Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to James Butler,
I have to admit, I taught myself to ride a motorcycle, which is ridiculously easy to get away with in this country.
Yes, I got my license here too, when I came back. I was shocked at how weak the practical test was. Basically, a guy follows you on a motorbike, and then makes a subjective judgment. It was quite amusing, in fact, when he did give his judgment - he passed me immediately, then proceeded to tell me about a few things he'd noticed I did that didn't seem right to him. When I explained that I'd been trained to do those things, and gave him the reasoning behind them, he was actually pretty appreciative, lots of things he'd never even thought about. He did have some good points too, that were particular to NZ - take especial care to cancel your indicators, because our left-turn rule does encourage drivers to turn aggressively across the road sometimes.
In Oz, they actually measured your ability to do advanced maneuvers. One of the guys in the group I was tested with clearly hadn't been riding enough, he'd just been using a postie-bike, which is on the footpath 95% of the time, and in the testing he was clearly a danger to himself and others on his inability to corner and emergency stop. He failed.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to James Butler,
. And as a cyclist I carry a larger part of the total risk of my actions than does a driver, so I feel somewhat more empowered to be calculating about those risks.
This. Going down Queen St, one of my favorite paths of all, I will go through every single red light. I don't walk the bike, that's really unnecessary, I just wait for the first press of pedestrians crossing to begin dispersing from the center, and then roll slowly into the intersection, no more than about 8km/h, maintaining a wide gap from all pedestrians, until I'm clear, then I bomb onwards right in the middle of the road, which is 99% of the time completely clear of all traffic on my side. There is pretty much no danger at all in doing so, and it feels awesome. It's one of the best things you can do on a pushbike, feeling the freedom of freewheeling down an empty road with plenty to look at and no danger in doing so. I'll happily pay the fine if some copper ever takes exception.
My thinking about how drivers feel about it is this: If I'm in a car and a cyclist rolls up in front of me, I'd rather they did cross with the pedestrians, because they will certainly slow me down when it is my turn to go, and that does actually pan out to cars further behind not actually making it through the light phase, and that does actually annoy motorists.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Isaac Freeman,
In practice, we can't avoid some interaction. Cyclists can't spend all their time on cycleways any more than motorists can travel everywhere on motorways. That doesn't mean they're not sometimes useful, they're just not a panacea.
Well said, Isaac. Cycleways really are like bicycle motorways. I would like more of them, but I have to accept that I'm not going to have them door to door everywhere I want to go on my bike. Which means it's also on me to learn to cohabit with cars, trucks, buses, and pedestrians.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to Russell Brown,
Otoh, I'll also sometimes take the defensive option on one stretch of Meola Road and actually pull over when I determine that it's unwise to move out around a parked car in the hope that following drivers will act sensibly. When passing lines of parked cars I look ahead for brake lights, indicators and bodies in drivers' seats. Staying alive.
Yes, I frequent that road, and it's a study in poor transport planning, and how to make survival strategies. Firstly, I always bomb the downhills right in the middle of the lane. Then, along the dotted yellow line, I pull to the side to let cars pass. Then, when I meet parked cars, I take the middle of the lane again, even though I'm only doing around 20km/h by then. But 20km/h is actually around about the safe speed for cars along that stretch too - car doors are not only a risk to cyclists, they're a risk to cars, and the car passengers. When the road is tight, you should go slow, it really is that simple. Where there are no parked cars, I pull over to let people pass. Sometimes they will pass by actually overtaking on the other side - they would do this with a driver cruising along slowly looking for a park, it's a perfectly valid and acceptable maneuver, with low risk all round. Where the pedestrian crossings jut into the road, I take center, because there simply isn't room for a car and me, and they might misinterpret hugging the kerb. The most dangerous part is the uphill climbs, because you're going slowly, the bike rocks from side to side more, and there are parked cars. But I'm going pretty slow, so I think it's not too risky to pass the parked cars more closely, I have time to see if there are people in the car, and going uphill means I can stop very fast. If there are people in the cars, I ring the bell from quite a way back, until I see the driver look in their mirror at me.
Like James Butler, I don't have very many experiences of driver aggression at all. When you are assertive of your road rights, but also courteous, people respect it. Ride "big", making yourself more visible. Drivers are more annoyed by timidity, which looks like indecision, and means they don't know how to react either. At a traffic light, I'll often make a long exaggerated signal, if I'm going to turn. People look, and they smile - it's like some kind of old-skool ritual to see a cyclist actually following the road rules, putting their arm out as an indicator of their intentions - drivers like it, because they have to do it all the time with their indicators.
But this all comes with experience, both of cycling and of driving cars and riding motorcycles. The motorcycling training was really the most enlightening, I learned in Australia and they have a very comprehensive training system - it made me a much better driver of cars. Motorbikes are much more unsafe even than bicycles. Motorbikers simply accept that their lives really are in their own hands (or they die). I would certainly agree with anyone who suggested that defensive cycling courses should be freely available, that would save a lot of lives.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to WH,
Hopefully the next few decades bring a gradual convergence
Yes, hopefully, as an optimistic worst case. Personally, I'm trying my best to work out how such a gradual convergence could be avoided, and how countries like the US, which have a long history of productive industry, could get that back sooner rather than later. It's all to easy to be apathetic in the face of history, but when it's history that hasn't yet unfolded, I'm not buying it. We're human, we have the power to change things. Well I am, anyway, I don't know about anyone else for sure, but it seems likely. I find it impossible to believe that there is no solution by which people perfectly capable of work and willing to do it, can't organize to do it, and prosper. That is modern madness, the schizophrenia of apathy.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Also, as long as it's framed as "those people getting our jobs" it's not going to be solved, because China's advantages in that regard (US-below-poverty-level wages, enormous working-age population, poor environmental regulation) can't - and indeed shouldn't - be overcome by trying to emulate them.
