Christopher Schmidt

yes

Tell me about it. (My wife has been regularly prescribed both for the past 5-10 years, and so many pharmacists have given me stink eye over it.)

(Also, tbh, if there was a desire for more people to be in the Discord, I feel like it would be advertised somewhere. It's not in video descriptions, it's not in any Patreon posts, etc. So it feels more like an invite-only club that I'm not invited to.)

driving around here is still pretty scary though. very narrow, hilly, twisty roads, often one lane wide but with two way traffic.

The hike is lots of steep, slick (muddy) ups and downs through a series of canyons, in the cloud forest environment -- so everything is permanently damp/muddy.

Really just breathtaking beauty in a lot of different ways. But after 8.8km of that, I'm pretty worn out.

Just finished hiking El Tigre Waterfalls and they were absolutely gorgeous, really lovely hike. But boy, did it help me realize I'm no longer the 20-something passing people on the trail, nor am I the semi-fit 30-something keeping up with people on the trail; I'm now the 40-something getting passed.

Enh, I don't belong in such a place, I'm not really a transit person.

I came into it being a bit skeptical, but that skepticism was completely misplaced; the whole team did an absolutely incredible job with putting together something compelling, interesting, and it was genuinely hard to put down.

If you are a fan of Jet Lag: The Game, you will like this.

Great Race to New York - YouTube 7 teams race from Boston to New York, with all the chaos you would expect!

While on my flights down to Costa Rica, I watched all of @milesintransit.com's "Great Race to New York City" (and back) series, and it was so much better than I had expected it to be.

There was far more drama than I expected, a truly terrific series.

www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

So yeah.
- Paid audience with incentive to just "click as quickly as possible"
- Overrepresentation in the first question of answers that count as e-bike ownership, so 'random' answers will bias outcomes
- All questions but one were bifurcated

This survey result is just going to be useless.

Given that almost the entire rest of the data in this survey was bifurcated on the "owns/does not own" an e-bike split, the rest of the survey data is likely *also* junk; the only other question that doesn't have that split is the brands question, which has plausible results imo.

These are paid respondents through a SurveyMonkey Audience panel, so getting responses isn't hard. (These are people who volunteer to do MTurk-like survey questions for small amounts of money.) So I suspect the answer is survey design rather than audience selection.

To fix this, I would split the first survey question, with just a "Yes, I own an e-bike" or "No I do not"; that way you don't bias your answers heavily towards ownership. (e.g. a "answer every question at random" would not have the same ownership bias).

Specifically:
- This is the first question in a survey.
- There is an overwhelming majority of answers that are effectively "Yes, I own an e-bike"
- The survey method is a paid system, which incentivizes "Getting through questions quickly"

So ownership is going to be overrepresented.

I mean, this whole conversation has been "Okay, what is the *way* in which this went wrong?"

The survey design itself seems fine. It could be that SurveyMonkey Audience panels are non-representative, but that doesn't seem to be the case. But I expect the answer is in the first question.

Gotcha. My bias is very heavily towards commuting, but that makes sense given that I specifically run an e-bike lending library aimed at serving commuters, and live in Cambridge/Somerville, which has among the highest bike commuting rate in the country.

But I also see a bunch of research that supports the idea that SurveyMonkey Audience and Google Consumer Surveys provide pretty reasonable proxy of representative adults, so I'm pretty torn: I can't find any flaws here or reasons not to believe the data, but it *feels* wrong.

Yes, absolutely! But the idea that there are 2x-4x as many as there are regular riders still seems like a huge jump. (I would believe you if you told me "among the population that visits cape cod, 50% own an e-bike", but that's a huge sample bias in the first place.)

But yeah, In my bike room at the office, we're around the 10%-15% mark, and that's probably top decile income almost across the board.

It is really hard for me to assume that applies across the board, *so many* households don't seem to have e-bikes that I talk to! I do not feel any saturation.

I can imagine some ways that this happens--like, I have a friend who has one e-bike for their household, but it is used by whichever parent needs it that day, and both would probably say they "own an e-bike" in a survey response, despite only 50% of them using an e-bike--but it still seems too high.

They used the SurveyMonkey Audience online panel for selecting people, which doesn't feel inherently broken, but the number they got feels *so* far off to me, which then worries me about everything else in the study...

I have 37ish, so that gets us to 1000% in my apartment!

(Actually, technically i own 1, the other 36 are owned by @communitypedalpower.org, including two I purchased myself, but it makes a good joke.)

I mean, my reaction is "that's not nearly the worst case, if that's as bad as your imagination goes, you need to think much, much worse".

I guess Clark has a primary challenger? He came to Streetwise this month.

(Okay, I said the same thing twice at the end there, but the point mostly stands. It's just wild driving in a ton of ways)

"interesting" is definitely one word that I would use to describe it!

Imagine Route 1 north of Chelsea -- heavy traffic, lots of ins and outs, lots of trucks. Now run it along winding roads with lots of topography changes. Then, run that traffic along the Kankamangus Highway. That's Costa Rica 1.

Landed in Liberia, Costa Rica. It’s a bit warmer here.

Soon I’ll be driving a rental car up winding mountain roads, which should be interesting.

But I’m no expert here. I don’t have any insight. I’m just either not understanding the attack, or I’m not understanding why Google is acting this way in their remediation.

Yes!

That’s where I think this fails. I can’t think of any other API where sensitive information is accessible without an oauth grant, which is a completely different flow. I can imagine a world where you miss that, but I can’t understand why you would not work to remedy the problem.

Yeah, to me this just feels like… a miss that is more related to (seemingly intentionally) providing some amount of private data access with only an API credential and not an oauth grant.

Either because you don’t think you’re providing private data access or because your don’t see that as a problem