there’s a lot of the-cool-new-thing-is-not-actually-beneficial-to-you type of gear in cycling, too.
biggest offender: suspension. “but it’s the new technology! all the serious off-roaders use it so it is going to make my rides more comfortable! there’s potholes where I live!”
you are probably not riding as fast as “serious off-roaders,” particularly since nowadays they ride ski-lifts up a mountain and go down faster over huge obstacles than you can ride on your road, bumpy or no.
they are a huge weight penalty, which you permanently haul around on more-smooth-than-not roads.
at the speeds you are likely to ride at, it is trivial to just look at the road and just go around potholes. you should be scanning your path constantly anyway just as best practice.
if dodging a pothole will e.g. put you in traffic, you can just put your body weight into your pedals and raise your butt out of the saddle slightly and your knees and elbows will absorb around six inches better than top of the line shocks, and there’s no weight penalty for having knees and elbows.
but the big one is just riding the widest tires that can fit through your frame and fork and riding tire pressure around the minimum recommended (printed on the tire or you can calculate it.) this makes the ride very comfortable with equipment you already have. I regularly go to pump up my tires to find I had been riding them 20psi below the stated minimum just fine (my technique [above] is very good, but still.) as long as your weight going over the worst bumps in your area isn’t compressing the tire to where it bottoms out against the rim (a “pinch flat”) you are all good.
second worst offender (imo): disc brakes, although for an average rider there are more use cases for disc than sus (again, imo.)
anyway, not life-or-death stuff like silencers and laser scopes, but the soldier’s explanations reminded me of the nuanced argument above. gear has a specific use case and if that’s not your use case, it becomes a penalty
I never knew the actual lyrics till this came up on my recommended list.
I’m sure Mom & Dad watched the Grand Ole Opry program before I was born; I know for a fact they both heard/listened to it on the radio as kids, Mom in particular.
Addendum: I love the interaction between the guitarist and the drummer during the former’s solol!
Matthew Rimsky was speaking out against Trump. That’s his main thing. A friend put me in his Facebook group but I got tired of how pretentious he was.
There’s a whole lot of teachers who sell Doterra oils and seem open to the side of wellness that is conspiracy driven. I don’t find it very shocking. A lot of teachers get some attention and start getting culty w their students.
The way this guy speaks is just so mesmerizing. It’s so no-nonsense, direct in-your-face clear and simple. So many details and so much that it inspires you to think about.
When Robert Kennedy died, American innocence died, at least for me. I began to look at America in a very different way, and I said if violence is the only thing it understands, then perhaps violence will be the way of the future. […] That’s how I felt. Liberalism ended when Robert Kennedy died. Liberalism never had real faith in itself. Liberalism had never delivered the goods to African Americans, to Hispanics, to working class people, to poor people. It promised much, and with its death came a wave of repression.
All of their beliefs collapsed like a house of cards. They really believed in the Democratic party […] and what they got was a slap in the face.
And when they turned their backs from Atlantic City and they went home, they realized that Malcolm X had been right all along. That there was nothing that was fundamentally different between the Democrats and the Republicans. Malcolm said in the summer and fall of 1964 that the difference between Johnson and Goldwater was like the difference between the fox and the wolf.
That’s just a brief bit from near the end. There’s so much more before that. I can’t sum it up in a way that does it justice. I think you should watch it. It’s so powerful.
Yeah, Reagan versus Mondale was one of the most media-determined elections in my life. The lack of any space for anything other than “Let’s get this done fast, Red Dawn rah rah shit, also lets just give rich people whatever they want.” It was sharply shittified stuff continually remarked upon on NPR until they got rid of the seventies leftists there too.
Watched a good YouTube history of disco. I feel so angry to have grown up in the 80s when everything was so corporate and such a rejection of the freedom of the 60s and early 70s.
