donnachaidh

I'm about to get a motorbike and, while this is in no ways reasoning for getting the bike (it's pretty much entirely for fun), it's had me thinking a bit about the social impact of motorbikes/scooters, especially if they were widely used (like they are in India, South-East Asia, and a couple other places) for commuting.

They're obviously more efficient in many ways. Less fuel usage, less material required to manufacture and transport, less space required both when driving and for parking, less infrastructure maintenance cost, etc. However, they're less efficient for all these things than the solutions mostly advocated by this and similar communities - namely public transport, cycling and walking. All of which are significantly better.

In contrast to those alternatives, though, motorbikes need basically no infrastructure development to be used, so it would be far easier to make incremental progress with individuals riding a bike instead of taking the car, rather than requiring organised political action.

Specifically for the USA and, to a lesser extent, the more similar countries like Canada and Australia, it's probably also more socially acceptable to not be riding public transport with the plebeians, or having to do physical exercise. And you can easily overcompensate with a massive bike, while still being far better than the massive cars coming out of the US - a litre bike is big, while a litre car is tiny. Obviously this isn't a 'good' reason, but it does seem to be a real consideration.

The main counter-argument I can think of is safety. But if you look at the countries where motorbikes and scooters are common, they seem safer than riding a motorbike in Western countries (anecdotally, from people who have ridden there on trips but wouldn't think of it at home; if anyone can find statistics for it, I'd love to see them). I'd say this is because of their prevalence. You'd get rid of the selection bias for risk-takers, and for high-power bikes. You'd also reduce the issue that car drivers aren't aware of motorcyclists, and often don't notice them. Any collision that does happen would also be more likely between two motorbikes, which would be less deadly than a motorbike and a car. And if we transpose this prevalence of motorbikes to a western country with stricter regulations around licensing, required safety gear, road rules, etc., surely this would be even less dangerous than it is in those countries.

Also, the safety argument seems quite similar to the safety argument for large SUVs for ferrying kids to school. Inside the car, you're safer, but that's at the cost of safety and health of those outside the car, as well as all the other negative effects we're all aware of. Obviously it's not quite to the same extent, but it just strikes me as similar.

So, those are my opinions, which ended up a bit longer than I was expecting... But the reason for posting is that I'd love to hear yours. Do you think largely replacing cars with motorbikes would be beneficial but insufficient, infeasible, or do you think it would actually be worse?

I'm probably late to thinking this, and plenty of smarter people will have seen this, but I was just watching a video on Google's proposal which read out Mozilla's position on it, and noticed something that I haven't heard mentioned. As it says, it's designed to help detect and prevent 'non-human traffic', which would likely harm assistive technologies, testing, archiving and search engines. All of which Google is involved in.

If they're an attesting body, which presumably they would be, they could just say that their indexing crawler is legitimate traffic and get all the data, while other search engines not accepted (yet) by an attesting body wouldn't be able to. So search engines will be locked down to only what exists now. And AI training currently requires scraping large amounts of the internet, which they won't be able to do. So this could also help create a moat for Google Bard, that their earlier memo said didn't exist, to outstrip open-source models, just due to access to data.

I've heard people complain that this is an attempt to monopolise the browser market, but they practically already have done that, and I haven't heard anyone mention this. If all I've said is accurate and I haven't misunderstood something, this could allow them to monopolise (or at least oligopolise) everything that requires access to widespread internet data - basically everything they do.

I just came across this video about a motorbike gearbox, and have a couple questions.

Firstly, she says the detent for neutral is between first and second gears. Why isn't it between fifth and first? That would seem to make more sense to me. Are you expected to shift down to first when setting off, then shift back over neutral to get to second? And presumably the grooves in the shifting drum have gaps between fifth and first to stop you shifting too high and ending up back in first, or is there another mechanism for that?

Secondly, and probably more importantly for my understanding of the transmission, can someone elaborate on how the 'constant mesh' transmission means it doesn't need synchronisers? For example, before the shift from neutral to first is shown, the input shaft, and the first free-wheeling gear with it, are rotating while the output shaft and the corresponding dog clutch are not. Surely, when the dog clutch is moved to connect with the free-wheeling gear, they wouldn't be able to mesh, unless it happened right when the recess and pin were in line, and even then that would cause a jolt. What am I missing here? I also watched another video with a physical gearbox, which seems to confirm that it works like in the first video, but doesn't explain it much, and I can't really see why it works.

I just posted this at [email protected] but realised it doesn't have much activity, so hopefully it fits here.