Dangerous-Dan

@friendlyfoe: what you have posted is ANECDOTE. The plural of anecdote is NOT data. Fryer provided data. His conclusions were that police are more likely to use physical restraint on black people being arrested than white, but that white people are slightly more likely to have deadly force used against them. Let me post a bit of the summary: "On the most extreme use of force –officer-involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of officer-involved shootings." -End quote- I have had cops point their service weapon at me on two occasions. I have had a toe to toe with a cop at the scene of a car wreck because he was asking for protected medical information and "get a warrant" didn't seem to be the answer he wanted. I had friends beaten by cops who entered their house while they were sleeping on a pretext that was thrown out in court. So I know that cops do step over the line. But that doesn't mean that is the reality. I am visibly Jewish. Hat, beard, attitude. I am also large, muscular, and can come off as being the guy in charge who doesn't take shit from anyone. I was all of these at the at the time of the three incidents I spoke of. Cops really don't like "contempt of cop." Not even from a firefighter medical crew chief in uniform. Unless you can give me good peer reviewed research like the study I posted, all the anecdote in the world will not change my mind. By the way, there is a terminal in the MSP airport named for the openly jew hating bigot Charles Lindberg. St. Barry O. had Al Sharpton as a private guest at the White House at least seven times. Do you want to argue that Rev. Al is not an antisemitic bigot? Really? The group with the highest per capita hate crime attack rate is Jews. That is an aggregate statistic that has been true for a long time.

@brianpark: most of the comments that I see here on PB that I believe are expressing prejudice against people due to their ethnic heritage are anti-Chinese. I have worked with many Chinese engineers. Most were good people, just like every one else. I worked for a guy from China for several years and he had a hard time with Jewish culture, but two of his top performing engineers were Jews. He once told me that he didn't understand us. His exact words were "you and xxx! You are so suborn!" But we worked together for years. Please note that he despised the rulers of the mainland ("CommieBastards") and was very conflicted about buying stuff from the mainland. He and I and a colleague from Hong Cong had many discussions about the difficulty of determining if something was made with slave labor or not, and if trade with China was a net benefit to the Chinese people or if it just put money in the pockets of the Commie Bastards.

@brianpark: clearly no one should ever be excluded from participation in a sport because of any factor that is irrelevant. We have a few women who are part of the group ride community here in Fargo who join in on some of the more aggressive rides. Everyone is happy to have them, or anyone else along. One of the local rides was started by an absolutely delightful guy who is of afro-Caribbean ancestry. He started it because he is moderately sabbath observant Seventh Day Adventist so he doesn't ride on the Saturday rides. Made it convenient for me, too. But maybe some people are down voting you because they know that the "Black Lives Matter" organization is based on pure BULLSHIT. Before you down vote me too much please read: https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force Have you ever heard of Warren S. Lindvold? Of course you haven't. He was a 72 year old white guy who died from a cervical spine fracture caused by rough handling by law enforcement officers which did not take into account a preexisting medical condition. He was arrested for DUI, so I am glad to have him off the road and in jail. He did not resist arrest, but his medical condition made him fragile. George Floyd was being arrested for using counterfeit currency. That is a Federal Felony in the US which makes him eligible for up to 20 years in prison. I spent a number of years in a volunteer fire department. I was aware of one incident involving an officer striking a handcuffed seated person who was pointing out that the officer was accompanied by his mistress. The officer was out of that department pretty quick. I have also used force to restrain combative people under the influence of meth-amphetamine and Opioids , which the preliminary autopsy indicate Mr. Floyd was. We used a restraint which tied ankles to wrists, and sometimes the weight of a fire fighter to the body of a combative person. So what will Brian Park say if the final autopsy indicated that Mr. Floyd died of coronary failure due to amphetamine intoxication? "Sorry"? The last time I was in Canada I told my wife I thought that word now was Canadian speak for "get the fuck out of my way!" Let me also point out that there is another factor in my distaste for the BLM crowd. They are part of the openly anti-Semitic wing of black american political thought. Think there is no such thing? Sharpton ("diamond merchants"), Jessie Jackson (Hyme town), etc. We were in Memphis Tennessee not long ago and went to visit the "National Museum of Civil Rights" at the Loraine motel. I wonder where they found the pictures of the Selma march without Abraham Joshua Heschel in the front row? Photo shop maybe. Heschel and King were close confidants. There was no mention of the Jewish presence in the front lines of the civil rights movement in the US. So, Brian... if you didn't read the study I linked BEFORE you wrote your bit of "noatalgia de la boue", maybe you should do so now. And in the future you should investigate before you open your mouth. "Everybody knows" is short for "it is the trendy thing to believe and I am too stupid and lazy to see if there is any research on the subject to back up my position."

