Sure are! I finally got pictures of my new project, and think I need to upgrade to disc brakes...
If Joe* can avoid telling Xi to not invade Taiwan and the Philippines, too much, the trend will continue.
I do hear pushback from mundanes who want the police to stop the hooligan kids riding around with ignorance or contempt for traffic and traffic rules.
My experience is far too many so called adults have completely forgotten being children.
But I'm going to ask parents who buy their kids transportation toys, from Barbie cars to dirt bikes, to teach them traffic rules and safety.
The local kids don't bother me, even when they ride past my house on the road on non-steet-legal machines. I just don't want the fun ruined by dismemberment and Karens.
******
This comes long after the ignored revelation that one variant of Covid developed with your taxes at the Wuhan biological weapons lab had a 100% kill rate in lab rats. I'm calling it the luckiest break in history that the relatively harmless one got loose instead. Just a few millions murdered instead of billions.
It's Monday, so I'll go with human pattern recognition often sees "things" in random stuff.
Tomorrow I'll go with time distortion from matter density. The "ring" is from a slower part of the ancient universe, which might explain the size difference.
Distortion caused by gravitational lensing. Or a coincidence. Most likely a coincidence. 100-200 billion galaxies out there. Some of them are going to appear to be in a circle, from our perspective.
I've watched as the paradigm failed to shift despite promises and prophesies.
Easiest example is the first Phantom II jet fighters with missile only armament.
It made "sense". A cannon has many problems. Recoil hammers delicate electronics and beats on the airframe. Gun gasses can flame out a jet engine. Gun gasses are corrosive and push the airplane off target. A cannon weighs as much as multiple missiles. Missiles have much greater range.
However...
The new guided missiles were not as good as expected. The number carried limited. Insane Rules Of Engagement forbid beyond visual range shots ( in fear of friendly fire blue on blue kills ) and required getting closer than the missiles minimum arming distance ( so they don't explode as they are released ) to positively identify targets. ( yup, the guy shooting at me is in a Mig, not a Skyhawk )
So, eventually, after lost billion$ and human lives, guns got designed back in.
See also Chevy Volt. A hybrid programmed to not work like the competition so the company could claim it's an Electric car not a hybrid! Oh, no! It's not a badly designed Prius copy! It's a magical electric with a backup gas engine for when the too small battery runs down.
It's a Littoral Combat Ship! Not an under gunned stealth frigate! It's got high efficiency hybrid propulsion. If we can get it to run. And a magical cannon! That we didn't make ammo for to use the budget money for pronoun training.
I doubt we'll ever find out why this particular fire started, but the odds are poor installation practices and/or lowest bidder lousy connection hardware is the problem.
For an analogy... If you wire 3 car batteries together to get 32 volt-ish power, by stripping the ends of old extension cord and wrapping the wires around the terminals, you probably won't get a disaster. Try the cheap and easy way on 50 car batteries, and the odds of a fire are Much higher.
Ditto, there's a Lot of juice in a big solar panels array, and lousy connections have more wasted energy turning into heat than the portable panel my sister uses to recharge her husband's medical gear when camping.
Or, it could be cruddy Chinese lowest bidder, or bribing bidder panels themselves having poor internal and external connections. Aluminum wiring hooked together with corrosion causing different metals?
Not all that's Chinese made is crap. I've got a scary sized Chinese 21700 cell battery between my legs in my E-bike. They make good stuff.
And cruddy. Just look at Amazon for the reviews on the 18650 batteries.
I would not buy a Chinese electric car. I really wouldn't charge it in my attached garage. See also, container ship fires.
It's a rental. The "not my car" renters might have abused them.
But if you can get one inspected ( on Your Dollar! And Don't skimp ) by a knowledgeable pro ( Teslas are specialty designs, not regular mechanic fodder ) you can get a good deal.
My source is behind a pay wall, so search for your own verification.
The New England Journal of Medicine is pushing Carbon Footprint reasons to not use modern imaging technology, like a MRI.
NEJM is a long time leftist propaganda rag, that considers You owning a firearm to be a public health crisis, so the editors being onboard with rationing of diagnostic tests to "Save the Planet" despite how many peasants will die preventable deaths is actually expected, if you're cynical enough and have a functioning memory.
I also predict today's Keffiyeh wearing Pro-rape students will fully embrace the nihilism of letting their patients die if it saves energy for billionaires fly to resorts to tell us to obey them.
