Scooters are much cheaper than e-bikes. You can probably get two e-scooters for the price of an e-bike. They are probably closer to regular bikes in price. But regular rental bikes are less attractive to people with low fitness levels. Especially when they have airless tires.
How does a microchip help when apparently the name “Parmigiano Reggiano” isn’t protected in the US? The article doesn’t seem to differentiate between actual counterfeit that claims to be from the region vs. cheese that is made in the US and sold as made in the US. The chips would only help against the second kind. Also, the article claims that parmesan is one of the oldest cheeses of humankind even though it is less than a thousand years old while people have made cheese since the stone age. Personally, I don’t really see a reason, that people in the US should only be able to call parmesan from Italy parmesan if most parmesan sold there is already made in the US. I don’t think it really matters where the cheese is produced and it doesn’t really make sense, to transport it over the ocean when it can be produced locally.
I think we can very strongly infere that other humans are conscious from knowing that we are conscious ourselves and seeing that other peoples brains work in the same way as ours and people think and behave in a very similar way as us and also have a concept of what consciousness is that corresponds with our own. In my opinion believing that other people aren’t conscious is in the same category of beliefs as the past, the future or even the world and physical laws not existing outside of our subjective experiences. Sure you can not mathematically prove any of that but questioning it isn’t really useful for more than a philosophical exercise of scepticism. As for AI I think it is a tricky question that I can’t answer. Right now I don’t think it is but maybe in the future it will be.
Imagine you hang your clothes out to dry. It is 15 °C outside, but doesn’t rain. After half a day you want to put it back in your drawer but it’s still wet. Now imagine it is 40°C outside. Surprise, your clothes are completely dry after only half a day. Same goes for plants. My succulents can go three months in the winter without watering and still survive but when it is hot they will be completely dry after a few weeks.
Type 1 diabetes only accounts for 5-10% of cases so you can assume that the numbers most likely mostly come from type 2 diabetes cases. I agree that this is making the data more imprecise than necessary but not completely useless.