You literally wrote "if you’re biking to work at a reasonable speed, it is not much different from walking." The point is that you're wrong about that, it is very different in terms of the energy involved, which generally determines how severe an accident is. Your argument that "you shouldn't be forced to [wear a helmet]" is a different argument entirely.

There's a road on my regular ride that has a grate embedded in it at the wrong orientation so that a road bike's tires would get caught in it. I saw it for the first time about ten feet in front of me going 30 mph (it's at the bottom of a steep hill). That's when I learned you can actually jump in a bike. I've been regularly complaining about this thing to the township for the 15 years since, to naturally no effect.

He might have just hit something in the road. I bicycled a lot when I lived in Florida and they used to have these turn lane dividers that were basically upside-down metal bowls that were bolted to the asphalt -- no big deal for cars but enough to send a cyclist to the ground if he doesn't see them, like I didn't one night.

Kinetic energy increases with the square of velocity. 3 mph is a normal walking speed while 12-15 mph is a reasonable cycling speed, and 30 mph is easy to achieve on a downhill. The energy difference is not "not much".

My worst bike accident was caused by a dog, a herding breed who took offense to my going past him at 25 mph and ran into my front wheel. The most annoying thing was his wandering off and taking a nap after he brought me down with a torn knee ligament.

Yeah, it should be "Fecund Freddy". People always get "fertility" and "fecundity" mixed up.

I would have kicked him if not for the arthritis.

It's just insanity that Anthropic can openly say "we won't ever make money and our product will destroy humanity" and they can still raise a trillion dollars in an IPO.

My brother's in-laws last winter were paying almost $2000 a month to heat their (overly large and mostly uninsulated) old house with oil. I can't even imagine how crushing this winter is going to be for them.

My grocery bills are double what they were in 2019 now

Rocket Mortgage has a commercial that shows some schlub walking into his house with his groceries while the voiceover says something about how those three bags of groceries used to be six. Then the house starts talking to him, reminding him that he can cash in the tiny amount of equity he has in the house with a second mortgage and use the money to buy groceries. Happy schlub dances the rest of the way into the house.

It must be hundreds of thousands of people that have been conned by this one commercial alone into thinking that going into debt to buy groceries is a solution to their problems.

I quit smoking pot five years ago. Altman's not wrong re: me.

I was walking down the street the other day and a mother with a little boy holding her hand came in the opposite direction. The little boy pointed at me and said to his mother "look mommy, it's an old man!" I'm fucking 59, I'm not Christopher Walken.