I have the opposite experience. After years in appsec and pentesting, I can read any codebase and quickly understand its parts, but I wouldn’t be able to write anything of production quality. LLMs speed the comprehension process up for me even further. I guess it comes down to practice, if you practice reading code, you get good at reading code.
Maybe you are used to read high quality code. I suspect that the simple fact that you are auditing some code means that someone actually cares, making it higher quality than average.
High quality code is generally hard to write and easy to read.
reading production code that is known to work can be done with faith and skimming. You don't have to understand every function call because they've each been tested and battle hardened, so it's easy to get an overview of what is happening.
LLM code is NOT like this at all, but it's like a skilled liar writing something that LOOKS plausible, that's what they're trained to do.
People like you do not have the ability to evaluate the LLM output; it's not the same as reading code that was carefully written at ALL. If you think it's the same, that is only evidence that you can't tell the difference between working code and misleading buggy code.
What you've learned to do is read the intent of code. That's fine when it's been written and tested by a person. It's useless when it comes to evaluating LLM slop.
Code is code, it's not a piece of art where we all can have different perspective about what it means or does, so from appsec perspective it doesn't matter who wrote it, just what it does. Also you seem to be interpreting "reading" as one would read a novel, but here "reading" is about finding and exploiting security flaws. So yeah, dunno what you are on about.
The way I understand these schemes is that they require minimum balance way above what an average person has to be effective, but not sure. Would love a professional tax engineer/CPA opinion.
There was a documentary on Dutch TV a couple of years ago, about 'DYI tax haven management' for common people. Can't remember which public channel it was on, and what the name was. Might have been part of "Tegenlicht" series.
Update: Maybe it was the program Rambam where the makers set up their own tax haven based on the methods of the big corporations. Information in Dutch:
it's weird when Americans day dream of giving tax breaks to billionaires because they might be rich one day; it's a another thing for people who ostensibly have the best social system in the world looking at America and say "we should do that".
There are plans for making mortgages more expensive by removing tax deductions and for taxing inheritance a whopping 75%. That is hardly giving tax breaks to billionaire, more so screwing over anyone who isn't dirt poor. Oh, and I'm already paying pretty much half my income in various taxes.
Anyone who has a significant amount of money can avoid these taxes, as always.
The problem with inheritance tax is that the person pays taxes all through their lifetime and then when their significant others inherit that wealth (which already has been taxed once at least) it gets taxed again. The issue isn't the amount, the issue is the principle of it.
I suspect BTW the very rich won't ever pay these taxes as there are always ways to restructure the wealth or simply move it elsewhere. I know this is done in the UK. So what it does is punish the middle classes the most.
> The problem with inheritance tax is that the person pays taxes all through their lifetime and then when their significant others inherit that wealth (which already has been taxed once at least) it gets taxed again.
Yes, because that's a transfer to different people. That's not a problem.
The problem is that it's not just treated as income to the recipients—which it manifestly is—with the income tax then being modified to include both advance recognition and windfall spreading options to allow taxpayers to deal with irregular income in a fair basis with more regular income.
This is also the problem with capital gains tax. And its not th people who have the kind of income that avoids regular income taxation that are getting screwed by that.
> Yes, because that's a transfer to different people. That's not a problem
Sorry I don't agree. The tax has already been paid when the person was alive. There shouldn't be a an additional tax on top because it is given to others after they died. Which is what is happening.
> The problem is that it's not just treated as income to the recipients—which it manifestly is—with the income tax then being modified to include both advance recognition and windfall spreading options to allow taxpayers to deal with irregular income in a fair basis with more regular income.
The problem wouldn't exist if the tax was abolished.
> This is also the problem with capital gains tax. And its not the people who have the kind of income that avoids regular income taxation that are getting screwed by that.
Again another case of a problem that wouldn't exist if the tax (capital gains) was abolished.
Tax is a means to an end (paying for civil services). Whether or not something is taxed twice is not inherently wrong, it's just a choice on how we choose to pursue our needs in a way that is effective and equitable.
I mean, reductively, saying something can't be taxed twice doesn't make any sense because all taxes work like that. A company sells products, those sales (and/or value add) are taxed. That money is paid as income, then that income is taxed. That income is spent on goods or services, where the sale (and/or value add) is taxed. Ad infinitum.
