For completeness, the IRS will care about when property is obtained, since when you sell it, the capital gains tax rate is different for short-term gains (typically less than 1 yr) and long-term gains (typically over a year). It’s just that they don’t require a report when you acquire said property (unless it’s cryptocurrency, which might require you to answer a yes/no question on your tax return that year, even when merely buying and not selling).
If you asked me a few years ago, I would have put all the non-electric motorized bikes right below street-legal motorcycles. But then I chatted with family friends who all rode dirt bikes in their youth and have dirt bikes for their children. And I’m now fairly convinced that development of off-road handling of motorized two-wheelers is a separate, valuable skill.
If it’s just a matter of operating a bike with a throttle, class 2 ebikes can teach that, at a lower cost point while operating legally on-street and at a fairly sane speed of 20 MPH (32 km/h).
But class 3 ebikes and dirt bikes are different animals. The latter is only off-road, but some/many class 3 ebikes can be on- or off-road. In the latter case, dirt bikes are purpose-built rugged and can really be thrown around. But on-road, ebikes require substantial attention to road conditions, because while the max speed is 27 MPH (45 km/h), that’s on the edge of what can safely be ridden on USA bike lanes or shoulders, which aren’t as well-maintained as auto lanes.
I’d also consider downhill MTB as a comparable activity to dirt bikes, since split-second terrain handling is valuable for riding in road conditions too.
But what I outlined was just one possible example route, and like all great human endeavors, there are multiple ways to get to the same end.
It was not in my vocabulary before, but it will be now: the word “overmatched” succinctly describes the dilemma when a particular bike requires more skill than what its rider can safely manage. The word doesn’t imply any sort of age-gating but rather one of experience and risk-assessment.
In all regulated or licensed endeavors, the regulatory structure should help guide people to correctly match with appropriate challenges, within reason. Obviously, public policy might have to simplify some rules or delegate to parental authority, but the gist is that it’s a public hazard when insufficiently-trained riders attempt to bite off more than they can chew.
But not giving people a space to learn and build experience also feeds the same hazard, and if there is to be sustainable growth in the broad universe of two-wheeled activities, we’re going to have to address this problem at some point.
I personally am a fan of legalizing an approximate spectrum of two-wheel machines. After all, one must first walk before running. And an intuitive spectrum of two-wheelers in the USA could look like: balance bike, acoustic bike, class 1 ebike, class 2 ebike, dirt bikes, class 3 ebikes and mopeds, motorbikes. The learning curve progressively adds complexity and develops valuable skills in different directions (eg on-street vs off-street, traffic laws, different environments and speeds). Plus, one can choose to stop climbing at any time and pocket the lifelong skills at that level.
Most of the other relief sought in the various federal court districts pertaining to the removal cases under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) have mostly focused on obtaining a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to prevent the named individuals from being imminently removed from the jurisdiction of the courts. And that makes sense since a condition where the court would lose jurisdiction is exactly what a TRO’s “preservation of the status quo” is meant for.
But as Steve Vladeck (blog, or BlueSky, or via fediverse bridge) opined today, this is the first court to address the validity of the root authority to invoke the AEA in the first place. Naturally, the administration will likely appeal the ruling once it’s finalized as a Permanent Injunction (PI), but it may prove useful to other people in the meantime.
That is to say, while the preceding districts didn’t look into the root question of the AEA’s invocation, the door is now open for a future district to arrive at the same conclusion re: authority, which could speed up future grants of TROs or even Motions for Summary Judgement (MSJ) that would immediately lose the case for the administration.
Still, this is something which really ought to be handled once: it shouldn’t be necessary for all 94 federal district courts to individually reach a conclusion about the same set of facts. Nationwide injunctive relief – while recognizing that they should be very rare – would be very welcome right about now.
Direct link (PDF) to the ruling, mirrored from PACER by non-profit Free Law Project’s CourtListener.
And I found that link from a Politico legal affairs reporter on BlueSky, that showed up in my Mastodon feed. I cherish reporters that provide links to court rulings.
