Even in motorsports, presumably it’s still
mostly showing off? Unless you are a pro, you’d still lose any seriously comepetitivr race and have plenty to learn and enjoy driving a not-quite-top of the line sports car?
I don’t know motorsports, but in all the sports I do know it’s that way. Tennis, cycling… there are serious diminishing returns in all of those and most kit spending isn’t justified by performance as much as status or stamp collecting.
So much of our lives are taken up by worrying about tiny performance differences that really don’t matter. It makes me sad for the waste of life sometimes.
>Even in motorsports, presumably it’s still mostly showing off? Unless you are a pro, you’d still lose any seriously comepetitivr race and have plenty to learn and enjoy driving a not-quite-top of the line sports car?
I was at a track day once, and you'd see guys rolling up with very expensive cars, and they were often clocked as noobs before anyone even spoke to them. The guy rolling up with a beat up 1st gen miata pulling a trailer with two sets of spare tires? Yeah, that guy got respect. Dude was scary quick in the turns.
That's definitely true, and I have a whole other rant how my cycling pals and I love to poke fun at dudes who show up to the group ride on a brand new $10,000 bike and get dropped before the midpoint.
BUT! It's easier than you think to get a point in participatory motorsports where the difference between, say, a Cayman and a Miata is something you can actively use.
>That's definitely true, and I have a whole other rant how my cycling pals and I love to poke fun at dudes who show up to the group ride on a brand new $10,000 bike and get dropped before the midpoint.
This has nothing to do with higher end cars or bikes being "signaling" this is just an anecdote between your skill and the next level.
You could say the same thing about a tour de france winner with any bike vs you and your pals.
If you are competitive, you get to a point where the differences do matter.
>This has nothing to do with higher end cars or bikes being "signaling" this is just an anecdote between your skill and the next level.
No, that's precisely what it's about.
>You could say the same thing about a tour de france winner with any bike vs you and your pals
In cycling, a TdF rider's bike isn't significantly more expensive or fancy than the highest-end bike available from any given maker. A novice rider rolling up on something one or two ticks away from the absolute top of the line is being a silly person. Novices in any discipline who opt for the high end of equipment are making foolish choices, and are frequently teased about it.
>If you are competitive, you get to a point where the differences do matter.
My guess is that you don't know very much about cycling. Pogi would be as very nearly as fast on my $5000 road bike as he is on his TdF bike. His comp bike is a little bit lighter, and it has components that are one tick higher up and thus lighter, but the differences at this level are tiny.
Nobody who isn't being paid to ride needs to go higher than $5k on a road bike. Going higher is just showing off, which is of course a totally reasonable thing to do, but don't pretend it makes a real difference.
The groupset would drive it for me. If I was buying a new bike, and I knew I wanted to be a rider, I wouldn't mess about with anything less than Shimano 105. At Specialized, the lowest end bike with the 105 groupset on it is $2100. That's the Allez Comp, which has an aluminum frame and wheels.
The next step up the ladder would be their "endurance" frame, which is carbon. It's called the Roubaix, and equipped with 105 it's $2800.
Either of those would be a good first "serious" bike.
If the question is more about diminishing returns, I'd offer my own bike, which is a Giant TCR Advanced. It's a couple years old. I have about $5500 in it, all in, but that includes the middle-grade SRAM electronic shifting group, carbon wheels, and a power meter. The meter is skippable if you're not doing serious training, but I did and do use power data for training. Subtract $800 if you don't want that.
I honestly think spending more is just showing off. If that's your jam, knock yourself out, but it's probably not making a big difference UNLESS you need a custom frame to be comfortable.
In the Uk it’s about £3-4k I think. Beyond that the differences in function are very small and would make no differences at all in an amateur road race. For time trials it’s a bit different and there clothing does make a measurable difference, although still v small relative to training harder!
This is becoming such a weird romanticisation of rural Americana!
Your civilisation is being destroyed because a largely rural constituency is able to clean a rifle in 60s but appears to have no critical thinking skills when it comes to a certain New Yorker.
Yes it’s good to learn how to be resilient in nature, but it’s also important to learn how to get along with and manage relationships with larger groups who are not always to be trusted.
The point missing from this discussion is that because of hysteria over stranger danger (not supported out by any real evaluation of or changes in risk) and because we allow cars to dominate our urban spaces, city kids are being denied opportunities for independence they previously had.
That’s the real change that’s happened … and we’re replacing real urban experience with corporate attention economies.
City kids can get on the bus or urban rail in actual big cities. Even in places like urban philippines or mexico where there is [often] no public transport, collectivos take up this niche. Kids abound in these places even in places like Manila where traffic is way worse and way more homicidal, and they take the jeepnee to go to the next barangay.
It's really mainly in the suburbs where neighborhoods are choked off by bike unfriendly freeways and no for-hire transit.
There is no in winning a war between the US and China, even assuming it doesn't go nuclear. There would only be losers all over the world. It would make the current Iran conflict look like a tiny speedbump (albeit one which is likely to cause malnutrition and starvation for millions of people in subsaharan Africa within 6-12 months).
There is a win condition achievable in a US-China war. You leave the army in shambles and take over the political power structures, like with nazi germany or any other conventional country in the world.
It'd be hell, for sure, but it is a war that can end in victory for either side.
I'm not sure if you're joking and this is a backhanded compliment to Harris, or you're sincere in your belief that what Trump will negotiate is going to be better than the Obama deal he ditched in the first term.
Really not many people outside far right proponents of hate speech (and more recently MAGA shills) have been complaining about free speech in Europe. Yes, there are laws against holocaust denial for specific historical reasons. The UK also had regulations on some Irish republican organisations access to TV, but not other forms of expression. And yes most European jurisdictions accept that speech can cause harm and try to balance this against free speech. But there is really no case that nonviolent political speech is -- in practice -- discriminated against in EU and UK.
On the IT and AI services: Europe hasn't really failed to compete in innovation, as much as scale of operation. That might change if we have a security imperative to protect our own markets for these things against an increasingly hostile US.
People have been fined and their apartments searched for insulting politicians online.
The fact that other Europeans aren't complaining about this makes it worse, because it implies that the society condones this behavior.
I'm sorry, but in no sensible society should the police raid someone's home because he called the deputy chancellor (think vice president) a dumbass on Twitter ("dummkopf"). Or more recently: police started investigating a man for calling Merz (the chancellor) Pinocchio:
I'm not defending racism against immigrants to Europe, but let's get this in proportion. It wasn't long ago that the US had _state mandated segregation_ and regular lynchings. All racism is abhorrent, but I really don't see Europe a specifically problematic in this regard.
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