A reasonable tax on inheritance, growing with wealth, makes sense in a society that has no effective wealth caps. Otherwise the "haves" accumulate wealth, which accumulates wealth, which accumulates wealth. By imposing a tax on wealth that is not earned, but entirely dependent on the circumstances of one's birth, you create a redistribution scheme that's... Quite fair?
No living person has their labor stolen, some redistribution is achieved, but the heir still receives a significant benefit.
> Tax is a means to an end (paying for civil services). Whether or not something is taxed twice is not inherently wrong, it's just a choice on how we choose to pursue our needs in a way that is effective and equitable.
Well in the UK, the civil services are crap, the police don't do anything, the NHS waiting times are extensive (my mother is waiting for over 2 years for knee surgery), the roads are full of pot holes, and we have more admirals than warships.
So the money doesn't seem to be used effectively. I don't know what you mean by equitable.
> I mean, reductively, saying something can't be taxed twice doesn't make any sense because all taxes work like that. A company sells products, those sales (and/or value add) are taxed. That money is paid as income, then that income is taxed. That income is spent on goods or services, where the sale (and/or value add) is taxed. Ad infinitum.
It almost like the tax man takes at every opportunity. Describing that they tax you many times isn't a justification for more taxes.
> A reasonable tax on inheritance, growing with wealth, makes sense in a society that has no effective wealth caps. Otherwise the "haves" accumulate wealth, which accumulates wealth, which accumulates wealth.
I don't think it is moral or fair to tax beneficiaries of inheritance. It is essentially a gift from the deceased to the beneficiaries.
That the entire point of building up an inheritance for your family/beneficiaries, is that you hope to leave your children better place. I don't know what is fundamentally wrong with building up wealth generationally.
> By imposing a tax on wealth that is not earned, but entirely dependent on the circumstances of one's birth, you create a redistribution scheme that's... Quite fair?
No it isn't fair. The wealth was earned at some point in time, presumably legally. I don't understand why it matters that the person receiving it may have done nothing more than been a family member, family friend or even someone/some organisation that the deceased thought was deserving? When they were alive it was their choice who would receive upon death.
> So the money doesn't seem to be used effectively.
That's not what we're discussing. Nor is it even the country we're discussing? The Netherlands has the second highest quality of life in the world.
> It almost like the tax man takes at every opportunity.
Taxes are a requirement of any functional nation. This just sounds like you have no intention of having a real discussion on tax policy.
> It is essentially a gift from the deceased to the beneficiaries.
Yes, that is what inheritance is. And gifts are taxed. At a higher rate than inheritance!
> I don't know what is fundamentally wrong with building up wealth generationally.
Oh, please, don't straw man me.
Nothing is wrong with generational wealth. Looking at the US, you can see how important it is for social mobility, directly affecting the outcomes of minority communities for decades to even centuries. And through systems like the private healthcare and nursing industries, how it's being targeted to extract every last cent out of American citizens before they die and can hand it off to their loved ones.
But are you seriously pretending you don't know what's wrong with a forever growing wealth inequality? Because inheritance taxes only meaningfully apply to the wealthy. We aren't talking working class folk here.
Are we supposed to wonder how will they ever survive on a mere €820.000 that they did nothing to earn? Despite the fact that being raised by someone with that kind of wealth statistically implies that they'll also be inheriting things like property. And that they will have a more stable upbringing with a better education and opportunities their working class peers would never get.
Most of the money circulating in the economy has been taxed many many times. The money your employer pays you has been taxed, the money that employer got from its customers was taxed, the money those customers used was their salary, which was taxed. That is such a stupid argument to make. It would mean that we should only have one tax at the root of money itself.
What? I'm talking about the netherlands, like is extremely obvious from the context. Read the thread you are replying to...
And I said politicians are talking about changing the laws. There are upcoming elections. Why are you talking about the current laws? Completely irrelevant. I very clearly said:
> There are plans for making mortgages more expensive by removing tax deductions and for taxing inheritance a whopping 75%
I describe the law of and linked to a government website of the Netherlands.
> And I said politicians are talking about changing the laws.
No, you said "there are plans". What you did not say is that one party leader made an insane comment in a campaign cycle met with so much backlash it took less than a day to radically change to "with 0% under €500.000" and has still been unilaterally mocked by opinion makers, politicians, and media.