The bank reporting requirements are primarily to protect against money laundering. That is, obscuring the source or destination of illegally-obtained funds through instruments that don’t leave a veritable paper trail (eg cash). The mandatory reporting threshold in the USA is for cash transactions (whether deposits or withdrawals) is $10,000, but bank clerks are instructed to also look for other signs of suspicion even if the transaction is smaller than that amount (eg repeated withdrawals that conveniently are below the mandatory threshold).
But reporting just means the clerk might have to ask one or two clarifying questions, to fill in the mandatory report. They usually otherwise perform the transaction unless the bank itself suspects money laundering or fraud is happening right now, which is very rare.
I personally have bought and sold a few automobiles with cash over the last decade or so, and have had no issue handling low-five figure sums with banks and credit unions, apart from their clarifying questions.
In short, don’t bother with breaking up transactions into smaller sums or whatever. That will almost always garner more suspicion than just doing a single large transaction.
That said, are you planning to buy gold in cash? Do they not offer wire transfer or ACH payment options? Those have no reporting requirements, precisely because the paper trail is already created and is traceable with the right warrants.
(I have other misgivings about whether financial privacy has taken a back seat, the opposite of the robust communications privacy we currently enjoy. But that’s a different can of worms).
I would argue that monospacing a non-monospace typeface is a kerning decision, but it’s a monumentally bad one. The fact that it’s bad enough to make the news also shows that it simply looks wrong even to the untrained eye. To that end, good kerning isn’t just an extravagance but a crucial part of typesetting. They screwed up here and that just makes it sad.
The remarkable thing is that modern chip-and-pin cards do support that sort of “offline” transaction, although fortunately without the carbon copy paper. Specifically, a non-networked credit card terminal can present a transaction to the chip, the chip will cryptographically sign this transaction in a unique way, and the terminal will store it for later submittal to the credit card company, when an online connection is possible.
For a typical “online” transaction when there are no connectivity issues, the third step would send the transaction immediately to the credit card company, so they can have the option of declining the charge. The cryptography is otherwise the same, and it’s why offline transactions are possible.
Some vendors, I think, like SNCF (the national rail operator) in France use offline transactions for their ticket vending machines at rural stations, where there’s no guarantee of being within mobile phone service. The card issuer also usually programs some safeguards to prevent abuse, such as X number of offline and then an online transaction is mandatory, or a limit on the value of purchases (eg $50 max for offline). After all, there cannot be a check against one’s credit limit when offline.
In the USA, it is exceedingly rare for credit cards to be issued as chip-and-pin (but it can be found), and while offline transactions can be performed with chip-and-signature cards, it’s rarely enabled since most/all terminals in the USA have been online since the introduction of electronic credit card processing.
Contactless chip cards might have changed the calculus though, since there is no PIN at all for these transactions. So perhaps issuers might allow a few offline transactions when contactless.
For buses in particular, bear in mind that liquid fuels typically require pumping, which usually uses electricity. So gasoline or diesel pumps might not be available, even if the underground storage tank has fuel. Here in California, a lot of public buses are fueled with Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) which in theory could have already been compressed at the depot, but this would only last so long, since it takes energy to run the compressor, assuming the natural gas pipeline is unaffected.
Obviously, battery-electric buses and trolleybuses need electricity. So at this point, perhaps the only bus that would be totally immune is an omnibus, that 19th century people-mover that was drawn by horses. But consider the “emissions” from a horse though…
In all seriousness, the contingency plans for a transit agency will vary depending on where you are in the world. For American transit agencies, most don’t even offer service on Sunday or holidays (very strange in the land of hyper religiousness; no bus to church??) and any labor strikes usually result in every service being closed, sometimes including essential ADA operations. So likely a prolonged outage would affect the buses quickly.
USB C charging
I was so excited that another ebike manufacturer is adopting USB C as the input for charging an ebike. But alas, they meant that the bike can charge a phone via a USB C output port.
The wait continues.
