Heat is the real killer. As someone else said with fenders and a raincoat the former is very manageable but there's nothing you can do when the heat index is in the high 90s/early 100s every day from late May through the end of October.
Bikes are wonderful and amazing and awesome but I was a full-time bike commuter in my southeastern US city for two years and I can't blame anyone here who doesn't.
In the summer you get so hot that you need to expect to have somewhere to change or ideally shower wherever you go if you're gonna be there for a long time. There's very few dedicated bike lanes and a lot of roads may not even have sidewalks so you need to be able to bike on the open road sharing space with cars, which means you need to have an athletic ability to be able to maintain a decent pace on the road, and quick reaction times to be able to get out of the way of cars that aren't looking and bearing down on you.
Even still you'll end up having dozens of close calls from reckless cars and maybe even an accident or two which if you'll be lucky are minor. I got hit by a Jeep that blew through a stop sign ironically on a bike path. I was okay but my bike had considerable damage. Another time I almost got sideswiped by a car that pulled through to parking on the other side of a bike lane without looking.
In short unless very significant infrastructure improvements are made (which are not expensive and are not really difficult to implement technically), biking is inaccessible as a regular form of transportation for most people in most parts of the United States. Which is very unfortunate, because biking is awesome.
I would not really recommend LaTeX or any of those other programs just for writing student papers. LaTeX is for academic papers and it's pretty cumbersome and technical to learn, it would be very very extra to use it for writing just like your random freshman comp paper. I'm not sure why that list doesn't have LibreOffice or OpenOffice or whatever.
The great news is that infrastructure to make cities more walkable and bikeable is actually really cheap. Like, compared to car infrastructure that can move a similar amount of people it's nothing. It's mostly an issue of political will to actually build the stuff.
I hope so, I just hope that it actually gets some traction in the wake of all this instead of getting a modest bump and then mostly dying out again, which is what seems like the most likely direction. I have faith though
It feels a lot more snappy, clean, and modern. I think most of that is because it hasn't accumulated a lot of the bloat and feature creep that Reddit has over the years. The biggest downside, though, is that the community is much smaller and there isn't a lot of the niche content that Reddit is so good for.
The best way in the modern capital environment is to pivot to algorithm-driven content like TikTok-- I think we're seeing the decline of traditional social media in general in favor of platforms that follow the TikTok formula.
unceme @ unceme @lemmy.one Posts 1Comments 31Joined 2 yr. ago
wear more clothes