akgerber

Interesting and worthwhile idea. Costco's clothing is mostly ugly even if well-made.

The general concept appeals to me, but I already have my own specific taste in materials & cuts and would thus like more details as to what 'high-quality' means without having to go through a signup process. Uniqlo is a also pretty challenging competitor in this space, with no membership required.

One popular bike touring writer is a big fan of belt drives: https://www.cyclingabout.com/belt-drive-best-bicycle-drivetr...

I started a long tour across Europe with my bike set up tubeless and gave up about halfway through. Even in Europe, access to consistent sealant to top up inconsistent, and reseating a tubeless bead with portable tools is difficult when possible. And one still needs to carry tubes in case of tubeless failure, which is generally messy. Tubeless ideally trades less roadside maintenance for more at-home maintenance.

Alternate ways to reduce flat risk while touring include armored touring tires (which can be somewhat slower & less comfortable due to how stiff they are) and/or by adding sealant to one's tubes.

Likely a regular meeting in a cafe or library at which people practice their Spanish.

Probably gonna be true for drone-forklift operators too before long.

Reminds me of the documentary Weiner, which was supposed to be a comeback film about Anthony Weiner's run for NYC mayor but instead became an intimate portrait of a man's life (as well as that of his unfortunate wife) utterly collapsing.

Nowadays one can also work remotely for an SF/Seattle firm and live in Appleton & buy a very nice house & talk about Bucks games at the bar rather than website capitalism.

Rent in a city like Appleton, WI (a random small Midwestern industrial city) averages $659 for a 1br: https://appleton.craigslist.org/search/apa?min_price=&max_pr...

Sharing a 2br is even cheaper. And this is only if one wants to buy a house all-cash.

Another traditional route to homeownership in Midwestern cities is purchasing a 2-family house. The tenant's rent generally covers the house's mortgage, even at today's interest rates: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/701-Broad-St-Menasha-WI-5...?

These descriptions remind me of Pittsburgh back before the Clean Air Act in the US— one apparently had to pack a second white shirt with them to work as the first was soiled with smoke by the end of the day. Buildings were and are still stained black decades after air quality had improved. My environmental history professor while studying in Pittsburgh was being treated for lung cancer in spite of never having smoked, and he thought it likely due to how smoky the city used to be.

Pittsburgh's downtown and many poorer neighborhoods were located in deep valleys full of heavy industrial installations.

I hope India makes the same progress on air quality as it develops that many richer countries have. Seeing things like its maturing domestic electric scooter industry is a reason for hope.

When a turning vehicle is attempting to turn across any lane (including a bicycle lane), it must yield to the vehicle traveling straight in that lane, whether or not it is a bicycle (and whether or not that bicycle is classified as a 'vehicle' or as having 'all rights and all responsibilities of a vehicle'). This does not vary between jurisdictions in the US.

The difference is that right-of-way laws for pedestrians and cyclists are actually enforced in Germany. The laws are generally similar elsewhere in the world, but as they are unenforced the larger, heavier vehicle de facto has right-of-way because the driver can easily kill a cyclist or pedestrian without meaningful consequence.

Helmets are designed to protect riders from bike crashes, not from cars.

Dutch commuter bikes are slow and upright, and many have a low top tube and are thus very easy to hop off of— a 9-12 mph bike crash is not unlike slipping while jogging, whereas a 18-35 mph crash on a road bike is a lot more risky. Lower-speed cycling is enabled by Dutch land use which does not require many long-distance trips: https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/best-kept-secret-dutch-b...

The tiles on the left map from 2012 load extremely slowly, presumably due to traffic.

Etsy, via sharding & a custom ORM — the 'Flickr architecture'.

In 2021: "We saw 1.8M queries per second on our massively sharded MySQL databases." https://twitter.com/codeascraft/status/1466174452459196420

Here's a post from a decade ago: https://www.etsy.com/codeascraft/two-sides-for-salvation

A Dutch-style bike is perfect for Dutch-style commuting: riding maybe three miles max to the shops or public transit on a high-quality network of bike infrastructure where you won't be bullied by drivers for riding at 8-12mph.

