Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.

Can, sure. I’m having difficulty finding the fatality rate for unseatbelted people in car crashes at 25 mph, but for pedestrians it seems to be somewhere in the single digits.

I see e.g. https://nltimes.nl/2023/08/01/trauma-surgeons-express-concern-e-bike-accidents-among-elderly

Dutch trauma surgeons have raised concerns over the rising number of elderly people suffering severe injuries from electric bicycle accidents, AD reported on Tuesday.

While some injuries result from collisions, most accidents are unilateral, caused by incidents like falling from a stationary position or losing control due to high speed,

It sounds like it’s particularly impacting 65+ year old men - the same types who die from breaking a hip slipping and falling while walking.

I’m not sure to what degree this is caused by ebikes encouraging them to keep biking when they should have stopped, or ebikes just being more dangerous when they fall over.

Many more accidents than what?

More accidents than traditional bikes per passenger mile, or passenger hour?

More accidents on ebikes than 5 years ago on account of more people buying them?

For example, drivers will give unhelmeted cyclists more room while passing, on average.

There’s biking and there’s biking.

In the Netherlands, for example, people wear helmets if they’re doing bike sports like road racing or BMX.

But if they’re just cruising down the street on their granny bike to get groceries, they don’t bother because that’s fairly safe.

It’s rather like the need for a seatbelt on the highway, vs the need for a seatbelt on a 25 mph neighborhood street.

That sounds a bit more like a nightclub.

I’d never want to live next to a nightclub, but living next to a tavern or pub would be fine.

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It’s not just car-centric Euclidean zoning and suburban sprawl.

The US also builds really dangerous stroads that you don’t really see in most other countries.

5+ lanes of 55mph traffic next to a sidewalk and tons of driveways for businesses is inherently unsafe.

It’s also interesting to note that the biggest spike in fatalities was during the pandemic.

The best explanation I’ve heard is that bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic essentially disappeared with the switch to WFH during the pandemic. Streets artificially looked safer pre-pandemic due to drivers getting stuck in traffic at peak periods. The pandemic just revealed how inherently unsafe American stroads are.

So why was there such a big spike in deaths during the pandemic, essentially limited to the US?

They have phones in the Netherlands, too, but didn’t see the spike in deaths. Are the Dutch naturally more responsible drivers or something?

I mean, you also see that in the US with bike path design in general.

Bike paths around me in the US mostly go along creeks and railroads. There’s one in the suburbs that’s an abandoned rail line out into farmland. They’re mostly designed as places for suburbanites to drive to for exercise. They’re more of a park than a piece of transportation infrastructure.

Oulu, on the other hand, has bike paths that go through the center of town, out to the suburbs. There’s over 300 bike underpasses on the main bike paths. It’s designed for commuters, for people running errands, and for kindergarteners to bike to school. They’re a practical bit of transportation infrastructure.

Plenty of people in Oulu, Finland bike literally all year round. Fully 12% of all trips in winter are made by bike.

Their secret? Just as the roads are plowed, so are the bike paths. If we didn’t plow and salt the roads up north, cars would also seem ridiculously impractical compared to a snowmobile or cross country skis.

Oulu invests in making winter biking safe and practical, while American cities of comparable size and climate like Syracuse, NY don’t. The results are predictable.

The walkshed of public transit is also really important.

People aren’t going to take a train to a parking lot…

The problem is that it isn’t a matter of cars vs busses. It’s a matter of urban design in general.

Public transit gets better as density goes up. A bus that drops you off at a giant-ass Walmart parking lot with nothing else but two drivethroughs in walking distance isn’t very useful. A bus that drops you off in a neighborhood with 4 dozen shops, a dozen restaurants, 4 bars and 3 coffee shops within a 5 minute walk is way more useful.

By contrast, density makes driving worse. Density means more people are driving the same way you want to go. More people in cars means more traffic on the road with you. Designing for cars pushes you to low density sprawl.

Just building public transit isn’t the solution. Just building public transit in a typical American suburban sprawl makes something about as compelling as a Ford F150 in Vatican City.

You have to fix urban design - stop building stroads and start building streetcar suburbs again.

How do private block chains protect against 51% attacks?

How do you ensure the accuracy of the data going into the block chain in the first place?

The average really isn’t close enough that you only need to consider outliers.

Two generations of 30 year old first time mothers fit into the same time as three generations of 20 year old first time mothers.

Neither of those cases is an outlier, and that’s slip in only two/three generations.

I still think it’s a really weak definition if you give out arbitrary date ranges which inevitably leads to random smaller generational definitions and too many varying opinions on what generation starts or ends where.

The point of generational cohorts like millennials or the silent generation is that being born at a particular time in history has an affect on people.

The silent generation’s earliest memories were depression and war. The great recession impacted millennials in their early career or in high school.

Age ranges captures that and makes it easy to measure things without having to find out when someone’s great grandparents were born.

And yeah, 30’s on the young side. Lauren Boebert was in the news recently as a teen mother who became a grandmother at age 36.

Your definition slips pretty quickly, though. Some siblings have really long age gaps. Some women first give birth at 18 or 19, others not til they’re 40.

Married With Children would have ended when millennials were somewhere between 16 and 1.

It doesn’t really matter how strict your parents were with TV. Most millennials weren’t really in the target demographic for it when it was airing; they’d have been more likely to be watching Rugrats, Power Rangers, All That, Dragon Ball Z or whatever if left to their own devices.

They’d have watched it if it were something their parents watched. I literally never deliberately turned on Friends or Will And Grace, but since my parents watched them, I saw a bunch of them. Married With Children wasn’t a show my parents followed, though, so the Futurama episode would have gone over my head.

It really seems like a reference aimed mostly at the oldest millennials, gen X, and boomers.

generation noun gen·​er·​a·​tion ˌje-nə-ˈrā-shən

1 a : a body of living beings constituting a single step in the line of descent from an ancestor

b : a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously

c : a group of individuals having contemporaneously a status (such as that of students in a school) which each one holds only for a limited period

d: a type or class of objects usually developed from an earlier type

Socially, named generations like millennials use definition 1b, because some people are grandparents at age 30, and others don’t become grandparents til they’re 80.