Buddy, I'm dutch. I am following local politics, and clearly, you're not.
> I describe the law of and linked to a government website of the Netherlands.
No shit? How is the current law relevant to plans to change it?
> What you did not say is that one party leader made an insane comment in a campaign cycle met with so much backlash it took less than a day to radically change to "with 0% under €500.000" and has still been unilaterally mocked by opinion makers, politicians, and media.
Yeah, so he's planning it. For now they seem to have changed their campaign surrounding the subject but there's no saying what they'll do if elected.
Buddy, that's not really was "there are plans to" means. Unless you count MJT talking about Jewish space lasers "plans to" investigate Jewish space lasers from the US government. In which case, you've got a tabloid-level definition.
The quote of the current law is used to emphasize just how ridiculous sounding what you're saying even is.
This is exactly what I mean in my first comment, you clearly aren't here in good faith. Or will you say, straight-faced, that you genuinely believe that the government is actually going to be implementing this?
No. Anyone can register a LLC in any of these places. They have minimal filing requirements going forward too.
You may be required to have a local agent, and they will add their address and names as the nominee shareholders so you remain anonymous. Then with an LLC, the company can open bank accounts and you can move money. Any money made offshore is non-taxed locally.
There are 2 major reasons why people choose to use layers of corporations in other countries: tax minimization (in their domestic country) and obscurity of the assets-owners relationship.
The latter is used by corrupt politicians, oligarchs (extremely wealthy people who have massive influence on policy/politics), and to stifle investigations by civil investigations (divorce), to stifle criminal investigations (political corruption, sanctions avoidance, fences for thieves, a convenient vehicle for transactions or large assets so governments/ oversight can’t easily track them).
There is a minimum overhead required (you need at least a part time CPA and attorney to give you the strategy, more if they actually implement it), but I don’t think it requires you be ultra wealthy. The problem is that most law-abiding, non-sociopath people don’t benefit much from avoiding the law.
I absolutely agree with you. In the right hands, LLM is a teaching tool, and the calls to resist it are as dumbfounded as the calls to resist the chalkboard would be.
One of my favourite uses of LLM is the reverse-dictionary, for example:
Give me one Saxon and one Romance word meaning "to write".
Saxon (Germanic origin): scratch — Old English scrætan, linked to marking or incising.
Romance (Latin origin): inscribe — from Latin inscribere, "to write on/in."
I have this idea, and I think you're landing on something similar, that LLMs can either be a bicycle for the mind (like your reverse dictionary) or an opiate for the mind (write my entire letter for me).
This isn't all that new, given that's a play on a Jobs quote about computers. And it's regular old software that can both unleash creativity and created social media brainrot.
The AI algorithms aren't the problem, it's how they're primed, marketed, and used.
There's absolutely nothing stopping us from releasing a bot that's great at looking stuff up and citing sources, but when asked to write an essay or make a decision for you, declines because that's not its job.
Maybe for simple cases sure yes, but for complicated sentences ability to map approximate/fuzzy meaning <-> words is super helpful, especially for ornamentation and ESL scenarios.
And LLM doesn't completely remove the "burden" of reading the dictionary to make sure the meaning is indeed fitting, but shortcuts the discovery by a lot. Also helps to learn new words, lol. I see it as a supercharged thesaurus.
IMHO this applies to all general research, one needs to be an utter monkey to copy LLM generated references without checking them first, so if anything, it trains critical thinking for free.
Yes, and get bombarded with 20 ads, go through a few blog-spam articles about "10 of the coolest old-Saxon words you never heard before but use every day", open the website and get old-school popups in the form of GDPR spam, an unecessary Google account sign-in popup, and promptly close 6 ads before giving. But you're insistent and repeat it by adding Reddit to your search term, and maybe you get some sort of Old English-focused sub-reddit and find something, else you maybe maybe maybe go through and find a decent 2010's website that has the thing you want.
Or you just ask the damn AI that has gone through the useless corpus of the ad-ridden web that was infested and prompted by VC's, and somehow magically, through a lot of effort, math, and 150Gigakilowatts of electricity, and extracted the piece of info you want, and simply gives it to you with a bit of annoying fluff.
My time is precious, and I want to see the useless web burn.
