#I have Standards when it comes to bike infrastructure | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

grenade-maid · 3 years ago

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☕️ poetry as like, a medium

I want to preface this with the fact that I really love poetry and I think it's genuinely one of the most incredibly potent mediums out there. There's this common refrain that "poetry gets such a bad rap, people don't give it enough of a chance!!!" but like, quite honestly I kinda understand where that bad rap comes from. Like, I go to the poetry section at most libraries, check out a handful of books, and almost without fail a lot of them seem to have been written by a bunch of people huffing their own farts out of a paper bag. A lot of the people I've met who make a big deal about liking poetry, the ones who tell everyone to give it a chance? Same farts, same bag. It's exhausting. I don't think this is a failure of the artform, though, or even the people who love it.

Rather, I think that poetry operates in its own distinct different way, just like any other medium. Because much of our cultural idea of poetry is centered on stuff written by bourgeois fucks two hundred years ago, it's easy to feel like there's nothing in it for you. For it to be powerful and engaging, you have to have a sense for how to engage with it, and, like any other medium, find the pieces within it that speak to something within you.

See, I think poetry is fundamentally really similar to short stories, short films, comics, of course, but also individual illustrations, because their limitations really magnify whatever the artist is doing. So if they're trying really hard to show off some virtuoso technical shit and don't actually know how to use it effectively to evoke something meaningful, it's going to look even sloppier than if they had more space to work with, just because it can't be hidden behind anything else. If they're trying to build a mood or evoke a feeling or just SAY something and can't figure out a way to deliver it to you in the space given, they probably haven't actually got it figured out very well.

See, like, when people look at art, they often mistake having a lot of details for having meaning. I mean how many times have you been looking at concept art or reading a comic and seeing like, for example, a fuckin' enormous sci-fi cityscape--every window is individually hand drawn, light reflects perfectly off the puddles on the ground, there's flying cars, there's ominous corporate infrastructure, there's a guy on a bike with a visor and a robot arm with every bolt and wire meticulously detailed and a leather jacket covered in patches and pins that you can even read the text of if you zoom in far enough--and you turn the page and have already forgotten about it because despite all that effort, nothing about that drawing really communicated anything. It doesn't tell you anything about this world, or this city, or the people in it, or the author, or what kind of stories this is meant to go with.

Like, let's make a comparison. Here's like a glossy jpeg of your standard cyberpunk city. If you've been on any art site you've seen a billion of these. Do you get anything out of this? Like it looks fine, but does it make you feel anything? Does it tell you anything? I don't wanna put words in your mouth but I'm guessing no.

And then let's compare it to resident favorite Tsukumizu, this page from Shimeji Simulation:

Despite being much much simpler, it's PACKED with compelling information. If you showed this single page to someone, they might not be able to guess what Shimeji Simulation is about necessarily, but they'd already have a pretty good idea of what kind of a story it is, what feelings it invokes, what ideas or concepts it's drawing from.

A lot of poetry is like the first image, where no matter how pretty it looks and how much effort went in, it's hard for a lot of people to find something in it to be gripped by. But the best stuff is like the second. And I think what poetry does best is capture intensely concentrated feelings and thoughts and experiences and inject it straight into your heart and skull cause it bypasses any kind of sensory judgement about how it looks.

Like, we've all seen this little gem:

And as funny as it is, I think it's a great example of what poetry can do as a medium!

The tiger - Full stop, line break, we don't need to spend time faffing around telling you what kind or what it looks like, this is just the platonic ideal of TIGER with all the feelings and associations you have with it.

He destroyed his cage - Full stop, line break, the action has begun, we don't need to tell you how he did it, that's up to your imagination, but already you can picture it, right? We've set the scene with everything you need to know. He was in a cage. Doesn't matter what kind, doesn't matter what context. He was in a cage. And he didn't just escape, he didn't wriggle through the bars, he destroyed his cage. How does a tiger do that? Doesn't matter. That statement fills the mind with ideas already.

Yes

YES - Triumph, exaltation, ecstasy, again, what more needs to be said? We aren't just happy, this isn't a sigh of relief, this is unrestrained excitement. That communicates a lot! A tiger breaking out of its cage can mean many things, after all. It might be exotic danger to be faced down if we're in a Rudyard Kipling poem, it might be terror if this were Edgar Allen Poe, and so on. But in two words we have established that no, in this case, the tiger getting out fucking owns.

The tiger is out - Full stop, conclusion. It's a sentence brimming with energy about what could possibly come next, and ending there leaves that mark on our brain. Because that's the thing--this poem is telling a story, definitely, but more than that it is evoking the feeling of this specific moment. If this moment took place in a full length book and a whole chapter were dedicated to it, we'd have a lot more detail, totally, we might get all kinds of themes and symbols and a rich characterization of the situation and the tiger and so on and so forth, but the raw impact of this moment would be lost in all of that. Here, in twelve bare words, we can encapsulate that feeling of that moment in a way that is more potent and memorable than if it were told any other way.

Another of my favorite poems, Little Viennese Waltz by Federico Garcia Lorca, translated and put to music by Leonard Cohen, opens like this:

Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women

There’s a shoulder where death comes to cry

There’s a lobby with nine hundred windows

There’s a tree

where the doves go to die

There’s a piece that was torn from the morning

And it hangs in the gallery of frost

Ay, ay, ay, ay

Take this waltz, take this waltz

Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws

I've been going really long so I'll keep this brief, but this is another great example of just pulling these incredible images to mind, that fill the mind with really potent emotional meaning that wouldn't translate to an image or a longer piece of text without having their effect drastically reduced. It creates this image of a dreamy, almost fantastical place, marked by incredible heartache and beauty. It's difficult to imagine in practical terms what it would mean to tear a piece from the morning, or what it would mean for a waltz to have a clamp on its jaws, but reading them, hearing them, you can feel what it means very clearly.

A lot of this comes through especially well when we start talking about translating poetry--because you are forced to contend with, well, what was the author DOING here? 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei is a great starting point on this, and it's pretty short, pdf can be found here and there's also a personal favorite of mine, which is In Praise of the Music of Language, which contains 88 translations of the same french poem done by everyone ranging from professionals to just regular people. Each of them end up evoking very different pictures and feelings despite all working from the exact same template. Really incredible stuff that speaks to what can be done with so few words!

#thanks for asking!!#i think i like poetry because it can say so much in so few words #which is a skill I fundamentally lack lol as evidenced here #quality content #op

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thedreadvampy · 8 months ago

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So there is actually a pretty significant difference between 'car-dominated society is Better For Disabled People Than Any Other Form Of Society' and 'some people have disabilities that mean they can drive but can't get public transport', and it's pretty fucked to conflate them (especially because there's an easy middle road)

but you specifically said 'there is no disability that allows you to drive but not [other transport]' and that, specifically, is ableist bullshit because there are some limitations that public transport just Always Will Have by nature of being public transport, however much you move away from car dependence.

Public transport can't both function as public transport and leave from Every Person's front door. I know a lot of folks who can just about get from the house to the car but can't walk a quarter mile or so to a bus stop. And however good public transport infrastructure is, some people will have to walk 5-10 minutes to the bus stop, which is nothing for most of us but can be insurmountable or at least really fuck up someone's day, because a bus that stops Exactly Where Anybody Might Need It isn't a bus, it's a taxi, and either you need way more of them than is sensible or they'd be stopping every few metres and it would be faster to walk.

Some disabilities, mobility related or not, can make it really unsafe to travel with big groups of strangers. Severe allergies, chemical sensitivities, immunocompromisation, contact issues like fresh burns or severe skin issues, and to a lesser degree stuff like PTSD, anxiety and autism can make it difficult or impossible to safely travel in uncontrolled environments.

Sure even if buses/trams/trains aren't viable some people might be able to walk or scoot or bike but some things are not within scootable distance. I live in a city and several specialist hospitals are on the other side of town, like 15+ miles away and over an hour on the bus or like 2 by bike. You wouldn't want to walk to an appointment there.

To your point about not being able to walk but being able to drive: individual vehicles are adaptable for a person's specific needs in a way public transport can't be because it's for general use (and also not every disabled person who's car-reliant is driving themselves - if you have a carer or partner who can pick you up at your door or help you into the car that's much more doable for many severely disabled people than the same carer helping them to a bus stop and onto a crowded bus.

There are things we could absolutely do to make public transport a better option than driving for more disabled people - accessible buses as standard, seating at bus stops and ramps at stations, normalising masking again, more public transport that's more reliable, 15-minute cities - but there are and always will be people for whom public transport or self-powered travel isn't always a viable option and I don't know who the fuck you think it serves to pretend those people don't exist.

I especially don't know why you need to be such a cunt about the fact that disabled people exist who would be excluded from a lot of public life without independent long-distance transport regardless of the social setup when the thing you proposed, which is deterrent parking charges and free public transport, already has a solution for those people.

It is called a fucking blue badge and it's already in use to manage other driving deterrents like LEZs, parking limitations and yeah, charged parking. It's not a perfect system and I'm usually not one to argue for means-tested disability support but in this case, it's not difficult. If you want to punitively charge car users without attacking disabled people, you introduce a disability exemption which people can apply for through social care systems, which comes with a plate or badge to display on a parked car, and then you don't charge people for parking when they have that exemption but you do charge everyone else.

Idk how other countries work but in the UK you can apply for a blue badge if you qualify as having certain disabilities (visual or mobility impairments, severe mental health issues preventing you using public transport, lack of arm mobility, or have a disabled child under 3). If you display a blue badge you can park for free in metered parking, on double yellow lines, in loading bays etc if you need to, and you can get a free parking place near your home. Literally expanding that scheme to include private parking is all it takes to make "free public transport, extremely expensive parking" viable for everyone, including the minority of disabled people who couldn't use public transport even if it was free, reliable and relatively accessible.

The solution to the problem people are raising already exists, and not only does it not require pretending a bunch of disabled people don't exist or are just being lazy and spoilt, it actively makes it easier to participate in society for disabled people who are reliant on cars without incentivising others.

but no you gotta pretend No Such People Exist because HEAVEN FORFEND we treat disabled people with inconvenient problems as anything other than lazy liars.

I think all busses and trains should be free and all parking should cost money and I’m not joking

#red said

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starswouldtell · 4 years ago

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Bats

So here’s the fic that spun out of what I previewed yesterday! It got surprisingly long. Hope it makes you smile, because it’s definitely silly. Riddles are from here because I am not smart enough to write riddles! John Mulaney is The Riddler, I don’t make the rules. Also posted here on ao3. Hope you like how it all turned out in the end, @light-miracles! _________________________________________________

The Batcave, as it turns out, is an actual cave that is home to actual bats; and bats, Querl has decided, are up there with snakes on the list of creatures he does not particularly care for. He especially does not care for them fluttering around his head while incessantly squeaking and potentially biting when he is trying to work with even older tech than he’s managed to get used to.

How does Luke work like this? He sucks in a breath, exasperated, and tries to wave a bat away from his hair.

It’s a bit of a swap. Kate’s got important business in National City, and Kara's volunteered to spend the weekend in Gotham. It’s strange to see her dressed as Batwoman; a shadow instead of a ray of sun. Luke is with Kate, so Brainy is here; guiding Kara as best he can. It’s almost like working out of the DEO again, but with more flying rodents and a crumbling city infrastructure.

“Would you stop that?” He hisses, swiping at another bat. “Unless you’re going to help me find The Riddler, go-- hang somewhere. Not by me.”

“They really need to do something about the bats.” Mary sighs. “I seriously don’t want Kate to survive getting shot at and stabbed and blown up, then get rabies.” Her lower lip juts out at the thought. “They seem to particularly like you, though. Or dislike.” Her nose crinkles.

“Wonderful.” Brainy grimaces. He would also rather not get rabies.

“Any luck?” Kara’s voice comes over the comm. “There’s so much lead everywhere, how is that even allowed?”

“Different standards when these buildings were constructed.” He says offhandedly; frowns. “I’m combing through both street cameras and social media postings, but I don’t have anything concrete just yet. Only that you want to be on the eastern side of the city.” The beginning of eternity, the end of time and space, the beginning of every end and the end of every race-- ‘E’, east; it had to be east. “I’m monitoring broadcasts as well to see if he turns up with another clue.”

“Do they all play games like this out here?”

“It’s not uncommon.” Mary answers sagely.

Kara huffs a sigh, preferring a more straightforward approach to her crime fighting. Brainy actually finds it rather exciting; he’s good at puzzles.

“I did stop two muggings, so that’s something! There might be a rumor that Batwoman can crush guns now, but that’s fine, right? Not a bad thing!”

Brainy smiles to himself and hears Mary laugh.

“Tomorrow morning Vesper Fairchild’s gonna be asking Gotham if Batwoman’s juicing.”

“Well-“

“I’ve got something,” Brainy’s back straightens and he brings up video of a rather inebriated young woman's livestream- “broadcast just fifteen minutes ago...”

