A note on tires, turns out there’s another compatible “standard” for 451. It’s called OS20. From what I gather it’s 451 but with wider widths. There are a few models. I saw some Tioga, Kenda.

Perfect. Given how unpopular the Democratic party is at the moment, this must have positive effect for Mamdani.

Probably not unless you have lots or animals crossing it. Ticks require hosts to feed and transport over significant distance I think.

100%

The silver lining to stuff like this is that it’s now trivial to show examples of how the system works in favour of the 1%. In cases like this, the differential between profits and fines is so huge that anyone would understand how the fine is completely ineffective, and therefore regulation relying on such fines.

Yes I do mean the revolving door. Also the campaign finance laws still favor better funded campaigns and we know how much better funded the cons are for example than anyone else. And then there’s the spending that goes to advertising from third parties which is very high. And then we have the third party ad spending outside of campaign periods. Your Canada Prouds and such pushing corporate propaganda all day, every day. And then in some provinces there are no limits for provincial elections or the limits are quite high. Don’t get me wrong, we’re in a much better position in this regard to the USA but we’re very much not in a democratic environment that really favours the majority of working Canadians.

Political campaigns cost a lot of money and billionaires fund the ones that would bail them out directly or indirectly. So billionaires are in fact bailing themselves out. This is why we so often find ourselves in the situation where all candidates are shit and we try voting for the lesser turd. If it were merely a matter of voting, we wouldn’t be in this position. Unless this is widely understood and we take the steps needed to counteract it, we’d forever be pointing at either the housing minister, or the voters and ask how could this still be happening. (Actually we won’t because the system would collapse when workers eventually revolt, but you get what I’m saying.)

The theory that if we only let large firms fail when they fuck up, things would get better is a fantasy because that changes nothing of significance in who holds power in society. And that’s before we think about corporate ownership and how profits are protected during failure. And before we consider that when firms fail, they rarely disappear. Instead they get absorbed, customers, employees and capital by their competitor, creating even bigger firms, now able to exercise higher market power, and their owners even richer. Competition does not lead to a competitive equilibrium outside of rare cases. Instead it leads to consolidation and eventually monopolies or oligipolies.

I think at best there’s evidence for a correlation between productivity and wages and even that correlation has largely disappeared since the 80s. If you’re looking for causation, I’m afraid that without union representation, wage increases come before productivity gains and it’s not difficult to see why. If your labour cost increases, your profit margin decreases. If you can’t decrease wages, you have to get more product out of the same labour. You can do that by investing in more or better tooling, equipment, training, automation. That is productivity increase.

In a union environment, the union can force higher wages when there’s increase in profits as a result of productivity gains. Which then drives further productivity increases as the owner tries to get their margins higher again. Which drives the kind of feedback loop which creates the tight productivity-wage correlation we’ve observed in the post-depression period till the 80s. You probably know what happened after that.

This can’t possibly play well over the long run. Israel is already getting isolated as a peace destabilizer. Given the rightward trends in Israel, combined with having these bombers, the likelihood of them restraining themselves from pulling the trigger isn’t too high. I guess we’ll see if the Qatari jet worked its magic.

Aren’t most US elections FPTP? If so, during the election he’ll split the right vote which boosts Democratic/other candidate’s chances. If they get a few senators elected with Democrats getting fewer than a majority, then for sure the plan would work as you described it.

Sent you something in addition to the recurring to help with that repaying. ☺️

Thanks for the info! The current model seems to come with 38c tires. I saw there’s very little variety in the 451 diameter and most are 28c. I’m thinking that if I end up needing wider tires and there’s nothing available, I could replace the wheelset with 406. Since it’s using disc brakes that should work fine. I was considering converting the front of a Link D8 to disc but it seems like 20" disc forks are much harder to find than 406 disc wheels. Have you looked into a front rack? Is it Taiwan-made or PRC-made? Have you fit fenders on it? Can it roll folded without the special rack for rolling?

Isn’t some of this an indictment of the federal worker unions? Shouldn’t the federal gov’t been ground to a halt by cross-agency strikes by now? What’s the unions’ strategy here?