Perhaps to turn on something like 'Bicycles ahead' warning lights for an upcoming section with poor visibility, or a tunnel or similar.
flug
joined 2 years ago
Or a simple bicycle counter - authorities are interested to know how many cyclists are using this route and at what times of day etc.
Hmm, something like a chip timing station so you can time your climb?
Presumably there would be similar ones at the bottom and top also, and perhaps at other points along the way.
It is on the uphill side.
Aha, now I see.
Further guesses: Place to pull over and rest; Place for cyclists to make a U turn - perhaps just before a particularly steep or difficult section.
A pullout area to allow backed up vehicles to pass?
It's strange that it's on the downhill side and not the uphill, though!
Other guesses: Brake check area (stop and let brakes cool...); U-turn area as we sometimes see for the 'j-turn' configuration; The pullout is for uphill cyclists but they have to make a u-turn to use it.
"I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants kind of thing."
Excellent. Then you're the world's greatest supporter of unions and would never allow a non-union shop situation, where the billionaire class can take advantage of workers completely unfettered and with no accountability.
You know, a "lords and peasants" kind of situation, where the lords have all the power and the peasants have none. That sure would be horrible. Glad we all agree on that.
I haven't read it myself but by pure luck I happened to read a piece by Henry Farrell today that had his take on the book:
These ideas were turned into novels by Vinge himself, including A Fire Upon the Deep (fun!) and Rainbow’s End (weak!). Other SF writers like Charles Stross wrote novels about humans doing their best to co-exist with “weakly godlike” machine intelligence (also fun!). Others who had no notable talent for writing, like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, tried to turn the Singularity into the foundation stone of a new account of human progress. I still possess a mostly-unread copy of Kurzweil’s mostly-unreadable magnum opus, The Singularity is Near, which was distributed en masse to bloggers like meself in an early 2000s marketing campaign. If I dug hard enough in my archives, I might even be able to find the message from a publicity flack expressing disappointment that I hadn’t written about the book after they sent it. All this speculation had a strong flavor of end-of-days. As the Scots science fiction writer, Ken MacLeod memorably put it, the Singularity was the “Rapture of the Nerds.” Ken, being the offspring of a Free Presbyterian preacher, knows a millenarian religion when he sees it: Kurzweil’s doorstopper should really have been titled The Singularity is Nigh.
Not having read the book myself, I can't say if I agree with that or disagree. But there it is, for your consideration!
This is very much along the lines of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theories that were popular with the right wing a few years ago:
https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory
My last couple of phones have definitely had it (Motorola).
This is a really great interview
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Hmm, Ed Martin is from Missouri and we are well acquainted with him here. Far, far right, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, big "Stop the Steal" guy, and all that.
Couple of highlights:
"They found that Martin had used his state office in 2007 improperly to encourage opposition to Attorney General Jay Nixon among anti-abortion groups, as the Democrat Nixon was likely to oppose Blunt in the next election."
"[Eckersley] filed a lawsuit against Martin and Blunt for his firing, saying he had been trying to enforce the state law for retention of emails . . . On May 22, 2009, the Missouri Attorney General's office announced that Eckersley's lawsuit against Blunt and others had been settled for $500,000."
[Tldr: He illegally fired a guy to illegally stop release of state records that showed a bunch of illegal and shady stuff he and others he was working with were doing.]
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-nominates-stop-steal-organizer-advocated-jan-6-defendants-dcs-to-rcna192451
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Martin_(Missouri_politician)