You start out as strangers but I can say, after attending my local parkrun for a few times I got to know the other runners. Often it's half an hour of chatting at a nice tempo. Though I didn't meet any of them anywhere else, which isn't my intention anyways and I barely ever meet up with people.
Four-and-a-half years ago I started a new job and used Anki to learn all the names and faces of my ~100 coworkers, thankfully we had some internal directory that I did use as a data source. It worked great! Then the pandemic hit... I left the company three years ago and now could remember maybe five names if I met them.
In my city (200k pop) a lot of traffic lights are turned off, or rather blinking orange during the night. The few exceptions keep operating normal for good reasons. We don't have a smart traffic control system in our city so I assume it's the bare minimum and if the light you talk about was red at 3am, then there's a good reason for it.
You live on an extreme road where road engineering can't do much due to the given environment and possibly low budget if the road is not that important. Though anything that slows vehicles before entering this stretch of road, or a much less harmful obstacle to heighten their awareness could improve the situation.
Roads where planners have a literal blank sheet is where roads need to be designed better to slow down drivers to the desired speed limit. Sometimes it's as simple as adding traffic islands for pedestrians, narrowing the road or planing trees next to the road.
It's not laws that are bad, it's the infrastructure. Wide roads that give the driver the feeling that it is safe to drive a 60 mph when the sign says 45.
Don't forget she was born in 1906, having this thinking at 76 is something only few of us will be able to do. She had been born in an age before so many things that were important to the 20th century but are already outdated and being replaced in our 21st century. Amazing!
8,200 in Germany is way too low, and I'll add some fun facts.
According to Wikipedia 30,000 of the theoretical 98,901 are currently in use. The number of people per postcode does vary a lot, from zero (no one lives in a company that has its own postcode) to none living in a demolished village of Billmuthausen (right on the inner-German border) or the two people living in a district that had no postcode until the problem was fixed in 2015. Yes, they forgot Gutsbezirk Reinhardswald (a quarter the size of Frankfurt/Main) which is almost all forest but has a forester hut with two people. There are even four Austrian villages that also have a German postcode in addition to their Austrian one, and a swiss one. There are even still four-digit postcodes with no five-digit update in use: Feldpost, the Germna army postal service.
Motorists will try to squish through if you give them just a little too much space. Please do no cycle with just a foot of space towards the side of the road as this is always an invitation for motorists to overtake when it's not safe.
Hehe, luckily I'm both a cyclist and a runner. I am quite annoyed by fellow cyclists who ride on sidewalks but I understand that many don't feel safe on roads that I consider a nice sprint segment despite (or because of) lots of fast moving cars around me when I try to beat that Strava KOM...
It's a lot about subjective safety feeling: Many cyclists feel safer on sidewalks, runners feel safer without cyclists, scooters and cars around them and motorists feel quite safe all the time in their metal box. Separating traffic, slowing down cars in towns and cities is the only way forward and even though it might seem very slow going or even small reversals like in Spain are taking place: It will happen within our lifetime.
Take more space if you need it for whatever reason is what I recommend to other cyclists. Dooring is a big issue, and motorists overtaking in blind corners, narrow steets or when you want to turn left. See the marks on the road where the outer tyre of vehicles leave there mark? That's the line a cyclist should ride on.
The French nuclear program was started without public or parliamentary discussion, read up on the Messmer plan, it was a spontaneous reaction to the oil crisis of 1973 and new deployments haven't happened in the 25 years. France has a plan to extend it's nuclear plants by another 10 years, but really it would have to replace them sooner or later.
Even in France the trend visible in other European countries will happen: Wind, solar combined with large-scale batteries or pumped storage hydropower. Those are more simple to construct with less resistance from today's public.
Why would motorists care? About 1/4th of killed car occupants didn't care about their own life when they decided not to put on the seat belt before the last car trip.
Cyclist here, I only communicate with motorists by means of rude hand gestures...
V2V should still help to avoid phantom traffic jams, but really I wish all that tech in cars could block motorists from overtaking cyclist without a safe distance to the cyclist or when they actually want to take a turn with their car that would cross the cyclists path going straight ahead.
Brake cleaner for diskbrakes unless it's a sound of metal on metal and you have to replace the brake pads. And for rim brakes if there's a metal sound a stone is stuck in the rubber part of the brakes, either get it out or replace as well if it's already worn down a fair bit.
Must be my crappy internet connection that lets me watch the white noise for an unbearable amount of time. It's a very annoying white noise. Also, I wonder if some channels send a sign-off sequence once they run out of content.
I had a quick search and the top result for a datacenter in a mine is in Norway https://www.lefdalmine.com/ . I grew up next to a salt mine in the Alps, and those mines are really cold places. The mine is even, by the nature of the former mining, multi-story which most overground datacenters are not. Uruguay doesn't have mines, but I sure with some creativity they could use the heat produced by the data center for other industrial processes.
One thing I like to tell car fans: Unless you LOVE traffic jams and searching for parking spaces (because they refuse to got straight for a parking garage of which we have plenty in my city) you should convince other motorists to give up their car and use a bicycle or public transport. The logic is sound yet a bit too much for most people ;-)
Electric cars are still cars that need a lot of space in our cities and run over pedestrians. It's rather sad that the move to electric cars wasn't taken as an opportunity towards smaller cars.
Did you know that of the car drivers & passengers killed each year, about 25% (and the difference between the US, UK or EU is pretty small here) didn't put on a seat-belt before their last drive? Of course this number will eventually go down, but it seems there's a lot of dumb drivers out there.
Awesome. On the bikes. There's plenty of variants, not just the regular city bikes or cargo bikes, but also push bikes for adults, here's one German pensioner who actually made a startup out of this and his bikes are also useful to people with certain disabilities https://www.laufrad-fuer-erwachsene.de/