“-then this weird guy said we should get a message to Batwoman.” She laughs. “It was... what was it? It was funny... Like we know Batwoman. What did he say?”

“When is the time of a clock like the whistle of a train?” Her friend supplies. “Who cares?”

“Hashtag Batwoman.”

“Follow us!”

He stops the feed; goes back... When is the time of a clock like the whistle of a train? That is... somewhat less obvious than the first riddle. He can feel Mary’s eyes on him; knows Kara is waiting.

“Brainy?” She asks after a long moment.

“I’m still... working this one out.”

“What is it? We’ll work it out together.”

It’s comforting, even if a little frustrating. He repeats the riddle, and Kara makes a thoughtful sound before-

“Oh!”

“You know it?”

“Two to two! Like toot toot!”

“Ah.” Brainy drags one hand down his face. “Apparently I need to brush up on my basic railroad noises. Pulling up the map, now... Ah! Perhaps number two on 2nd Street! It isn’t so far from the bar those women were attending and- yes, others are posting the same riddle... hashtag Batwoman.”

“Yes! We’re in business!”

Mary claps her hand together with a little cheer, and Brainy zeroes in on the location.

“It seems to be abandoned.”

“I’m almost there.”

“Maybe circle around the block- since you’re not out on the bike.” Mary suggests thoughtfully. Batwoman doesn’t have super speed. “We don’t know if he’s waiting for you in there, or if it’s gonna be another clue. Or a trap.”

“Right.” He can almost see Kara nod, slow down.

“Sprock-”

“Brainy?!”

“Sorry! Bat. Another bat. Uh- the building is old, so you may not be able to see through it, but if the DA is inside, you should be able to hear him, and The Riddler. If they are not inside...”

“I’ll be careful.”

Being able to see exactly what Kara does is a smart touch; credit where it’s due. These computers might be ancient, but Luke Fox uses them well (even if he did question if Querl could handle assisting Kara). After a few moments, she slips into the building.

“Got him.” The DA is tied to a chair in the center of the room, unconscious. Kara approaches slowly, but she and Brainy both go still when someone speaks...

“Now, why are you like a clock at midnight?”

“I believe,” Brainy says in Kara’s ear. “he wants you to put your hands up.”

Kara turns swiftly and lunges, dropping down to sweep The Riddler’s legs out from under him, but when he falls Kara hedges and Querl can’t blame her because the man looks incredibly pleased.

“Did you enjoy the game?”

“What?” Kara, Querl, and Mary say it in unison.

“You’re clever! I thought it might be fun; a bit of a scavenger hunt with the Batwoman!”

“You kidnapped the DA!” Kara says indignantly.

“Well, I assumed you’d find him. And you did! Look, he’s fine- he just had a couple benadryl.” He stands up, walks to the man tied to the chair and taps him lightly. “For a mild antihistamine it’s surprisingly potent.”

“You... what?”

“It was exciting, wasn’t it? You are clever, I thought it would take you longer.” He starts to clap, looking genuinely impressed, and Querl stares. “Well played!”

“You don’t kidnap an innocent person for fun.” Back on her feet, Kara puts her hands on her hips.

“I mean, he takes bribes, I figured maybe he’d earned a little scare too.”

Kara’s palm slaps to her face.“You realize I’m taking you to the police, right?”

“How many sides does a circle have?”

“Are you serious right now?”

Then he leaps out the window.

Querl shakes his head. Mary stares at the monitor in bemusement.

Gotham.

Getting up, Brainy jumps at the almost immediate fluttering and squeaking in his ear.

Bats!

#querl dox #kara danvers #mary hamilton #batwoman #supergirl #supergirl tv #the riddler #my writing

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prettyporcelainporcupine · 5 years ago

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I'm not always going to agree 100% with everything in a post I reblog, usually if it's something I feel needs clarification I'll add my stance in the tags. I don't normally have the energy, or feel particularly enthused with having an argument or pointing out exactly what I agree with vs not agree with. I'm not interested in splitting hairs. I figure almost 10 years on this site my position as market anarchist is clear. However I'll list my exact stances.

I believe in no federal government, I believe in the free market, I believe in strong community ties, and above all I believe in the sovereignty of the Indigenous people. As an American I believe that supporting the Indigenous nations here is the truest path to a free and sustainable future. That includes returning land, hunting rights, and following their lead in conservation.

I believe a free market has room for all markets, including voluntary socialism and communism. Unless you plan to enslave people and force them to adopt a specific economy people will always group together as they please. In modern times forming these micro economies would be easy, the government and corporations are what is standing in their way. Moreover even if they are not permanent fixtures a voluntary commune can easily take the role of halfway houses and homeless shelters teaching people valuable trade skills and supporting those in crisis.

People want to help eachother, joining communities and paying into them as a voluntary form/replacement of taxation is how charities do their work. The government does not need to be involved. The only reason we can't live sustainably is because we replaced the nobility and monarchies of the past with huge corporations that own all our land and prevent us from being able to survive without a salary. This is especially true for Indigenous communities who were removed from their land to places with no water and hunting or had those resources diverted.

I fully support the dismantling of the big Agricultural corporations, from farming to cattle, because our taxes go into propping them up via subsidies. That land should be immediately returned to local Indigenous nations, especially in places where the community does not have land rights or reservations. This also goes to national, state, and local parks, because establishing these locations, even in conservation efforts, required stealing it from the Indigenous communities.

I agree that businesses have the right to refuse service to anyone, however I also know that most prejudice and oppression came about because of government intervention and so certain protection laws are necessary to the saftey of minority groups. Stand your ground laws are in place because duty to retreat laws are in place, minimum wage laws are necessary so long as blockades are up against new businesses, and regulations against big businesses are essential so long as those businesses continue to have the power and means to evade justice. We must first remove the restrictions on PEOPLE before we remove restrictions on corporations.

The same goes for things like welfare, Medicaid, and Food stamps. So long as the system is broken the saftey net should be the LAST thing to go. So long as you can't grow food, collect rainwater, and sell goods from the trunk of your car then I will support food stamps and welfare. So long as water and electricity come from only 1 company in your area and it is illegal to have them turned off (and your kids removed from you) then I don't disagree with people who demand it be free. If you cannot unplug from the grid without legal consequence and that grid is using infrastructure built by taxes you were forced to pay then you have a right to demand that service be included in your taxes.

I don't think landlords are all evil leeches, I do know there are predatory practices that have become standard in the industry. I am against non refundable fees like per pet deposits that don't go into your security deposit and get returned to you if there are no damages, I resent expensive application fees, appartments renting for more than houses, rent hikes that are higher than mortgages because the owner does not actually own the house. I have no sympathy for landlords who owe multiple mortgages and rely on tenants to pay them off, and I believe that loss of rent during the Quarantine from unemployed tenants would be no different then loss of rent from the empty home if they kicked the tenant out. If your tenant is paying your mortgage + profit you are not the owner, you are the intermediary for the bank and you should have known better then to "live beyond your means" as they say.

The key fight should be in breaking up the monopolies and helping people live sustainably so that everyone has a choice, but too often small government advocates nitpick every little thing that people put in place to hold those in power accountable. Because its easier to remove OSHA standards when a big corporation is paying for all the legwork then it is to remove restrictions on fruit stands and taco trucks and guys who sell icecream from the cooler on their bikes. It takes less energy for people to add their weight to fights against animal rights for factory farms then it would for them to challenge why you can't have agricultural animals like poultry and rabbits within city limits.

So long as it is illegal to keep your own chickens and grow your own food and sleep in a tent in a vacant lot I don't want to hear about how hard it is for coca cola to maintain their outlandish profits if they didn't hire assassins to murder union employees in Columbia.

#rin's mundane life

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weaselle · 6 years ago

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The Plan to Save All - speedrun

I’ve tried to write this out before and it gets really involved and complicated because it’s a big idea I’ve spend decades developing. I want to try to get it all out in one simple, short, digestible bit. Here we go ____________________________________________________________________ (edit) the MOST simplified version/overview: Phase One: initial membership all lives under one low-cost roof Phase Two: start making $$ by creating alternatives to shitty institutions Phase Three: use those institutions to create an entire city Phase Four: showcase successful alternative that self-propagates via imitation _____________________________________________________________________

PHASE ONE: -leverage group dynamics to lower living costs of both money and time -find simple solutions to complex systems by addressing them under one roof -provide affordable housing and property ownership to minimum wage workers 50 to 100 people live in a single building with communal facilities: shared industrial kitchen, showering (like at the gym -- in fact, include a gym) common areas for recreation, etc. This lowers cost through efficiency, i.e. you don’t need 50 apartments with 50 ovens, you can have a large communal kitchen with like 4 industrial ovens. One Monthly Payment: everything including food and chores -about one 50th to one100th of the 10 year mortgage (and property tax) -all utilites: garbage, gas, electricity, water, internet, group phone plan -meal plan, like at a college or whatever. -laundry plan -community fund (for building upgrades, amenities, repairs, etc) -about one 50th to one 100th of the caretaker stipend -a group healthcare/health insurance program Caretakers: about 20% of the residents no monthly bill for living there, plus paid a reasonable stipend. Caretakers have a 30 hour workweek wherein they do all building maintenance and cleaning, provide the meal plan, do the laundry, water the plants, feed the pets, etc. Not only does this solve an increasing time issue for the residents, each caretaker also receives the solution because they live in the same facility - in other words, the caretakers that do the cooking don’t have to come home after work and do laundry and the caretakers that do the laundry don’t have to come home and cook dinner. More time to be a student, do art, or care for your kids. Costs continue to lower through efficiency - you don’t need 100 apartments with 100 toolboxes containing 100 hammers. Shared facilities like gym showers means caretakers don’t have to clean 100 showers all over the building; about 25 showers in one place will probably do. Free Rooms (and board): semi-temporary room and board outreach programs it does not significantly increase each person’s monthly bill to leave about 5% of the facility’s rooms empty and absorb the corresponding room-and-board costs (in other words splitting the total bill 75 ways instead of 80 ways equals almost the same payment per person). This allows the group to offer free housing and food to whoever they decide needs help in their area - women fleeing abusive relationships, homeless veterans, disowned transgender teens, etc. Cost: about $1,000 per month, or roughly 2/3 a minimum wage income. My initial budget exploration shows that the total monthly cost to each paying resident works out to be about a thousand a month. Since about half the monthly payment is going to the mortgage, and property values / local minimum wages tend to be relative to each other, this amount tends to be about 2/3 of a full time income on minimum wage. In other words, out where minimum wage is about seven dollars, the property values are also lower, making the total monthly payment closer to $700, whereas in Oakland where I’m doing the most planning, the mortgage would make the monthly payments closer to $1,200 but minimum wage is 11 or 12 dollars. Remember, total payment includes food and everything. Built in Disposable Income Raise (through cost lowering) even if none of the residents ever get a raise in 10 years, after a decade the mortgage is paid off which means the monthly bill gets cut in half. Plus residents now own outright a share of the facility, which increases in value; the beginning of a retirement investment. But in phase two we go after more money anyway. **************************************************************************************************** PHASE TWO: -help the middle class pay minimum wage workers to create alternatives to corrupt, damaging, or flawed institutions -create monetary success and grow socio-economic\political capital -move into another, better building -help the next group of 50-100 minimum wage workers Develop Caretaker Positions into alt institutions imagine you want to start a business as a bike repair shop. Now imagine you are starting that business with 100 guaranteed customers paying a pre-arranged fee that has been budgeted to cover your business supplies, workshop lease, plus your wages and personal monthly bills. Dog walking, gardening, house cleaning, cooking or food delivery, whatever the group needs and the facility/community is designed for, there are plenty of business to start this way. A group providing a dedicated and funded laundry service to 100 people within a facility designed for it can easily expand to accommodate paying customers from outside the community and keep growing. This is how the facility can start offering house cleaning, laundry, meal plan, gardening, etc. The middle class is already paying for these things - gardeners, housekeepers, dog walkers, laundry service, food delivery... so the market is there. The wages for these jobs are typically more than minimum wage. As more middle class households become customers, more residents of the facility can quit their minimum wage jobs at corporate mega stores and start earning better wages working for themselves and each other. The community incorporates and is able to take part in all the unfair advantages afforded corporations over the common public. Soon the public will BE corporations, and either everybody has to pay a fair tax, or nobody does. This also helps the group include a health plan as part of the monthly bill. Move to Better Facility and offer the old one to a new group When the first group gets a property and pays the mortgage, they pay the bank an additional few hundred thousand dollars for their property. For instance, if you buy a 2 million dollar property from a bank and pay a 30 year mortgage, the total payments on your 2 million dollar property after 30 years will actually be about 3 million dollars. It’s less over a ten year mortgage, but still. SO when the first group owns their facility outright, they can enter a second 10 year mortgage on a different facility, but offer the first one to a second group while acting as the bank themselves - doing this for a cycle of 3 means that after 30 years the first group owns a single property just like a standard mortgage, but has helped two other groups own property and defrayed their own payments instead of shoveling so much money into a bank. The goal is to liberate more and more property from the banks and enter them into a system of citizen-to-citizen ownership where people own the buildings they live in, having paid other citizens for them. In the second facility, the building is nicer, there are more amenities, monthly payments go up, and you add people to the group. The people you add are more-than-minimum-wage professionals. Teachers, firefighters, admin clerks, paralegals. Some of them join the caretakers to provide their services to the group -- daycare, tax-filing, vehicle repair, IT service, plumbing, even community security officers who are people you know and trust who live with you... and of course coffee and cake and everything else. Once again, these are fledgling businesses with guaranteed clientele and budgeting, that can then be offered to customers outside the community. Once again, the other professionals added to the group can quit their outside jobs and work for each other and themselves. These all grow into full institutions along planned paths. The caretaker watering the plants and cleaning the house becomes a gardener and handyman. The gardener/handyman starts a landscaping home-renovation business. That business grows into a property development and construction company. The caretaker doing the laundry starts offering repairs and minor alterations (replace a button, hem some pants). They start a laundry/dry cleaner and taylor business. They grow into a clothing line. The meal plan grows into a restaurant grows into a farm-to-table network. After school programs, daycare and tutoring become a whole school. Each service within the community becomes a business that grows into an institution. PHASE THREE Build A City You have a large construction company. You have a school. You have a publicly owned non-profit bank/credit union. You have firefighters. You have Alt-mart, which I’ll have to explain fully somewhere else but involves a locally sourced mega-mart featuring a permanent farmer’s market and is designed to put Walmart and Target out of business. So. You have all the elements you need for a functioning city. Have your construction company build one. In this city, there is no private property; you lease a private residence directly from the city, which holds the whole city in a trust for the citizens and administrates it via an elected city council, which means each citizen owns an equal share of the city as a whole. The whole “rent” is therefore subject to regulation and available to fund public works instead of going into the pockets of some real estate mogul or slum lord. Imagine if your city had your entire rent payment to help end homelessness, provide healthcare, maintain infrastructure and innovate powergrid alternatives, instead of trying to do all that for the 2% of the property value they have access to now. I have a whole bunch of city design stuff that addresses things like sustainable water sourcing etc, but, I’m trying to get through this quickly PHASE FOUR this is important. By the time you get to phase 4, the project is showing a successful straight line development from minimum wage/poverty and powerlessness, to autonomous socio-economic alternative achievable by any group. You start as a fry cook in your twenties, and you end as a comfortably successful citizen in a city you created, that takes proper care of you and which has improved the lives of countless people along the way, all by the time you are 65. Now THAT’s a retirement. You KNOW people are gonna copy that all around the country. It’s my socio-economic worm ... it self replicates, and has the potential to subvert and replace existing socio-economic systems. I don’t want to tell people how to live, I’m trying to free them to live how they want. If they want a city that allows homelessness but everybody gets a horse, then fine, that’s their city (which I predict will fail, but whatever) the power will be with the people, and the city I live in will have priorities I agree with.