It's wild that people don't see that LLMs are following the same playbook as streaming etc. and in time will predatorily monetize in every way possible. If you think people are trapped as customers because they can't do without tv shows, imagine five years from now when it's general thinking that people have become dependent on the tech giants for.
It’s a huge refrain that shows up again every 20 years or so. Wolfram wrote a huge book with this premise, but I don’t think it’s gone anywhere even though it’s surely 25 years old by now.
It's arguably ~2500 years old, dating back to the Pythagoreans, who believed that "all is number" and had a very large and complex system of musical rituals.
The modern manifestation is mostly the intellectual product of Konrad Zuse, who wrote "digital physics" in 1969.
Wolfram came to our evolutionary biology department to preach that book about 20 years ago. We all got our heads into cellular automata for a while, but in the end they just don't have the claimed profound explanatory power in real biological systems.
GEB was similar in a cycle prior. It's cool to dream but the limits of accepted knowledge requires the hard work of assembling data, evidence, and reasoning.
this is curious, as cyclists are famous for not remembering what the traffic lights are for, or if there were any traffic laws the they are supposed to follow
Those are ad riddled sources by three obviously biased authors who each wrote books on the topic and stand to profit from a buy in, though.
Carlton Reid - "Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How cyclists were the first to push for good roads & became the pioneers of motoring", a book "whose very title is fightin' words" is basically a Mein Kampf of cycling. He also writes for DailyMail, which is famous for hit piece journalism and lack of credability.
Angie Schmitt - Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America, from which one reviewer quotes "The bigger challenge, Schmitt argues, is addressing the systemic racism built into cities". It is obvious to anyone who reads into this sentence that this is a woke bias.
Peter Walker - The Miracle Pill pushes the active lifestyle narrative, of which cycling is one.
While I think your argument only adds to the fact that cyclists are delusional, I have to agree that it is not a "cyclist" itself that is the problem, but halfwits both in cars and on bikes, with cyclists having a higher proportion of those.
The traffic lights themselves are often unaware of what they are for when a cyclist approaches, and insist on keeping the light red until maybe eventually a car might or might not arrive and trigger a sensor to turn it green.
I am not sure if I could come up with a more effective way to train cyclists to roll through red traffic lights.
What MCP is missing is a reasonable way to do async callbacks where you can have the mcp query the model with a custom prompt and results of some operation.
My main disappointment with sampling right now is the very limited scope. It'd be nice to support some universal tool calling syntax or something. Otherwise a reasonably complicated MCP Server is still going to need a direct LLM connect.
Dumb question: in that case, wouldn't it not be an MCP server? It would be an LLM client with the ability to execute tool calls made by the LLM?
I don't get how MCP could create a wrapper for all possible LLM inference APIs or why it'd be desirable (that's an awful long leash for me to give out on my API key)
An MCP Server can be many things. It can be as simple as an echo server or as complex as a full-blown tool-calling agent and beyond. The MCP Client Sampling feature is an interesting thing that's designed to allow the primary agent, the MCP Host, to offer up some subset of LLM models that is has access to for the MCP Servers it connects with. That would allow the MCP Server to make LLM calls that are mediated (or not, YMMV) by the MCP Host. As I said above, the feature is very limited right now, but still interesting for some simpler use cases. Why would you do this? So you don't have to configure every MCP Server you use with LLM credentials? And the particulars of exactly what model gets used are under your control. That allows the MCP Server to worry about the business logic and not about how to talk to a specific LLM Provider.
I get the general premise but am uncertain as to if it's desirable to invest more in inverting the protocol, where the tool server becomes an LLM client. "Now you have 2 protocols", comes to mind - more concretely, it upends the security model.
The async callbacks are in your implementation. I wrote an MCP server so customers could use an AI model to query a databricks sql catalog. The queries were all async.
In the United States we do treat one form of transport as the most privileged, the automobile.
We force places of business to build parking, forcing lower density, and higher cost to business. We build many neighborhoods without sidewalks at all, and with no bike access, forcing pedestrians and cyclists out of dedicated lanes and into traffic where they need to contend with multi ton SUVs. We do not penalize against designing vehicles with extremely poor visibility and excessive height, which directly translates to fatalities of those not in an armored shell on the roadway.
I would strongly encourage you to read more about building our cities and towns not directly around the automobile. We need to build around people, and bikes, and not strictly around the car.
