This is a high quality video of a guy reviewing his own Brompton, but generally showing around it, the features, the fold, the kickstand mode with the rear wheel folded under, the rolling wheels to wheel it around when folded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6bmuJ98Zc8
It's his bike, he loves it, it's not an unbiased independent review.
My ‘low stakes conspiracy theory’ is that adults enjoy the Brompton more than you’d think, because it’s too small for them, so it feels more like a BMX for sensible professional adults who would never think to ride a BMX or want to be seen on one.
I’ve been eyeing up Bromptons for years, especially the new G (gravel) line which has 20” wheels up from 16” and chunkier tires (for ride comfort on potholes and rough asphalt, and being able to ride down a trail). But I have no need for one, and they’re not cheap to buy on a whim.
I’d really like to try a Kwiggle folding bike, too, just for fun. The standing-riding position might feel less like riding a bike and more like ‘accelerated walking’. And it folds smaller than a Brompton tri-fold.
12" wheels would be sheer hell on anything less than perfect pavement. Source: I own a Brompton with 16" wheels, and wouldn't ride it more than about a block without cycling gloves. It's absolutely punishing on the wrists. The elastomeric block for the rear triangle makes it pretty tolerable on your ass, but the front end is rough.
- The steering column is made of austenitic stainless steel. This .. even provides a pleasant suspension.
- Of course everyone prefers to ride on smooth asphalt. With the Kwiggle you can also easily drive on paved trails. Even cobblestones are relatively comfortable to ride due to the wide tires.
- Is the Kwiggle suitable for longer distances? The physiologically optimal upright posture and the swinging saddle bring each of your muscles in motion, especially in the hip and lower back area. That's why you can ride even better than with any other bike, without tension, pain or signs of fatigue symptoms. We already rode 200 and 300 km (124 and 186 miles) in one day.
in summary, we were all imagining a Star Trek "take me to your leader" moment of First Contact, and instead he imagines it will be a slow transition of increasing evidence that convinces more and more people over years and years.
There's probably something eloquent by Hannah Arendt about how 190,000 Americans killed by health insurance companies goes unnoticed while one person killing a CEO becomes a spectre of "left wing extremism" held up as an example.
Or was it by The Joker from Batman?
Or was it when protesters in Latin America sat down blocking a road to protest environmental destruction and an American driver was so angry that he was mildly inconvenienced that he got out of his car and murdered one of them with his gun. And Joe Rogan's podcast commentary was "what did they expect?", more annoyed at the inconvenience to drivers than the murder of a human.
Or maybe when Just Stop Oil protestors threw soup and mashed potato on the glass in front of a painting, with the idea "look how angry you are at the damage to a valuable and irreplacable object, this is how angry you should be at the damage to the valuable and irreplacable environment which keeps all humans alive" and Fox News laughed at them for both damaging something important and not causing any real damage so they were ineffective. Then the judge gave them 2 years in prison on the grounds that throwing a can of soup at someone's face would be violence, so throwing it at a painting is violence. But no oil executives overseeing the Exxon Valdez disaster or the Gulf of Mexico disaster faced any jail time at all.
Or when the suffragette movement cut a painting of Venus de Milo to protest against Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested and rough-handled, and people were angrier about the harm to the painting of a woman than about the harm to a real woman.
Or when Fox News says "they aren't protesting the right way" so Kapaernik asked actual verterans how to peacefully protest respectfully and they told him to kneel during the national anthem, and the complainers didn't care a whit and said that was still the wrong way and disrespectable, and he lost his job and the president tweeted rude things about him personally, and the national football thingy made that kind of protest forbidden, almost as if the objection "protesting the wrong way" was all bullshit.
Yes, probably Hannnah Arendt could put it eloquently.
But you're right, murder is wrong, and that's all there is to it.
> There's probably something eloquent by Hannah Arendt about how 190,000 Americans killed by health insurance companies
Health insurance companies don't kill people, quite the opposite. If it weren't for health insurance, a lot more people would die. Murdering their CEOs is crazy extremism.
Physicians For A National Health Program put the figure at 200,000 people annually[1]. What's your source for saying the number is zero? When they deny claims, people die. When they override medical doctor recommendations and insist on cheaper treatments, people die. When they tangle up customers with paperwork and bureaucracy, that some people can't access the health insurance they pay for. When they take money out of the system as profit, that money isn't helping the sick. When United Healthcare spends $12M/year on lobbying[1] it isn't doing that to improve patient care.