That was what I was getting at above in my point about the profoundest mistake all around is to place the value of working above all other virtues. That means that we get into the mode of thinking that it's all about trying to maintain high levels of employment, and avoids/ignores the point that the entire purpose of industry is to create enough things, and if there are enough things, we don't have to work so much. The natural tendency of industrialization is for human unemployment, and it's only our own preconceptions about work that mean we have to treat that as a bad thing.
A call for full employment is always a call for a trade war, and trade wars lead to real wars. These wars are at all levels, from class war to regional fighting to international war, right down to war within the family units, where partners are set against each other over whether the other one is doing enough to "deserve" things.
There is a perfectly viable utopian vision that has most of the nation unemployed in an economic sense, living perfectly comfortable lives, if they so choose. Work would still be available for anyone who wanted to do it, giving them more things, to do with as they like. The "unemployed" would still be doing things, of course. People will still raise children, still fix up things that break, or spend endless hours on their hobbies. They could set up businesses, and many would - most people who do something with joy and passion conceive eventually that the talents that they have developed in it could work for them more than just for personal interest. Musicians would play, artists would create, architects would design. Lots of people would throw themselves into public works just because they believe in the value of the public work, rather as the Open Source people do, or people who become interested in politics. Or the contributors on this very website, some of whom feel their writings are a public service, of some value, even if small.
This vision is not a hell-on-earth with everyone moaning that they can't get a job, but rather a world where people do the jobs they want to because they are freed to a large extent from the jobs they must do. And people admire industry as a public work in itself, the factory is not a threat, it is a good churning out things that we can have. Businesses would probably compete, but it would be the fierce competition of people who want to make fortunes, rather than desperate competition of people who can't survive, and the consumer would vote with their dollars for the best. It is a world that's mostly carrots and very few sticks. Sticks would only be needed to prevent actual crime, and crime would be considerably less attractive than just picking up the carrots one needs.
I'm not saying how this utopia could be reached (although I believe I know the answer to that), I'm merely saying that it's not the terrifying end result that our protestant work ethic would suggest it is, a degenerate world of poverty and misery. That degenerate world already exists, and it results from that work ethic writ large, and enforced on people, needlessly so, with inverted results - the hardest workers are often the worst compensated, and the people who make nothing at all, who did nothing more than loan people money they didn't even have themselves, are the richest and most powerful people on the planet. The work is directed into highly trivial activities to create vast excesses of things that aren't really needed by most people (but are very much desired by people who want for nothing), and the things that really are needed, like food, water, shelter and heat, become more and more expensive every day, despite endless industrial capacity to reverse this.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Poor chickens. They get the shit end of the industrial stick all right. Between mammals which make us humans feel stink when they suffer, and fish, who at least mostly get to be free for their entire lives, barring the minute or two when they get crushed and suffocated to death in nets. Free range is some compromise, I guess.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Our local Whole Foods (a store I patronise only when I really need something out of the bulk section, because the woo gives me hives) has its meat organised in sections from worst to best ethical production.
Wow, so customers quite literally line up in order of who gives a shit about ethics? Interesting concept, creating an actual physical segregation of customer political/ethical alignments. I can imagine them eyeballing each other.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’m one of those people who doesn’t accept that “capitalism” and “the anus of the body politic” are the same thing
I don't accept that either. Sometimes it works quite well. Sometimes it fucks up badly. Most of the time the question of whether it is working well or fucking up badly depends on where you are when you're saying it.
In China, it seems to be working well at the moment, at least in terms of generating wealth for a country that is still quite poor. In the "First World", not so much, at least in terms of median incomes, and the quality of life for the bottom .
I don't think capitalism is incompatible with socialism, but I have a broad definition of both terms. When you define one in contrast to the other, then of course they can't cohabit - if you understand socialist ideals and define capitalism as the negation of these, then you get the stupid situation where capitalism is synonymous with laissez faire. But if you say that socialist ideals can actually be realized by capitalism, then you get much wider flavors of capitalism, like what the Chinese are doing, and First World welfare states.
These still aren't the only flavors, though. Both of them seem to still fall into what I think is the most pernicious trap of all, something that is not really built in at all, and only reflects our old attitudes about things. This trap is the idea that the only thing humans do that is of any value is work for money, and they must therefore be compelled to work by being deprived of the ability to survive if they don't work for money.
Which is very silly considering that one of the things capitalism does best is remove the need for human labour. It could relatively simply be reformed to take this into account. But I don't think the world is ready, after all. Valuing humans as ends in themselves, and social organization as a servant to humanity rather than a master, is still a hard concept to internalize, most of us can really only do it for ourselves and the small tribe of people we can personally remember.
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Hard News: Getting to the bottom of…, in reply to Chris Waugh,
The water transfer projects currently being built are pretty incredible, though. There's some serious commitment in projects that take many decades. Environmental concerns have held them up, but anywhere else they would have killed them stone dead, not to mention financial objections to the cost.
Only in China could you solve the problem of the entire North being too dry by building aqueducts big enough to feed such an immense region.
Seems like a strange solution - I'd have thought if you can't get water somewhere, then that means don't make things there that need lots of water. But when you're from a communist mentality, and the Chairman, he say "Southern water is plentiful, northern water scarce. If at all possible, borrowing some water would be good.", then that's what's gonna happen.
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