Not at all, try to support the US economy on a bicycle? Without zoning laws and motoring infrastructure you will have a city of Florence, walkable - sure, but you are in a crowd of cars, pedestrians, cyclists, mopeds, etc.
In many locales, bikes are legally allowed to run red lights, if there’s no cross traffic coming. Bikes do have to yield to pedestrians, I’m not sure why you think otherwise.
What an odd perspective. Bicycles and Automobiles are treated the same in the law. They have the same rights and obligations. Please provide a citation that says that a car has to yield to a bicycle. They are peers. Cars have to follow the same rules that bicycles do when they choose to be on the public roads. There are some commonsense laws that allow bicycles to ride on the shoulder of a road to allow traffic to flow better. I have seen bicyclists be cited for traffic violations on multiple occasions. I've seen automobiles not be cited for violations many more times.
Just the fact you don't need liability insurance and a passage of traffic laws examination to ride a bicycle on any road except a freeway contradicts the core of your statement.
I think insurance and licensing is about the risks and the government stepping in to make things more safe for society. Bikes just don’t carry very much risk to others. Of course, it’s possible a bike can crash into a pedestrian and critically injure, kill etc or cause some property damage buts just rare and going to cause minimal damage. When was the last time you heard a bike causing $1000s in property damage? I have literally never seen it happen and I’m pretty active in the biking community. When you drive around a multi ton piece of steel with the capability to kill scores within seconds, millions of dollars in property damage to others etc, there needs to be some rules. Honestly I think it’s too easy in the US to get a drivers license and the new e-bike laws are overkill. Yes cyclists break traffic laws, but the implications are minor to others (they are mostly risking their own lives). If you feel like it’s unfair, you can always ride a bike!
A cyclist can easily cause 1000s in damage by causing an accident with a vehicle, or simply by hitting a pedestrian. Mending a scratch is expensive even for cheap cars. An ER visit, even for a simple fall, can result in a hefty bill.
Since cyclist don't carry liability insurance, they likely have to be personally sued in court for damages, with all associated costs to both parties.
Are you claiming this is a fair responsibilities and risk distribution? How is it appropriate to "risk your own life" by breaking traffic laws on a public road?
I kinda agree with what you are saying on damage. It just doesn’t happen so it’s not really a problem anyone cares about. Cyclists don’t regularly cause $10000s in damage. If they hurt themselves, you use your own health insurance. On the other hand, my friend who was mowed down on his bike sharing the road was killed when someone had the sun in their eyes. That woman’s insurance had to pay hundreds of thousands in medical bills and damages. The same with my great aunt, killed in front of her house by a car. The same for my best friend who was killed in elementary school crossing a road. I think that’s 100x more common than the other way around.
Traffic laws are in place to ensure each other’s safety and also reasonably get folks places. Cars are an extreme risk to peds and cyclists, not the other way around so yes, they have more rules and must follow them more strictly. My 3 year old toddler on her trike doesn’t need a license to ride down our neighborhood street because she isn’t risking anyone’s life but her own.
Thank you for engaging in an argument rather than just feeling attacked.
Cycling accidents definitely happen, and they’ve become a lucrative industry. Just look up "bicycle injury attorney" and you will see tons of ads claiming that they "have recovered over 50 million for bicycle injury clients". The market here speaks for itself. Of course, a reasonable person doesn’t set out expecting to mow down a cyclist, but accidents happen despite the traffic laws designed to ensure everyone’s safety, and, to follow your example, a 3 y/o toddler doesn’t need a license to ride her trike down the street, but there’s nothing in the law, aside from common sense, stopping the child from continuing down the street and joining a major highway. At least "a multi-ton piece of steel" is visible and moves at the speed of traffic.
What I don't understand, why is it accepted, that both pedestrians and motorists should "watch out for cyclists", yet there is absolutely no campaigns for cyclists to watch out for cars and pedestrians and to follow the law. The easiest solution, imho, is to make the requirements equal for all - if someone wants to use a public road, they should be licensed and insured.
Why do cyclists need an injury attorney when motorists have insurance? Why are there so many attorneys offering this service? High demand? Is it because personal injury law is a well paying grift? Would any of these attorneys represent a driver if it was a cyclist fault? Much harder to collect from a private person than from insurance.
