make any changes to the bike, and the bikes would need insurance. This would be a profitable business case for insurance companies, as there are over 30 million e-bikes on the road in Europe without insurance. And the technical testing institutes would also benefit from type approval. They could then say, “E-bikes are far too unsafe, we urgently need a technical inspection.”

This is clearly where things are going, but it’s a bit of a unsolvable conundrum. Even e-bikes which are EU-certified (i.e. no throttle and speed limitation) can often be jailbroken pretty easily. And police on the street can’t be expected to arbitrate all that. It’s going to be so tempting just to ban anything with a motor (or battery) from trains and maybe even bike lanes. A bit of a tragedy of the commons.

Related sort-of good news: Jaguar population doubles around Brazil’s Iguaçu Falls

This rather thin article has been discussed elsewhere. The basic argument boils down to, “Natural landscapes need humans on hand to manage them”. I don’t question the good faith of the authors but personally I’m finding it hard to take that premise seriously. With time, nature will regenerate without our help. And yes, on a planet of 8 billion humans and still rising, less people is always going to be better, period.

I second your manifesto. It’s always been a mystery to me that so many people seem to enjoy wallowing in misery and anger and negativity and helplessness. It really seems to be the essence of much of social media. I’m guessing it’s something to do with catharsis, and release of frustration. But there must also be a certain personality type that is attracted to social media - and apparently we’re the odd ones out. Just downvoting is a mystery to me TBH (I see it as pure toxicity and obviously antithetical to civilized discussion) and I know from bitter experience that quite few people here agree with me on this. But there are a few who do and I take heart from that.

It just feels we’re squandering an opportunity if we just let this place turn into just another social media site

It can’t ever be that bad as long as there is no advertising. That’s my positive spin.

on Windows they keep waking up when nobody asks for it

Good to hear.

Just the fact that this beautifully written contribution got zero engagement for three whole hours is enough to bother me!

Many obvious cases of people responding from emotion from headlines and not actually reading articles. More infighting in comments. Less debate and dialog, just arguing.

So well put. People responding to headlines alone really is the bane of social media. Personally, I’ve begun to systematically add a quote from the source article, even when it doesn’t add much to my comment. As a way of subtly showing others that I actually read the article and that perhaps they should too.

But how are Chinese brands not eating their lunch? Chinese cities are literally filled with electric two-wheelers of all kinds, already. The country has the tech edge in EVs and batteries, hands down. How is this legacy Japanese brand gonna compete on cost? I mean, I want them to succeed, but how?

Could have written almost all of that myself, to the letter. Yep, now I remember your amusing description of the “responsible centrist” or whatever’s the term of mockery. Personally I am that odd type (possibly not so rare these days) who finds the left extremely annoying while never voting for anything else.

I was also banned from another community BTW (relax, there are only 2!) for objecting to the egregious community rule “No Zionism”, which IMO was very close to literal racism given that none of the other rules concerned specific countries or nations. The mods there would do well to read this piece just out today, by an Israeli pacifist, and consider again the value of open debate and speech, not to mention empathy (something they are always so keen to ask of others). Absolutely heart-rending.

PS: I’ll add a quote from the cited article because it’s so uncannily relevant to this whole thread:

So I ask myself: Where should I go, as an Israeli pacifist?

My own relatives question whether I belong in Israel, because I criticize the troops in Gaza for the killing and starvation of Palestinians. Abroad, a theater colleague once told me to “go back to where you came from”—that I don’t belong in the land where I was born but in the lands where my ancestors faced pogroms and the Holocaust. Nuance has no currency in a world addicted to absolutes.

Of course, there are far greater tragedies than mine. Palestinians are being killed in Gaza, and Israeli hostages are still in captivity. I carry the weight of those horrors daily. I’m not comparing my suffering with theirs. But I do believe that if we want a different future, we need space to speak from wherever we are—even from the uncomfortable middle.

I really empathize with your take BTW. Over the last year I have been unsubscribing from mainstream communities one by one for pretty much the exact reasons you cite: acute groupthink, dogpiling, purity testing, incitement, celebration of violence (the Luigi Mangioni cult was why I unsubscribed from “Uplifting News”, for example), vulgarity, basically all the things you find in a school playground.

So I get you totally. And yet the “ban 'em high” zero-tolerance strategy only goes so far. I was myself banned for the cardinal sin of racism after making a subtle (but entirely innocuous) point which happened to challenge the prevailing groupthink in an otherwise pretty decent community. That community now has one less moderate centrist.

The best possible solution is surely hands-on moderation in line with what happens at Hacker News (where the quality of discourse is incredibly high despite, as I understand it, very infrequent recourse to bans). But that community is full of literal-minded geeks and has a full-time paid moderator, yes.

Not OP but go peruse the links they posted in this thread. Everything is explained there, it’s well-written, we can’t ask them to lay it all out again here.

Some very perceptive observations in those comments. To others - click thru and have a read! This is clearly a mod of unusually high quality, if they’re really bowing out then we really owe it to them (and ourselves) to understand why.

found only in New Zealand

And only just, given the massacre by rats and cats and possums. The few remaining kakapo are all confined to islands off the mainline and watched over individually. This species is above all a major conservation test case.

See the last 10 minutes of episode 1 of Attenborough’s Life of Birds (it’s been shared online) for a great introduction.

Looks like a cross between a sparrow and a coal tit. What it is?

it looks purpose-built to capture diverse motorcycle-heavy markets like Indonesia, which counts over 120 million two-wheelers and is quickly transitioning to electric models

A transition that cannot come soon enough for that region’s eardrums and sanity.

It does seem so, but I’m guessing it’s mostly a tourism venue at this point.

What I find interesting is how the experiment effectively taught us some humility:

But the most important lesson from the biospherians’ experience, experts agree, is the realisation of how difficult it would be to live anywhere else than on Earth. Humans can’t exist in isolation; they come in “biospheric packages”, as Nelson puts it, and recreating these complex systems is no easy task. While Tilman reckons that some of the problems may have been solvable, it was clear during his visit to the facility that it was a long way away from being able to sustain human life. “It really impacted me when I saw that, because… my initial guess was that you would probably make it work,” he says. Now, “I firmly believe that this really is our only planet ever”.

Harsh! I do faintly remember it (very young at the time) and I do vaguely remember a bit of a circus atmosphere, sure.

Probably referring to this (trailer). Have not seen it. Looks super interesting.

Perhaps you’d consider writing a paper to detail all this. And then submitting it for peer review, of course. I am not a climate scientist so I will content myself with trusting reliable secondary sources.

Point 2: “Reliable sources”. They are likely wrong. Read the paper.

Yeah, no. To be clear, the source I referred to is Our World in Data. It’s widely respected and I have better things to do than second-guess it.

And yet reliable sources say what seems to be generally accepted, namely that stopping carbons emissions completely in a short time frame (a couple of years) would land us with “1.5 degrees by the end of the century”. So, as I said, something is off with this “10 degrees”. Perhaps it’s the “end of the century” bit.