D&F 9/03/23

I rode to Vancouver! Last weekend was tiring but super fun, and I can’t wait for more adventures on my bike. Instead of packing a bag to be carried by a truck to the finish lines, I carried all my gear with me, and yet managed to average 25kmph over the two days. My fueling was good, and my spirits were high despite a few setbacks and extremely early wake times. Next on my bike calendar is a century with my friend Sara, and the Mt. Diablo Challenge. Hopefully in the fall I’ll also go bike around Japan, but nothing is booked yet so we’ll see.

I’ve saved a lot of links up in the week since I last sent one of these, and I think there are some great ones in this batch. Without further ado, enjoy!

Links

• Shopping online is had these days. There are so many weird fake brands on Amazon, and a glut of cheap crap and fly-by-night drop shippers it is hard to know what products are any good. In the past, I always depended on Wirecutter, but these days it’s harder to trust them. The case in that link for what’s happened to the site is good, but I always figured the writing was on the wall after the noted transphobic rag the New York Times bought it from people who actually cared about quality. These days I use RTings and Outdoor Gear Lab for a lot of what I buy, and specialty sites like Bikepacking for specific bits. It’s better for all of us to buy less and buy things that last, but I’ll be the first to admit it’s fun getting packages in the mail.
• If you’ve heard that people become more conservative as they age, perhaps you’d like to know that’s not true—the poor just die earlier. Rich people tend to be conservative, and since their wealth insulates them from difficulty and means access to healthcare in a country that lets people go into debt for the crime of being ill, they live longer.
• In other news, trickle-down economics don’t work. The sooner we increase the wealth tax, estate tax, and capital gains taxes and prevent people from becoming billionaires at the world’s expense, the better.
• Part of a healthy society is ensuring people don’t end-up on the street, and for a majority of houseless people it looks like giving them money helps. Imagine if we made housing and healthcare a human right? It’s perplexing to me that the rich assholes in the Bay Area complain about houseless people and their imagined downfall of SF but instead of housing and healing their fellow humans, they just vilify them and hope they die or get relocated to Sacramento. We’ve known how to solve housing for centuries, and there are ample examples of countries getting it more right, but we’ll need to fix gerrymandering and elect progressive candidates throughout the country to see anything change.

Closing

It’s almost 4pm on Saturday as I write this, and I need to get out of the door and bike a bit. I fell and hit my knee pretty hard the Friday of my trip, and the bruise is annoying when I ride, but I’m trying to keep it moving and not overly stress anything as I heal. Until next week, say hi to a tree and introduce yourself to a crow, space cowgirls~