Atrocious US land use & infrastructure makes this less practical for many trips in the US, where destinations are widely spaced to allow for free/easy car parking and evasive maneuvers are often required for safety, and steep/off-road shortcuts are often useful to avoid traveling miles out of one's way on a network of arterial roads designed for fast & easy car travel at the expense of everything else, including human life. A gravel or hybrid bike is better suited for this sort of riding.

Modern trolleybuses with in-motion charging, like Dayton's latest models, will still have substantial batteries for off-wire operation.

US streetcar lines were in the 'transit death spiral' in no small part because they were largely built before cars were common, and became dramatically slower once car traffic started obstructing their right-of-way, which they were usually required by contract to maintain.

(There were many other factors, including their overexpansion during a securities bubble and that their concessions were usually for a 'nickel fare' with no inflation adjustment, which lead to declining real revenue over time)

My recollection of prior research is that you do not need contracts beforehand — you need to demonstrate that your business is a going concern after a year to renew your visa.

We've banned car traffic at certain times and places in New York, mostly since the pandemic, and it's remarkable how much quieter those streets became.

If you are not aware of the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty, note that it makes it pretty straightforward for an American to get a visa in the Netherlands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT

Where bike infrastructure is lacking, it is easier to integrate with urban car traffic on an ebike because you can travel at closer to urban car speeds and start/stop more quickly.

Car-oriented areas are also designed with less respect to topography than older areas designed around pedestrians, and electric propulsion makes biking up grades easier.

Renter's/homeowner's insurance covers one's property at home or away from it. One can get a rider for particularly valuable property.

"Velosurance" is also an option for many with expensive cargo ebikes.

Ebikes are a pretty new technology with very little used market so far, but that will change quickly— I already managed to dig one up for 50% off MSRP last winter.

I took a 60 mile bike ride yesterday in perfect weather, much of it on a beautiful forest road, and afterwards I was exhausted and it took a huge amount of effort even just to feed myself, and it was totally impossible to summon any motivation to spend 5 minutes to do the dishes afterward. I've been riding a bike for a decades, have crossed continents by bike, and have bike commuted my entire career pre-COVID.

I slept pretty well and feel healthy and energized today and doing the dishes was easy this morning, but it's totally contrary to my entire life experience to claim that doing something physically tiring gives you more energy afterward.

Not that doing nothing all the time feels good— humans just don't have unlimited capacity for output. Taking a leisurely morning walk (or a moderate-distance bike commute) certainly gets my day started on the right foot, but going harder faster longer at physical activity makes me physically tired and less capable of doing other things.

I had a similar experience in a problem in which I was requested to extract the digits of an integer before performing some other task. I proposed doing this by converting it to a string and extracting the digits from the string, and that was rejected arbitrarily even though it solved the problem at hand just fine. So I spent entirely too much time during that session recreating an algorithm to extract digits via repeated division/modulo operations that would likely be much slower in practice.

This is supposedly a 'new capital' but it's really more of a new district on the current fringes of Cairo connected by rail service that will likely take less than an hour— more to the nature of Shibuya/Shinjuku (which only became busy districts after WWII) versus the old Chuo of Tokyo as opposed to Brasilia hundreds of miles away from the old cities. And Egypt is growing fast enough that the intermediate areas will probably get built out.

Living in NYC after Hurricane Sandy, I spent a lot of time biking past mile+ gas lines. Gas stations ran out for a significant period of time and National Guard fuel trucks were eventually deployed, but didn't have enough for all comers.

You can buy a Kandi in the US today, often for under $10,000 after subsidies. https://www.kandiamerica.com/ It does have a backup camera, as basic camera modules and screens are essentially free now.

If you're in an urban area, consider an ebike for a light electric vehicle without unnecessary frills that you can store in your home.

My parents ran their 2004 Prius until last year and it had zero mechanical problems— it was just old, and the parts that were failing and uneconomical to fix were related to interior trim degradation.

I was worried when ING Direct was bought by Capital One, but they never introduced any bullshit fees and seriously improved the app and website. So I've remained happy with them.

It will be interesting whether any of the electrical components (battery/charger/controller especially) will be able to be adaptable from budget-priced used EVs to power a kit like this.

Plenty of people still want a unique vehicle, and electrical drivetrains are a lot simpler than everything required for an ICE.

There will likely still be significant military & other 'off-grid' demand for liquid fuels into the indefinite future.