Not in a city they aren't. They are an excellent commuting tool that offers much of the flexibility of a car for a fraction of the cost and much better commute time.
OK, I'll need to see a source on increased pollution. I really doubt that a motorcycle is putting out more pollution than an average American-size vehicle. For example, my sport bike gets 59MPG, and I've owned multiple bikes that got >100mpg. Even without a catalytic converter, how is that more pollution than a single commuter driving in a truck or SUV getting 20MPG and likely shedding more road and tire particulate due to the increased weight.
Edit: although the noise thing is valid, I'm perpetually annoyed with the "loud pipes save lives" crowd, that's obnoxious.
Does that include motorcycles that have illegal aftermarket exhaust systems with all emission controls removed in an effort to make them as loud as possible? This accounts for about 80% of them, so it's irrelevant how they function by design.
They might have to be that way to buy them new from the factory.
But the moment it belongs to you and even before you leave the lot, you can have illegal aftermarket exhaust systems installed that not one governing body in the United States, nor most of the rest of the world, will come close to enforcing any noise or emissions laws against.
Things get really out of hand when there's a big move outside of the US trading hours because liquidity is so thin. Usually it recovers of course, the scary thing is when it degenerates into a 2020 covid style selloff - 10% down day followed by a number of 10% down days.
Those times are not coming back. We need to stop looking at market behavior 100 years ago. Modern markets and society function very-very differently. Even looking at 2008 as a model for how modern crises happen is very likely to give you incorrect conclusions.
Everything has sped up drastically. Information (whether valid or invalid) is priced in vastly faster. In 2008 you had a month to buy various crisis insurance products (e.g. variance swaps), in 2020 you had days. The next crisis you might only have hours.
Sure, fundamental human behavioral patterns stayed the same, but these are things like herding behavior (monkey see price go up, monkey buy, monkey see price go down, monkey sell), panics, various interests fanning the flames one way or another, etc. But the interconnectedness and the speed at which information travels across that interconnect has increased orders of magnitude just over the last decade.
It's important to recognize that the increased processing speed has a non-linear impact on the system as a whole. New kinds of failure modes and boundary conditions arise that never happened before. New feedback loops get amplified and old ones stop working as they operated on different time scales.
Every time the market is down 10%, news outlets can't shout loud enough how the end times are upon us. Various doomsayers come out of the woodwork and point at how they predicted this crash, but conveniently gloss over the 20 other crashes they predicted and that never happened.
The media fanning the flames when the markets are down is something you have to get used to or simply ignore. Tney have no clue, they just want the clicks :D
The idea behind long term investment is that you hold a diversified basket of assets, add a little regularly and hold for >10 years. This smoothes out the various drawdowns quite a bit.
You are basically paying some premium for the fact that someone already did the hiring and built the talent pool and a cohesive team. Doing that from scratch is a multi-year project, so they basically bought a shortcut.
Yeah I get the general idea that you're paying more for the assembled team and software / experience.
It's just always wonky as acquisitions generally don't seem to be 100% known quantities / outcomes. People paying big premiums for what sometimes turn out to be nothing.
That package of talent and etc is handy, but also seems like sometimes it makes it harder to really know what you'll get out of it. It's an interesting dynamic.
The photo in the article looks amazing! You basically don't see a city, you see a vast woodland! An occasional rooftop peeking through here and there are the only signs of civilization.
I'd love to live in a place like that. London is a very green city by many standards, but it is nowhere close to appearing like the unbroken forest in the article. In fact, the thing I miss the most after having moved to the UK are the forests. Most of it is private and fenced off, and it's just tiny patches of woods anyway. It's interesting how different it is compared to Switzerland for example, where one can roam freely (at risk of being chased by an occasional herd of curious cows) and there are plenty of forests where one can escape civilization.
Huh? I've read multiple times that in the UK, private land can't be "fenced off" and the general public has the right to roam on it, as long as they aren't causing a nuisance or getting too close to peoples' homes. Is that only for pastures or something?
Generally, only undeveloped land is covered by freedom to roam. Forests, cultivated land and gardens aren't necessarily freely accessible by law, if they are privately owned they can be fenced.
There is much more expansive freedom to roam in Scotland, but then most of the land there is undeveloped anyway.
> and the general public has the right to roam on it
There's no right to freely roam in the UK unlike Finland and other countries [1], although there are public footpaths/rights of way that cross private land [2]
That applies outside of Scotland as far as I'm aware, whereas in Scotland there is a right to roam on all land as long as you're not disturbing housing/farm activities etc.
Unfortunately the decision is often made based on costs, and chopping them down is cheaper than employing an arborist (?) to make sure the tree is reinforced properly.
Please don't get me wrong, I agree with you. In many historic cities, there are trees that are hundreds of years old. There are trees that have been around since before the invention of the telegraph, lived through 2 world wars and are still going strong! There are efforts to keep these alive, but I feel newly planted trees won't get the chance to live that long :(
Around here, they also plan to chop down a lot of trees that are around 200 years old, because the road repairs are cheaper with them gone. I hope it does not get to it as resistance is forming, but I might consider climbing and sitting there to block it.
I think what parent actually means is that there are better solutions for it than insurance. E.g. a central registry of ownership and liens would probably solve 99% of the cases that you need insurance for. The insurance is a scam in the way that there are technical solutions that would obviate the need for this "service", but that solution is against the interests of the service providers. Very much like tax returns, which are a solved problem in many countries for the majority of the population because the authorities already have all the data they need. Most people should not need to faff around with them. In the US however, the tax return lobby is strong and effectively prevents the government from making it easy...
In those cases where the government handles recording all transfer, there is typically a fund which covers loss due to fraudulent or erroneous transfers. Thus there is still title insurance, it's just hidden from view.
A lot of Americans would rather pay $1000 to a private service than $900 in higher taxes. It's the principle of the matter. Government bad. Privatization, "choice" between the oligopoly businesses, and public-private partnerships good.
The shit that would be heaved on both the equity and bond markets if the Fed hiked rates at this point is quite possibly Biblical. I'm not disputing that the pain is better now than later - and it may be the case here as well (I don't know, I'm a trader not an economist). My view is that rate hikes aren't really warranted at this point. Inflation is still high but many of the core measures are finally starting to show signs of improvement. The question at this point is whether the Fed can justify cutting this year or only in '25.
The other side of the coin is that if the Fed hiked now, half the country would be up in arms that the Fed basically assassinated the Biden administration. I think the Fed is not in the wrong of waiting a bit, at least until after the elections. Then if inflation starts coming off, well there's nothing for them to do, and if it doesn't, they can do it without so much fuss from politicians.
Hell, if Trump wins, he might be in the lucky position of claiming that he singlehandedly fixed everything and allowed the Fed to start cutting rates :D
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