> Murdering their CEOs is crazy extremism.
When a system doesn't have a pressure release valve, the pressure doesn't go away. When a system blocks or ignores peaceful protest, the pressure doesn't go away. The thread running through my comment is that harming humans is wrong, yes murder is wrong - but sticking a label on it and saying "leftist extremism" and then denying real issues is not helping. The system needs ways to hear people saying "things aren't fine" before those people go crazy extremist, not after.
> Physicians For A National Health Program put the figure at 200,000 people annually[1]. What's your source for saying the number is zero?
I'm not saying the number is zero. I'm saying the number is vastly negative. They are overall saving a lot of people rather than killing them. Health insurance companies are hugely net-positive.
> but sticking a label on it and saying "leftist extremism" and then denying real issues is not helping.
Talking about murdering CEOs is helping far, far less.
Imagine I believe that the Democrats are net-negative. Would this justify people saying that Democrat leaders should be murdered? Or that labelling these justifications of murder as "rightist extremism" is "not helping"?
Compared to no healthcare at all, yes, but similar could be said of Crassus' firefighting service in ancient Rome. He brought his slaves to your burning property and they stood around outside while you negotiated selling your property to Crassus at a bargain price. If you agreed, he ordered his slaves to fight the fire and you got some money. If you didn't, they let it burn and you got nothing. Crassus would be there to buy the ruins for even less if you couldn't afford to rebuild. That's a net positive for Rome compared to no fire service - fires don't spread to other buildings as often, people get something instead of nothing - but it's hardly a ringing endorsement, and it could be better.
Observation 1: you are bothered by the murder of the CEO. You dismiss the business-as-usual harms to hundreds of thousands of poor people. You consider yourself to have a good grasp of what is crazy.
Observation 2: when faced with claims that insurance companies kill people, you turn to dreaming of a world where you can talk of killing Democrat leaders. You still consider yourself to have a good grasp of what is crazy.
Complaints, letters to the editor, letters to congresspersons, achieved nothing; the murder of a CEO has achived nothing; what size event would make you notice?
> "Imagine I believe that the Democrats are net-negative"
Just feels important to say, for the record, that facts don't support that position; the Economic Policy Institute[1], and the Senate Joint Economic Committee[2] found that since 1949 the economy performs better under Democrat administrations than under Republican administrations. Job growth is greater. GDP growth is faster. Unemployment is lower. Small business creation is higher. Manufacturing investment is higher. Stock market returns are higher. Wage growth is faster. Recessions start less often.
> "Would this justify people saying that Democrat leaders should be murdered?"
First problem here is your implication that I would support the Democrats being awful and not be on the side of people objecting [although not calling for murder]. Second is the implication that I would want to silence your free speech instead of, say, supporting your right to say things I disagree with, or sarcastically mocking you. Third (or really, first) problem is that you're replying to claims that insurance company behaviour causes humans to die with "Left bad".
- an out of band way to request and obtain permission to change the owner, possibly a high-trust environment with no arguing "you agreed" "no I didn't"
- a programmer/scripter who can develop the management reports on-demand
It's minimally viable, which means it does what people needs now without costing too much in resources. I'm not Joe (I wasn't even born at that time), but
> a text file (with an undefined character encoding)
Most team kinda have the same system to work from, so character encodings doesn't matter much (and people who deviates from the norm know how to handle such things).
> an undefined structure for the header of the file
That's pretty much YAGNI. By the time you get to this point, you could probably switch to a DBMS and import the old data.
> a rule that status must be 'open' or 'closed' in every human head
A lot of rules, even today, are encoded in human head. In the ticketing systems at $WORK, each team has a different set of fields with different semantics for the status field. And there's a global repo. You can easily enforce that new addition don't have any other value.
> a revision control system which dates changes
No need to wonder how to enforce proper date control. And less code
> an out of band way to request and obtain permission to change the owner, possibly a high-trust environment with no arguing "you agreed" "no I didn't"
The owner of the ticket? Why can't it be a new update to the file? It's version controlled. And the import to the global repo (which I think is the source of truth) can be monitored and constraints enforced.
> a programmer/scripter who can develop the management reports on-demand
It was 1986. If you have a computer on site, you also have a programmer available.
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So you got a working solution without investing too much resources solving subproblems, some of which are not even important.
It's his bike, he loves it, it's not an unbiased independent review.
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