I do the same, although my reasoning probably slightly differs. I hate the idea that I'll mangle a pastime as "primitive" as hiking or biking into some technology optimization problem. People did this stuff way back with perfectly simple gear and were entirely happy enough.
Sure, I could probably be a bit faster or go on a bit longer if I had better gear. But I could also achieve that by just getting into a better shape. With this level of commitment the gear is not the limiting factor. If I can't go faster with this bike, then I don't deserve to go faster with a fancier one, god dammit.
My work is very complicated and technical, so I get some satisfaction from keeping my hobbies ascetic.
I don't know about the situation in your city, but there problem really is that a comparatively large portion of e-scooter drivers are either idiots or drunk and idiots.
At least here they should follow same traffic rules as bikes, but it's very common to see them driving amid pedestrians. Of course, no gear present whatsoever. The average scooter accident is also more serious than the average cycling accident with head injuries being particularly common. Even if the typical victim is the driver himself, that does not make e-scooters great for the city.
We already have city bikes here and it would be societally much preferable if people were just using those instead.
No doubt. It's just that people do not feel as seriously about scootering drunk as they do about driving drunk (and of course, they should not. It's obviously not the same level of risk.) The rental scooters seem provide an easy avenue for the drunk to drive around at 20 kph instead of just meandering along the sidewalk in a leisurely manner, or taking a cab.
Sometimes some people seem to need to learn lessons the hard way. It's much better if that hard lesson comes on a scooter rather than in a car.
If we can get people to go to bars/etc on rental scooters then they won't have a car to get back in when they are drunk. Ideally they walk, bus or taxi at that point (new public education campaigns can help with this), but even if they get on a rental scooter, that's still a win for public safety.
I'll point out that it is much easier to take a taxi home and leave a rental scooter at a bar then to have to leave your car there overnight and go back the next day.
By taking a look you'll find that regulations are commonly written by civil servants and various experts (which are typically not chosen by a vote) and then approved by people that you do get to choose by a vote.
Had you performed your reading outside of PopSci, you would know that the "general establishment" does not agree with your interpretation of Planck units. In fact, even a cursory look at the Wikipedia page on Planck units would show you that some of the scales can obviously not be interpreted as some sort of limits of measurability.
A reasonable interpretation for the Planck length is that it gives the characteristic distance scale at which quantum effects to gravity become relevant. Given that all we currently have is a completely classical theory of gravity and an "unrelated" quantum field theory, even this amounts to an educated guess.
No observations have ever been made that would suggest that the underlying spacetime is discrete in any sense, shape or form. Please refrain from posting arrogant comments on topics in which you are out of your depth.
I, uh... What? Did you mean to respond to some other post there?
I can't see how anything you said is a response to anything I said. My statement was very simple: if two models predict the same result, you can use either of them. As far as we have worked out so far, continuous and discrete spacetime give the same results for every experiment we can run. If you have an experiment where they don't, physicists would really love to see it.
Firstly, my comment was overly antagonizing, sorry for that.
My problem is with the interpretation of Planck units; they really do not appear in current theories as signifying any theoretical lower limit to measurability, as I must interpret that you claim by saying:
> As far as physicists believe at the moment, there's no way to ever observe a difference below the Planck level. Energy/distance/time/whatever. They all have a lower boundary of measurability. That's not as a practical issue, it's a theoretical one. According to the best models we currently have, there's literally no way to ever observe a difference below those levels.
For example, the Planck energy is a nice macroscopic quantity of approximately 2 gigajoules. For the Planck quantities that are more extreme, the measurement is not hampered by the theory but by practical issues.
Sure, we don't expect our theories to hold at Planck length, but this is not due to something that's baked into the Standard Model or general relativity.
Sure, I could probably be a bit faster or go on a bit longer if I had better gear. But I could also achieve that by just getting into a better shape. With this level of commitment the gear is not the limiting factor. If I can't go faster with this bike, then I don't deserve to go faster with a fancier one, god dammit.
My work is very complicated and technical, so I get some satisfaction from keeping my hobbies ascetic.