I'm in US and I've had a single one. It was sedation which induces twilight sleep but I was definitely conscious. I've known many that have had them (ex-partner had stage 3 colon cancer and had/has them on the regular) and it was always sedation.
Former bike messenger in large eastern US cities in late 90's/early 2000's here, just started commuting by bike this summer again after having not done so since probably late 2000's. I have mostly MTB'd the last decade or so.
It is a totally different world on US roads these days. There is so much dumb shit I've done on a bike in my 20's that I refuse to tell my kids about and that makes me cringe thinking how lucky I have been and after about 2 weeks of commuting this summer I have abandoned that dream and instead choose to ride where the cars can't go. I am fortunate to have access to a massive trail system outside my front door but will avoid as much vehicle interaction as I can here on out. Aside from the crazy, impatient drivers there are so many other ways you can get destroyed by a massively oversized car or truck that the distracted driver can barely see out of. Not to mention the erosion of trust that people are going to actually behave on the roads, as illustrated in the above article. Riding on city streets was always something that put my faith in other humans to the test and since I already know the answer, the safest thing one could do is to simply remove yourself from the equation.
For real. Biking for a commute in the United States should come with hazard pay. So many drivers just absolutely, from the word go, hate cyclists with a burning passion. And the best you can hope for outside of that, is benign neglect, and since you don't pose the same threat a 3-ton suburban does to their suburban, they just don't look for you and don't give a shit where you are. I've been nearly hit so many times, and not in the way you think: it's low-speed stuff where someone is trying to make a turn out of a driveway, or backing out of their own, or waiting to go left across busy traffic, and they're so focused on looking for cars that pedestrians and bikes just fade into the background.
And I know I'll probably get some dickhead typing an angry reply about how one time a cyclist didn't obey a stop sign or something and therefore we're the scum of the road fit only to coat the tread of his tires, but just like, this is not the same goddamn situation. I'm moving about a hundred pounds of light metal and rubber, and you're moving between 2 and 4 tons of machinery. Fuck off with this ridiculous equivalence.
Couldn't agree more. Not going to get into philosophical/cultural differences between life in your country and America but it cannot be ignored the gap between a cyclist's mentality and the right-to-road mentality of the average car driver, even in supposed bike friendly cities, in the US. This fundamental difference in thought is reinforced by infrastructure and the type and size of vehicles that are pervasive on American roads. Just had another white bike memorial erected on my route to work some 2 months ago that stamps out any idea of either being able to commute to work safely again myself or that this gap in thought could/is shrink/ing.
That said, I have seen and still see some questionable cyclist practices on these roads from type of bike, lane of travel, footwear (or gear in general), lack of helmet (or misfitting/unfastened helmet) and route choice though I understand, at least where I live now, there sometimes isn't a choice. In larger cities there was an unspoken agreement _most_ of the time between myself and vehicles in the road that we were "aware" of one another. I find sometimes cyclists being far too aggressive to assert that awareness on drivers here (or today?) where it could be an honest misconception that the person behind the wheel knows how to interact with a cyclist for any number of reasons.
Full disclosure; former bike messenger in Boston, Philly & Portland OR, long-time commuter when not riding for work.
I was paying for a family plan with some people spread out and wanted to get everyone on the same page before I just dropped their paid service. I have to say it's been horrendous using the app over what seems like months. I recently bought a car with Apple CarPlay (which is garbage on all fronts IMO though may have more to do with Subaru's console than Apple).
As you said, I was bombarded with Podcasts when the app loads in the car though I NEVER listen to them, ever. Even when my phone isn't connected to my car. Playback has gotten super annoying where if I'm listening to a playlist I've made or my Liked songs when I disconnect the phone and re-connect the song I was listening to will continue to play to the end but then then the app will take over and play recommendations instead continuing with the playlist I was listening to, every time. I also don't like not being able to generate a playlist in the app from Liked songs as I was using liking songs as way to quickly group a few tunes that I want to investigate further at a later time and maybe keep around or remove after a couple listens. They typically don't stay liked for long.
Since leaving the service I've been listening to the couple gigs of songs I had cached locally in iSub on my phone. I used to host my own Subsonic server, over 12 years I think, but had a catastrophic hardware failure in Feb 2021 which brought all my containers down permanently. Fortunately, I was able to recover the array long enough to copy everything to an external drive, nearly a TB of MP3's/AAC/FLAC etc. Not sure where to go from here as I don't really have the interest or resources to build a new/better/more efficient homelab nor do I have the time. These services to stream and never own or curate a thing are killing my interest in general in learning how to roll your own again, which oddly I am somewhat thankful for especially as warmer weather approaches. This has lead me to cancel other streaming services and really question how badly I want to rent content which always ends in not doing so these days. My kids don't always appreciate it but I feel like I've taken back a small amount of control by opting out and not participating. Interested in seeing how far I can go with this purge...
> Not sure where to go from here as I don't really have the interest or resources to build a new/better/more efficient homelab nor do I have the time
Disclaimer: this is my commercial service...
A middle way is to use what is essentially a hosted service for streaming your own collection. I run https://asti.ga/ . Let me know if it seems interesting or you have any questions!
Not the device, the student district-managed account that is logging into the device. Districts are bound by law (varying from state to state) at a basic level to filter content and restrict access in the broadest sense, on or off the district network. I've worked in multiple states for various districts they all had similar compliance requirements.
I don't see how the mere fact of someone being logged into a school account could create such a requirement. If I log into the school account from a normal desktop computer, I don't believe that the school even has the ability to restrict what webpages can subsequently be accessed. Is the school then failing to meet its responsibilities? If not, then how could they be required to enforce this on a chromebook that they do not own?
We run Chromebooks. I'm logged into one right now, on my personal account. There is no way for me, the GSuite admin of my company, to fuck with that personal account.
I can't read anything from it, I can't manage it in any way, I can do nothing. Some things in the personal account aren't accessible (you can only have one account on Chromebooks with a Linux VM), that's it.
If a kid or parent can log in from offsite, it is not technically possible to force all browsers or systems to monitor and restrict activity. I can log in through Firefox (or curl, for that matter) and not have my activity sent to the school.
Also, there is absolutely no legal way the school could force the monitoring of activity from an offsite computer (unless it were school-owned), even if it were technically possible. To secretly and silently install spyware on a parent's computer when the parent logs into the child's account would violate so many laws and constitutional protections I can't even list them.
Yeah seconding this both as a parent and someone who has worked in education IT (K12 and higher ed) for almost 15 years. I'm not familiar with GoGuardian but I do recall with certain 3rd party Google apps that did similarly there were ways within the admin console for said app to exclude monitoring devices (regardless if managed account that's logged in) unless they were on the district network(s) by adding CIDR blocks to a whitelist. Of course, if someone were to use the device on a BYOD network in district you could then get scooped up in that dragnet though we excluded even those networks to prevent this as all district devices should be connected to the proper LAN.
I've personally forbade my kids from logging into devices we own with their school accounts (O365). I've also gone so far as to relegate them to only connecting to a segmented guest network (internet only) with their district issued devices. I no longer work for a district but provide various levels of support for districts in my county as a state employee and let me tell you, no one really knows what they're doing. A district I used to work for uses a product called Aristotle essentially logging key strokes of every staff member and student. There are, or were, certain school admins that made it their business disciplining bored-ass students for things 99% of the time they may have said in jest to a fellow student. On the flip side it was instrumental in catching a couple staff members that were doing some pretty heinous things, one of which who is currently serving 35 years on federal charges.