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namejason13-blog · 6 years ago

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Is New York City ready for the e-scooter revolution? - Curbed NY

The micromobility revolution that has permeated cities across the U.S. has yet to arrive in New York City, but—having conquered the West Coast through a combination of rule-breaking and eventual cooperation—electric scooter companies are now looking to make their mark in the five boroughs.

As The Verge has pointed out, there’s money to be made there; Bird, one of the leading scooter companies, has reportedly been valued at $2 billion in recent months. And New York City, with its more than 8 million residents—more than half of whom regularly use public transportation—could be a “tremendous scooter city,” according to Gil Kazimirov, the general manager of Lime, the micromobility start-up.

But before that money can pour in, there’s a skeptical populace to win over, some of whom see e-scooters on the same plane as Thanos. There are also laws that must be changed and streets that need to be made safer for the more rugged version of the push-assist scooters that Bird wants to bring to New York.

Those first two necessities are what Bird, the company most prominently trying to enter New York’s market, seem to be focusing on at the moment. The start-up, which is based in Santa Monica, has been courting politicians on both sides of the aisle, though neither Eric Ulrich (a Republican who’s pushed for unfettered competition among bike share companies) nor Robert Cornegy (a Democrat who participated in Bird’s recent Bed-Stuy demo) would comment about their feelings on e-scooters. Bird even snagged one of the city’s most prominent street safety advocates, making clear that it’s approaching New York City expansion in a responsible fashion not usually embraced by “break shit, apologize later” disruptonauts.

Bird has also tried to win over skeptics with demonstrations of how its service works—there was one in Bed-Stuy in September, and one earlier this month that was meant to show how e-scooters could be a key component of the looming L train shutdown. Bird donated scooters for a mass ride from the Myrtle-Wyckoff station to the Grand Street stop, which will be a departure point for a series of Brooklyn-to-Manhattan SBS routes. The demo offered not just a look at how the scooters work but also a proof of concept of how they could help get people around if trains are packed to the brim.

The group ride seemed to win over Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who liked his scooter enough to throw it in his SUV and show up with it at another press conference that morning in Brooklyn Heights. Before the Bird ride started, Adams told the assembled crowd in the Myrtle-Wyckoff stop’s pedestrian plaza—itself a symbol of reclaiming the streets from cars—that “too many car riders are making decisions for millions of New Yorkers who are not in vehicles. Selfishly, they think that they have to drive alone.” While Adams doesn’t have the power to vote for the impending bill to legalize e-scooters, he did at least give rhetorical support to their legalization.

That effort is being spearheaded in part by City Council member Rafael Espinal, who announced his support for scooters in a Daily News op-ed earlier this year, and is currently working with Transportation Committee chair Ydanis Rodriguez to introduce a bill legalizing them. Espinal’s interest in the scooter issue is driven not only by their potential usefulness during the L train shutdown, but also as a way to include his district (he represents parts of Bushwick, Brownsville, and Cypress Hills) in a transportation system that Citi Bike has yet to meaningfully reach.

“What I’d like to see is an expansion of modes of transportation—not only in Manhattan, but in the outer-outer-boroughs,” Espinal tells Curbed. “We have Citi Bike, but it hasn’t made its way out to East New York and other neighborhoods on the outskirts of the outer boroughs. We have to make sure this transportation is available to everyone.”

But while scooter companies can stage events and work with elected officials, the issue of safety—and aggressively redesigning the city’s streets—is what will no doubt determine how widely adopted scooters become in New York. While their top speed of 15 miles per hour make them inherently riskier than bikes, a Washington Post article about the rise in scooter-related emergency room visits notes that the number of bike lanes in Washington, D.C. was one of the reasons the city didn’t see the same rate of increases in injuries as other American cities.

Bird itself has put a huge emphasis on bike lanes, telling Curbed that “protected, well-maintained bike lanes are part of our vision for a safe future for all road users—be they on foot, bikes, or scooters.” The company has also pledged $1 per scooter per day in each city it operates in to help cities pay for more protected bike lanes, but at least in New York, opposition to bike lanes has had less to do with price and more to do with parking spots. And on that front, radical thinking seems to be in short supply.

Cornegy, whose district mostly encompasses Bed-Stuy, told Streetsblog that he would “stand up for more protected bike lanes” when he was at Bird’s Bed-Stuy event, but he was also a high-profile opponent of the Classon Avenue bike lane, which was installed in response to a cyclist’s death in 2016.

The city’s addition of bike infrastructure has not stopped opposition from community boards; new bike lanes and other improvements are still at the mercy of the right combination of political pressure. Even Adams—who’s called for something as ambitious as a Flatbush Avenue bike lane next to Prospect Park—was ambivalent about the relationship between community boards and the need to quickly shift space away from cars.

“We should never count out the voices of people,” Adams said after the Brooklyn Heights press conference. “[Community boards’] advisory status helps as we carve out bike lanes, because bike lanes are personalized to those communities. It doesn’t mean a community board should be able to have veto power if it’s unreasonable. Allow community boards to have their space to voice their concerns; but at the same time, don’t allow anybody in government to get in the way and stop progress.”

Espinal says that when it comes to New York’s existing network, “the city can be doing more to make sure that bike lanes are acceptable and not being blocked,” though said he’d rather see the results of a scooter pilot program before committing to any type of radical street redesigns.

But Curbed’s urbanism editor Alissa Walker, who’s written previously about how micromobility give cities a huge opportunity to move away from being so car-centric, said that instead of reacting once scooters are being used, street design “needs to be a part of the conversation at the same time.” Without being comfortable on the streets, people either won’t ride scooters, Walker says, or wind up taking to the sidewalks—which simply wouldn’t work in New York City.

One idea the city can embrace is instituting the Vision Zero Design Standard, a series of pedestrian, cycling, and mass transit improvements that are implemented whenever a road needs to be fixed. “It traditionally takes longer to build protected bike lanes than it does to, say, empty a truckload of scooters onto the street,” says Transportation Alternatives’ Joseph Cutrufo. “The best way to accommodate more people on bikes and scooters is to make safer street redesigns part of regular repaving projects. This way, every time a street is repaved, we have the opportunity to make our streets more accommodating for New Yorkers on two wheels, and, more to the point, to save lives.” While Cutrofo says the idea has been endorsed by a majority of members on the City Council, it hasn’t been instituted in any street repavings yet.

“The best way to accommodate more people on bikes and scooters is to make safer street redesigns part of regular repaving projects.”

As a scooter agnostic/skeptic, Bird’s demonstration earlier this month certainly worked on me: The mass of riders didn’t seem to have any huge problems with Bushwick’s streets that are barely habitable to bikes in some stretches, especially the heavily-trucked and pockmarked stretch of Knickerbocker and Morgan Avenues north of Flushing Avenue. If you squinted, you could see a vision of the future where people used the scooters in peace, although they had some good fortune in clear bike lanes and a dearth of double-parked cars on side streets.

And while some might worry about scooter companies “imposing their will” on the city, the fact remains that car companies have already imposed their will on New York in a way that e-scooters could never possibly match. Besides, if you’re out on the street, you can already see the scooters are there. The same afternoon as the Bird demonstration, I saw a scooter rider salmoning on Ann Street, just blocks from City Hall. Later, I came across an e-scooter rider named Mike while I was walking down Flatbush Avenue.

“It’s convenient, you can slip between cars,” Mike said when asked what he liked about his push-assist scooter that he bought online. He also sees larger benefits for the city if it embraces the scooter revolution. “I feel like you can definitely help the environment, and even start new businesses. Cars suck, and you could open a bunch of mom and pop shops to service the scooters and sell scooters, and just help with the transportation system.”

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Source: https://ny.curbed.com/2018/10/15/17969900/new-york-electric-scooters-bird-legislation-street-design

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whatisdevops3 · 3 years ago

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DevOps - Development together with Operations

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benefits of devops

Solution Improvement and Delivery

Around earlier days, options were associated with finding the technology right. The crucial was technology, the most effective was technology plus the business expected and additionally paid for technology. Moments have changed. Effectively, at least for those of united states taking notice. At present technology is never a significant problem. Thousands of people, we have a easier world. Over the years we've come to understand that know-how is basically an concept of Processing, Recollection, Networking and Safe-keeping. We have mastered application by using virtualization. Most people understand horizontal running is 'better' compared to vertical scaling knowning that we can deliver that PMNS more easily with converged and hyperconverged products that at the same time contain the software choice. We have automated you will find many key activities equip reduction in time in addition to costs.

benefits of devops

The Impair paradigm came along along with made life much simpler by helping you to become Service Real estate agents rather than server admins or network fitters. To the customer were now Service Agents; well, we should come to be. We should be having shorter procurement fertility cycles given that applications together with services (the solutions) are delivered by a Service Catalog. Despite the fact that this can be true inside Public Cloud deployment model and the Program as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, in the case of Private Cloud procurement we still look stuck in the past and additionally suffer unnecessary delays. Even as Public Foriegn services are taken on by more and more organizations the activity of getting this servers, applications in addition to services 'up there' still makes for challenging going. All the operate that is required to design along with deliver a Open public Cloud hosted natural world is still steeped within old-fashioned working techniques.

Despite all this shift and learning, method design and setup is still a thorny job and generates mountains of proof (some needed, certain pointless), endless Gant charts and interminable meetings trying to get the perfect solution is in place and transferred. Why is this?

Practical application Development and Delivery service

Application developers benefit from to live in a earth of their own. Somewhat that is still authentic. Application development organizations don't usually have mobile phone network engineers, technical designers and storage SMEs sitting in over the early morning scrums. Apps are developed around isolation and isolate from the technical answers that will need to be designed to host, resource together with support the application.

Usually an application is constructed for one of a couple reasons. To provide an answer for an external buyer or to provide an use for the business along with which it can earn a living. For instance, a company must pay salaries. To accomplish this it needs an application which might pay the pays, calculate tax and additionally pension information in addition to enter data towards a database and then screen-print a payslip just about all in accordance with the suitable framework set out with the Revenue Services 'rules of engagement'. A software development company takes on that obstacle and through a group of iterations it will send out an application that satisfies all of the customer along with legislative requirements. For any business that likes to make money from an application your scenario is very like that for an outward customer. The improvement is financial in that , the business has to explain the cost of having designers on staff designing the application. That value is set against some sort of forecast of money from the eventual deployment of the application to be a service for the internet business.

