I might have like a cargo bike if I didn't like on top of a hill.
And if I didn't have 6 months of cold dark weather with snow / ice covering the roads.
I live on the top of a hill and have 6 months of dark cold weather with snow and I use a cargo bike for around 12kms every day. The roads are covered with salt to prevent the ice though. Works fine overall.
It only snows when it's warm (say, -10 C). Plows smear the snow into a thin layer. Then a high moves in so the temperature drops and you get asphalt covered in sheer ice that just gets polished by the sun and subsequent plowing.
In some places there's Winter, not just the pause between autumn and spring.
They might be for major roads in major cities eventually, but most of the streets are pretty terrible for anything smaller than a car whenever it’s snows periodically.
Just search "Netherlands bicycle snowing" on Google Images to see how normal it is. The top results show both children and the elderly cycling on ice and slush and snow.
Yes it is normal here, but it is also hilariously fraught with low-stakes peril. Dumpert always has vids of people busting their ass trying to make a turn or they hit an icy patch every year. I've had a couple of falls on ice here and I am not confident of my resilience long term doing that as I get older. So I avoid biking when it is frozen. But since that is only like a week or two out of the year, it is no big deal
I've ridden my bike in pretty much any condition. When it's icy, I ride with lower pressure in the tires, snow and slush is usually doable, the only thing that really sucks is when it gets cold again after a warmer day and the roads or covered with frozen slush, that's where I get off and push my bike.
It really depends on how well the roads are maintained, this winter they were quite good at clearing the snow in my city, so it wasn't much of an issue.
Yup, I do it every Scandinavian winter on a beater mountain bike that I have an extra set of wheels with studded tyres for the sketchiest days of ice-y conditions. When it's just snow/packed snow the usual deep grooved MTB tyres handle it quite well.
I mean yeah some switch to transit, but there are still lots of people on bikes. I guess I shouldn’t have said nobody changes their behavior, but rather that it’s common and totally fine to ride in those conditions, as evidenced by many people doing it in my daily commute.
I'd think that many people still commuting, doesn't erase the fact that cargo bikes (the thread topic) don't do well in those conditions.
And a critical factor is, hills. I live in a countryside that alternates between flatlands and all-hills. The towns are all around rivers (the pioneers needed water) and built close to them, and it's very hilly around rivers.
So here our experience is different from, say, the flattest country on earth.
I just booted up my 2009 MacBook Pro since it's the only machine I still have with a CD/DVD drive. Some keys are not working (eg R, T, P, probably others) so I had to use the accessibility on screen keyboard.
I was surprised it still booted up and I was able to use the optical drive.
The brine more often than not contains traces of pretreatment chemicals, heavy metals, and other byproducts. It's frequently treated before being disposed of. Methods include pumping it down to the ocean floor or mixing with a source of less salty (wastewater/hydro) runoff. Removing the trace chemicals to make salt out of the brine would be prohibitively expensive.
> 4. How is this better or worse than making progress through asking questions on X/Reddit/mailing lists/IRC/Usenet/your local library? I'll tell you: it doesn't irritate other people as much, and it's likely a lot more efficient. I get it, "I spent 20 minutes with an LLM and made a one-page HTML website!" doesn't sound impressive, until you compare it - about a year ago - "I spent two days going through awful ad-laden tutorials and made a one-page HTML website!".
I think this is the money-shot. LLM's (specifically ChatGPT) have helped me debug weird issues, and help get started with new technologies / libraries where searching for the issues on Google did not yield (good) results.
I don't think it's just us getting old. Newcomers to the filed don't really understand HTML and CSS. It's just "React components" to them, and they aren't looking deeper than that.
I'm getting the feeling that a lot of old timers also don't understand HTML and CSS in emails, from the responses I'm seeing here.
There are a lot of reasons to have abstractions over HTML/CSS in emails, for all but the trivial cases. It is notoriously difficult to get right, since there are some features lacking and standards in the email client space moves way slower than browser.
A regular marketing HTML email would look unrecognizable to a lot of old timers.
That's pretty unfair. It doesn't look like an html page they'd create for the web but I'm pretty sure they'd recognize html and css. Would someone who templated it in react see the connection?
As long as you stick to only HTML that was available in the year 2000, and use zero CSS, your mails will come out the same in pretty much every client.
