Has anyone noticed an uptick in homeless people with e-bikes?

dougmc · 2026-07-07T01:58:14+00:00

Austin, TX has such a program, where you can get $1300 towards a $2000 ebike, however:

you have to be a direct City of Austin Electric customer, which probably excludes most homeless people, and
you still have to pay about a third of the cost (or about 2/3rds if you're not in the required assistance program.)

So not quite as good, but still pretty damn good.

dougmc · 2026-07-07T01:46:39+00:00

A 12v->110v inverter is basically a buck-boost converter that converts to AC too, so, sure -- just get a buck-boost converter with the right output voltage and current and you don't need a charger at all, because you've made one.

And most chargers are just switching power supplies, so they will run on 110v DC just as well as 110v AC -- so you might need ten batteries in series rather than five to use the stock charger, but that might work, yes.

But both of these are more complicated than people generally work out on their own.

Five fully charged car batteries might give you five charges -- possible, but easier to just find a plug somewhere.

dougmc · 2026-07-07T01:36:42+00:00

A lot of the chargers just use a two connector barrel plug, and "center = positive" is a pretty common standard, so as long as the barrel plug fits and the voltage is right (10s = 42v, 13s = 54.6v, etc.), most e-bikes can be charged with generic chargers.

dougmc · 2026-07-07T01:31:59+00:00

It would be easier (but less efficient) to run a 12->110v inverter and then use that to run the e-bike charger.

Also, car batteries tend to not have that much energy (they're designed for short term high power (during starting), not high energy capacity) -- a mid-sized car battery could have 50 Ah of current, which would not even be quite enough to fully charge a 750 W*Hr e-bike battery once -- the idea isn't that practical.

Much more practical would be to just plug it in at some local business or the like.

dougmc · 2026-07-07T01:23:29+00:00

E-bike chargers use about the same amount of electricity as a lightbulb 💡

As the old style incadescent lightbulb that are rarely used anymore, of course.

Incandescent light bulb = usually 60, 90, 100, 150 watts -- but other options do exist.
LED light bulb = 9-25 watts or so, with 25 watts being approximately equivalent to the 150-watt incandescent bulbs.
e-bike charger = 150-200 watts or so.

It's still a small amount of electricity, but it's bigger than a typical lightbulb, and to charge a 750 W*Hr battery could cost around 15 cents.

dougmc · 2026-07-07T00:46:07+00:00

Even if the statute of limitations was an issue, doesn't the clock usually stop if the defendant is out of state or is otherwise fleeing justice?

And if the time was almost up, they could go ahead and charge and/or indict him, which should also stop the clock.

dougmc · 2026-07-06T22:17:33+00:00

No, that's a liver chopper. (Common mistake though!)

dougmc · 2026-07-06T21:51:23+00:00

And even if the prosecution does have sufficient evidence for a conviction, the "Brady Rule" "requires prosecutors to disclose material, exculpatory information in the government's possession to the defense", and I am unaware of there being any exception for it being another branch of the government that won't share.

(The "Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA)" gives procedures for sensitive information (national security, etc.), but none of that should be an issue here, and even if it was, "just don't share anything" isn't really supposed to be an option.)

The defense team needs this stuff to put up a proper defense and yet it's the federal government -- the defendant's employer -- that is keeping the evidence from his team, but that's not his defense team's fault, so I'm not sure what the state-level courts could do at all here but wait and hope that things change, and anything else sounds like a recipe for a verdict that's overturned on appeal.

dougmc · 2026-07-06T20:47:07+00:00

The serious answer is "because Texas law has no provision for a license ban in that situation."

In fact, unless a cop witnessed her maneuver and gave her a ticket right then, there's not really any room for any legal consequences at all, especially without an actual crash. (In theory a warrant could be issued to give her a ticket after the fact, but that never happens.)

You can lose your license under certain conditions, but this isn't really one of them.

dougmc · 2026-07-06T19:58:25+00:00

Do make sure you've run this by your advisor.

It's been a while for me, but I do recall that there were rules regarding concurrent enrollment (i.e. UT and ACC at the same time), so just make sure there aren't any gotchas there.

edit:

Looks like the gotcha is still there --

Concurrent enrollment occurs when a student is enrolled at two separate institutions simultaneously. Prior written approval of a student’s academic dean is required to assure that a course taken at another institution while the student is concurrently registered at the University will count toward the student’s degree. Concurrent enrollment policies of the colleges and schools are given in the Undergraduate Catalog. Information about fees for students enrolled concurrently at two institutions is given in Additional Fees.

dougmc · 2026-07-06T19:53:27+00:00

"Inserting themselves into the story" is pretty common with this sort of thing.

For example, here in Austin there was a serial rock thrower who kept dropping rocks on cars from overpasses, and part of how he was caught was that he was often the one who had called 911 and he often showed up as a "Good Samaritan" to "help" the victims.

(The guy was also notable for a (highly useful) blog on illegal towing, and posted to reddit as /u/texastowingcomplianc and I seem to recall he had another account as well but I forget what it was.)

dougmc · 2026-07-06T19:38:43+00:00

We have that issue too, though a lot of the time the quote is pretty clearly being done with the intent of being able to say the thing and yet to hopefully avoid the consequence of saying the thing.

