OT: New driving laws and cyclists etc

If they were mandatory, a way would be found.

and sooo last century.

However, that doesn't allow them to be identified from dash cam footage.

They certianly use them in Switzerland, so they've found a way round that impracticability. The letters/numbers are not as big as those on a car.

It's the bystander who needs to know the number.

What was his speed (estimated)?

What should it have been?

It was impossible for him to "give" the cyclists fifty-nine inches of clearance.

The space didn't exist.

One way to do it would be to have the number plates on a fill-in of the frame (ie, visible from the side).

A bit like this (perhaps not identical, but *like* it):

It seems to be acceptable when the user *wants* himself to be identifiable.

Quite.

And the victim.

slow enough to pass the cyclists in safety (their safety)

So are Russian tanks driving across the Ukraine...

Odd how all this retro stuff is back in vogue.

Round here, that means slowing down to less than 20mph on one or two blind bends, but up to 100mph is safe (but not legal) on some open high visibility road stretches round here. Most people who live here learn how to drive safely and be nice to their horse riding dog walking neighbours.

Until the LycraLouts turn up.

Not going very well for them, is it.

When I left college, I decide I would never work on weapons. However, even to me, it has been obvious for a while that much of our current military consists of expensive vanity weapons suitable for previous wars.

Putin is finding this out.

How do you define safety? Slow enough that if they wobble into the path of the car, it can stop before hitting them. Slow enough that they aren't scared into falling off?

Should you drive any slower if you are going in the opposite direction to them, than if you are going in the same direction and overtaking, assuming the same distance sideways between car and bike?

No, that is what the west found out in Afghanistan,. What Putin is finding out is that if you run a country on exactly the same lines as the Mafia, where your chief weapon is disinformation bullying and lying to the rest of the world and spreading propganada to undermine it, whilst you skim its economy for every last ruble you can extract, you shouldn't be surprised when your conscript army, looks upon state cash for defence as simply another income stream to be stripped, sold on the black market and in turn, lied about to your superiors.

What people here have forgotten, is that the comfortable safe spaces of Western civilised behaviour depend on two things. The ability of a thin red line of utterly professional men and machines to defend its borders from uncivilised influences, and a code of conduct that reveres such old fashioned concepts as honesty, courage, paying ones debts, fairness in business dealings and obedience to the Law, no matter how absurd it is, as the necessary ethical basis for the civilisation they so like to enjoy.

Since Blair all of that became utterly risible and old fashioned. And we are entering a period in which we will be massively reminded of just what it takes to maintain civilisation.

I don't believe you!

It doesn't sound that different from the UK?

Yep, I too long for the days of Flashman and the East India Company.

But it isn't children in tanks, aircraft carriers, subs. Weapons are going to be drones.

More importantly we need strategic alliances with people we can trust, particularly: hi tech, manufacturing, energy, food. We really should have stayed in the EU.

Well they existed up to 2011

It is certainly the model used by the EU. Without the tanks. so far.

Psst. Flashman was fiction.

Do you understand what fiction is?

What on earth are you one about?

Yes.

Hahahaha.

People we can trust != EU. That's WHY we left. And we were right.

With the people involved the only truly safe way would have been for the motorist to have stopped and the cyclist who couldn't stay on her bicycle to have got off and let her friends hold her hand until they were clear of the vehicle.

The cyclist was spooked just as a horse might have been. The other cylclists seemed to manage just fine.

If she was so nervous she could have stopped and waited though. That the motorist seems to have taken all the blame is what I take issue with.

At least it's not as bd as the motorist who overtook me with only an inch clear of my right handlebar. The bodywork hit my pedal and the bike went left sharply. The surgeon said I was luckly to keep my right arm. As it was I had 3 months in plaster from shoulder to finger and still have 2 titanium plates in my forearm. Not good at airports. Oh, and I've still got the scar after nearly 22 yeasr.

There are other meds they give people, who are treated at emergency here. If you're positive, you should at least spend a moment on the phone with someone, to see what your options are. Rather than just ignoring it.

Paul

I only took the test because Lou has Covid for a second time. My 4th test in two years.

This time she is really feeling it and she is ill - the first time was milder.

I am fine and have been to work today.

My test took 6 hours to show a line on the LFT, hers went red in 20 seconds.

Work has altered stuff so I am not working is places such as hospitals and prisons next week.