Right, I should’ve been more specific. I haven’t shipped for a bike in eons so I don’t know when they became common. Last I remember using everything was 3x7 or so.

Would be funny to use a single speed on a trail though.

Ah well I can see that kind of distance being an issue. While I’d say cold is a solvable problem with bar mitts and stuff, that time of day is certainly dark.

I don’t know your area of course, but maybe there’s an early morning commuter train or bus or something that could get you closer? For a time I rode to a station 20 minutes away, hopped on transit, then got off and rode another 15 minutes to get where I was going.

Maybe carpool? Though it might be unlikely any of your coworkers also live in your town.

I was surprised too. Went into a local shop and every single one of their mountain bikes, be it full suspension or otherwise, was 1x.

They said most of the time a chain gets spit off a ring, it’s the front, so people have been converting over to 1x to keep the chain on, and going to 10-12 on the back to make up for the lost range.

No idea if it’s bologna or marketing but it seems to be the new trend. I’m guessing it’s beneficial moreso in competitive circumstances, but the only time I spit my road bike chain out is when I shift under too much pressure. I don’t really do much trail riding on account of not having an appropriate ride, so I’m just going off what this one person said.

They look nice though without a front derailleur. Makes me want a fixie.

I was looking at mountain bikes recently and found out the new norm is 1x. Been ages since I rode a 3x, but going to 1x seems attractive if only to remove the shifter.

I too bike around town, on 25mm tires, and usually with a trailer though. Such a joy to get everything done under your own power. Obviously this isn’t the post to tout such ideas, but more people should be riding around the city.

Is a bicycle an option to get to work? I’m guessing there’s no bus option nearby or running early enough to be of use to you.

I use my bike to get around my entire city. I even built a cargo trailer for picking stuff up. It’s not the norm, but I get to places I need to be in roughly the same time I would had I driven.

I’m all aboard Spotify alternatives, but this post is an echo chamber of people that are far more likely to know “the difference”. We aren’t representative of Spotify’s customer base.

Most people listening to music probably wouldn’t be able tell the difference from cutting the quality down by double digit percentages. This is exemplified by the number of people using wireless headphones.

Spotify certainly could offer service on par with Tidal and similar, but being beholden to shareholders that only look at the bottom line and never the quality of the service, that executive might not be right, but they’re not exactly wrong.

Funny how a mistake in a single sentence earns vitriol on the entire comment.

Despite what I’d mistakenly wrote, I meant that to overcome inflation and see a return of double to quadruple your investment - which is what the comment starting this thread suggests as the outcome - you’d have to beat the market by around 10%.

Regardless, my point was more to do with whether someone with only $50 to spare a month is truly in a position to invest in anything or whether they might be better off saving it for a rainy day or something like that.

If someone has a few dollars to spare come month’s end, but has found themselves skipping the odd meal, that money would probably be better spent on a small grocery trip than putting it into an ETF that’ll take years to turn a profit.

Taking a step further, if the last thirty five years are any indication, that future $21k would be worth less than today’s $10k.

Besides, to overcome inflation, you’d need to average double digit returns on your investment every year for half a lifetime.

Like you say, it’s a tough decision if there’s anything that can provide you value now. Not to argue against savings, but expecting it to grow exponentially with no effort is folly.

I see your point, but I also saw Juiced Bikes go out of business last month after 15 years in the industry.

China’s market is also fundamentally different. The buyers care more about function than they do form. This is what allows vehicles like the Changli to sell in China for about $1,000 USD. People import them for about triple that, and there you go, a four figure electric car. These days there are even some commercial outfits in the United States that import dozens at a time and sell them for about $10,000 USD for people that don’t want to deal with the bologna that comes with international imports.

The safety and quality are certainly on par with the cost, but at low speeds, we certainly don’t need advanced safety equipment. Accidents would be less common anyway if people had more reaction time as a result of driving slower. Besides, many repairs that may be needed will be simpler to perform due to the less complex construction.