In both for the examples there are constants that can make for tricky going. In the same way this technical solutions are influenced by people, process together with politics, so app development is suffering from an isolationist put into practice. Why is this?

Some reasons why This?

Across most IT from datacenter infrastructure to apps to cloud you can find one problem of which affects the simple, joined-up running associated with a project and that is 'silos of activity'.

Your silo has long been a black mark than it. We became very much accustomed to operating inside silos that we decided not to question whether this arrangement was useful and cost effective. Actually , even now, the majority of THE IDEA organizations operate choosing silos. Solutioning and additionally development in remoteness.

Solution design in addition to application development experienced the arrival with Lean and Agile as a really useful way to operate yet nevertheless, silos remained. Organizations operated Agile nonetheless, kept the silo way of doing important things. Strange when you ponder over it. Agile means bendable and able to modify without trauma. Silo is a 'pit' by using high sides brings about change very difficult. Therefore , in essence, Agile along with silo worked alongside one another and made switch difficult. Still will.

What is DevOps

Similar to the Cloud paradigm it happens to be simply another method doing something. Just like Cloud it has numerous definitions depending on so that you can whom you are discussing at the time.

Wikipedia areas: Because DevOps can be described as cultural shift together with collaboration between improvement and operations, there isn't a single DevOps program, rather a set or even "toolchain" consisting of an array of tools. Generally, DevOps tools fit into more than one categories, which is reflective of the software enhancement and delivery system.

I don't think that is all DevOps is. The inference is that DevOps is concerned only using application development and additionally operations. I do possibly not believe that. I believe that will DevOps is a paradigm and that like various IT 'standards' in addition to paradigms it is connected all IT rather than applications. By doing away with the partitions around each practice within the chain and using all the key game enthusiasts involved from moment one, as part of some sort of inclusive and collaborative team, the bike of application progress and solution style and design becomes a continuous operation that doesn't have to move to consult just about every required expert. No-one needs to throw some document over the selection to the next crew. Every single document is penned within the collaboration approach and this has to create the document a lot more relevant and effective. Imagine that the job team is always inside the same room coming from concept to deployment and each guru is always available to investigate and add to every different step of that undertaking. How much better than the larger method where it will take days to get a simple solution to a simple concern, or to even find the proper person to talk to.

The mantra is normally: Develop, Test, Use, Monitor, Feedback etc .. This sounds application-orientated. In fact , it can connect with the development involving any IT answer. Like ITIL, TOGAF and the Seven Part Reference Model it usually is applied to any and all THAT activities from advancement right through to support assistance. DevOps puts all of us on the same page at all to the finish.

Never let your company to put into practice DevOps in remote location and only as a shape for application improvement. To do that would be to establish another silo. Make use of for every project in addition to being the default customs for all your teams whether they are developers, planners, architects or functions. And, finally, do not complicate it. DevOps doesn't need deeply and profound descriptions or long along with tedious conversations as to what it is and tips on how to implement it. Basically do it.

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eagle-eyez · 3 years ago

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With a glut of subsidies provided by the government, electric two-wheelers in India are now more affordable than they’ve ever been, and that means they’re finding more buyers than they ever have. Just last month, Hero Electric sold more than 10 times its July 2020 sales, and a proliferation in electric two-wheeler buyers spells increased demand for electric two-wheeler charging. With no national charging standard in place as yet, no two manufacturers use the same charging system, so not every electric two-wheeler can use every charging point, and this could end up discouraging potential buyers.

However, Ather Energy has stepped in to solve this issue by releasing the intellectual property (IP) on its fast-charging connector, which it believes will go a long way in facilitating the rapid expansion of India’s fast-charging network for e-two-wheelers. In an interaction with Tech2, Ather Energy CEO Tarun Mehta explained what prompted this move, and drew a parallel between the fast-charging connector and a USB Type-C charging cable to drive the point home.

“You can build your own charger, but the connector itself is the automotive equivalent of USB Type-C. Why have different USB Type-Cs out there? As we're starting to see the market open up, and more players coming in, we feel that it makes no sense for every single OEM to have different proprietary standards. I believe this is a massive enabler if multiple OEMs share the same connector, which makes it far easier to proactively install chargers before vehicles are sold, and once chargers are in place, it drives vehicle sales”, said Mehta.

Ather already has 150 fast-chargers – that have a charging capacity of 3 kW – installed in the 22 cities it presently operates in. It’s aiming to add 30 fast-charging points every month. The fast charger – which adds 1.5 km of range per minute of charge to the Ather 450X – has been improved and enhanced over time, and by using Ather’s connector, manufacturers will be able to leverage the benefits of an established, time-tested system.

“The advantage for OEMs is massive because they get a ready connector with a stable design; issues have been fixed over several years so it’s fairly reliable, and a supply chain is already set up – though they’re also free to set up their own chains. Secondly, customers get to access hundreds of fast chargers Ather has already set up from Day 1 itself”, Mehta said.

And here, Ather Energy promises this is more than just lip service or a PR exercise. Unlike Tesla, which simply opened up its patents in 2014 for any OEM to use in ‘good faith’, Ather says it will not only provide the information to any OEM that’s interested, but will also assist it in incorporating the fast-charging tech into its products and charging infrastructure, at no cost whatsoever.

“It's academic to say you can use this patent, because it's one thing to have a patent, and a completely different ballgame to industrialise and mass-produce it. We’re going to support OEMs who want to use this with our own engineering efforts. Tesla did the right thing by opening IP, but I think you can't just stop there. You have to go all the way up to actually helping the industry make this transition. We will have our teams assist interested OEMs in integrating the connector into their platforms, architecture and vehicles”, Mehta adds.

Up until now, the electric two-wheeler space was largely untapped, with only a few prominent players trying to drive growth. Now, however, newer players are entering the market, and they may be more open to collaborating with Ather to save development costs and time, something Mehta is hopeful will happen in due course.

The reason for doing this, in Ather’s approach, is simple – more chargers will boost confidence among potential buyers and lead to quicker EV adoption, which will translate into higher sales for every player in the electric two-wheeler business.

“If more of us use the same connector, more chargers will pop up; more chargers that are out there, faster the EV sales will take off. That helps everybody uniformly. If this move doubles the number of chargers on the road tomorrow, everybody's sales will double.”

But why do this now, when competition is intensifying, and bigger names are set to jump into the fray? Mehta says now is the time to do it, as three years from now, it could be a way more complex proposition.

“I'm hoping tearing down the IP walls here and helping with engineering at an early stage will help drive a common standard. Once everybody commits to their own design, backward integrations become more complex, architectures get locked, supply chains become fixed. Today is a fantastic time. Most OEMs are yet to enter, and even ones who are present are out only with first-gen models. Ather is the furthest along, so it makes sense for us to open up and drive a common standard”, says Mehta.

Ather Energy presently lets customers use its fast-charging points for free, an offer that is valid till September 2021 and is likely to be extended by a few more months. Mehta is hopeful that if other manufacturers do adopt Ather’s fast-charging tech, the company’s charging network will also be used by customers riding rivals’ bikes, which will help it eventually price its charging plans even more competitively.

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/auto-tech/why-ather-energy-thinks-sharing-its-fast-charging-tech-will-boost-electric-two-wheeler-sales-in-india-9877051.html

#Technology

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jayhe · 4 years ago

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Post Visit Evaluation and Analysis

Before visiting Beihai Park, I was pretty enthusiastic about the trip, since I wanted to see the cultural and historic buildings and structures of China, which were pretty hard to find elsewhere. Moreover, one of the key concepts that I had before the trip to Beihai Park was that the Park would be a peaceful place, and visitors would be calm after visiting the destination. Furthermore, before the trip, I was also speculating that there would be a food extravaganza at Beihai Park. Overall, my expectation associated with the Beihai Park was wholesome as I thought the place would be fun, exciting, and a pretty healthy natural environment and my perceptions regarding the people were that hosts would be welcoming and the fellow tourist would be joyful, and happy.

Moreover, another crucial aspect of our visit was the online experience that convinced us to visit the place. Firstly, talking about the details, information and data available on the park, it can be identified that there was sizeable information regarding the Beihai Park on several different online websites. Moreover, the information was rich and detailed which helped in planning which was suitable for us. Secondly, the website of Beihai Park was also well developed, designed with rich information regarding several different buildings, and structures inside the park, which allowed the visitors to understand the core message, history, and concepts behind each one of them and identify which are the most crucial for a visitor. However, a downside was that the information regarding customer services was not quite adequate, although, the information regarding different services was available in abundance, the quality and management of these services was not discussed which left me and maybe many other visitors in doubt.

A major flaw was that there were many private trip advisors and agencies, which provided these details, which cannot be completely trusted, because the sources were private and they have interests in our trip, which can be a reason behind manipulated and false information regarding customer services to attract customers. From an online search, it was pretty evident that the hosts to the visitors, which include the local community around the Beihai Park were welcoming to the visitors as they embraced foreign people coming and getting close to their culture. It was also clear that the local community stood against any kind of discrimination, which we observed during our trip as none of us became a victim of religious, ethnic, or gender discrimination etc. Moreover, I observed that if any kind of discrimination is shown from the foreigners the local community detested that act and tried to stand up for the victim. From the latest studies, it can be identified that the Chinese government is putting a lot of emphasis on the tourism and development section of the country. I observed that tourism and development strategies used by the Chinese government for attracting more tourists. For example, in 2000, Beijing gained many foreign investments and the numbers increased to around 80 per cent from the previous year. The foreign brands and different local developments in transport and accommodation were some of the most crucial factors that attracted me as these brands, and facilities were pretty helpful for me during my tour and according to my observation, many tourists felt the same.

Based on personal experience, organisations operating in the Beihai Park can initiate events at the park to attract a larger crowd. These events can mostly be related to the historic and cultural aspects of Chinese culture. However, in Beihai Park, no organisation organises any event and I witnessed it. This indicates that organising events is not one of the primary strategies of Beihai Park, which is a shame because if there would be events organised in the Beihai Park the, number of visitors would significantly increase; thereby increasing the sales and profits of the Park. It can be argued that the destinations are a good place for corporate meetings, and incentive travelling. Although there are no exclusive facilities provided for these kinds of meetings, yet the standards facilities provided are enough to accommodate a large of group people who have come for a corporate meeting or incentive travelling. Moreover, the restrooms of different varieties can also be utilised for these people to take rest and relieve stress.

The environmental factors that I witnessed pre-visit and during the visit were that the Beihai park is full of adventure, and livelihood and believed it was even better at the park, when I saw it from my own eyes. There was very less pollution in the air, and it was fresh and pure in such a way that it was a joy to breathe. Moreover, it was evident that the management has put a lot of work into the infrastructure and the pathways, structures, and buildings were built in an immaculate way and old-fashion, yet fascinating designs and also maintained pretty well. Furthermore, the place was a heaven for someone who likes to connect with the culture and arts of civilisation. Almost every structure or building I visited, there were sculptures, items, art pieces, and drawings that shed light on the rich history of the Forbidden City at the time of different Emperors. Moreover, every building carried a message within itself, which conveyed to the visitors once they take a deep look and surf through those buildings.

When it comes to tourist infrastructure and transport system for Beihai Park, it can be reflected that there are some positives and some negatives aspects. Firstly, what I experienced was that the accommodation was adequate and accessible, but the price was relatively higher, yet the quality was good enough in the 3-4 star hotels. However, if someone wants to go for luxury accommodation, the prices are drastically higher, which is a downside. Moreover, if the transport system is considered, it is evident that the public transport is available, but the time it takes to reach the park from key areas of the city is long, and according to Sharpley (2009), this long travel time duration frustrates the visitors. I preferred taxi over the public transport of Beijing because the fares were not extraordinarily high and the time consumed reduced drastically.

Although, there are quite a few negative impacts of tourism on the Beijing city for example contribution to pollution, traffic, and disturbance in the eco-system and some of these are pretty hard to control (Boniface, 2021) However, the efforts of the government to reduce these effects are commendable. Firstly, there are bike-sharing systems, which contribute to a reduction in pollution and traffic, as a bicycle does not produce pollution and do not cover much space on the rods (Ruan et al., 2020). Moreover, the online house rentals services allow tourist to reduce the efforts in finding adequate houses for rent and book them easily when they want (Ruan et al., 2020). Throughout the trip, what I experienced was that both inside and outside the Beihai Park, the use of efficient machines were preferred and encouraged and the low-carbon emission technologies were utilised to carry out several practices which contributed to the reduction of pollution through access activities from tourists.