@bikekrieg: thanks for the info. I have been riding on a skinny tire bike all winter but I am planning on building a Fatbike for next winter and for $50 US these sound OK. They do have plain old machine screws passing as traction pins, but I can probably live with that... maybe file them down or buy some decent pins from someone. I suspect that the decision to use machine screws is a cost cutting decision.

@mikaeljc: I have had two saddles crack in extreme cold temperatures,like -30 cold. No issues with a Brooks leather saddle. I have asked a polymer pedal manufacturer if they have tested their pedals at -30 (I don't care if it is C or F at that point) and got no response, so I will keep on riding with Al pedals. One note about polymer pedals: not all polymers have the same characteristics. Even the same monomer can behave differently depending on the way it is polymerized, what is added to the polymer for reinforcement, how the pedal is manufactured, etc. Would it be possible to select a polymer that can withstand -40? Yes, but it might have implications above 20C/70F, just like winter tires. Also, I can't stand to even look at pins that are just machine screws with threads to get buggered up all the way to the end. And I do not believe that Al is the correct material for pins.

@Mazdamia: Did you ever consider that the research you are relying on is flawed? Let me explain: I used to live "down a sunny dirt road deep in Bear Country". I often rode a bike carrying a Weatherby carbine. Nice light accurate hunting rifle, Mine could punch 25 mm groups all day long. Our bears were American Black Bears. Little guys, maybe no bigger than 300 kg. Most a lot smaller, maybe 200 kg. We also had coyotes, cougars and bobcats. The Weatherby would have dispatched any of the above with ease, and maybe even a big bear like a Kodiak or Grizzly. Would need a good heart/lung shot to drop a big animal with that rifle. Most of the time these animals try to avoid a large adult, and at 120 kg I fit that description pretty well. But I did once come home to find a cougar on the porch. Yes, I tried to track it and if I had found it I would have killed it. And this leads me to the reason that the data set is flawed. There is a saying in rural America, "If you have to shoot an attacking animal you shoot, shovel, and shut up!" If I had found that cougar that was on my porch that is what I would have done. It was not hunting season, so rather than deal with a very hostile bureaucrat, follow the rule of "3S". I am going to claim that what the study found was that some people are injured when they are attacked by bears. No shit! What they did not take into account, and I don't know any way to get an accurate count, was how many people dropped the bear and walked away happy to be alive and never reported it to anyone. That is what I would do.

@caveley: I have had a Box 9 speed on my adventure tandem for about a month. I have the Box 1 shifter, the Box 2 derailleur and the Box 2 cassette. The shifting effort is higher than the GX Eagle it replaced, but the SRAM would miss gears a lot. The Box 9 speed has never missed a shift. Important on a trail with 450 lbs of people and stuff on a bike. Box calls their Prime 1 unibody, but it doesn't look like one in their pictures. It looks like it is two pieces. Still, 300 grams saved is a lot for a bike that is supposed to pack into two suit cases and fly.

Pole machine.

Looked at your web site and I didn't see a temperature range for using these pedals. How cold can they go? I often ride at -20F and lots of composites are brittle at that temperature.

@schofell84: The problem is that the article is flat out wrong. It is well known who bought Mavic. Mavic was sold to Regent LLP (Limited Liability Partnership) which created a new corporate entity, M Sports, to keep the liability of owning Mavic at arms length, so to speak. The purchase price was not made public. It is possible that all they did was agree to take over the liabilities. Mavic was pouring money down the drain at an alarming rate of over €50,000 per employee per year. The only reason to do that is if you expect a future return on investment. Likely once they owned Mavic and could talk to potential future customers they discovered that it was as valuable as a business as John Nance Garner described being VP of the USA: "not worth a pitcher of warm piss." Very likely Regent has lost money on the deal. I once worked for as an engineer for a small firm that was bought by a private equity firm. They thought we added value to their existing portfolio. Then, one of our sales people told a customer about an R&D project. That customer told another, who told another... Sales dried up. The new technology should have been sold years in the future. It was rushed to market. We spent $20m on warranty work for $16m in sales. The loss was about $400,000 per employee. They paid for the loss as the purchase price of the patents, moved the people who were willing to move into one of the other companies, and closed up our company. The PE firm lost money on the deal, but kept alive some technology that they needed for their other businesses. I got a new job in a different industry. Also, the Cell Phone was invented by a team of engineers working for Motorola, so, yes, it was invented by a capitalist firm who viewed it as a way to make money. The following is from the Bike Europe web site about the sale: After announcing its intention to sell its bicycle business as part of its group portfolio, stock-listed Amer Sports Oyj has now entered into an exclusive agreement with global private equity firm Regent, LP to sell Mavic S.A.S. The purchase price is not disclosed. Amer Sports second bicycle component brand Enve is not included in the sale.