Favorites March 28th 2023

Balboa Park, June 2022

Bella Chu @bellachu10

Traffic engineers would rather see people on foot or bikes die than scratch a car. Insofar as this is driven by liability laws that hold cities accountable for damaged cars but not dead residents, the laws need to change.

David Ho @_david_ho_

I talked to a city traffic engineer and it turns out one of the reasons we don’t have real protected bike lanes is because drivers don’t like it when they hit concrete barriers and damage their cars so cyclists are left with plastic sticks and paint for protection. https://t.co/e32vWdKgzw

Apparently it's not uncommon for concrete barriers to be replaced with plastic sticks after cars get scratched after they started driving into the bike lane. This is pretty tragic because those concrete barriers are one of the few effective ways of lowering cyclist fatalities.

Dan Primack @danprimack

Headline of the day

Derek Thompson comments "We’re actually gonna do it, we’re building Jurassic Park… as a restaurant."

Trung Phan @TrungTPhan

Microsoft Teams now has 270m users. Slack has 20m users. Wild chart.

Dare Obasanjo calls this "Product-led growth versus sales-led growth." Phan likens Satya's entrance into an industry to the a scene from The Wire, a notorious gangster rolls up, sparking chaos and fear among the incumbents

Threads

• It seems China has been building cities within Bhutan's borders, and Bhutan seems to have given up claim to the territory in question. Here's a long thread with details

• An economist looks back at predictions folks have made about which mergers will be anti-competative. TL;DR: lots of big mergers turned out to not be a problem for competition or to actually increase competition.