There some pretty adequate visitors’ facilities all over Beijing, which helps the tourists in navigating their way around the city with efficiency, in addition to the provision of details regarding common tourists’ spots. Although Beijing is a technologically advanced city; however the destination of Beihai Park presented a very detailed interpretation of Chinese history and culture, so it cannot be denied that the city is developed in terms of science and technology, yet there are destinations like Beihai Park which allows the tourists to get attracted towards authentic historical developments and Chinese cultural history. Visitor management was another key aspect of Beihai Park. The visitors are first made to uniformly pass the check-in at the gates to ensure that they have tickets etc. Moreover, there are guide groups for the international visitors yet due to enough information available on the internet and from the Beihai Park enquiry counters, most people opt to visit personally without a guide and explore the destination. I also preferred the personal touring option as it allowed me to go wherever I wanted at any time, rather than being bound to move in a pack and report at certain places to ensure the group is still intact. Personally, I observed no particular sustainability issues around the tour to the whole Beihai Park and I found everything I wanted at the right place with great ease.

However, one particular issue that I and many other tourists faced was that sometimes due to the language barrier, visitors are unable to explain their requirements to local business personnel or Beihai Park workers. Moreover, the accommodations for tourists were pretty encouraging in my opinion. For example, the hotel in which I stayed, there were comfortable rooms with good quality beds. Moreover, the place looked immaculate with great room service. The food was also pretty good, and the hotel allowed the tourists to play indoor games in their facility. All these factors contributed to increasing motivation in the tourist to travel more as they felt relaxed and pleased with their accommodation (Golden-Romero, 2007). There are three major types of accommodation near Beihai Park. Firstly there are small hotels which people use for only sleeping purposes and these hotels are good enough for visitors to stay for the night eat and go out (Jones et al., 2016).

Moving forward there are a bit more luxurious hotels with better facilities and more spacious rooms. At the highest level, there are 5 or 7-star hotels with top-notch services and rooms and a large area for the guest to move around. It can be identified that these hotels provide customers with almost everything they desire during their stay (Clarke and Chen, 2009). It is quite oblivious that the prices also increase with luxury. Although Beihai Park is doing pretty good at the moment yet some of the key challenges that the Park is facing and can face in the future are that firstly after a certain time people can get bore of the place if they visit it more than 3 or 4 times as they will get to know every part of the place. This happens due to a lack of interactive events and festivals at the destination (Van der Wagen, 2010). Moreover, the language barrier also plays a big role in de-motivating visitors to participate in certain activities because it feels awkward to be unable to understand and make others understand the language. Another key challenge is that the use of public transport is pretty hectic for tourist as the time taken to reach the destination is pretty high. An exclusive transport service for Beihai Park can help to resolve or eradicate this issue.

References

Boniface, B., 2021. Worldwide_Destinatination.

Clarke, A. and Chen, W., 2009. International hospitality management. Routledge.

Golden-Romero, P., 2007. Hotel convention sales, services and operations. Routledge.

Jones, P., Hillier, D. and Comfort, D., 2016. Sustainability in the hospitality industry. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.

Liu, K. and Ma, J., 2016. 3D-Scanning and Computer Reverse Engineering Technology to Preserve Inscriptions at Beihai Park. International Journal of Simulation: Systems, Science and Technology, 17, pp.38-1.

QIN, H., 2015. Restoration of Plant Landscapes in the Building Complex of Chanfu Temple and Wanfo Tower in Beihai Park. Journal of Landscape Research, 7(3).

Ruan, W., Kang, S. and Song, H., 2020. Applying protection motivation theory to understand international tourists’ behavioural intentions under the threat of air pollution: A case of Beijing, China. Current Issues in Tourism, 23(16), pp.2027-2041.

Sharpley, R., 2009. Tourism development and the environment: Beyond sustainability?. Earthscan.

Shuai, Z.H.A.N.G. and Xiong, L.I., 2012. Appreciation of the landscape gardening art of Beihai Park. Journal of Hunan Agricultural University (Natural Sciences), p.S1.

Van der Wagen, L., 2010. Event management. Pearson Higher Education AU.

Williams, S. and Lew, A.A., 2014. Tourism geography: Critical understandings of place, space and experience. Routledge

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wandabherrera · 4 years ago

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10 Reasons For Making Dubai Your Home

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maddalenafragnito · 4 years ago

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Emergency Kit to take with you in case of sudden restart of the art system in the post-pandemic world.

How are we? Good, not really, no.

On Monday June 15th, theaters and performative art centers are reopening. At all costs? At what cost? Restart, sure but how? To be honest, we never really stopped producing artistic matters, be it for entertainment, or for depth, or pure narcissistic pleasure—always in 2D. Now that the carbon got back to feed the engine and everything will go back as before, I can imagine that some will be sitting in first class, some in the second whilst some others will keep running behind.

If before, 10 were working out of 100, now we will be even fewer: who’s alone on stage? Who has the most flexible format? Who’s got a name? Surely those who will be able to adapt their labor. And the rest? What will happen to them without any public fund nor income measures?

So well, no. No to labor at all costs, no to making without conditions. At least I’d like to say no if others have no choice, if many remain unheard. I’d like to say no, but I don’t wish to be alone.

The virus is a body entangled with other (non-)human bodies—it teaches me that to speak of it in corporative terms is not useful at all. Art labor is not an exception, it is not better than others, it doesn’t deserve more. I’d rather have no rights nor recognition, when they’re founded on exclusivity—we need no professional register nor sectorial categories.

The pandemic has triggered the most-ever visible crisis of care and all of a sudden, all reproduction labors have become indispensable: who takes care of the bodies of others; who delivers food at home, by bike, at the supermarket, in warehouses; who teaches; who takes care of children; who writes; who takes care of the household; invisible labor—the social, the sexual and the relational labor.

The art world is not another world.

Image description: at the center, the sentence “The art world is NOt another world.” The NO is purposely placed at the center of the image, and is bigger than any other words. The first two letters are of the word NON are bigger so to have NO stemming out. The word ART appears over the word NO, while the rest of the sentence continues below, to the right. The sentence is written in black caps lock. On the background, in pastel color, shades of pink, green, blue and violet.

It is not a world apart, we wouldn’t understand much, if we would remain aside, we would get nothing. What do you do for living? Only the artist? I work as interpreter, I do my own projects, I lead workshops, I do projects in schools and educational activities, I translate, I write, I work in a cafe, in a restaurant, for a catering company, I play music, I am a graphic designer, I am a waiter, a babysitter, a researcher, a technician. I am an artist too. Maybe the time has come for these worlds to rejoin. The time has come for a feminist eco-politics of the arts: the economy of those who make art is a composite economy—instead of hiding it, it could be the occasion to build alliances among ecosystems.

I wish that residencies and productions’ budgets in open calls and networks would be invested in research, because we don’t know anything about this time and if we don’t practice and go through it, we will be moving further and further away from the rest of the world. I wish this time would be invested into paid training for the whole technical compartment. Artistic production moves at slow pace—and might wish to be slower, so the market should respect this pace without imposing its own. Since we’re changing the theatre set up, removing seats and doing extensive disinfestations, why not to profit of this time to get the infrastructure up to security and accessibility standards to welcome all workers?

Image description: at the top right, the sentence “My performance is a performance, my life NO.” The sentence is written in black caps lock. The word “No” is bigger than the other. On the background, in pastel color, shades of pink, green, blue and violet.

I wish this restart to be conceived not simply for able bodies, but for all those who needs some other caution and pace, for their body and mind. In the (post-)pandemic not all of us are as exposed and vulnerable, and asymmetries and inequalities become deeper: women, trans, non-binary, non-white, racialized, disable, “unhealthy” bodies don’t have an equal exposure as others.

I also wish that we could think not just about the athletic public, but about the public made of those who today can’t leave their house, and neither won’t they after June 15th. Whom are we performing for? Do we really want only privileged people to witness our work? Speaking of privilege, I cannot ignore the lack of access, inclusion and relation for black and racialized workers within the theatre, dance and performing art worlds in Italy today. I’ll keep on talking about it.

Always, and now more than ever, I’d prefer not to give my availability, my time, my economy, my ethical and political positioning, my health conditions for granted, without concern first. I’d prefer not to be involved into projects with a subtle blackmailing of urgency—please I don’t know what else to do, sorry it wasn’t planned, if you say no I’m in trouble—giving me no space for any arbitrary choice. I’d prefer not to fill in a form for an open call “compatible to the context caused by the conditions of the Covid-19 emergency,” because we can always make something up and we had that idea in mind already.

Image description: at the right bottom the sentence “To visibility as compensation. NO.” The sentence is written in black caps lock. The word “No” is bigger than the other. On the background, in pastel color, shades of green, lilac and violet.

I’d rather focus on research and rehearsal, this year. Will all the theaters, the festivals, the research production and residency platforms, the closest—formal and informal—cultural institutions be able to afford this all? Will they be able to take care of each and everyone of us? Will they be able to take care of the whole production chain, of its inequalities, of the interrupted shows, of the cancellations, of the shows we couldn’t rehearse although they were scheduled, of the precarious pregnancy leaves in the post-pandemic world, of our unpaid rents, of our uncertainty towards the future, of the most fragile and exposed bodies, of the most vulnerable and marginalized bodies, of the most peripheral theatre companies?

We need income measures, we need to open, to move, to widen for each and everyone of us the boundaries of a welfare that’s too tight. We need practices of mutualism, because precarity, intermittence and blackmailing will grow more and more violent and exclusive in the post-pandemic crisis. We want art and culture to be public. We want the right to an income for all the unpaid labor we’re already doing, and we always did: we are not in debt, we’ve never been.

So shall we start over at all costs and pretend nothing has happened?

ON WALLS + article

Well, no. I’d rather not.

ITA

INSTA

#project #IlCampoInnocente #art #ArtForUbi #basicIncome #NO #text #collectiveproject

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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How Uber Turned a Promising Bikeshare Company Into Literal Garbage

One morning at the end of May, Mark Miretsky awoke in his San Francisco apartment and groggily browsed his phone. There was no rush to get up. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been laid off from his job at the bikeshare company JUMP, which was owned by Uber, along with hundreds of other people.

While still lazing in bed, he opened the Slack with more than 400 of JUMP’s laid off staff, and he saw something that hurt him even more than the layoffs. The JUMP bikes were being destroyed by the thousands and someone was posting videos of it on Twitter.

At first, Miretsky couldn’t bring himself to watch. He spent eight years of his life, often working 100-hour weeks to the point of nauseous exhaustion, to get people to ride those bikes. He did this because he believed in bicycles, and that they are worth riding.

Miretsky's family left the Soviet Union while his mother was pregnant with him. They briefly lived in Italy but couldn’t afford any mode of transportation other than a single bike. His dad pedaled, his mom rode side saddle on the rear rack, and his brother, just a toddler at the time, sat in the basket. Miretsky grew up hearing these stories, and even if he didn’t realize it at the time, he said it taught him bicycles are the cheapest, most efficient, and equitable way to get around. He would end up spending most of his adult life working with bicycles, caring about them so much he can’t even bring himself to get rid of any of his seven bikes.

In one of the videos, viewers can hear the claw crunching the frames and baskets while lifting the JUMP bikes. That was enough. Miretsky didn’t need to watch a second time.

“It kind of crushes one’s heart,” Miretsky said. He had difficulty putting into words exactly how he felt, but repeated what one of his former coworkers told him. To the die-hard bike enthusiasts who worked at JUMP, destroying bikes is like burning books. “To me, and to many of us [who worked at JUMP] the bike is not an object to a means of a business. It has a soul.”

Few, if any, of JUMP’s former employees were shocked by the videos. To some, it even felt a fitting, if upsetting, coda to a troubled two years under Uber’s stewardship.

Motherboard spoke to a dozen former JUMP employees about their time at the company, most under the condition of anonymity because they signed non-disclosure agreements in order to receive severance and extended health care during a global pandemic. Former JUMP employees who agreed to speak on the record did so under the condition they not talk about the time the company was owned by Uber. They described remarkably similar experiences, in which JUMP, a previously thrifty company, with a culture that had a deep commitment to a shared sense of purpose gave way to Uber’s scale-obsessed model. The early promises of bikeshare for the world and replacing ridehail trips with bike journeys only partially materialized, but it came with unsustainable inefficiencies and waste. Uber bought JUMP in 2018 and two years later sold it to Lime, a changed and broken company. To these employees, the literal destruction of the bikes was a metaphor for the destruction of the operation they’d worked so hard to build.

Uber’s unrelenting pursuit of scale created all sorts of problems for those working on the bikeshare systems on the ground. In cities with high rates of theft or vandalism, the same people hired to retrieve, charge, and fix bikes were also responsible for recovering stolen ones, an occasionally dicey proposition. To address this, Uber hired private security teams, which three employees referred to as “hired goons,” to assist in getting the stolen bikes back. One employee from Providence, Rhode Island described a scene in which one “hired goon” wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying handcuffs and pepper spray “tackled” a black teenage girl riding a JUMP bike. The employee said it was something he would “never forget” and that “the optics didn’t look good, as people would say.” An Uber spokesperson said the company has no records of such an incident taking place and this account is “wholly inaccurate” because JUMP technicians and the security teams accompanying them were instructed not to forcibly remove anyone from the bikes or “engage in aggressive behavior.”

