A relative of mine (a doctor) posted on her facebook page how much healthier we would be if all of us would follow Mao’s… errr Obama’s… advice to ride bicycles… This a few weeks after they bought a new R.V. and took it in its maiden trip.
Any family willing to adopt a “crazy” uncle?
Closing down the universities and sending the young people out to the farms to learn useful skills like planting rice by hand can’t be far off
I wonder how many of these eggheads have a daily commute of, say, 100 miles round trip through some extremely bad neighborhoods. I did this for over three years on late afternoon shift (left work at 11 pm). Dodging bullets and gangs while pedaling through the ‘hood isn’t the healthiest lifestyle I can think of.
A few weeks ago, the NY Times did a profile of a couple of the pioneers who were buying the first of the “plugin” electric cars – the type that rely completely on you installing a 240v outlet in your garage and recharging it overnight.
The one guy lives in New Jersey and had like a 160 mile/day commute – and his fight every day to get home before the batteries died (and pushing for public charging stations, requirements that employers let employees charge their cars, etc…). There *might* be merit in plugin electrics (particularly if we can build new nuclear power plants or use natural gas to make electricity) – but this is like the profile of the person for whom the all electric car was the worst possible choice.
I really don’t have a problem with bicycle usage as long as it is not forced down my throat. I could commute to work and my ride would be around 10 miles which wouldn’t be too bad but I would have to ride through a couple of rough neighborhoods and along 3 or 4 roads that are not very bicycle friendly so its not very feasible…
Unfortunately, we are not set up to rely on bicycling for a major part of transportation. We are too spread out and our roads for the most part do not have bicycle lanes.
At the rate tuition rates are rising on college campuses, I think we are heading back to pre-WW II when only the wealthy will get to attend college especially with our great socialist government now being in charge of the student loan programs.
I could very easily see them starting to dictate what a student majors in by saying “if you want this loan, you will major in XX because we need more people in that profession.” That way if somebody is interested in engineering, they could push them into say Environmental Engineering because “they” see a need for engineers at the EPA to go after all of these evil polluting corporations…
Yea …. I’ll consider it as soon as I see him tooling around on Bicycle One.
700 people die each year and 500,000 people wind up in the ER each year from riding bicycles
http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/bikeinjuries.html