You have it backwards here. Apple needs to support developers. They make it expensive and inconvenient to develop on their ecosystem. But until Apple releases their stranglehold, I would be just fine if I never have to use their shitty OS, development software, and tools ever again.

my M1 Max MacBook Pro could run Baldur’s Gate 3 at max graphics with no performance issues. On battery. Over extended periods

I’m a bit skeptical on this claim, or maybe we have different ideas of what “extended periods” mean. My M1 Max MBP would have just under two hours of run time with VS Code doing .NET Core dev. It was even worse when doing Ruby on Rails work. And that was when MBP was new. My whole team were issued these, and our experiences were the same. Zoom calls were even worse, with about 90 minutes of run time.

The ARM architecture has amazing battery life when idling, quite unlike x86. But when it gets spooled up, it eats angry pixies just the same as x86. All of my x86 laptops can do .NET Core work… for two hours.

Anything worth doing is worth doing again.

But …why does the boat have a sprit and no stay? 😆

But seriously, thank you for sharing. What are the dots on the paper? Is this one of the digitizing sketchbooks?

This is exactly the case. Also, I worked for a credit union at the time, and employees got a 1% discount on interest rates for loans over a 24 months.

Liquidity. Buying a car on credit is mostly stupid, but there are cases when it makes some sense. My last car loan was 3.54%. My combined accounts were earning ~8%. Paying cash in that case would be throwing away money. Well, throwing away money on top of wasting it on a car.

You raise a good point on REI. I would trust any of those to not burn down my neighbor’s house. I would also trust REI to be able to work on any bike they sell, AND make sure it’s actually set up correctly before it goes out the door. At the LBS where my partner works, just about every day, people bring in bikes that would put the fear in you. The “new in box” mail order ebikes can fill a novel just by themselves.

I love what Priority is doing with bikes. It’s like they thought “What do bike commuters really need?” And then they built those bikes without letting the MBAs and bean counters getting in their way.

You can get a pretty damn good one in the 1k range, which seems reasonable given the price of batteries.

Avid cyclist here, former community bicycle mechanic, and my partner works in the biggest bike shop in town. There are no good electric bicycles under $2000. This is how houses burn down. Furthermore, shitty mail order bikes are an e-waste scourge.

They are difficult to work on, very frequently use proprietary parts that might be specific to that model year, often have mechanical disc brakes and no-name parts, and have crappy electronics and batteries.

You may love your cheap electric bike. I wish you the best of luck and many happy miles.

I’m okay with the price and range. I am actively averse to the parts and service lock-in, app requirements, subscription-based everything, data privacy issues, and all of the other “modern” bullshit that comes with modern vehicles. I think most people at least implicitly understand that the early gold rush is going to be a bloodbath and that new entrants to the game are going to sputter and trip on things that other companies have been doing for decades.

I’d buy an electric motorcycle today if it didn’t have an app requirement to get full power and level 3 charging, didn’t have any subscription bullshit, was entirely designed to be worked on by anyone with basic tools and knowledge, had user-swappable batteries, and had a strong data privacy policy.

So yeah, lots of niche players are going to die, and most of them absolutely deserve it.

They really can. And you should know your rights. The death industry is slimy AF, about on par with timeshares. My late mother-in-law was Lisa Carlson, a pioneer of funeral rights and ethics. If you are going to be dealing with someone’s death or planning to die (and you should be prepared), it’s important stuff. You don’t want to get suckered when you are so emotionally vulnerable, on which the death industry preys. There are a lot of options which the death industry tries very hard to keep hidden from you and lobbies to remove.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Final_Rights.html?id=-qxJEAAAQBAJ

Also: this is the offshoot of Carlson’s funeral ethics organization https://funerals.org/

Fake it til you make it!

Oh no! Anyway…

Another drop-shipper … err, I mean “manufacturer” of cheap Chinesium garbage bites the dust. The more of these companies on the trash heap of history, the better. Say hi to VanMoof and their stupid garbage when you get there, Juiced. It’s just too bad they didn’t eat shit far sooner.

I have negative sympathies for people who buy this garbage. “Why would I spend $8000 for a life-critical, high amperage transportation system with FUCKING LITHIUM in it?! I could spend $1500 and get something just as good! Oh shit, my house burned down/my bike can’t be serviced by the LBS/I can’t get any parts.”

Remember in grade school, when we had all those caveat emptor lessons? Does that just not happen anymore? Because I think it’s one of the few possible explanations for how much cheap, dangerous crap there is that people are buying. Not just crappy e-bikes, but the freighters full of shit that is all destined for local landfills.

• Dress for the slide, not for the ride
• ATGATT
• Gray-haired riders don’t get that way from luck

What others did I miss?

Thanks for digging that up. The details in this article are a “refreshing” change from most of what we see when the FBI arrest a terror plot suspect. “Our agents befriended a quiet loner. They then cajoled, pushed, and prodded this reluctant teenager into making a bomb for them. QED, BITCHES!”

Now I’m just waiting for Conservative d-bags (such as my parents) to start screaming about how we need to shut down the legal immigration too. The real kicker: they’re both immigrants.

Got a link for that other source?

Ya Kid K’s Congolese accent definitely has some of that marbles-in-the-mouth Staten Island sound. I was also surprised to learn she wasn’t from the Burroughs.

Because patents are now used as an offensive thicket and a way to parasitize businesses that actually do something.

Intellectual Ventures is one of the more notable patient troll companies: https://www.techdirt.com/2016/03/31/stupid-patent-month-mega-troll-intellectual-ventures-hits-florist-with-do-it-on-a-computer-scheduling-patent/

Ihttps://www.techdirt.com/2012/12/20/intellectual-ventures-dont-mind-our-2000-shell-companies-thats-totally-normal/

Having seen firsthand what happens when someone unknowingly enters a hypoxic enclosed space, I think the difference is foreknowledge. Thrashing sounds like acidosis from holding one’s breath. I was helping an acquaintance work on his old steel boat. There was a watertight compartment. The risk of steel-enclosed spaces is that rusty steel in an enclosed space can consume all of the oxygen, leaving only nitrogen rich air.

He opened the hatch and, before I could stop him, he just strode on in like it was nothing. He was unconscious before I could get to him, maybe ten seconds. Fortunately, he was near enough to the hatch that I could just reach in and grab him, rather than trying to find an air tank and regulator, and then put it on.

He recovered just fine, but had a terrible headache. He didn’t remember anything about it. He didn’t thrash. There was no drama. He walked in and fell unconscious. Lucky for him it was a small space, so the bulkheads kept him from doing a full header into the steel deck.

Is anyone else contemptuous of proprietary systems on bicycles? The spiraling complexity and lack of interoperability even on acoustic bike drivetrains really chaps my ass.

Just me? Fine, I’ll slink back to my retrogrouch hidey-hole now. 😆

While I don’t see the need for bicycle ABS in any of my riding, I do see why some may find it helpful. And this lawsuit seems like a step in the right direction for interoperability.

So… like running a blender in reverse? 😁