Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 28 Posts
  • 981 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Splitting lanes is not legal in the vast majority of the United States but idk where you’re from

    Where I am it’s explicitly allowed for motorbikes (at a maximum speed of 30 km/h), thanks to a relatively recent law change. Pushbikes are a different story. There’s no law explicitly allowing it, and this has led to some people (even people in positions of perceived authority, such as the social media team of the Department of Transport and Main Roads) to suggest that it’s not legal for bikes. But the reality is that it is legal, as a necessary side-effect of the fact that cars are allowed to overtake bikes without leaving the same lane. Basically, bikes are allowed to share a lane with another vehicle, and this has the effect of also allowing a bike to come up through congested traffic.

    It’s very very rare for me to see a car blow through a red light outright

    I find this rather hard to believe. First, remember that an amber light does not mean “be careful” or “get ready, you might have to stop soon”. It means stop right now, if it’s safe. How often have you seen drivers actually do that? I’ve had so many times where, as a driver, I saw the amber and found myself in that awkward position where I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to keep going or to stop, and eventually decided to go through; a situation where it is obviously going to be the case that anyone behind me should stop, because I was on the borderline, so anyone behind me must be well over the other side of the line. And yet, so many times not only has the car behind me gone through, the car behind them did too. And that’s before we even get into the daily cases where they don’t even start to enter the intersection until after it has turned red. I’ve got a mate who rides a motorbike and posts helmet-cam footage on Facebook at least weekly, and every one of his compilations includes at least one case of a driver who runs a fully red light.

    For cyclists, recall that there are some places in your own country that explicitly allow cyclists to go through a red light if it’s safe. Not everywhere does (nowhere in Australia, to my knowledge), but those places that allow it do it for a reason. Evidence shows that it makes cyclists safer. Not all lawbreaking is equal, and the evidence pretty clearly tells us that when cyclists break the law, it tends to be for far better reasons than the reasons drivers break the law, even though the rate of lawbreaking is the same.



  • I can’t speak for horses. I’ve only once in my life encountered people on horses while on a bike. It’s an exceedingly unusual scenario.

    I can tell you that, as a matter of fact (not anecdote), drivers and cyclists break the law at roughly the same rate. But that in crashes between cars and bikes, the car is the responsible party in 80% of cases. And that studies have established that when cyclists break the law, it is overwhelmingly done in the interest of their own safety, while drivers break the law in the interest of perceived convenience.

    I only realised after writing the above that that you mentioned “trails”. Sounds like you’re talking about mountain biking. I can’t speak to that, I’m almost exclusively a roadie, using the bike either as a means of transport or for exercise/training on the road. Saying “you” doesn’t really work here. The amount of overlap between mountain bikers and road bikers is surprisingly small.













  • In much simpler terms:

    Think of an IP address like a street address. 192 My Street.

    There might be multiple businesses at one street address. In real life we address them with things like 1/192 My Street and 2/192 My Street, but there’s no direct parallel to that in computer networks. Instead, what we do is more like directing your letter to say “Business A c/o 192 My Street”. That’s what SNI does.

    Because we have to write all of that on the outside of the envelope, everyone gets to see that we’re communicating with Business A. But what if one of the businesses at 192 My Street is highly sensitive and we’d rather people didn’t know we were communicating with them? @bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de’s proposal is basically like if you put the “Business A” part inside the envelope, so the mailman (and anyone who sees the letter on the way) only see that it’s going to 192 My Street. Then the front room at that address could open the envelope and see that the ultimate destination is Business A, and pass it along to them.


  • Yeah every 10 years would be good even if you assume they did learn everything correctly the first time and don’t forget anything, just to make sure people are keeping up with changes in the law. I regularly still see people loudly sharing interpretations of the law on social media that haven’t been true for a decade. And then speed it up to every 5 years after 65 to additionally account for senescence.