While hardly typical of JUMP’s operations, the incident—which occurred last year during a rash of thefts enabled by a faulty bike lock design—exemplifies just how far the company strayed from its original mission of getting people of all walks of life onto bikes. JUMP used to be a company that held countless community meetings in low-income neighborhoods prior to launching in a new city to make sure they were addressing everyone’s needs and offered low-income residents virtually unlimited biking for just a few dollars per month.

But JUMP’s rise and fall is not just about Uber—which only owned the company for two out of its 10 years of existence—or even just about bikeshare. It's about the role cities play in determining their futures, how much of that role has been usurped by a handful of people with a lot of money, and the perils of trying to be the good guy.

Even with everything that’s happened, many former JUMP employees still think selling the company to Uber was the right decision. Had it not, one former employee told Motherboard, “the company might have saved its soul, but died much younger.”

Ryan Rzepecki became a cycling evangelist when he borrowed his roommate’s bike one summer day in 2005 while living in New York City's East Village. It made getting around the city so much easier and more pleasant, even though at the time New York didn’t have anything resembling safe bike infrastructure.

On a trip to Paris, Rzepecki came across the Velib bikeshare system. Although Velib has had its problems, to Rzepecki’s eyes it was a marvel: tens of thousands of bikes for Parisians to use for a very small fee. No worrying about locking the bike, storing it, maintenance, or repairs. Just unlock it, ride it, dock it, and be on your way.

But Rzepecki had an idea for a different kind of bikeshare system. He wanted one without docks, where people could begin and end their rides anywhere they like. He thought this would be the key to unlocking cycling for the masses. In 2010, he started Social Bicycles.

The original business model of Social Bicycles (SoBi) was different from the one it would adopt after re-branding as JUMP eight years later. Instead of going directly to people, it sold its proprietary bikes and docking stations to cities, who would then contract with another third party to operate the bikeshare system.

The key to this model was SoBi’s quasi-docked model, in which every bike had a GPS unit and a built-in lock. Riders had to lock the bike to something, and were encouraged to lock the bikes to SoBi’s docking stations, but could use regular bike racks if they wanted.

“It’s probably good I didn’t have a technical background,” Rzepecki told Motherboard, “because if I knew how hard it would be I probably never would have attempted it.” It was not a simple or easy business. Back then, cities would put out Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that announced they were interested in a bikeshare system, triggering a two-year process that, if all went well, resulted in a bikeshare system. The RFP process ensured a deep partnership with the city that would minimize long-term uncertainty or community outrage over bike rack locations. For both SoBi and the cities in which they worked, this trade-off was worth it, because they were in it for the long haul.

SoBi hired urban planners to help cities with the expense of figuring out where new bike racks should go. This involved not only painstakingly drawing architectural renderings for hundreds of bike racks, but presenting those drawings to local community groups to hear their feedback. As a general rule, they drew up plans for about three times as many racks as they would ultimately install, knowing local community groups tended to reject about two-thirds of them.

While this approach to a bikeshare system was complicated, time-consuming, and expensive, Rzepecki and his early team thought it was the best way to forge the kind of relationships between the city government, local bike advocates, and casual riders to allow bikesharing to thrive in the long run.

Likewise, Rzepecki wanted SoBi’s bikes to be comfortable and fun to ride. They debated the merits of certain bolts over others, the size of the baskets, and the best distance between the handlebars for the most comfortable ride for the most people. SoBi’s designer, Nick Foley, and the other designers not only took into account the rider experience, but also that of the mechanics charged with fixing and maintaining the bikes. They standardized parts, reduced the number of different bolts and screws as much as possible, and put thought into how to make flat tires easy to replace. The bikes were not to be disposable objects, but permanent, rideable street art.

“Ryan’s goal was the bicycle comes first,” another former employee told Motherboard. “He brings that kind of attitude, that I want to make my city better.”

All that attention to detail notwithstanding, in the early days SoBi’s technology barely worked. One of its first clients in 2012, the San Francisco International Airport, wanted a bikeshare program for employees to use during their lunch breaks. But the bikes barely worked. Miretsky remembers having to run around the airport to reboot the bikes’ onboard computers, which he described as “super 1.0 early beta technology that wasn’t working” in which the GPS and computer unit was attached to the bike with velcro.

There wasn’t very much money in the bikeshare world then. The company was operating hand-to-mouth, people were forgoing paychecks some weeks, and everyone was working on shoestring budgets. One employee recalled the “SoBi flop houses” where six of them would live in a two-bedroom Airbnb to save on costs. The unlucky ones who didn’t get a bedroom would sleep on the floor; more than one former SoBi employee recommended if I ever find myself in a similar situation, I snag the space under the dining room table so that anyone getting up in the middle of the night doesn’t step on me.

With this shared sacrifice came shared responsibility. The company structure was remarkably flat. Once a month, everyone would get on a call and make decisions together by consensus. People’s titles only vaguely aligned with their actual jobs. “Things got done because everyone wanted them to get done, not because someone was assigning them or there were super-clear expectations,” one employee described it. “You just went to wherever you could supply the most-needed help.”

Over time, SoBi worked out the kinks, and each contract got slightly bigger than the last. Its big breakout came in 2016, when 1,000 of its bikes launched in Portland’s Biketown program, sponsored by Nike. It was the company's biggest launch to date and also its most successful. It was also the first year SoBi was profitable. Things were looking up, until the people at SoBi started hearing about these bikeshare companies out of China.

“Here’s where the story changes,” Rzepecki said. “Just as we were figuring out how to do bikeshare and make it work, the entire landscape changed.”

Up to that point, the bikeshare world was a small one, an industry of government contractors and their suppliers. Companies couldn’t be neatly divided between partners and competitors. Social Bicycles sold its hardware to Motivate, which operates the biggest docked bikeshare systems around the country, to operate Biketown, even though SoBi and Motivate would compete for contracts elsewhere (to complicate the dynamic, Motivate was purchased by Lyft around the same time JUMP was bought by Uber). It was a small world, in part because it had to be; there wasn’t enough money in bikeshare to make it any bigger.

Which is why when two Beijing-based bikeshare firms, Ofo and Mobike, expanded to the United States right around the same time Biketown launched, it blew up everything the bikeshare world had known.

Rather than work closely with cities over years, Ofo and Mobike parachuted in, got permission to launch a bike share by shoveling money at cities, and then did it. They also introduced a fully dockless model known as “free lock,” in which riders didn’t have to lock their bikes to anything after finishing a ride. They could leave them wherever they wanted, including in the middle of sidewalks and strewn across lawns.

“At least initially, there was this hint of hope that this big dumb app company was actually helping push us towards a more sustainable transportation ecosystem.”

This went against everything SoBi believed in. It not only was a short-sighted strategy that was sure to create conflict with city officials and communities—the very people SoBi felt were integral to any bikeshare systems’s success—but it sent the wrong message about the bikes themselves.

“Freelocking turns the vehicles into trash and blocks the sidewalk,” one former JUMP employee said, “which is both bad for business and bad for cities.” It turns bikes into obstacles for people with mobility issues, the exact opposite of what bikes are supposed to be. And it sends the message that the bikes are disposable, have little value, and belong to no one.

But it was not the free lock element of the Ofo and MoBike model that changed everything, at least not directly. Without the need to go through the lengthy RFP process or site docks, Ofo, Mobike, and their countless imitators could grow as quickly as their bank accounts permitted. It was catnip for the type of venture capital investors who love exponential growth charts.

Suddenly, dockless bikeshare became the trendy investment. From October 2016 through July 2017, Ofo raised $1.28 billion in two funding rounds, according to Crunchbase. Mobike raised more than $800 million. In October 2017, the newly-founded Lime (then called LimeBike) raised $50 million. To Social Bicycles, this was an unimaginable amount of money. Up to 2016, SoBi had raised only a few million dollars.

“It became a feeling of there is no way we can succeed anymore,” Miretsky said. “We were playing checkers and it suddenly became chess.”

“They would go into markets we were just in with RFPs and said ‘we’ll pay you. How many bikes do you need? We’ll give you more,’” Miretsky recalled. “Cities said well great, this is no longer a problem for us to solve, the business community has solved it.”

Almost overnight, Rzepecki said SoBi lost 25 percent of its revenue. For sexy startups like Mobike and Ofo, a 25 percent revenue drop would be a tough pill to swallow. For SoBi, it was poison. Thanks to overseas investors flooding the market with cheap bikes, the time of working closely with cities to build a sustainable bikeshare system was over. The RFP approach, everything SoBi had built its business around, was dead.

SoBi pivoted to be a permit-based dockless bikeshare company like the others. But it resisted what it viewed as an ideological non-starter and it did not succumb to the free lock model. Just as in the SoBi days, riders would still have to end the ride by locking the bike to something.

Moreover, SoBi didn’t need to compromise on its deeper philosophy because Rzepecki had an ace up his sleeve. For two years, SoBi had been secretly developing an electric bike, where a battery-powered motor helps the rider pedal, making bike riding an effortless endeavor even up the steepest of hills and longest of distances. Former employees credited Rzepecki and Foley for having the foresight to know the entire industry would eventually shift to e-bikes, and the only way JUMP could survive was to get there first. And it did.

In the summer of 2017, as JUMP was looking for investors to stay afloat, Uber invited two JUMP employees in to demonstrate the e-bike, sparking conflicted feelings among the JUMP staff. This was right at the height of an Uber public relations disaster, as its co-founder Travis Kalanick floundered in the days leading up to his resignation. At this stage, Uber was virtually synonymous with spoiled rich kids flouting laws and operating solely according to their own internal code. Among the JUMP staff, Uber was regarded as wasteful and environmentally irresponsible at best and downright evil at worst.

Some former employees believe JUMP ultimately took the meeting as an intelligence-gathering operation, others as an implicit admission of JUMP’s precarious condition despite the distasteful prospect of working with the company so many of them loathed.

In any case, two JUMP employees rode the e-bikes to Uber’s headquarters on Market Street, where Dmitry Shevelenko and Jahan Khanna, the duo behind Uber’s micromobility and transit expansion, took them for a test ride.

“This was like the first time using an iPhone.” Shevelenko told Motherboard. “It just feels magical.” He had demo’d other bikeshare e-bikes in recent months, but the JUMP bike was far superior. Instead of having a motor that kicked into gear providing an unwanted jolt, JUMP’s e-bikes sensed how hard a rider pedaled and increased the motor power to match what the rider is doing. It felt like a partnership between human and bike, not a human ceding total control to a machine. “It was almost like a superpower,” Shevelenko recalled, “like this bike is connected to your body.”

Shevelenko and Khanna viewed the e-bike as a perfect complement to Uber’s ridehailing business. Insofar as it would cannibalize Uber trips, it would be shorter city trips that weren’t profitable anyways. The e-bike would not only be cheaper for riders, but also quicker during rush hours in the dense urban areas where Uber is most popular. And Uber wanted JUMP’s superior product. Shevelenko figured JUMP had a year’s head start on every other dockless e-bike. Paired with Uber’s resources, they thought it would be hard for anyone else to catch up.

Image: CHESNOT/GETTY IMAGES

After some brief negotiating, the companies initially formed a partnership and Uber connected JUMP with the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures to keep the company afloat. Starting in January 2018, SoBi officially rebranded as JUMP and its bikes would be shown as a rental option in the Uber app. Four months later, Uber acquired JUMP for close to $200 million.

It was, undoubtedly, an odd pair, not just in mission but in corporate culture. Many of JUMP’s staff were self-described hippies, a far cry from Uber’s bro culture and no-holds-barred approach to business. But, the acquisition made sense as one between two companies struggling to figure out what they were doing at a time when the old way was no longer going to cut it. Uber had to clean up its act and put on a good face for investors in a run up to a public offering, while JUMP had to find a model that worked in the dockless world of VC capital.

On a personal level, eight years of bikeshare startup life had taken its toll on Rzepecki and the original SoBi crew. To illustrate the point, Miretsky said that when he visited the New York office where Rzepecki was based, he had stopped buying breakfast, because he knew Rzepecki would take two bites of a breakfast sandwich, vomit it up from nerves, and then give Miretsky the rest of the sandwich.

When asked about this, Rzepecki confirmed his stress manifested with various physical symptoms around that time, and that “2017 was particularly hard.”

“I think it’s really on the right course now and [Uber’s then-new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi] believes the way we approach working with cities and our vision for partnering with cities” aligns with Uber’s mission, Rzepecki told TechCrunch when the acquisition was announced. “That was important for me and his desire to do things the right way. This is a great outcome and gives me a chance to bring my entire vision to the entire world.”

“At least initially, there was this hint of hope that this big dumb app company was actually helping push us towards a more sustainable transportation ecosystem,” a former JUMP employee said. “And then they fucked it up.”

