I love subsidizing these jackoffs energy bills in my own power bill /s. 17c/kwh for me, 3c/kwh for Bezos… From the same supplier.

To an extent they’re right but probably not in the way they intended to be. Government subsidies help ensure that animal ag can be profitable and incentivized regardless of consumption levels, and the ever-expanding amounts of land required for most animal ag and it’s support infrastructure (eg feedstock production, a byproduct of industrial soy oil) literal fuel and are fueled by imperial expansion in a cyclic self-reinforcing fashion. If people stopped eating beef today without also protesting it’s existence you’d probably see the animal ag industry continue to run on it’s own fumes for years.

The straw thing was a manufactured distraction.

It’s way simpler to just farm something other than cows. Plants, maybe.

As a bike wrencher, mad respect to car mechanics that make that shit work. Cars are 10x more complex than most bikes, 10x more proprietary, and sometimes 10x more expensive. Fucking nightmare land.

There are some types of bike parts I don’t fuck with for this exact reason. Most carbon frames, wireless battery-driven derailleurs, hydraulic brakes, some types of gearbox drivetrains (Pinion drives are cool as hell but not at all future-proof). Things that have a tendency to break in irreparable ways, aren’t serviceable at a normal shop or home repair stand, intentionally eschew cross-compatibility, and are coincidentally expensive more often than not.

Shimano and SRAM have been trying to leverage their market dominance into semi-proprietary standards for decades, but in recent years they’ve accelerated their pace with things like 12/13 speed cassettes, electronics, puzzling cable pull ratios, etc. I think it’s this trend that’s fueled the alt-bike / xbike and 26er party pace reactions in the opposite direction. FWIW I always look to underdog competitors like Microshift, Sunrace, FSA, etc first before turning to the big blase S-companies.

I monkeywrench at a bike coop several times a week and the bikes we get donated tend to be 20-25 years behind current trends. So we get a lot of 90s 26ers with canti brakes or skinny frames from the final era of steel race bikes and they’re usually a blast to work on, but we dread the coming day in several years when the disc brake models with hydraulic calipers start coming in the door. Yeah disc brakes are great if you’re an extreme rider (95% aren’t) but they’re over-complicated and a total bitch to tune.

What if they advocate for nuclear power and say leave the solar panels up?

Don’t fuck around with Reddit, it’s become an unchecked consent-manufacturing machine masquerading as a web 2.0 forum and if you consistently speak your mind on there it’s only a matter of time until you get on some power-hungry moderator or admin’s shitlist with zero means to communicate or reciprocate. Save yourself the grief and leave it to die, it’s become literally what federated sites were created to make obsolete.

He’s gonna fire you anyway, leak harder.