teuast

I ride my gravel bike anywhere from 5 to 25 miles before work, depending on how early I get out the door and whether or not my bike is broken. 1. I get around by bike, so the 5 is the bare minimum and 25 is for when I get out the door with two hours to spare and can really get down and dirty with some dirt, and 2. I literally broke my crankset on Thursday while trail riding before work.

Weirdly, off the bike, the latte describes me the best, right down to the unexpected tattoo, but I actually drink water most frequently.

since he was 14?

Right, but the specific break I had also isn't one I commonly associate with Hollowtech. I know that has its own issues.

FSA Omega. Came stock on the bike when it was new in 2017.

Yeah, if it had failed thirty seconds earlier, my day might have looked a lot different. I'm counting my lucky stars on that front, for sure.

Honestly, I'm not even mad. It's a bit annoying and inconvenient, but if anything, it really does feel like an achievement.

That's pretty impressive. Lots of bad luck? Or just crappy quality control?

I'm a fairly average size, but I do a lot of pretty serious gravel biking, as well as riding in all conditions thanks to using the same bike for almost all of my transportation. And honestly, running down the list of changes I've made to this bike since I got it in 2020, most of the stock parts that came with it have failed and had to be replaced, to the point that I'm on first-name terms with everyone at my shop and they've started comping me labor when I go in for replacement parts.

Unfortunately it wasn't anything dramatic looking. At first blush, even after Ashton took the crankset apart and showed it to me, it didn't really look like anything was amiss, other than there not being any way to fix the axle and the crank head back together again. A trained eye would have probably immediately spotted the evidence of a failed weld, but nothing really jumped out at me until he pointed it out. Even the manner in which it broke was pretty anticlimactic: I noticed something weird when my chain started rubbing on the front derailleur after I cleared that drop, and I couldn't shift into the big ring, so I got off to look at it and then realized the crank/spider was loose.

Jesus, that's gnarly. I hope he recovered.

That money that's going to kids and families who need it is money that's not going directly to people who are already rich, and as such can only be made available during dramatic crises. Boring, ongoing crises, like the housing crisis and the poverty crisis and the climate crisis don't count.

I would slightly rephrase this to "too little housing." Houses per se is not the answer, because just building more single family houses is not going to solve any problem that isn't going to be massively outweighed by other problems that are exacerbated, as we've seen over the past 70+ years of suburban development. Increasing infill density and allowing for "missing middle" housing and mixed use development is the way to go, at least as far as the problems faced by your downstairs neighbors are concerned. This also must be complemented by prioritization of public transit and active transport as preferred modes of transportation in cities, coupled with redevelopment of parking lots and a moratorium on any new freeway construction, as more traffic lanes always and only ever make traffic worse.

Tell that to centrists, or at least the American ones.

Agreed. Seems we're largely on the same page, then.

It's kind of a philosophical question, I guess. A concrete example would be during the 2020 BLM protests, people who self-describe as centrists argued (and still do now) that the protests, because they occasionally led to property damage and theft, were as bad as the police murdering unarmed black people, and all the other aspects of the criminal justice system that disproportionately punish black people for existing. This is a pattern common to most issues that results in centrists most commonly aligning themselves with the status quo, which, in practice, means they spend a lot more time fighting against the left than against the right.

I think a lot of people associate centrism with, like, skepticism, the idea of which is that you apportion your beliefs to the ordinariness of the claim and the evidence available to support it. The problem there is that while a skeptic should not accept a claim without evidence, there should also be an evidence threshold at which they do accept the claim. For a small example, I as a skeptic am happy to take your word for it if you say you got a dog, because I know that's a thing a lot of people do, though I'm always happy to look at photos of your dog; for a larger example, most people who practice skepticism do accept evolution and climate change, because of all of the evidence for them. Likewise, while it is good to not blindly base your values on what one side or the other tells you, after an assessment of the evidence on both sides of an issue, one should be able to come down on one side if that side is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong, and that is the step centrists appear to consistently neglect.

Therefore, in a situation like BLM, or climate change, or following the rest of the world's lead on healthcare, if rigid adherence to centrism leads the centrist to say both sides are bad, then I think that's a pretty convincing case of centrism doing a bad thing. And because in practice, it does that bad thing consistently across a range of issues, I think a pretty strong case could be made for centrism in general being a bad thing.

Here's a longer-form dive into this idea.

Sorry for talking your ear off. I have the day off work.