Accounts differ on precisely how long it took Uber to undermine everything JUMP had previously been about. Some former employees said it happened virtually immediately. Others described a more gradual process that took a few weeks. But they unanimously agreed it didn’t take long at all for JUMP to stop being JUMP.

Not only were JUMP employees no longer working on a shoestring budget, they barely had any budgets at all. Sleeping under the dining room table gave way to $400 per night hotel rooms. Like the Ofos and MoBikes they long decried, JUMP was now buying as many bikes it could get its hands on.

For a split second, JUMP was “the hot new thing” at Uber, as one former employee put it. Khosrowshahi talked it up during company all-hands meetings and in the press. He came to the warehouse where JUMP built new prototypes.

"During rush hour, it is very inefficient for a one-ton hulk of metal to take one person 10 blocks," Khosrowshahi said at the time. With JUMP, "we're able to shape behavior in a way that's a win for the user. It's a win for the city. Short-term financially, maybe it's not a win for us, but strategically, long term we think that is exactly where we want to head."

One of the first signs that the acquisition was not going as planned came just two months after the acquisition when Uber put longtime employee Rachael Holt in charge of the New Mobility unit. In one of her first meetings with the JUMP team, Holt made it very clear that she was in charge, as multiple employees recalled. This directly undermined what Rzepecki had publicly said when the acquisition was announced, that JUMP would remain independent of Uber. Now, the employees were being told that wasn’t the case. When asked about this reversal, an Uber spokesperson described Holt as “a longtime Uber executive with experience growing a mobility business.” Holt did not respond to a list of questions sent by Motherboard.

"There was also an awareness that this was no longer some private company, that it was fucking Uber now."

Holt brought an Uber 1.0 approach to bikeshare, one that mimicked what companies like MoBike and Ofo were doing (MoBike co-founder Wang Xiaofeng had previously been general manager of Uber’s Shanghai operations). They flooded the streets with bikes under the philosophy that any second a bike is not on the street, it's losing money. They expanded to new markets and hired so many people so fast some employees spent half their time in hiring meetings and prospective employee interviews. Teams doubled or tripled in size within months, only to find they were now overstaffed. Bike mechanics at the main warehouse would have thousands of bikes to build that were just delivered from China, but local mechanics in the cities where JUMP operated didn’t have spare parts to fix the bikes on the street.

In other words, JUMP employees felt Uber was applying a software business mentality to bikeshare. It was, to JUMP’s longtime employees, a fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of business they were in. Uber was running JUMP with the mindset that anything that’s broken can be patched, but, as one employee put it, “a firmware update can’t fix a bike chain.”

“Like any startup (whether inside of Uber or out), JUMP’s early days can be characterized as scrappy,” an Uber spokesperson said. “JUMP was scaling very quickly. When we bought JUMP they were a very small company with a fleet of only 500 e-bikes in San Francisco. When we merged with Lime a few weeks ago, we had tens of thousands of e-bikes and scooters in 30 cities around the world.”

Otherwise an impressive feat of engineering, the bikes JUMP released in early 2019 under Uber had one critical flaw. JUMP replaced the sturdy if bulky U-lock with a cable lock in order to make the bikes easier to secure. But the cable lock wasn’t robust. It was a critical oversight, one that highlighted how far JUMP had strayed from its roots, since any New York City bicyclist knows a cable lock is an open invitation for theft. All someone had to do was flip the 75-pound bike over and the cable would snap under its own momentum (there was also a method using a hammer that took more finesse). With a few well-placed blows, thieves could easily disable the GPS unit and be on their way with a (very heavy) bike.

While every city experienced some degree of theft, Providence, Rhode Island experienced among the most because, for whatever reason, stealing JUMP bikes became a form of sport for the city’s teens.

“We didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem until it was too late,” one former JUMP employee familiar with the situation told Motherboard. “Hundreds and hundreds of bikes were getting stolen.”

In emails obtained by the Providence Journal, JUMP’s operations manager in Providence, Alex Kreuger, told the city that, in one weekend in July 2019, 150-200 bikes were vandalized out of a fleet of about 1,000 bikes.

“Someone brandished a gun on a field tech, kids tried to steal bikes directly from our warehouse, riders reported attempts by people to steal the bike as they were riding them,” Kreuger wrote.

In another instance, according to a source, an employee trying to retrieve a bike reportedly had to wield a broken kickstand to fend off some kids swinging a 2×4 at him.

In the fall, Uber hired a private security firm to ride along with the field technicians in order to retrieve the stolen bikes. This didn’t strike any of the employees as especially odd, since none of them had signed up to be fighting kids in the streets. One field tech who spoke to Motherboard estimated that "five to 10" instances resulted in private security workers physically restraining people while the bikes were being recovered, as was the case with the bulletproof vest-clad rent-a-cop tackling a kid riding a bike.

Among other things, the vandalism made it impossible for JUMP to have 90 percent of its bikes on the street at all times, as its contract with the city required. Sometimes, one former employee said, they’d have fewer than 300 bikes, or less than 30 percent of the fleet, on the street.

In August, JUMP pulled its bikes off the streets of Providence for what it claimed was a temporary period, but the bikes never returned. In October, the field technicians, who had ridden around with the security guys for weeks, received an email at the end of their shift telling them not to bother coming in anymore; they were all fired. The security guys got an email at the end of the shift, too; their new job was to take over bike retrieval, but their first order of business was to escort the field technicians out of the building.

At least one former Providence employee thinks the vandalism could not be disconnected from the Uber acquisition.

“There was also an awareness that this was no longer some private company, that it was fucking Uber now,” they told Motherboard. “This is owned by a corporation that doesn’t care about bettering anyone’s fucking community or whatever, so people saw an opportunity there.”

Whether or not that was the case, JUMP had bigger problems than just Providence, and Uber had bigger problems than just JUMP. After breakneck growth and an IPO in the spring of 2019, Uber was under more pressure than ever to show it could be profitable. And thanks to its growth-at-all costs approach to bikeshare, JUMP was leaking cash.

But it wasn’t the financial losses that bothered JUMP employees the most. It was the gradual erosion of everything that got them to sacrifice so much for the company in the first place. Morale tanked as people slowly noticed they were busting their asses to hit growth metrics. The joy of cycling and creating a community good was not only secondary to that, it was becoming a memory.

“We went from putting 45-pound steel plates with 35-pound racks down on street corners where we had paid surveyors to stand and count people riding and locking bikes and working very closely with municipal transportation services, universities, and community groups, to, from what I understand, basically offering cities as much money as they needed to launch as quickly as possible and putting as many bikes on the curb as quickly as possible wherever we could,” one former employee said. “That’s the same approach that Bird used for scooters, that Lime used for their bikes, and Ofo used for their bikes in Texas and got in so much trouble for. And that’s why they’re trash. And that’s why JUMP became trash.”

In September 2019, JUMP employees were transferred to a new entity called Sobi LLC, which some employees took as an indication they were being broken off for a sale. An Uber spokesperson said it was because “As JUMP grew its footprint, so did the need for more focused business support for day-to-day operations.”

Four months later, at the beginning of 2020, Rzepecki and a handful of other original Social Bicycle employees left. The following months would result in a cascading series of layoffs in which Uber let 25 percent of its staff go.

At the beginning of last month, The Information reported that Uber was leading a $170 million funding round in Lime in a deal that would involve transferring JUMP to them. This was news to the JUMP staff. In an all-hands call that day, Khosrowshahi refused to directly answer a question about JUMP’s future, which both irked and worried its employees. An Uber spokesperson said, as a public company, Khosrowshahi could not discuss the transaction before it finalized. The next day, Uber laid off nearly everyone at JUMP. Because it was in the middle of the pandemic, the laid off had one hour to say goodbye to their friends over Slack. Then their computers turned off.

Whatever comes of JUMP under Lime’s stewardship, it will be without the people who made JUMP what it was. Lime was founded in 2017 by two former venture capital executives who quickly bailed on bikes to hop onto the scooter fad. It even experimented with a carsharing service. Lime obtained the intellectual property rights for the newest versions of the JUMP bikes and scooters, but, as of now, none of the people who designed or built them.

The big question facing the bikeshare industry—and its scooter-share offshoots—is whether the business can ever be profitable. To date, the answer is no. Lime lost some $300 million last year while its major competitor, Bird—founded by a former Lyft and Uber executive—isn't faring much better. While 2020 doesn’t look poised to turn industry fortunes around due to the global pandemic, it is a testament to how poorly managed the micromobility industry has been that ceasing operations may, in fact, be a blessing in disguise for companies that haven’t figured out how to run a service without bleeding cash.

Unlike software, transportation is a deliberate business, sometimes painfully so. To tech executives, this appears to be a flaw, an inefficiency to disrupt. No doubt the RFP process and other regulations around the transportation industry can be improved, but there’s a reason transportation businesses move slowly. It costs too much to screw up, both in money and in reputation. Useful mass transportation doesn’t suddenly appear. It is carefully nurtured from a tiny seedling of a good idea to a fully-formed organism that breathes life into a city. It is a process that takes time and effort and patience as well as money.

For all their shortcomings, this is something the SoBi people knew well. It is also something Uber could never understand, because it has always rejected the premise that it’s in the transportation business. It’s been telling itself and regulators since its inception it is merely a business-to-business software application so it can skirt employment regulations that would force it to make all of its drivers employees. But that deception became so ingrained in company culture that it conducted itself as a software company even when it was purchasing and fixing bicycles by the tens of thousands. On the most basic level, it’s impossible to succeed when you don’t know what line of work you’re in.

On top of that, transportation companies have to work with the cities in which they operate whether they like it or not. To several of the employees Motherboard spoke to, this was the single biggest and most consequential culture shift after the acquisition. Whenever there was a problem with a city, Uber postured for a fight, which went against every instinct JUMP had.

“We wanted to work with [the cities] and build trust,” one former employee summarized. “Uber wanted to steamroll them.”

(“We disagree,” an Uber spokesman said. “JUMP worked diligently to address sidewalk riding and parking clutter through both operational changes and investing in innovative technology.”)

And the whole scheme was built on a faulty premise, that putting more and more bikes on the road in more and more cities would eventually result in profits, even though the company lost money on each ride. They imitated the strategy that MoBike and Ofo used to blow up the bikeshare industry—which itself imitated the strategy Uber used to become a global behemoth—because that’s what investors wanted to see.

But by the end of 2018, the very strategy JUMP would later imitate was clearly not working. MoBike was sold to Chinese neighborhood services company Meituan-Dianping and retreated from foreign markets (its European operations were spun off, so some MoBikes are still on the road there). In June of last year, a Chinese court found Ofo “has basically no assets,” according to Quartz, and couldn’t pay off its debts. Photos of mass bike graves of the erstwhile bikeshare boom went viral.

But the damage was done, because the perception of what bikeshare should be had been irrevocably altered. It was no longer a transportation business; it was a tech business, and everything that brought along with it.

Even at the time Ofo and MoBike were getting handed billions in cash, the JUMP people didn’t know what to think, because they were still thinking like bike people. “We didn't believe the unit economics worked,” Miretsky recalled, “Then we heard the companies said the unit economics worked, and we thought well they couldn't be lying, we wouldn't lie. And then it turned out later they were probably lying.”

After the videos of the bikes getting destroyed surfaced, several former JUMP employees wondered if there was something they could do to save as many bikes as they could. They asked that I not disclose who they were so as not to jeopardize the NDA they signed with Uber.

With some help from current Uber employees, they were able to save some. They will get donated to various groups and organizations. The Bike Share Museum in Florida got five, but an Uber spokesperson did not say who got the rest. But multiple sources told Motherboard that, in total, they saved 5,298 bikes. They each knew the exact number.

