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Excuse my French, but could we fucking please stop calling bikes "analog", "acoustic", or -the worst I've heard- "bio"? Bikes are bikes. Ebikes are something else. Now get off my fucking lawn you punks!

point of order... *Netcompany INEOS

There are no words for how disappointed younger me would have been with older me. Empathy and that whole "prefrontal cortex" thing have both been pretty wild.

I was listening to a road biking podcast recently. One of the guests on the podcast is currently a DS for a bigger team and used to be a world tour rider. One of the things that came up in discussion is how absolutely insane the new generation of riders are. They are SO fast. They are SO good in their training. They are SO dialed in their nutrition and recovery. The guest made a point to bring up an interesting-to-me factoid: They can't let the younger riders anywhere near the big-name riders during team training rides. None of them...

Tech Rumors and innovation

Charlie no

I would answer this question but we're not allowed to talk about ch__n__ay _ength in the tech forum anymore.

Seems like a lot of e-bike talk in here lately, can you move this to the e-bike thread?

Yes, it's suffering, but the wrong kind, it must feel bad from the start, not accidental. Now back to rumors!

In the last two years my local New England observations of bikes on the trail went from, oh wow that’s the first time I’ve seen a big group ride off all e-bikes, to, oh wow that’s the first group ride of all mountain bikes I’ve seen in months. Even the number of old school solo xc ripper guys is down… Riding bikes in the woods has pretty much changed again, the last big change here was almost everyone “serious about riding” being on a full suspension bike.

Yo dawg! We put your shock inside your frame so it’s covered and we put a hole in your shock cover so your shock isn’t covered when it’s covered 🤘

The suffering is 75% of why i ride, emtb can't give me that. For practical reasons eebs are good.

Agile in the context of software development makes total sense. Agile in the context of advanced safety critical engineering design less so.... I've seen companies attempt to do the latter purely because the former was/is minting money but that trend (fortunately ) seems to be subsiding.

About three cool MTBs.

We'll get a lot more information on Strava in the latter half of 2026 being they've already filed their S-1 to go public (confidentially), but their success doesn't shock me, network effects are powerful (and hard to beat). For those who don't know what an S-1 is, it serves a number of purposes, most importantly (for us) forcing disclosure about the company's financials. That means we'll finally get to look under the hood and understand how profitable the company really is. For fun, here is GoPro's S-1 and here is Fox Factory's S-1 (Vital MTB is cited!). What Strava decides...

Sad to hear that Jeff! It's even sadder to think Strava could introduce private segments and bike park mode on a slow Tuesday morning without breaking a sweat but don't and leave it up to overworked people with their hands in multiple pickle jars to do so.

If you're ever able to get this project going, I look forward to cheering you on, enthusiastically adopting your new tech, and inviting all my friends to join the platform with me, and then later calling down curses on you and the Brines family for generations to come for the inevitable enshittification of your platform after you've sufficiently saturated the marketplace.

I just started listening to a whole podcast season that is about how outdoor gear, including camping, hiking, hunting, and even biking gear can trace a lot of its roots to the military. The Berry Amendment is a big reason why there is any domestic outdoor gear manufacturing industry at all. I've only started episode 2, but it's very interesting and I think a lot of people who are interested in this forum thread would think so too. https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/gear-chapter-1 It also goes into some of the sociology of how fashion developed for different outdoorsmen over the past few centuries and...