azimir

azimir t1_j65bhr9 wrote

Reply to comment by feauxtv in Amsterdam’s underwater parking garage fits 7,000 bicycles and zero cars by Ok_Champion6840

Do you have a pile of spare bedrooms for a visiting family? :-)

I'm glad that you've found a great place. My visits to Amsterdam have been very nice and it looks like the city is continuing to invest in positive change over time.

The Not Just Bikes YouTube channel has lots of great material on cities and city design. He's got a great one on why he's not a fan of Houston.

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azimir t1_j64i222 wrote

Reply to comment by grumble11 in Amsterdam’s underwater parking garage fits 7,000 bicycles and zero cars by Ok_Champion6840

> Amsterdam (and the bulk of the Netherlands) is almost perfectly flat, so biking is easy

Definitely a win for biking there.

> cities and towns are older, so densely built which makes biking convenient

So why don't we build our cities more densely? Often because we've put laws in the US to block it, but those should be changed:
https://youtu.be/bnKIVX968PQ

> and the weather is milder, without extended periods of heavy snowfall.

True, but Finland still manages to ride bikes all year in many places:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU

> Does rain and does get cold, but people in Copenhagen are crazy like that and will bike through it

More often because the bike infrastructure is cleared and is built for bikes (not cars where there's a snowplow'd pile of snow in a bike gutter).

>For this to happen elsewhere like in NA you need an urban redesign to cram a lot of people into much smaller spaces.

Yes. Our cities have a much too large footprint to be sustainable. They're essentially all insolvent and they shall all eventually have to shrink their square miles by abandoning the sprawl. The economics of our post WWII city designs just don't work once you start having to do maintenance on the car infrastructure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa

The Strong Towns book lays it out reasonably clearly. We're going to have to shrink our car infrastructure, build denser cities, and construct serious public transportation to serve the core, not stroad-based big box stores and low density suburbs.

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azimir t1_j22wnak wrote

Reply to comment by MurderDeathKiIl in Sam Bankman-Fried to enter plea in FTX fraud case by hzj5790

>Money, such as coins and banknotes, are physical object. The amount of metal in a dollar or euro coin amounts to the value of its alloy, which is in limited quantity in the world and has real-life value.

Except that around 90% (or more) of US dollars are digital. Add in that they might be physical, but their materials are worth less than their face value. Only cents from before 1982 (and some 1982's) actually have a metal value more than their face value because copper's value climbed so much. It's same reason we went to small cents in 1867 because it was too costly to make larger copper cents.

We (the US) haven't been on a gold standard for at least 50 years where we had true gold/silver backed notes. The actual value of a US dollar is entirely because someone else will take something for it.

> Bitcoin has no real value. It’s all made up value through speculation and shady/criminal transactions.

US dollars have made the transition to having daily value while cryptocurrencies did not. Anything can be used as a currency if the public values it and accepts it as such. That was the lesson learned when countries dropped the gold standard.

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azimir t1_irdi6l1 wrote

Reply to comment by Sqwrell315 in Georgia doctor implants one of the first wireless, dual chamber pacemakers: New type of pacemaker is safer option than traditional surgery by universityofga

I don't know that particular unit. It took me a while to stop noticing that the pacemaker was running. It was a new heart rate for daily life (about 15 bpm higher resting) and it was a weird feeling.

I also had to have some of the settings tweaked a few times. The biggest impact was from the setting which raised the rate when I stood up and started moving. It was on the default which was for a 80 year old in the hospital so it had a very slow response. I'm in my 40's so it needed to react much faster when I would stand and start moving. Once that was tuned somewhat almost all of the poor out of breath feelings when I would stand and move vanished.

As to "feeling it fire" - not directly. It's just my heart beating. The difference is when and how much. I also had a long time worrying about it. I (and my wife) did some therapy to help me understand the changes to myself and to address fears. That helped a ton.

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