How Uber Turned a Promising Bikeshare Company Into Literal Garbage syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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whichmortgage · 4 years ago

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What's the point in an electric bike? After riding one for a few weeks, I think they are the best chance of getting us out of our cars, says SIMON LAMBERT

As I sailed past the bloke on a racing bike, I felt slightly guilty. I was heading uphill on a folding bike with BMX-sized wheels and barely breaking a sweat, meanwhile my lycra-clad fellow cyclist was puffing away to travel at a far slower pace. To ease my conscience, I gently let go of the button I’d been pressing to give me a turbo boost up the hill and went back to just the standard level of assistance the electric bike was giving me. This was in pre-lockdown days and I was commuting across London to work on GoCycle’s GX – a folding electric bike that over a few weeks managed to radically change my thoughts on battery-assisted pedalling. Until March, on average, I had cycled the eight miles from my home in North London to the This is Money offices in Kensington High Street, at least four out of the five days a week I went there, all-year round, for the last 14 years. I love riding a bike. Living in London and riding to work, it was a mode of transport that was more pleasurable than the tube. In my leisure time, I do it for fun. But I’m not that serious about it. I own no lycra, I’ve never been on a club ride and I do not have the Strava app on my phone. I’d also rather drop a couple of grand on an old car than a very expensive bike. Like many more serious-minded cyclists than me, however, I was of the opinion that if you’re going to ride a bike then you should do it under your own steam - and couldn’t quite see the point of choosing a heavy, expensive electric bicycle over a normal one. Nonetheless, when GoCycle asked if I fancied trying out one of their electric bikes over a few weeks, I thought why not. I imagined that I’d use it a few times to see what it was like and then stash it away somewhere until it was time to return it - going back to riding my normal bike in the meantime. That couldn’t have been further from what happened. I absolutely loved riding that electric folding bike and pretty much used it every day. I ended up borrowing it for longer than originally planned, and even took it up to Centre Parcs, in Suffolk, travelling there after work by a combination of train and bike. After three weeks of riding it, I was genuinely sad to give it back. So, what did I love about it and why do I think electric bikes could make a huge difference to the way we get about? Firstly, it’s worth noting that a GoCycle GX should be good, because it costs £2,899. That’s a lot of money. You can buy a decent car for that, including a bargain classic that probably won't lose money. However, it is also worth noting there are quite a few serious cyclists out there who wouldn’t consider the price tag that expensive for a good bike. Yet, they would also probably look at a GX and think that they won’t get much enjoyment out of riding that. It’s a folding bike, hinging in the middle, and while it looks considerably more space age than a Brompton, it’s got that gawky long saddle post and handle bar thing going on, which doesn’t shout nimble ride. And yet, somehow, the GX handles exceptionally well and is good fun to ride. A clue to why comes from the company founder Richard Thorpe, who left a design job at McLaren Cars to start-up the e-bike firm. The GX sacrifices some of the compactness of a Brompton, with 20 inch rather than 16 inch wheels, and a bulkier frame meaning that it doesn’t fold up as small. But design elements - incuding a deliberately longer wheelbase - mean it rides much better and is just as practical. You genuinely can fold it in ten seconds, releasing one clip allowing the frame to hinge and another the handlebar stem, and then attach a small rubber strap to hold it in place. You then flip it back and wheel it along using the saddle. Put it in a train carriage and it takes up not much more room than a Brompton, and the extra space is mainly above it where nothing would be anyway. It weighs 17.4 kilograms, enough to make your serious road cyclist wince, but that's only about 3kg more than my mountain bike - and so not that heavy. Plus, you've got that 250 watt electric motor helping you along, while the easiest way to move it about is to wheel it, and it's not too heavy to pick up to get through a door or onto a train. Out on the road, the bike can be set to give you three different levels of assistance up to 15.5mph, but you must be pedalling for the power to kick in, you cannot just use the throttle to move only on electric power. That top speed for assistance and no throttle-only riding are the law for electric bikes in the UK. All GX bikes can actually run in electric mode up to 20mph, but when you register it as a UK bike that's digitally downgraded to our 15.5mph. Folding electric bike alternatives Brompton sells an electric version of its hugely popular folding bikes, with range of up to 45 miles. The Brompton Electric costs from £2,595, whereas a standard Brompton costs from £900. Decathalon sells its B'Twin Tilt 500 electric folding bike for £749. Range is up to 22 miles. Halfords sells the Carrera Crosscity folding electric bike for £999, with range of up to 30 miles. Raleigh's Evo electric folding bike has a range of up to 30 miles and 20 inch wheels and costs £1,350. There are three gears on the bike and its a decent system, although I felt I could have done with a bit further for the gearing to go when riding flat out. There is a button that boosts the assistance, as I referred to at the start of this column, and you can go faster than 15.5mph if you want under your own pedal power. The range is up to 40 miles on a charge, which takes 7 hours or 4 hours with a fast charger. I found that even using it for 16 miles a day of battery-assisted cycling, I only needed to charge once or twice during the working week. The experience is like riding along with a strong wind at your back, or being a kid with your mum or dad riding alongside with their arm behind, helping you along. You’re still cycling, it’s just a lot easier. And this is where I think e-bikes could be a game-changer. They are unlikely ever to get the serious cyclists to swap to them, but that’s not the point. The e-bike is better suited to those who wouldn’t otherwise cycle – whether because they feel the journey is too long or hard, the hill is too steep, or they can’t turn up hot and sweaty. An electric bike removes those problems. If you get a folding one, whether at the top-end from GoCycle or considerably cheaper from some other manufacturers, including Decathalon’s £750 bike, it can remove the need to drive to work or the station, get on a packed tube, or even use public transport at all. At the same time, you have the flexibility to bung it in the car boot or take it on the train if you need. One of the good things about lockdown is that it has got people out of their cars and out walking and on their bikes. I'm no longer in London - we had sold our flat and moved before lockdown began - but I've never seen this many people out on bikes on the roads and country lanes in Hertfordshire, where I've moved back to where I grew up. Friends in London tell me it's the same in the capital and bike shops around Britain are reporting booming business. It would be great if we could continue that once life returns to whatever normal will be. Combine electric bikes with some newfound confidence from Britain getting back on its bike while the roads were quiet and we could have potent combination. A standard electric bike could easily replace the short regular car journeys that you do - and there is something about that assistance that means you are much more likely to decide it won't be a hassle going on two wheels and use it instead of the car. A folding electric bike - like any folding bike - is a compromise, but as I found with the GX they can be seriously good and a very handy companion for the commuter. You are still doing exercise too, so it's good for you, just with a bit less effort than you would with a normal bike - and you can always turn off the assistance to work out properly. What's lost in the electric assistance may even be gained overall, as people are more likely to get out on their bike and do some exercise. Meanwhile, if your employer does a cycle to work scheme, you can save up to 40 per cent of the purchase price with a tax break, as we explain here. The Cycle to Work Scheme allows you to buy a bike via your employer and then pay for it via salary sacrifice, saving on your tax bill. The purchase price limit was previously £1,000, but the latest government guidance lifted this for employers who agree to go higher. Is it too great a leap of imagination for the authorities to buy strips of land through the fields, to link villages and towns with direct, safe, off-road cycling and walking routes? We also need councils and the government to play their part. Off-road routes needed to be stepped up a gear in urban areas. But too often the focus is all on that and not on linking up villages and towns, where a huge amount of day-to-day car journeys could be replaced. Is it too great a leap of imagination for the authorities to buy strips of land through the fields, to link villages and towns with direct, safe, off-road cycling and walking routes? That would make a great green transport infrastructure push for the coronavirus recovery. An electric bike is possibly the best alternative to a car for many people making journeys of up to 10 miles. We should seize the moment and encourage the switch. Click here to view original web page at www.dailymail.co.uk Read the full article

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ridingirlsblog · 5 years ago

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Photoshoot of the Week: April 20th-26th 2020 - Ozzy & Honda CBR600RR

Although bikers may pride themselves on their glamorous, fast-moving image, many non-bikers have a less positive view about motorcycles and think they are a dirty, loud and aggressive presence on our roads. Besides when it comes to air pollution, motorcycles are deemed actually worse than cars. Is this really fair? The question of how much pollution a motorbike emits is not a simple one. Most people assume that bikes must emit less pollution per kilometre than cars simply because they are much lighter and therefore must consume less fuel. This is true in relation to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions - in general, urban/commuter-class bikes cause half the CO2 emissions of the average car. This is positive in terms of climate-change impact, as CO2 is a significant greenhouse gas. Where bikes score less favourably is in terms of ground-level pollution - and, therefore, direct impact on health - with their disproportionately higher emissions of hydrocarbons (HC), nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon monoxide (CO). The reason for this discrepancy is that motorbike engines are still far less advanced in terms of fuel efficiency than petrol-powered cars. Anyway technical innovation in the motorcycle industry has played a key role in progressively lowering vehicle emissions, especially in Europe. Since the introduction of the first standard for motorcycles and mopeds in 1999 (we have now reached the so called Euro 5 level), pollutant emissions have been drastically reduced. Combined emissions of HC and NOx have gone down by 96.6%, whilst carbon monoxide (CO) emissions have been reduced by 92.3%. Is that a good news? Yes, but I am well aware that much remains to be done to improve environmental performance of motorcycles. The next step will probably be crucial: the electric revolution! I truly hope it won’t take long for the promise of electric vehicles to takes over the automotive industry, and for motorcycle manufacturers, the revelation of innovative technologies, instantaneous power delivery and lightweight cells seems like too good of an opportunity to pass up. Anyway I'd like to remember one thing: even if all motorbikes will be zero-emission vehicles one day, this won't save us from the catastrphic climate change danger. The whole economic and industrial system is facing a critical challenge and has to shift towards clean energy transitions, but even that is not enough: we must preserve our environment and biodiversity, especially woods and forests, which are put at risk by agricultural expansion, cattle breeding, timber extraction, mining, oil extraction, dam construction and infrastructure development. Bikergirls surely do know that: just look at the Romanian tremendous motorgirl and Ozzy Zulum, aka the Ghost Rider, who never misses an opportunity to reconnect with wilderness, even after riding her Honda CBR600RR. As mother of twin girls, she thinks that nature is crucial for both children and adults: we need to spend more time unplugged and find ways to let nature balance our lives. So, if you're a biker, relax: it won't be that ride into the woods that will destroy our environment, it's the reckless disregard towards forest degradation emergency that is doing that. So, whether you are or are not a biker, are you ready to fight? Honda CBR 600RR *** Cheating on her Honda Bmw S1000RR There was a time when a lot of bikers wanted a 600cc sports bike, especially the Honda CBR 600RR. With a long history as the sole engine used in the MotoGP intermediate class (Moto2), the glorious return of a new model is set to happen next year with possibly the 2021 Honda CBR600RR-R! The new rumor circulating is that a Honda CBR600RR-R could be coming in 2021. The Japanese publication Young Machine was the first major publication to report on the rumor and then Asphalt & Rubber and some other publications picked up the story. Botn newspapers reported that this might be a possibility as Honda plans to launch a new middleweight sports bike model that complies with the Euro5 emission regulations. The CBR600RR hit a wall back in 2017 when Europe stopped selling them due to the bike’s not ranking up with the Euro4 regulations. This was then replaced with a more subdued and ‘road-friendly’ Honda CBR650R and its naked brethren, the CB650R. Designed more as a sport-tourer rather than a full-on track-eating 600cc machine, the CBR600RR seems to be put into storage as even the Moto2 folks moved on to the bigger 765cc Triumph-powered inline-three engine. It’s somewhat true that the 600cc sports bike category is slowly have been losing popularity over the years but Honda might just have something that may reignite this particular category with the 2021 Honda CBR600RR-R. Based on its bigger and very powerful 1000cc sibling, the CBR1000RR-R, it’s a good prospect to have. Price and specs are the key points that may affect the overall outcome of this new and possibly upcoming Honda middleweight crotch rocket (as with any other bike). While a lot of riders may not be able to afford the 2020 Honda CBR1000RR-R Fireblade SP (RM198,800 here in Malaysia), the CBR600RR-R might just be a worthy choice. What do you guys think? #bikergirl #fastbikes #RidinGirlsBlog #racing #HondaCBR1000RR #honda #Shoei #speed #motorbike #bikelife #bikersofinstagram #bikerfamily #bikergirl #HondaCBR600RR #girlsonbikes #ridemore #sportbike #sexybiker #HondaCBR #CBR1000 #CBR600 #CBR600RR #hondagirls #hondacbr #hondagirl #bikerchick #bikerlady #motorbike #speed #roadracing #ridingsexy #girlswhoride #riderich #girlsonbikes #cbr1000rr #caferacer #motogp #moto #helmetporn #bikersforenvironment #streetcaferacers #cbr #motorlady #motorrad #motard

Visualizza questo post su Instagram Happy sunday . . . . . . #motorcycle #moto #honda #summer #motorcycles #picoftheday #motogirl #bikelife #photography #motorsport #motorcycleracing #racing #motogp #black #600rr #motorcycles #love #passion #instagram #instapic #likeforlikes #likeforfollow #photooftheday #like4likes #photography #instagramers #bikersfamily #roadtrip Un post condiviso da O.Z GhostRider (@ozzyzulum) in data: 15 Set 2019 alle ore 3:42 PDT Let's try to be serious for a moment Romania's forests are the Amazon of Europe - with large wilderness areas under constant pressure from loggers. For years, corrupt authorities turned a blind eye to illegal felling. But now a series of killings in the woods has intensified demands across the continent to end the destruction. Six rangers - who defend forests from illegal cutting – have been killed in as many years. Two died in the space of just a few weeks late last year. The latest victim, Liviu Pop, father of three young girls, was shot as he confronted men he thought were stealing timber. But the men weren’t arrested. They say the ranger shot himself. And in the remote region of Maramures, where many people are involved in logging, that version is widely believed. Locals are afraid to talk about what happened. Is the lucrative logging business protected by powerful interests who turn a blind eye to murder? And are rangers sometimes complicit in the rape of the forest? Last February, the European Commission put Romania on notice over illegal logging in the country, calling Bucharest to put an end to the traficking, or face sanctions. However, this may not be enough to tackle the issue at the heart of the wood trafficking scam. Read the full article

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