I have an extremely minor quibble: most of the world’s countries using an AC voltage over 200 volts are using 230 V single-phase nominal. Whereas 240 V single-phase really only appears now in former British colonies, and many have since redefined their nominal voltage to match the 230 used everywhere else. This includes the progenitor of this voltage, the UK, as part of harmonization with the European power grid – when they were part of the EU – but that was accomplished by raising the EU upper voltage tolerance to include British 240 V single-phase.
North America does have 240 V split-phase, which mostly works fine for unpolarized 208/230/240 volt appliances, but it’s just not common to provision for general-purpose circuits – even though we could do it . Would that redeem America as a civilized country? The jury is still out…
At the very minimum, this type of mail would incur the $0.46 non-machinable surcharge because it’s smaller than one of the minimum USPS dimensions for postcards, namely that one side has to be at least 5 inches (127 mm exact). You may also have issues with it being too floppy for basic handling by the postal carrier, especially if it was previously left in a warm mailbox.
But perhaps a more practical issue may arise first: will stamps even adhere to the wrapping of a Kraft Cheese single? If you cannot affix postage, that’s the most immediate impediment.
Switching noise is naturally the first place to look, when an IRQ is firing rapidly and unexpectedly. But have you verified that your IRQ handler is completely handling each interrupt event? And that another interrupt event while handling the prior one will not lead to unusual behavior?
It could very well be a rare, spurious interior firing due to noise, but then exacerbated by an IRA handler that doesn’t clear properly, leading to high speed sprioois events.
What are the approximate sizes for the internal and external pull-up resistors you’ve attached? And what is the impedance for the actual interrupt source, when it actually fires?
no rubber for seals
Modern synthetic rubber would indeed be unavailable, but I vaguely recall reading something to the effect that early steam engines used leather seals or something like that.
But yeah, there’s a lot of missing prerequisites for machinery. Even simple rotary power – like from a windmill or waterwheel – would suffer from being incapable of long distance transmission. Such a limit means the interior lands of a country away from a river or coast would remain unusable for development beyond basic agriculture. No railroads, no A/C, no Phoenix Arizona.
should
when it comes to legality
This needs clarification. Are you asking about the legal status of Character AI’s chatbot, and how its output would be treated w.r.t. to intellectual property rights? Or about the ethical or moral questions raised by machine-generated content, and whether society or law should adapt to answer those questions?
The former is an objective inquiry, which can be answered based on the current laws for a given jurisdiction. The latter is an open-ended, subjective question for which there is no settled consensus, let alone a firm answer one way or another.
I decline to answer the latter, but I think there’s only one answer for the objective law question. IANAL, but existing fanfiction does not imbue its author with rights over characters from another author, at least in the USA. But fanfiction authors do retain copyright over their own contributions.
So if an author writes about the 1920s Mickey Mouse character (now in public domain) but set in a gay space communist utopia, the plot of that novel would be the author’s intellectual property. But not the character itself, which remains public domain. However, character development that happens would be the author’s property, insofar as such traits didn’t exist before.
What aspects of this situation do you envision would require different treatment just because it’s the output from a chatbot? Barring specific language in a Terms of Use agreement that transfers ownership to the parent company of Character AI chatbot, machines – and crested macaques – are not eligible to own intellectual property. The author would be the human being which set into motion the conditions for the machine to produce a particular output.
In conventional writing, an author does not relinquish ownership to Xerox Corporation just because the final manuscript was printed using a Xerox-made printer. But just because an author uses a machine to help produce a work, that will not excuse plagiarism or intellectual property violations, which will accrue against the human being commiting that act.
I express no opinion on whether intellectual property is still a net positive for society, or not. But I will very clearly lay out the difference between objective conclusions from the law as-written, versus any subjective opinions on how the law ought to be reformed, if at all. After all, what is not understood cannot be effectively changed.
I have a morbid curiosity for UK law, as the progenitor of the common law adopted by California, the federal government, and 48.5 other US States (Louisiana is special). On one hand, the proposed bill would amend (see page 43) the Road Traffic Act 1988 (England and Wales) to be consistent between motorists and cyclists. On the other hand, as a matter of public policy, it is equating offenses by cyclists to be of the same order as offenses by motorists. This is logically and logically incongruent.