You either discovered a massive unreported cause of harm to our society or you are fitting a narrative you have in your mind.
The anger against cyclists is so weird to me. Like I can relate to seeing a cyclist taking up a whole lane on highway 1 somewhere they shouldn’t be riding and me thinking, this is ridiculous, they shouldn’t be risking their own life and slowing everyone down like this (and feeling some anger). But I have only encountered this a few times and even then, it’s just a minor inconvenience… Most cyclists ride relatively responsibly through city areas and are a net positive on the community, environment, parking, traffic, city budget, etc. Look at some data instead of coming up with some narrative in your head based upon some immediate emotion.
This negative sentiment towards cyclists is real, I see it on Facebook all the time and at first I thought it was a joke. Maybe they should add a few questions to the drivers test
Insurance does whatever it can to avoid paying and having an attorney represent you is almost a matter of course.
But please continue theorizing that this zero effort google search you went in to knowing nothing about is instead evidence for a world in which there is a large market for attorneys forcing payment by cyclists causing significant damages.
Next, have your last word because this conversation appears completely disingenuous and I will not be continuing it.
> Why I don’t understand, why is it accepted, that both pedestrians and motorists should “watch out for cyclists”, yet there is absolutely no campaigns for cyclists to watch out for cars and pedestrians and to follow the law.
There are several reasons:
First, your assertion is simply not true. There are campaigns to educate cyclists, and markings for them to yield. I’ve seen them first-hand in multiple US cities.
Second, there are far far fewer cyclists than cars, therefore you need to expect there to be proportional spending. More education for drivers mirrors the (many) more drivers.
Third, cars are heavier and faster by a huge factor. Cars cause far more deaths in practice than bikes. There is a much much bigger problem with cars than there is with bikes. Over 40000 people die in the US in car crashes. As far as I can tell, fewer than 10 pedestrians die from being hit by a cyclist. The number of minor injuries of pedestrians caused by cyclists is dwarfed by the number of cyclists or pedestrians kills by cars.
Cars require way more education because they’re way more dangerous. As a cyclist, if I hit a car, I die. If a car hits me, I die. It seems really weird that your arguments are ignoring basic facts of physics and ignoring the realities and statistics of accidents and fatality rates.
There’s also ~100x more miles driven than biked. Bikes riders do cause a significant number of major medical incidents per mile and even some fatalities, but it simply doesn’t get much attention.
Actually both are a problem. We got reflectors + bike helmet laws, and little else.
At a minimum any vehicle going 15+ MPH should be making enough noise to get people’s attention.
Personally I’d like to see insurance and licensing requirements on any e-bike with more than 50w of assistance. Because constantly going moderately faster means dramatically more danger as KE = V^2. So going a little bit faster and slightly less in control can be a lot more dangerous to others.
Ultimately, anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle. Making it harder to ride bikes increases the barrier to entry and hence discourages their use - and the alternative all too often is a car.
Cars are so much more likely to kill people that I think you'd increase road casualties by making the alternatives harder to use. Yes, an ebike is faster, heavier and less safe than a conventional bike. No, an ebike is nowhere near as dangerous as a car, and in general I don't think they should be regulated. The current thresholds most places are setting (250W/25kph or thereabouts) are plenty conservative anyway.
Tangentially, this is why it's also good to give bikes their own space. They are not pedestrians, and they shouldn't be mixing with pedestrian traffic. That's why they're on the road. They act more like a car than a pedestrian.
In a 2D layout there’s going to be an intersection between pedestrians, bikes, and buses etc.
> anything is better than driving around in a 2T vehicle
While your gut feeling is that discouraging use is harmful the statistics are more questionable.
In the US, statistically E-bikes are roughly as dangerous as cars on a per mile basis. It’s got almost nothing to do with the bikes themselves and is almost totally related to the infrastructure and how people use them. The rates people on bikes ignore basic traffic safety and do things like speeding between stopped cars and then going through a red light is insane. Further, they are directly used around pedestrians with little concern for people’s safety.
PS: There’s lots of ways to slice these numbers, but we don’t actually know the exact numbers for miles biked per year.
