:sicko-biker: :sicko-biker: :sicko-biker:
edit: let me clarify that I understand biking isn't feasible for everyone or even safe considering how dangerous city streets are. is just funny meme because bikes are cool.
Legit question for urban Americans - How am I supposed to transport 30-50 feral hogs and unload them into my neighbor's yard where his small kids play?
Not good enough, I need to unload them within 3-5 minutes.
Invite your praxis pals
:sicko-biker: :sicko-biker: :sicko-biker: :sicko-crowd:
You need to build up a sufficient schwerpunkt before overwhelming your neighbors defences
You can just send your neighbors hog on the internet now. :horsepoo-theory:
I know someone with a PMC spouse who makes bank. He was saying they recently determined they need - not want, need - the absolute largest class of SUV.
They have one kid and a large dog...
I’m guessing it’s for the one camping trip they go on per year
That’s how the PMC couch potatoes I know justified their humongous lifted trucks to their wives/themselves anyways
I live in a major college town in the south and I can confidently say that 95% of the people who own humongous ass abominable F-150's are PMC Chud small business owner dickheads and rich frat bro douches. Only about 5% of the people who own said trucks actually need them for hauling.
Recent large scale polling has determined that less than 1% of truck owners have ever towed or even used the bed of the truck. Ever.
This is why I will never get rid of my 2012 Suzuki Equator. Suzuki doesn’t even exist anymore but I refuse to get a Ford. :big-cool:
That's what the 90s, maybe up to mid-2000s, version of that guy would get. For the past 10-15 years it's been about TRUCKS
Ostensibly they are thinking about buying a second large dog and they bring them on trips to the in-laws an hour away 10-15 times a year. Whatever, I said a Subaru could handle that just as well and at that he kinda backtracked on it being a "need" and not a "want".
The rationale I've heard for wanting a battleship-sized SUV is that they are "safer" since allegedly if you get in an accident then the other guy in a smaller car will be crushed and you will be fine. I don't know if accidents even work that way but on a general level the idea of adding mass moving at high speed to accidents for safety's sake is absolute madness.
Not when the grocery store is a 5-10 minute drive away. Gotta have better cities before we can have bikes.
Ebikes solve that, and you can get a decent one for sub $1000 if you get a shop to modify a normal bike or get a decent second hander.
Its true main roads can be terrifying, especially with the hostility of Sydney drivers (the local government states Paramatta Rd as "Bike Friendly", which is like saying the Thirty Years War was safe.), but if you embrace evil and just take the lane straight down the centre you can feed off their rage.
Well in my case it's also summer in the southern US. Not a very good combination.
Not trying to take sides in this discussion, but I will note that wind is not always effective at cooling--when I lived in Phoenix I was quite surprised to discover that opening a car window was like having a hair dryer pointed at my face.
I love cycling but it just isn't a safe way to commute where I live
Oh I should mention it's because of all the cars
bikes work great when you have insulated bags and less fragile food items, and are only going about a mile, mile and a half. like it works but hauling groceries by bike can easily be miserable.
I love bikes! I’m not anti-bike at all, but the vastly superior solution is just to have small corner groceries and inexpensive local restaurants all over the place so you’re always within walking distance of food
I remember I got into an argument on Reddit once, maybe on the old sub, when I suggested that a multitude of cornerstores is a far better alternative to big box stores. I think they were mad because people would still have to have service jobs, but assuming you get honest pay then that sort of work really isn't that bad.
I guess the alternative to having food vendors would be a quartermaster who gives you rations, or maybe trading for food from farmers if we go back to a village structure.
if we go back to a village structure.
:melon-musk: city status: emptied
working food service was only tolerable when I did it because I was literally stealing shitloads of food and money (pocketing leftovers and intentionally-prepared extras and cooking the books), but if I had been working with customers I didn't despise, for a comfortable wage, I'd have probably preferred it to the bullshit desk job I'm doing now
I had to fetch wine bottles for the fucking Waltons, shit was miserable
I've never worked in restaurants, though basically everyone I know has at some point in their lives (and some still are). I have been a shelf-stocker, though.
Honestly, if I'd been paid a wage I could live comfortably off of, and then used my free time to pursue hobbies/life, I coulda done that forever. Did I love the job? Of course not. But it was easy, simple work.
Obligatory fuck the Waltons. I was having a fantasy the other day of seeing a Storming the Winter Palace style painting but instead of the Tsar's Winter Palace it's the Walton family estate.
As someone who frequently commutes by bike, this is a huge limitation of them. Whenever you have to be somewhere in decent condition -- not sweating through your clothes, not wet from rain, not with helmet hair -- you either need a locker room on the other end or something beyond a regular bike.