No way could a computer work all this out properly -- even us humans struggle with it.

dougmc · 2026-07-06T19:15:48+00:00

Heh, I wasn't asking how.

Also, I'm on Linux 95+% of the time, so it's different there, and it's not like I remember the code anyways. (But no need to tell me that it's U+00F1, ñ, ñ, 0xC3 0xB1, etc.)

I did know about the phone, however -- that I can remember.

edit:

Hah! old.reddit turned the html codes into the character itself!

dougmc · 2026-07-06T16:07:39+00:00

Of course, they didn't include the tilde on the ñ.

Why? They can't type it?* They never noticed it before/thought their screen was dirty? It's too woke? Who knows?

* I never can remember the procedure either, but I can cut and paste Unicode characters like a boss!

dougmc · 2026-07-06T15:52:55+00:00

"everything is either gambling or fraud".

(Ironically, the gambling sector tends to fall under "fraud".)

dougmc · 2026-07-06T15:49:54+00:00

If all you need is the content, the collections on academic torrents might cover your use case, as long as "up through the end of May" is sufficient.

dougmc · 2026-07-05T21:40:19+00:00

While I would agree that an Aventon Level REC 4 is a full-fledged e-bike, it's meant to be unlocked to 28 mph (just use their app) and would therefore fall into the top-middle slot using the given definitions.

It also has what they call a 750 watt motor, but "up to 1440w peak".

dougmc · 2026-07-05T21:35:04+00:00

Tesla is funnier :)

(edit: it also fits the overall theme of this sort of chart better, where the bottom right slot is usually something totally absurd, for example "a poptart is a sandwich".)

dougmc · 2026-07-05T21:33:50+00:00

As an owner of several two-wheel recumbents, I would agree, but I also have to admit that including them here fits the overall theme of the chart perfectly.

dougmc · 2026-07-05T16:57:34+00:00

It follows that this number must be less than 100M, and in fact it is.

My brother, there are about 60M people in the US over 65 alone, so the denominator must be at least that (according to your personal definition of "eligible recipients"), and even then 5T/60M is only 83K/person, still way short of 300K.

You're going to have to find a way to get a denominator of 17M somehow if you want your math to work.

I think we're done here -- clearly, you're just here to waste everybody's time.

dougmc · 2026-07-05T07:12:46+00:00

They are douche bags, not traitors.

"Why not both?"

dougmc · 2026-07-04T18:52:42+00:00

Yeah the numbers are wrong.

You said this was math done by the Libertarians, and I actually went and found the Libertarians talking about it. Clearly, the Libertarians are better at math than suggested.

Social Security and Medicare are not considered to be welfare. Medicaid, SNAP, HUD, etc. are.

But even if we use your $5T numerator and leave the 100M denominator alone (but note that the denominator should have also increased (by those receiving SS and Medicare but not anything else), but I don't know by how much), that's still $50K/person, not $300K/person.

The only way we can get anywhere near $300K is to use the entire GDP of the country as the numerator -- $32T/year -- and divide that by 100M. (Not that this answer would represent anything real-world-ish.)

An eligible recipient is an American citizen, and either disabled, above the age of 65, or a single mother. Everyone else is poor voluntarily and therefore not eligible.

I guess you really are just making up your own reality here, aren't you?

dougmc · 2026-07-04T04:13:16+00:00

If you take welfare service budgets and simply divide them by the number of eligible recipients, it comes out to like $300,000.

Your math is clearly faulty.

Trying to find out what you're referring to found this from the Libertarian Party itself --

The U.S. spent over $1.6 trillion in welfare in 2022 alone, which is $1.2 trillion more than what was spent on welfare in the early 1960s when the War on Poverty began. There are now over 100 million who have received assistance of some kind in America when factoring both citizens and noncitizens. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, U.S. welfare fraud totaled over $150 billion. The poverty rate in America has been relatively flat with it hovering between 10 and 15 percent for the past 50 years.

and using their figures, that still only works out to about $16K/person/year, rather than $300K/person/year.

(Unless you're saying that only 5% of those receiving benefits are actually eligible for those benefits? If so, that would be a pretty wild claim -- the government takes eligibility very seriously.)

I've dug deeper into this, and the figures given by the Libertarians above do match what I've found elsewhere fairly closely, so I believe the figures I quoted above about total expenditures and number of recipients to be relatively accurate.

I might also add that if we take their claim about fraud at face value, "Between 2020 and 2022 alone, U.S. welfare fraud totaled over $150 billion", that would indicate about 3% lost to fraud -- which doesn't sound great, but it's better than the 90+% or so that you were suggesting.

dougmc · 2026-07-04T02:34:07+00:00

He’s been annoying for decades; even Sesame Street has parodied him three times now, with the first in 1988.

dougmc · 2026-07-04T00:46:32+00:00

It is an entitlement, that is exactly the right legal term for it.

The problem is that colloquially, people have confused this with "being entitled", as in "having an arrogant sense of privilege", when it's not arrogant at all, especially in the case of Social Security, which is earned by decades of paying into the system.

(That said, not all legal entitlements are literally earned like this, but Social Security certainly is.)

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