The moral panic about bycles was real, but didn really happen until Lance 2012.
What baffled me was how/why does US Postal field an international bycle race team when their business has nothing to do with bycles, racing, or Europe?
(My favorite fact about USPS: their funny little oddman lorries have wrong-hand drive and GM Iron Duke 4cyl motors pilfered pretty much direct out of the national fleet of abandoned Pontiac Fieros. Can you fit an elite racing bycle in the back of your USPS oddman lorry, probally only Lance knows for sure…)
No the vans are correct it is the rest of you driving on the wrong side of the road.
Seriously though they are designed for multi drop deliveries as it is safer and quicker to get out of the van on the kerb side rather than exposing the driver to the risk of being run over every two minutes.
We have the same with street cleaning vans in the uk so the driver can align with the kerb.
The moral panic about bicycles was real, and it happened way, way before Lance 'I never tested positive' Armstrong. It was back in the 1890s when women took up cycling in large numbers, finding that it gave them a freedom they'd never had before, and triggering sensationalist articles in the press about the physiological, mental and societal harm that bicycling could cause - especially when indulged in by (gasp) women, many of whom found they were able to travel independently for the first time. As a piece in the New York Times put it in 1894, “there is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania.” There's a good summary here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-did-you-know/moral-and-medical-panic-over-bicycles
Nov 4, 2023·edited Nov 4, 2023Liked by Alistair Dabbs
Who puts their mobile to their ear any more? Certainly not the aged nor the youth sections of the population. It's all video calls with the volume turned up to 11. Or talking into the end of the phone.
Nov 4, 2023·edited Nov 4, 2023Liked by Alistair Dabbs
That was my thought too - certainly amongst millennials, you're unlikely to see them with a mobile phone pressed to an ear. I still do use a phone that way because it's how they are designed to be used and I don't want to appear like a wanker in an episode of The Apprentice (I'm quite able to appear like a wanker with or without a phone).
Given that I hardly ever use a phone to make voice calls, that means my "decreased attention span, loss of memory" must be caused by something else... probably related to alcohol consumption.
I remember back in his days at the register, there was a column written about the way people hold phones, for some reason youngsters hold them as if they where a large bar of chocolate and they about to take a bit out of the end of it. I don’t know why….
You are right about AI being hazardous to most of us. Upheaval will affect the least resilient first.
Strange really, because the task AI seems most applicable is Politics: creating and manipulating bollocks to incite those waiting to be affronted by something that doesn't bother them.
When young I could actually afford to drink, until I found a pint at 75p. 50p was the normal price, but once I went to a night club with half priced scrumpy.
That night was a very well spent £1.
However drinking a lot was rare as a lot of us had bikes and considered drinking and riding to be dangerous, ignoring the legallity.
Back then I think I could buy more pints of cider out of student money, than I can now out of wages, simply due to some extortionate prices in some pubs.
Huh, AI like the cloud is someone else's computer and as the old, old timers said GIGO Garbage in, Garbage out..
Eh? Aye?!
…have you been talking to your mate from Leeds again!
Now then ...
Wearing a cat-flap.....
Filthy, Rich and Catflap?
And your wobbly visual effects had me flashing back to The Young Ones !
Then pondering how they would have covered artificial insemination...
PS latterly thought of another riff on the title of this one:
Rush to self-insemination !
The moral panic about bycles was real, but didn really happen until Lance 2012.
What baffled me was how/why does US Postal field an international bycle race team when their business has nothing to do with bycles, racing, or Europe?
(My favorite fact about USPS: their funny little oddman lorries have wrong-hand drive and GM Iron Duke 4cyl motors pilfered pretty much direct out of the national fleet of abandoned Pontiac Fieros. Can you fit an elite racing bycle in the back of your USPS oddman lorry, probally only Lance knows for sure…)
No the vans are correct it is the rest of you driving on the wrong side of the road.
Seriously though they are designed for multi drop deliveries as it is safer and quicker to get out of the van on the kerb side rather than exposing the driver to the risk of being run over every two minutes.
We have the same with street cleaning vans in the uk so the driver can align with the kerb.
The moral panic about bicycles was real, and it happened way, way before Lance 'I never tested positive' Armstrong. It was back in the 1890s when women took up cycling in large numbers, finding that it gave them a freedom they'd never had before, and triggering sensationalist articles in the press about the physiological, mental and societal harm that bicycling could cause - especially when indulged in by (gasp) women, many of whom found they were able to travel independently for the first time. As a piece in the New York Times put it in 1894, “there is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy, and homicidal mania.” There's a good summary here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-did-you-know/moral-and-medical-panic-over-bicycles
Damn, got lost in my own overlong sentence there.
Moral: don't leave a 24 hour gap between writing the first half of a comment and the second half.
Who puts their mobile to their ear any more? Certainly not the aged nor the youth sections of the population. It's all video calls with the volume turned up to 11. Or talking into the end of the phone.
That was my thought too - certainly amongst millennials, you're unlikely to see them with a mobile phone pressed to an ear. I still do use a phone that way because it's how they are designed to be used and I don't want to appear like a wanker in an episode of The Apprentice (I'm quite able to appear like a wanker with or without a phone).
Given that I hardly ever use a phone to make voice calls, that means my "decreased attention span, loss of memory" must be caused by something else... probably related to alcohol consumption.
I remember back in his days at the register, there was a column written about the way people hold phones, for some reason youngsters hold them as if they where a large bar of chocolate and they about to take a bit out of the end of it. I don’t know why….
It was Happy Hour when I first heard Madge's music: a hotel bar in Kowloon. A Filipino 'tribute' band and they were very good.
On return to blighty and hearing the 'true' version, I always felt it was not as good as the original.
You are right about AI being hazardous to most of us. Upheaval will affect the least resilient first.
Strange really, because the task AI seems most applicable is Politics: creating and manipulating bollocks to incite those waiting to be affronted by something that doesn't bother them.
At least the current iteration of LLMs, as one of the main sources of training data is exactly that!
Plus of course spew out endless useless clickbait articles.
I'm still trying to train myself not to click on such ...
'90% of the population...underlying neurotoxic effects...decreased attention span, loss of memory'
Sounds like something out of yet another bad Bond film you may think.
Actually this was our plan all along when we invented the mobile phone, world domination through induced incompetence.
Sits and rubs hands with glee whilst stroking a white cat.
When young I could actually afford to drink, until I found a pint at 75p. 50p was the normal price, but once I went to a night club with half priced scrumpy.
That night was a very well spent £1.
However drinking a lot was rare as a lot of us had bikes and considered drinking and riding to be dangerous, ignoring the legallity.
Back then I think I could buy more pints of cider out of student money, than I can now out of wages, simply due to some extortionate prices in some pubs.