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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...

Fallacy or not, if our domestic manufacturing capacity is contingent on wreaking havoc in the Middle East and the global south then I want nothing to do with it. Based on the tidbits shared above, it sounds like our domestic production capacity only exists because the ruling class can’t afford to outsource defense manufacturing without the risk of it being used against them (see Westmag drones) but they’re happy to sell us out for everything else. It may support the workforce but that’s just happenstance as evidenced by them actively trying to replace human labor with AI without any plan...

The "multiplier effect" is an economic fallacy. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

That wild recent evacuation in Los Angeles was due to failure of a holding tank of epoxy used for windscreens on jet fighters. Dod is everywhere. And there is countless communities dependent on those contracts. Ultimately I don’t care about our government spending money in general. I care more about how they source that money (taxing wealthy folk versus borrowing) and that the money spent either a) directly pays money to poor folk or b) creates jobs. And having the world’s most advanced and funded military is an obvious strategic advantage. Even if we have often used that advantage some...

The point about defence spending having a positive affect on the rest of the economy- in my lectures this was talked about using the concept of the multiplier effect. This is the idea that if someone, ie the state, spends £1 on something then it increases national GDP by some amount because that’s been spent at a local supplier, who then pays wages, their employees go to the local butcher, who buys from the local farmer, etc etc. The issue with defence spending is it has a comparatively poor multiplier effect vs other forms of government spending. If I spend...

There's more to that Vulcan investment... https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-vulcan-deal-white-ho…

RE: Magnets - something I broadly agree with you on. (china owns the market) As to the future, I know the American Dynamism team at a16z, along with other VCs, has been circling this general problem: rebuilding domestic capacity around critical minerals, magnets, motors, defense supply chains, and industrial manufacturing. A16z wrote directly about the critical minerals side last year in It’s Time to Mine (linked below), and you’re also seeing magnet-specific startups going after the downstream bottleneck. Vulcan Elements, for example, announced a $1B rare earth magnet facility in North Carolina, partly backed by the Pentagon. I know y'all...

Note that Orson Scott Card (who wrote Ender's Game, about using child soldiers to fight aliens) turned out to be one of these neo fascists like the Dilbert guy. You can bet that the guys for that VC are all about deregulation...

"Is the state of manufacturing in the US really that bad that a company, backed by the most important VC firm achieving 30 million motors per year is an achievement?" I'm not in a great position to comment on the annual global production of drone motors, but I can tell you that yes, the state of manufacturing in the US is pretty bleak. By one measure, China's manufacturing sector accounts for roughly 26% of their GDP, Japan is at 25%, Germany is 18%, but in the US that share is only 9% of GDP and continuing to trend downward annually...

I've never had an issue with getting the AXS batteries wet having used them since the original Eagle AXS came out. That includes spraying with a hose, and riding in truly awful conditions.

I've always maintained that if you had to pay for your Gopro, I don't want to see your shit.

That's a hot take on things. A lot of us don't care if a bike is inside the box or outside it, we just want it to be a good time. Oh, and pretty much all mountain bikers are uncool. That's fine with me, I don't really like the cool people anyway.

The serial number on the pic can be read as "1270890-0002-T" which translates to Description: Bomber Z2, 29in, Marzocchi, 130, RAIL 2.0, Sweep-Adj, Shiny Blk, Neutral/Gloss Blk Logo, 15QRx110, 1.5 T, 58HT, 44mm Rake, YG, AM I suppose the lowers might be from something else.

This is my situation too and why I think the industry is still screwed for the foreseeable future. Not only have those of us propping up the industry year after year stopped buying, but we now have a huge back catalog of dirt cheap previously released bikes we want to try. If I ditched my dual crown Patrol it would be for the old high pivot Range, not the new Torrent.