For reference, driving a motor vehicle in England/Wales means to operate a multi-tonne vehicle safely amidst a population of 61 million people on a small island off of mainland Europe, at speeds of some 30 MPH (48 km/h) in built-up areas but the speed cameras might have a tolerance of +10%.
Whereas cycling in England/Wales is similar to many parts of the USA, where a fragmented system of routes mean that only some parts of the population participate in the activity, where motorists and infrastructure are often actively hostile to cyclists, and where scores of cyclists (87 in the whole UK in 2023) are killed and tens of thousands maimed (>14,000 in the whole UK in 2023) per year. Bicycles simply do not have the mass, the speed, or quite frankly, the space to be anywhere as lethal as motor vehicles.
Of the road death total of about 1600 people in 2024, only four were caused by cyclists. The notion that motorist laws should be level with cyclist laws is to throw all the above considerations out the window, in a “spherical cow” notion of “simplifying the laws” or some such nonsense.
I compare this proposal with how California law – as written and as charged – treats the same. Over here, our Vehicle Code spells out that bicyclists have the same rights and responsibilities as vehicles “except those provisions which by their very nature can have no application”. This spares the Vehicle Code from having to duplicate every law about stop signs or overtaking, and it’s also very pragmatic: sections related to the aiming of high beams are simply inapplicable to bicycles, and we don’t even need to go to trial to prove that’s the case. The law is fairly easy to interpret.
That said, some sections are explicitly written for bicycles, such as the Bicycling Under the Influence (BUI) statute, which is a misdemeanor with no jail time and a $250 fine, and is the analog to the DUI law that would apply to motorists, which can be either a misdemeanor or a felony and almost always ends up being a 5 figure financial penalty. This distinction is sensible because, as a matter of public policy, it is far, far preferable to deal with drunk bicyclists than to deal with drunk motorists. The latter regularly cause death, mayhem, and sorrow. Whereas there is no recorded case of a bicyclist anywhere somehow drunkenly killing a family of five on the roads. Most often, drunk bicyclists are only noticed because they keep falling off their bike; bicycles don’t just keep barreling forward when the rider is asleep at the handlebars.
For the few times that bicyclists cause death, prosecutors in San Francisco set the example, where a bicyclist who killed a woman was charged with vehicle manslaughter (the same felony as it would be for a motorist) but did not ask for prison time. The stigma of a felony conviction will follow that man for the rest of his life, as well as a total alienation from any bicycling community he was ever part of. That 2013 case was so rare and bizarre that now in 2025, eleven year later, it’s still the reference case on how to deal with death caused by a bicyclist in this state.
Public policy should be the guidestar for legislating, and legal parity – a nebulous notion that throws out the maxim of fitting the punishment to the crime – should take a backseat.
There’s at least !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world
I should clarify that my original comment – foot traffic keeps paths in decent shape – was in answer to the OP’s titular question, about why vegetation doesn’t grow atop the intended walking/hiking trail. But you’re right that traffic will cause other impacts, even if plantlife isn’t getting in the way.
I’m in 100% agreement that for trail upkeep, people have to be mindful how they step. The advisories here in California focus on not eroding the edges of the trail, such as by walking around muddy areas, which would only make the restoration work harder and damage more of the adjacent environment. We have a lot of “stay on trail” signs. We advise people to either be prepared to go right through the mud – only worsens an existing hole – or don’t walk that trail at all.
Here in California, the term “dirt bike” essentially exclusively means off-street recreational vehicle. Some road-legal motorbikes will draw heavy inspiration (eg dual-sports like the DR650) or truly are dirt bikes with added equipment to make them legal, but these would be called motorcycles or motorbikes and registered accordingly.
Being able to ride one’s own two-wheeler from home to a vehicle recreational area in California is the domain of dual-sport motorbikes or certain smaller electric dirt bikes that are eligible for moped registration, both options requiring some level of license.
In Australia, are those rules consistent between all the states? I’m sure different US States regulate dirt bikes differently too, but it’s not something I’ve ever looked into in detail.