u/HaraldvonBlauzahn

I *love* that viewpoint of American tech bros that "regulation baaad!". Are you aware that the living standard in the EU is in many measures much better than in the US? To start with, everyone has health insurance here while US has some Third-World reality...

Yeah, the issue isn't the light motorcycles/mopeds/etc.

A thing which has a motor and where the human delivers less than 30% of the power at max speed *is* a light motorcycle. The reason for that is with more power you need a heavier battery and a much heavier frame with better brakes. You need a solid helmet which again makes it impractical to pedal at power because it becomes hot. At 40 km/h, it becomes to chill in the winter and at 45 or so, you really need protective clothing because otherwise in a fall, the asfalt will strip your skin off. At that point you are very clearly becoming a motorcycle. You have lost thr technical sweet spot of a bicycle at that point. There have been *many* attempts to blur that line (guess what the name "Mofa" comes from or "Moped" or why these things have pedals which nobofy uses).

And we *have* motor-powered bikes since a long time - over 75 years -, and regulations have evolved **out of need**. Traditinally, the motor was a combustion engine - but that's the only difference **and it is totally irrelevant for traffic safety.**

In Germany, that's not the case. What's frequently allowed outside villages (but need explicit permission!) are mofas which are gas-powered vehicles which have a max speed of 25 km/h. The Netherlands are more permissive here but they do have far, far better cycleways.

There's a whole class of electric vehicles being held back by regulation.

Do you know that there is a reason for the regulations on light motorcycles, mopeds, mofas, Vespas, scooters and however you name them? It's the number of fatal traffic accidents. And yes, there are probably over two dozens of these motorized vehicle classes which originally started with the idea of an "bicycle with a bit of motor" such as mopeds and mofas.

And to put the power value of 800 Watt in relation: An average human is unlikely to go with more than 150 Watt over a sustained period. If you put this into this web computer:

http://kreuzotter.de/deutsch/speed.htm

http://kreuzotter.de/english/espeed.htm

you get a speed of 27 km/h for a road bike. If you put 800 Watt in for such a bike, you get a speed of 49 km/h (which in Germany is the general inside-village speed limit which is anachronistically high, and is slowly being replaced by 30 km/h where you have bicycles, pedestrisns, or schools).

That also means that an e-bike with 800 Watt power is actually a light motorcycle, with all the associated risks.

What's fascinating for me is that Copenhagen is arguably the most bike-friendly city in Europe, and probably in the world - and very few people use e-bikes there! Why is this? Can somebody who lives there explain why?

From the interview:

The whole industry is worried, but it's not about one company. With motors like these, we are moving further and further away from bicycles, and as an industry, we risk e-bikes being regulated by the EU. So far, e-bikes have been treated the same as bicycles in the EU. And we as the ZIV want to protect this status. To achieve this, we need to clarify the gray areas in regulation that define what is and what is not a bicycle. And two values are important here: performance and the ratio between rider power and motor power.

>> In this respect, DJI achieves values with the Avinox motor with 1000 watts and 800 percent muscle gain that did not exist before.

As I said, it's not just about one specific brand. It's about everyone pushing the performance values upwards. And the EU could look at this and ask: What are you actually doing here with your Newton meter power assistance factor race? Unlike the e-bike, the S-pedelec with a cut-off speed of 45 km/h is considered a moped in the L1 class and is subject to type approval. The type approval defines the assistance factor 4 for the S-pedelec.

>> And now the e-bike manufacturers are launching e-bikes that do not require type approval with a factor of 8 on the market.

Note that there is some confusing terminology: "eBike" as a common (but wrong) term means a bicycle with assistance electric power which is limited to 25 km/h in speed. The proper term for this is "Pedelec". In difference to this, "S-Pedelec" means a light motorcycle which in Germany can go with up to 45 km/h, needs insurance, license plate, strict technical certification, helmet - and cannot, of course, use bicycle paths and cycle lanes.

Here the link:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

Good. Next we have to get rid of cars where they are not necessary, because they block the transition to climate-friendly person transport.

Well, in the case of closed-source software, you can be dead-sure it *is* already subverted. As are probably most networks.

In general, I think Linux' many-eyes principle works quite well, just think in the case of the xz-utils backdoor which was caught before it reached large distributions.

I think the much larger risk hidden in plain sight is the amount of private and confidential data which is extracted and gathered from Windows and smart phone OSes. Doing that against the wish of the users makes it not better than malware.

Also a lot of the little program bees that make up your favorite linux distros are hosted on github, Microsoft owned

Not a good idea, but github is based on git, and git is completely decentral, a developer can move or backup his or her code in minutes.

For example to a FLOSS site hosted in Germany, Codeberg.

I closed my own github account the week after I learned about Microsoft's purchase.

I think in the future, it is advisable to use larger distributions where a lot of eyes look at, like Debian. And avoid software that can not be inspected.

How long before linux itself gets targetted by the American regime?

Well, nobody knows what will happen, but let's just assume that the US goverment, POTUS and such, catches a bad case of Alzheimer's, fuelled by reading Mussolinis memoirs and goes full *removed*. What could happen?

Larger open source projects with many people contributing are in most cases geographically distributed. If the US government tried to "own" their github repo, well, they already have the full source code and git repo of the project on each contributor's linux machine.

Linux as a project can't be taken hostage, that would be like trying to imprison the ocean. But imdividual open source developers can, and sadly I think this is what is going to happen. Developers are people, too, and quite a few are Americans. While there are certainly a few nutjobs, I think the general goals of the open source movement are just totally incompatible with the authoritarian drift of current US politics - the GNU Manifest is pretty much a child of the American Civil Rights movement. It may well happen that in the next decade, many sweet American People will need our help and protection as much as people from other parts of the world have needed since the World War.

The other thing is that in the less nice world we are facing for the next time, we probably wont be able to take trust and good intentions as granted, neither in technology nor in code. This will affect every piece of digital technology.

Linux has tools to deal with that, for example kernel code is signed, with signatures based on a web of trust, a decentral PKI. And more projects should do it. If your data is truly sensitive, you should have a look at GNU Guix and similar projects.

If it comes to full-scale fascism in the leading technological nation, this will certainly be a big challenge for our technological civilization. But we will overcome that. It will not work because fascism is regressive and it tries to turn the clocks back in a world if progress.

Thanks ! 😃

I have worked in several large organizations with over 10,000 enployees and if needed you can tighten Linux Desktop systems to be really safe - one of the largest customers of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the US Military.

Linux has still some large advantages. On Windows systems, the boundary between "executable code that is part of the system" and "untrusted data and documents coming from the network" is constantly blurred. This is not a good thing. Linux keeps that boundary, and thus makes it much safer.

Also the unholy amount of sensitive and confidential data that is squirreled away by the Windows OS. How can e.g. Engineering companies even tolerate that?

And one aspect which enterprises put wayy to little concern in - the US cloud systems are all pure attention suckers. Notifucations, Messages, Updates, News - all this costs **a lot** of precious time and even more of precious attention. It is not just smart phones, also Windows is infested with principles of addictive design.

Being the Linux newbie I am, I still have to wait until 2028 until I can celebrate 30 years of my personal Linux desktop :)

5% of the fedaral budget or 5% of the BIP?

That's a huge difference. It often gets conflated in the discussion.