I don't have evidence to back my claims, but it seems disingenuous to compare ebike and car miles. ebikes are predominantly used in busy areas with lots of other traffic, cars will rack up a ton of miles on highways with much reduced per-accident risk (albeit the accidents are probably more severe in that environment)
If we're going to talk anecdotally, I think we need to read between the lines. Many locations in the US don't have good support for bike riders beyond telling them to ride on the road. This is going to encourage/force many to ride (unsafely) on the footpath because they don't want to share space with cars, and thus into conflict with pedestrians.
I'd like to see a breakdown of ebike accidents between them and pedestrians vs them and cars. I would bet that the vast majority of accidents are into (or from) cars. Almost all of the fatal accidents are almost certainly from accidents with cars as well.
You could try regulating them, but that's not going to fix the core issue that in many places they are expected to share space with cars, and cars are just plain more dangerous than everything else.
Also, I will point out that even if bike riders are supposedly less law-abiding (maybe, I don't know), the consequences are almost entirely isolated to themselves for doing so. They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else. The same is not true for heavy motor vehicles.
With cars there’s more fatalities per mile in rural areas than urban ones. For pedestrians being killed that flips but not by a huge degree.
It seems counterintuitive that despite being human car interactions being vastly more common in urban areas you see so many rural fatalities but accidents occur in unusual situations.
> They are simply far less likely to hurt someone else.
There’s nuance here. They are more likely to injure a pedestrians in a bike pedestrian crash. However cyclists will be more likely to die because they end up in traffic after an accident.
Huh, interesting. I guess there's probably more accidents in urban areas, but thanks to lower speeds fewer fatalities.
I don't quite follow the second point - my presumption is that the chance of a bike hurting a pedestrian is lower than a car doing the same, and the chance of causing a fatality is, in general, reasonably low compared to getting hit by a car.
Stats would probably be hard to gather - there's probably quite a few bikes hitting pedestrians, but in all likelyhood many incidents go unreported if no one is injured.
A single bike accidents is less likely to cause serious injuries but statistically that’s offset by vastly more collisions.
IE the number of serious accidents depends on the number of accidents times the risk of each individual accident and bikes are far less segregated from pedestrians than cars.
I was hit by a driver while having the right of way on a bicycle. New York has mandatory personal injury protection of $50K. Because the insurance companies don't want to fulfill their mandated obligations, there was an attempt to secure my own car insurance as the primary coverage despite not being applicable under the law.
In the end I burned through the whole $50K in medical expenses without having to pay for for somebody else's screwup out of pocket. Despite being clearly at fault, the driver was not held accountable due to systemic bias against bicyclists even when we obey the law.
Before cars, we did not need things like registration, insurance, traffic signals, speed limits, complicated traffic rules, or even sidewalks for pedestrians or cyclists.
All these things needed to be created solely because cars are extremely dangerous machinery, like forklifts.
Saying that cyclists should need liability insurance because drivers need liability insurance is like saying that it's unfair that people who lift boxes by hand don't need licenses when people who operate forklifts do.
It isn't required because bicycles simply aren't anywhere near as dangerous to people other than the person riding them as cars and the conditions that necessitates these requirements being created for cars don't exist for bikes in the first place.
Almost all of this also applies to pedestrians, and I expect you'd feel it would be a significant restriction on personal freedom if one had to be licenced, carry liability insurance and so on to walk somewhere.
In Denmark (where I live) pedestrians and cyclists will generally yield to each other according to circumstances. Almost everyone knows what it's like to ride a bike, and that it's easy (no extra effort) to pause for 1 second while walking to allow a bike to pass, which can save the cyclist having to stop and restart.
Indie/local book shops have had a revival in the wake of the Amazon bookseller behemoth even as big box stores like Barnes & Noble have flailed or Borders have failed, so you may be onto something there. Counter-market cultural trends lead people to value locally-sourced productions.
I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all of the intelligence comminities exist just because it attracts people who can't stand being bored. Advancing national security could be a thrilling entertainment.
> I have a little theory I like to tell at pubs that all of the intelligence comminities exist just because it attracts people who can't stand being bored. Advancing national security could be a thrilling entertainment.
That's probably Special Circumstances in the Culture novels, but those novels are just a mashup of Iain Banks's imagination and biases, and I think they're poor approximation of anything resembling reality under any set of conditions.
Personally, I think your theory would be a fun conversation topic, but I doubt it reflects real life.
