Gentoo, we’ve ascended.

Also also, if you decide to still get a helmet, don’t get a Chrome helmet.

Defederate from your feelings.

More and more often I find myself clicking on my original text because Google decided it knows better than I do what I’m looking for.

Kagi is great. I just wish it was a little bit cheaper. Every time I search more I’m aware it’s costing me.

Whoogle it is for me.

What you want is called “ending capitalism”

Internet is a network, that is to say, it’s hardware mostly. The content on the internet is shittier than ever, for sure. But, getting rid of the internet involves scrapping trillions of dollars worth of hardware.

always has been

At least you can request that the items be sorted!

I’ve just started buying from AliExpress because it’s literally the exact same item. Drop shipping destroyed Amazon’s credibility. If I’m gonna get garbage I may as well pay 95% less.

The problem is it really depends who you ask. On road.cc, a fairly reputable bike magazine/website, you can find this: link

1. Do you need to change your helmet after a certain amount of time, even if you haven’t had a crash?

Yes, but that’s not necessarily because the expanded polystyrene foam degrades over time, as April Beard, Bontrager’s (link is external) product manager for helmets, explains: “It really depends on how good of care you take of the helmet. There is no evidence that the EPS liner will deteriorate from age. Still, there are things such as solvents, chemicals and environmental exposure that can degrade the performance of the helmet.”

Paul Caswell, the senior brand manager for Giro and Bell helmets’ distributor ZyroFisher agrees: “We normally recommend a new lid every three years depending on usage as even with no impacts there is a constant knocking and pressing of the EPS as the helmet is stored, dropped, placed on hard surfaces etc. Due to tiny impact after tiny impact over time, the EPS will gradually lose its volume making it less able to deal with the energy in the unfortunate event of an impact. Of course, the more the helmet is used, the more it will deteriorate, so one rule for all does not work here, but three years is a good guide.”

Helmets.org, a non-profit consumer-funded program providing information about bicycle helmets, largely backs up the manufacturer’s stance. They cite data from an MEA Forensic study in 2015 that found that the foam liners of used but not crashed helmets retained their performance over many years, with some of the helmets tested being 26 years old.

When you actually look on helmets.org I am not sure what part of the manufacturer’s stance they imply that this program backs. link

Personally, I like to replace it every 4 years because I use mine a lot and I would rather fall for a selling trick than risk a higher chance of brain injury. In any case, a system like MIPS or wavecel would, in my opinion, justify buying a new helmet anyway if you don’t have that on your old one.

At a guess, it could be because the materials just naturally degrade over time. Any foam will start disintegrating, sun exposure could weaken the plastic, and the straps will fray.

I ride a motorcycle as my commuting vehicle and I find my helmet needs replacing every 5 years max, as the inner foam lining has compressed to point where it is no longer snug to my face and therefore unsafe.
Push bike helmets would be made of similar materials, just with less coverage.
So as @wander1236@sh.itjust.works says, it would be materials degradation.

I’m on a long-term hiatus from motorcycles at the moment after getting sideswiped by an SUV a few years ago. I was traveling at about 40MPH and had a “high-side” get-off, landed on my right side and face, then had my 300lb motorcycle strike me as I was sliding.

Sounds likely to result in serious injury that requires physical therapy to relearn walking and possibly some reconstructive surgery, right? Well, thanks modern protective gear, I still have a face, and the only injuries that I had were a minor and rather rare internal injury akin to a bruise that required no medical intervention, a sprained ankle, and an abrasion about the size of a nickel on my arm that was treated with some ointment and a bandaid (at a criminally inflated price).

Modern helmets and protective gear are incredible. I provided my experience in the hope that it gives you more hope. They make the stuff for skateboarding and bicycling the same way, for the most part (heavy, kevlar mesh is a bit impractical and unnecessary at the lower speeds). It can keep you safe, as long as you use the safety gear between your ears.