Showing up to work with helmet head and getting fired for dripping a gallon of sweat on the tile of the Target you work at to own the car losers. I love biking but it's just not feasible for a ton of people in North America.
What about disabled people?
We will make a goddamned exception now ride your bike.
- Authoritarian tankie red bike fash
A lot of the replies to this thread is a good example of how atomised political understand is under late capitalism, even on a leftist website.
People see a "bike good, bike possible" message and interpret it as a moral condemnation of them personally for not biking while nothing else changes and not as a call for people in general to bike more with the changes in infrastructure and city planning that would go with it.
It's not that there's something wrong with people for thinking like this, after all this is how we're being taught to think constantly by the bourgeois propaganda apparatus, but it is something to consider in political communication, being explicit about the collective nature of what were proposing.
It's not that the understanding is atomized, we all fully grok the benefits of a move to non-car society. It's that individual action is often dangerous, irrelevant, or even counter-productive independent of a wider shift in consciousness and action, and currently reactionary forces are stronger than we are. Individually adopting a bike-first approach in many urban centers massively multiplies your chance of getting fucking murdered by people who despise cyclists who will clip you intentionally and laugh as you die.
I and several people I know have been chased off the shoulder and into ditches by aggressive drivers for daring to walk alongside the road. Like I don't think you grasp how sociopathic American drivers are.
the courts love victim blaming and would rule that you were endangering traffic, basically nullifying your 2A rights
while I agree with the sentiment it's kinda immaterial. not like you can feasibly draw a weapon and fire on someone speeding off when you're eating pavement
I would absolutely love to use a bike for the day to day tasks but goddamn is it a catastrophically stupid idea where I live. Like, solid chance of dying if I tried to do it regularly, with how car culture dominates.
The extent of the struggle session which has arisen from the idea "bikes are good" shows clearly that the left is so thoroughly divided as to be absolutely doomed and incapable of ever resisting capitalism in any meaningful way. The fed reading this thread is probably pissing themself laughing
Bingo. If you're unwilling to risk your life riding a bicycle, what will you be willing to do to usher in a worldwide proletarian revolution (in minecraft)? Vote?
"Socialism can only arrive by bicycle." –Jose Viera-Gallo
lol I would be fucking hit by a car if I tried any of these except the backpack
With the backpack it's only a 20% chance I get hit by a car any time I travel by bike
where the f do you all live? If there's a lot of traffic, it must be a big city right? Don't they have decent bike lanes yet? I haul about 50lbs of groceries using 70L panniers and a back pack with my ebike once a week, y'all babies 🙃
Cities are actually better for bikers. I live outside a small town of ~25k. In order to get to downtown I need to drive on two separate highways with no bike lanes, and the commute would take over an hour.
Yep. In the minor city I went to grad school in, my nearest grocery store was about a kilometer away, but there was a multi-lane split freeway in between, and the nearest crossing point that was accessible by foot or bike was a 20 minute drive away literally on the opposite side of town in the super gentrified downtown area. The nearest grocery store on the same side of the freeway as my building was a whole foods in the downtown area. The only "public transit" in the entire town was a bar hop trolley bus that only ran in the downtown area. This city has about 200,000 people in it.
I don't think there's a single bike lane (decent or otherwise) in my entire city, and yes there is a lot of traffic
In fact, I have actually never in my life seen a bike lane in person.
There are tons of large and relatively large cities in North America that refuse to install any bike lanes at all. Additionally, thanks to the way small to mid size towns are laid out over a huge area based on suburban sprawl so towns with like 20k to 50k people have pretty constant heavy traffic on arterial roads and pretty heavy traffic even on collectors, and often won't even have sidewalks or will ban bicycles from use on sidewalks.
and often won’t even have sidewalks or will ban bicycles from use on sidewalks.
This is a big one. Bikes are vehicles and vehicles aren't allowed on sidewalks. Not that it would help much even if that weren't the case, because as you said, often there aren't sidewalks. I see these weird orphaned sidewalks just begin and end next to roads sometimes, maybe like 100m of sidewalk total, starting nowhere and leading nowhere. Otherwise, largely they don't exist at all.
Yep. The other classic is the fake edge of road "shoulder sidewalks" where they just paint an extra line on the street so now the road is actually not even as wide as the suvs or trucks that make up 99% of the traffic and every time you try and walk down the road you're dodging those fucking giant "tow mirrors" that dudes leave extended so it looks like they actually use the truck.
I've been to a lot of US towns where it's like... an H of four-lane highways, a cloverleaf connecting the bar of the H with an even larger interstate, and all the highways are flanked with so much parking infrastructure that the majority of the frontage is ramps into lots. Then like two loops of smaller roads somewhere link the H to actual housing, because this is still a podunk town.
