In the case of bikes, it’s luckily mostly true that you get what you pay for and that bikes in bike stores tend to be reasonable quality. They aren’t all great but at the minimum they’ll generally accept readily available replacement parts and not fall apart right away. The nicer bikes will last many decades.
The thing about bikes is that running a bike store is a very low margin business that barely pays the bills. Most bike shops are purely in the business for the passion of it. They love bikes, they love sharing the hobby, and they hate seeing people turned off of cycling because their department store bike stripped out the crankset two weeks after purchase. They also don’t make much money on bike sales; they mostly rely on servicing and parts/accessories to keep the lights on. This means customer relationships tend to be important to them.
If you have a good bike shop like this near you, you can have a frank conversation with the people at the shop about your needs and they will steer you towards something decent.
The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.
I don’t disagree with you. Low quality bike manufacturers have gotten very good at making their bikes appear high quality to uninitiated while being cheaply constructed.
Unfortunately I think this holds true for a lot of things these days. Back to the analogy of boots, high quality footwear is undergoing a renaissance right now where resoleable long lasting shoes are more available and more affordable than they have been in decades. However, that comes with the undercurrent that some brands have sold out on construction quality to make a quick buck because they know how to keep the “indicators of quality” on the outside while using cheap materials on the interior construction of the boot.
Luckily there is a great, passionate, community for bikes that will happily help people find quality products. I just don’t want to discount the work of the engineers, the bike shop owners and the manufacturers of quality bikes. There are an insane number of really incredible modern bikes that blow anything from the 60s or 70s out of the water in nearly every way.
If you look at my post, I qualified this with “if you buy a good one”.
Mongoose bikes are literal cheap throwaway trash bikes. This is exactly why people with knowledge about bikes try to steer people towards good quality stuff from bike shops. Cheap department store grade bikes are built to a price for people who rarely ride them. They fall apart under normal use and are not intended to be repairable.
Good quality bikes are very much long lasting, durable, and repairable goods. This is kind of like buying cheap fake leather boots off of alibaba and bemoaning that they aren’t as reliable as the handmade leather boots of your childhood. Of course they’re not! You chose not to buy good boots.
Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.
I’d like to address this directly. Perhaps aluminum is more energy intensive but this seems like an odd thing to focus on considering the long lifespan of bikes, relatively small amount of metal used, and how much better cycling is for the environment than cars in general.
On the properties of the materials, steel is still readily available for those who want it. However, carbon and aluminum are better in most regards than heritage style lugged/brazed steel frames. They’re:
Bicycles in general are not flimsy products with short lifespans if you buy a good one. A modern, run of the mill, road bike with mechanical groupset will likely last many decades and tens of thousands of miles if well maintained and looked after.
It’s honestly weird to me that we are talking about 1960s bikes in a good way here. Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.
Do you not understand how ads work? It’s about making sure that IBM is the first company that comes to mind when you think about potential suppliers for an upcoming project.
It’s no different than ads for Coca Cola. You know what Coke tastes like. An ad isn’t going to materially influence whether you like it or not. However, it attempts to keep the name present in your mind so the first thing that pops into your head on a hot day is a nice cold Coke.
Yeah, it’s not like people have been driving off first world occupations with rusty AK-47s since Vietnam or anything like that…
Sure! AFRL released a document called a primer on cislunar space targeted towards military personnel that does a great job of explaining it in easily understood terms.
It’s not nearly as easy as you’d think in the case of rocks being dropped from the moon. The crux of the issue is that:
The Tl;dr is that we can’t effectively track non-cooperative objects in cislunar space over any extended period of time.
Energy storage of solar is promising to be cheaper than nuclear
Nuclear powerplants are very, very expensive when you amortize the commissioning and decommissioning costs into the lifetime expenses. There have been repeated attempts to encourage fission adoption over the last 20 years and almost no new plants are being made because the economics just don’t work.
… what do you think the green energy sector is doing?
There is orders of magnitude more funding being sunk into rolling out existing green energy tech than in researching fusion. This money isn’t going towards fission reactors because they aren’t economically viable when compared to other forms of green energy like wind and solar.
Ohh, so gay people hide their homosexuality when same sex relationships are shunned by their friends and family? What a shocker.
@nBodyProblem
@lemmy.world