If you can spare a few hours every week getting involved in a great use of your time. Not just for safer infrastructure. Hold your town accountable in other things.

Most people only care after things happen. People should show up when things are being decided on.

Getting involved in local bike politics is more effective for keeping you safe while biking. Nobody said anything about what people can and cannot do.

No, I expect them to at least go yo the ballot and vote for people who are pro cycling, for example.

Yeah, it’s simple as that. 100% of dutch cyclists are fucking stupid /s

Edit: typo

sure, keep on wearing your helmet, but don’t let it obscure you from fighting the real problem: badly designed streets making cycling unsafe.

The whole of the Netherlands thinks you’re a knob

Be sure to wear one as a pedestrian and while driving a car, too. Risk of head injury is actually comparable so all arguments for wearing a helmet apply.

Only we as a society have decided that wearing a helmet during those activities isn’t needed but on a bicycle it is.

The UK version of this is which.co.uk

Yes, it’s paid, that’s how it works

At least that is typically more obvious on first glance than an independent site that tricks you at first

Reddit is better in the app

NO IT FUCKING ISN’T

Telling me that every single time doesn’t change reality

and get notifications from the website

and download the app

Huh I wonder how expensive and easy that would be

I linked the article in my edit

Slight exaggeration there. Actually they usually poo-poo on anything less than the Lelit Bianca at $3000. Unless you get a cheap single-boiler and mod it to fuck.

The $1000-2000 range is this battleground between Heat Exchanger machines, or “buy this otherwise badly-rated double-boiler at the top of the range and just pray because Heat Exchangers are worthless shit and you might as well just go to starbucks”.

Fortunately, in my research I found mister James Hoffman, a down-to-earth espresso snob who is also one of the best baristas in the last 30 years and has been a coffee advocate forever. He seems to think a good HX unit is great, and I ended up buying his #1 pick and calling it a day. Because the other machine in my price range people were talking up (and insulting) got bad marks from him. When it shows up, I’ll know if I made the right choice, or if the reddit army was right and I needed to save up another year or two.

Reddit’s big problem is how much its userbase tends to skew toward men, often single men, in their 20s and 30s who make WAY too much money because they’re doing whatever preposterously lucrative tech job that you aren’t doing while you struggle in a normie job. Also shout out to similar men now in their 40s and 50s who have been quietly making $200,000+ a year for the last ten years while the average person is doing pretty damn well to pull down 50k, which is the current mean yearly salary in the US.

So they never struggle with rent and bills, and they always have money for pricey toys. Also, capitalism has been unequivocally telling them with a number that they and their opinion are more valuable than other people. Why, they’re literally worth 5 of you, just compare the paychecks.

This will not be made clear on the surface, though. You have to live there for a while like it’s a city, picking up the fairly obvious clues as you notice them.

Like in 2020 when everyone was in a panic about how they were going to pay their rent now that 30% of the US was unemployed, but at the same time GPUs for personal computers were at just insane prices, $3000 for a top line GPU was the norm for that year.

That did not stop Reddit from buying GPUs at those prices, just to have something fun to do under lockdown. If you aren’t on Reddit a lot, you don’t get to string together such data points and start getting an idea of how much money these people really have. It’s kind of insane. Somebody is buying those $2 million 4 bedroom houses in the Bay Area, it’s just not you.

This is also why it’s such an infamously good source for answers to techy questions. As much as it is an international platform, it is almost literally just the time-waster of choice for the entire North American West Coast IT community, from SoCal all the way up to Vancouver. New York City is kind of there, but that seems to be a Twitter town. The rest of us on Reddit are just the peasants in steerage.

Also, Reddit might be juuust a little bit autistic, so when they fixate on something it tends to be unreasonable. It’s not always so, but there’s a trend, one that also tends to mesh well with employment in tech.

You? You just wondered in from the wilderness outside and asked this beast what kind of coffee machine you should buy, but you have more of a Walmart budget. Good luck.