Perhaps to turn on something like ‘Bicycles ahead’ warning lights for an upcoming section with poor visibility, or a tunnel or similar.

Or a simple bicycle counter - authorities are interested to know how many cyclists are using this route and at what times of day etc.

Hmm, something like a chip timing station so you can time your climb?

Presumably there would be similar ones at the bottom and top also, and perhaps at other points along the way.

It is on the uphill side.

Aha, now I see.

Further guesses: Place to pull over and rest; Place for cyclists to make a U turn - perhaps just before a particularly steep or difficult section.

A pullout area to allow backed up vehicles to pass?

It’s strange that it’s on the downhill side and not the uphill, though!

Other guesses: Brake check area (stop and let brakes cool…); U-turn area as we sometimes see for the ‘j-turn’ configuration; The pullout is for uphill cyclists but they have to make a u-turn to use it.

Assuming the Santos seat flips Democrat, the house goes from 222-213 to 221-214.

So a 9 vote margin to a 7 vote margin.

It is mighty thin indeed…

For comparison, in the previous Congress the Democratic majority mostly ranged from 218 to 222 (for the last couple of weeks of 2022 it was as low as 216-213 due to resignations etc). See

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/117th_United_States_Congress

“I just don’t like anything which creates a lords and peasants kind of thing.”

Excellent. Then you’re the world’s greatest supporter of unions and would never allow a non-union shop situation, where the billionaire class can take advantage of workers completely unfettered and with no accountability.

You know, a “lords and peasants” kind of situation, where the lords have all the power and the peasants have none. That sure would be horrible. Glad we all agree on that.

I haven’t read it myself but by pure luck I happened to read a piece by Henry Farrell today that had his take on the book:

These ideas were turned into novels by Vinge himself, including A Fire Upon the Deep (fun!) and Rainbow’s End (weak!). Other SF writers like Charles Stross wrote novels about humans doing their best to co-exist with “weakly godlike” machine intelligence (also fun!). Others who had no notable talent for writing, like the futurist Ray Kurzweil, tried to turn the Singularity into the foundation stone of a new account of human progress. I still possess a mostly-unread copy of Kurzweil’s mostly-unreadable magnum opus, The Singularity is Near, which was distributed en masse to bloggers like meself in an early 2000s marketing campaign. If I dug hard enough in my archives, I might even be able to find the message from a publicity flack expressing disappointment that I hadn’t written about the book after they sent it. All this speculation had a strong flavor of end-of-days. As the Scots science fiction writer, Ken MacLeod memorably put it, the Singularity was the “Rapture of the Nerds.” Ken, being the offspring of a Free Presbyterian preacher, knows a millenarian religion when he sees it: Kurzweil’s doorstopper should really have been titled The Singularity is Nigh.

Not having read the book myself, I can’t say if I agree with that or disagree. But there it is, for your consideration!

Well at least they got the column of light right:

https://www.kcur.org/arts-life/2021-05-08/kansas-city-church-will-revive-its-iconic-steeple-of-light-this-weekend

The rest seems to include a considerable amount of artistic interpretation. For starters, any rock column or butte or mountain or, uh, (far more likely) minor hill or river bluff around here would be maybe 1/20th the height of the ones shown, at very most.

The giant land squid is scaled about right, though.

This is very much along the lines of the Agenda 21 conspiracy theories that were popular with the right wing a few years ago:

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/is-the-un-using-bike-paths-to-achieve-world-domination/252572/

https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory

My last couple of phones have definitely had it (Motorola).

Here’s the article:

https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article278281138.html

It’s something Kansas City Manager Brian Platt has been saying privately for nearly two years, and now he’s acknowledging it on the record: He would push to close Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport if it continues to be hard for developers to construct high-rise apartment buildings in the airport’s flight paths over River Market and downtown.

That would be an unpopular move among the top Kansas City businesses that use the airport . . .

There has been some recent talk about repurposing it. Not only does it use a huge chunk of ground right in the middle of the downtown area - some of the most valuable land in the state - but also it puts crimp on the height of buildings in the whole area surrounding airport itself.

So I don’t know how serious it is, but I’ve been hearing some chatter.

This is a really great interview