The nationwide fuckup in the US is zoning rules that block commercial venues from residential regions, which means people cannot step outside their front door and get groceries in a 1 block walk. People are forced to travel unwalkable distances to reach anything, like food and employment. Which puts everyone in a car. Which means huge amounts of space is needed for wide roads and extensive car parking, generally big asphalt lots, which exacerbates the problem because even more space is wasted which requires everything to be spread out even more, putting resources out of the reach of cyclists. Making the city mostly concrete and asphalt also means water draining problems where less of it makes it into the soil and groundwater, and it means the city temp is higher because of less evaporative cooling from the land mass (Arizona in particular).

This foolishness is all done for pleasant window views, so everyone can have a view of neighbors gardens instead of a shop front.

Europe demonstrates smarter zoning, where you often have a shop on the ground level and housing above it. You don’t need a car because everything is in walking or cycling distance. But you more likely have an unpleasant view.

Yes, in Minnesota. I shoveled it but just as well could have used a snow blower. I certainly would not have driven a car or truck onto a path as narrow as a sidewalk.

If you look at my post, I qualified this with “if you buy a good one”.

I missed that. But that’s exactly the purpose of the thread - to identify the good bikes. The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.

Mongoose bikes are literal cheap throwaway trash bikes. This is exactly why people with knowledge about bikes try to steer people towards good quality stuff from bike shops.

It sounds like you’re saying if it’s in a bike shop, you can expect quality. I don’t think so. I doubt all bicycle shops reject all low quality bikes in their 2nd hand business. Some do though, so you have a better chance than in a dept store or grocery store (indeed even Aldi sells bicycles), but it’s still down to odds. What about sporting good stores? You can probably find a bit of everything in a large range of qualities there.

Cheap department store grade bikes are built to a price for people who rarely ride them. They fall apart under normal use and are not intended to be repairable.

Good quality bikes are very much long lasting, durable, and repairable goods. This is kind of like buying cheap fake leather boots off of alibaba and bemoaning that they aren’t as reliable as the handmade leather boots of your childhood. Of course they’re not! You chose not to buy good boots.

I have a problem with the idea of making the pricetag in input source for your appraisal. It should be the reverse. You should determine what you’re willing to pay based on your appraisal which should be blind to price. Cheap prices can reflect lack of brand reputation and high prices are heavily determined by established brand reputation which is often overplayed. I’ve also seen far too many cases where reputable brands exploit their position and put their label on cheap outsourced garbage. You can get thick genuine leather goods in Tijuana for a fraction of the price you pay for low quality leather just across the border. In the world of tools you’ll pay 5 times more for a tool but it doesn’t outlast 5 replacements.

I knew an artist who ran her own shop and made things in a large range of prices. If an item was sitting in the store too long and she wanted to get rid of it, she would increase the price and then it would sell. It works. Consumers appraise based on the price. By increasing the price, she put that item in the budget range of a different demographic.

The ultimate problem is transparency. They obviously don’t write on the bike’s description “drivetrain: proprietary”. And when a layperson looks at a good bike, they just see the trivial specs, weight, etc. A layperson can’t easily discern from one spec sheet to another which one uses more standardized parts or is more repairable. And if it’s a used bike there’s no spec sheet.

Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.

It’s the other way around. Modern bikes are less sustainable. Unsustainable cheap Chinese bikes have flooded the market. In the past couple decades proprietary parts have become widespread along with needless excessive introductions of more standards. So bicycles are being thrown away on a large scale with perfectly good frames due to compatibility issues.

Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.

SUGG frames are made from steel. And they make an effort to avoid Chinese components. iirc there’s only one component from China on it.

I needed a new crank, chain and sprocket on a modern Mongoose fat bike. That brand goes back to my childhood so I was surprised to find what a big fiasco that common need was. It was insufficient to simply buy a square taper crank. In the struggle to track down a compatible front sprocket, I had to go to the manufacturer. They told me they couldn’t help me because the part was no longer made. WTF? I called months later and they said they were able to track down a compatible replacement. But of course getting official the parts from the manufacturer is costly. Of course they take full advantage of the compatibility fiasco. I think they wanted $90 for another cheap quality crankset. In the end, I said fuck this, I bought the cheapest square taper sprocket i could find and took a gamble. The result: chainline issues. My threshold of tolerance was pegged, so I simply decided i will not shift into the gears that cause the chain to rub the tire.

BTW, the reason i needed a new crank was because a peddle came loose as i was peddling. The aluminum threads in the crank are soft, so it didn’t take much peddling with a loose peddle to destroy the threads. The crank is part of the sprocket (a poor design). That forced the sprocket to be replaced. Funnily enough, the damage was done when i was test riding it before purchase. I pointed out to the seller at the end of the test ride that the peddle fell off. He offered to fix it or reduce the price. I was far from home so i opted to reduce the price. We both thought it would be cheap and trivial to fix. I think he knocked off ~$50 or so. Well, I could not have predicted the nightmare from such a seemingly minor problem.

You don’t use a car to plow the sidewalk. It’s too wide. Why would think a cycle path doesn’t have the same problem? Of course you use a bicycle to plow a cycle path.

Sure but when it comes to investment using public money the worst options need not make the cut. You can count on people to blow copious amounts of their own money on the convenience and luxury of EVs. Public money should be focused on cycling infrastructure in the most full-blown way possible. And if there is still money to spend, then public transit. #fuckCars.

I don’t think so. If that were true then there would be no reason for a retailer to have a Black Friday sale as they would be selling the goods anyway. Black Friday sales exist to move more goods than previously. Non-retail workers get the day off which they use for shopping, so it’s a chance to sell a lot of the kind of gifts that are well planned (like appliances and electronics).

If retailers were to give their staff the day off (and give them equal treatment to non-retail workers), then more Christmas shopping would be pushed off till later, provoking procrastination. That’s a good thing, I think, because last minute gifts are more likely to be less harmful environmentally (consumables like chocolates, fruit cakes, and services like massages).

Perhaps it would help. Black Friday consumerism would still happen though. Consumers are highly motivated and would still go to shops to see what the deals are and after they find a good deal they would leak that on social media.

I wondered what that article would say about Ada. No mention. But certainly Ada gives you the ability to have the issues that are listed so apparently Ada is memory unsafe (despite it being highly regarded as a safe language overall).

Also worth noting that Ada developers generally consider rust a watered down lesser alternative. OTOH, rust has memory safety and Ada does not, correct?

When you say “some users don’t trigger it”, that’s probably a feature. It’s important to know if a user is federated with the server the msg is posted to in order for them to get the notification.

Indeed we can always write a markup hyperlink and put the users address in it, but that’s not the point. That would not ensure that they get the notification. It’s the automatic generation of that link that tells us whether the user was recognized.

I believe we 1st have a documentation bug since the docs do not cover this. And functionality-wise, we should be able to see a list of who is mentioned for the purpose of notifications.

Indeed. IIUC, OP said 33 reqs/min is a ceiling and tunable on a per-target basis.

If the target is a Cloudflare instance, you could perhaps even do 300 reqs/min without even being noticed.