Regarding longevity, there are people using these things on farms, on construction sites, and in college towns. Might not last twenty years, but seeing how buying a used car for $500 can end up costing you more than $40,000 over less than a decade, I’d say the Changli is extremely compelling given the cost per year of ownership.

Sure, gram for gram, Tony’s has 34% more lead than California would like, but their chocolate is still sold in the state.

To add to what @Maalus@lemmy.world pointed out, the Mast bar is 70g for $8, while Tony’s bar is 180g for $6.

Gram for gram, Mast is more than triple the price.

Some years ago, I wanted to know if an electric car would fit my lifestyle. I drove a gasoline sedan at the time. I decided to refuel my car at the end of every day, and take notes on the distance I had driven and where the needle was on the gas gauge. I did this for two months in the summer, when I knew I did most of my driving. The data I collected about my own habits showed me I didn’t really drive a lot most days. There were only a handful of times I went over 100km in a day. The gas needle rarely dipped below three quarters full, and never below half.

There’s about 12,000 gas stations in Canada, and nearly 9,000 charging stations - up 30% last year. If you’re able to plug in for fifteen minutes or so at a destination you’re already stopping at, that really helps with the longer distance issue. It’s only getting easier to have a low range car as the years go by.

In my view, driving out of town every other week is a poor argument for buying a vehicle with twice the range than it needs the other 339 days of the year.

That’s another good point. I guess I assumed that A-B-A was a trip to the grocers and back, for example, but a trip out to the countryside to see the inlaws for the weekend would count as two trips, the A-B and the B-A. Counting the grocery trip as two trips doesn’t seem right to me, I don’t take hours in there.

For what it’s worth, the various electrification plans I’ve been involved with all assume that these ‘long stops’ being the employment location, the hotel, the theatre, the doctors offices, all have charging on site. If this were the case - even just at the workplace - it would be a big help for electric vehicles that have small capacity batteries.

Visiting family out of town every weekend is 104 trips a year. Commuting each work day is 520 trips. That’s 16% of all those trips that are long distance.

Once you add in the grocery getting; the drives to school (only 10% of children walk or ride bikes); the doctors appointments; the local leisure related trips; I can see how 90% of trips could be short range - and that’s still accounting for taking a long weekly trip, which I don’t think most people do.

From the way you wrote, “The car needs to be able to handle that, without being a huge pain to charge all the time,” gives me the impression you don’t like electric vehicles and might not be open to any of these conversations without it turning into an argument. I could be misinterpreting your tone, and if so I apologise, but I don’t think the content nor the conclusion of that study should be called moronic.

I see your point, though my own experience is similar to @PriorityMotif@lemmy.world, and perhaps just as anecdotal as yours, is that people more often take trips that are A-B-A, A-C-A, A-D-A, than they do A-B-C-D-A.

I suppose it’s just a matter of convenience or time constraints, but running more errands in one trip is an overall time save in many occurrences, and more people should do that.

Makes me wonder how many of these ‘trips’ are one stop then back home and is many contain multiple stops. Or if it would drastically change the average to remove the multiple stop trips.

Thanks for raising that point, I hadn’t considered it before.

It was found recently that most trips were less than three miles, with only 2% of all trips made are more than 50 miles.

From what that article says, this fee is only charged to a PayPal balance. I have no clue who’s keeping a balance in a PayPal account, but it’s not like they’re going to charge someone’s payment methods.

Not defending them, I just find it surprising that they have any customers this could even apply to.

In theory, Sponsorblock could evolve to download a new video multiple times, check what frames match each copy, and use that data to skip to the next matching frame when users watch something.

This would overcome video stream ad injection even if every ad was a different length and in a different location each time someone watched the video.

“Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers,” stated a spokesperson from the Irish Ministry of Finances.

I wish the media would eviscerate these people like they used to.