I personally wear, most of the year, a mesh jacket, ( Cortech ) with the liner in my tank bag, since it's pretty normal to ride locally on a 80 deg. F day, but dropping to the 40s at night. And I'm enough of a ditz that I'll leave my buddy's house after dark, and then stop a dozen miles down the road to install the lining.
I brag that a mesh jacket is as cool as wearing a t-shirt, not quite true, as my back and elbows sweat under the pads, but true enough that I do recommend one in hot weather. ( And it's like a t-shirt in the cold too, as I found out at Whiteface Mountain, where it was in the 70's at the bottom, but 43 on top. )
I've also got a couple of "fabric" jackets over the years, and a decent leather one. Water, abrasion, & other factors influence gear choice, YMMV.
I'm not an armor Expert, but I do know a few, and I've built a lot of body armor specifically for impact protection in martial arts with blunt weapons forms. I can, and have, done sharp stuff armor too, and while I'll leave the Bullet Resistant armor to experts, I have a grasp on the principles.
I don't expect my motorcycle armor to protect me from a broken bone. Abrasions and lacerations, yes, please.
Sure, I bet that the sub minimum protection from the Euro certified pads helps, but long experience shows that if you really need to protect your skeleton, you need HARD armor and full coverage from joint to joint. Dislocations, tendon tear, etc. protection is a matter of armor joint design.
My brother in law had his thumb tendon ripped when a blow bent his thumb back. The only way to prevent that is restricting the range of motion of the armor joints. It's a real design challenge, but fortunately, there is thousands of years of development, and this aspect was figured out by the 15th century. It's NOT Easy, it's just possible.
btw, metal "Knight's" armor will scratch the Sh*& out of your paint on a motorcycle. DAMHIK.
I think you have to go to the top end race gear to get substantial bone breaking protection, and very few will tolerate that level of restriction, weight, and heat retention for street riding.
And Almost No One will wear hard joint articulation armor outside specialist sports, as the armor must be custom fit to work properly. A range of basic sizes will work for helmets and some parts, like elbow/knee joints, and a breast plate, but people are varied enough that you just don't have off the rack hard articulated armor.
Soft armor, protective plates or not, still has to fit fairly well to work, but doesn't need the precision fit required for the better protection of hard shell stuff. Cloth/leather articulation also doesn't protect against hyper extension and other wrenching injuries.
That's why motorcycle gear, mass produced, doesn't use hard articulation. And using, say, a Titanium plate, fitted outside your padding, will greatly improve abrasion resistance, as you lay a spark trail down the highway at speed, and provide a little better protection against, say, hitting a fence post on the plate, but nothing else.
And even the best possible armor can't protect from acceleration/deceleration internal injuries. I could build you an armor suit that would even protect your ribs & skeleton from a wrecking ball, ( You might not be able to walk far with that much mass ) but nothing will protect you from internal organs tearing loose and your brain bouncing around in your skull.
In conclusion, I'll take the protection from lacerations and road rash, and I'm grateful for that, ( I did spend my own money ) but I think the video guy above is projecting unrealistic expectations on his gear.
I always armor up when I ride. My bad wreck in '08 resulted in multiple shattered bones and lots of hospital (and rehab) time...but armor wouldn't have helped against a fence post made from a telephone pole.
When I cut a deer in half with my S2 back in '18 (I won't be riding at all in '28....), I slid a little over 110 yards down the road, on my back, after I Superman'd over the bars, somersaulted in midair, and landed on my back, feet first. I had rash on my hip, where my jacket pulled up (I hadn't zipped my jacket to my pants; I typically - and still - don't on the street, although I probably should), and I had rash on my shoulderblade where 110 yards simply burned through the jacket...and the armor is only over top of the shoulder anwyay.
That was it.
Over the bars at 70+, I stood up on the double yellow, watched my bike continue to slide (it went over 250 yards), walked off the road and called my own ambulance.
And I currently wear Klim gear. Was wearing it in '18, too. If you damage their gear in an accident...they replace it. Free.
I have a mesh Joe Rocket, but frankly its so old that the armor has literally disintegrated. And, my Klim jacket has such good venting...it's just as cool in hot weather (when moving, anyway) as that mesh was. Bulky, sure...but "ride for the thrill and dress for the fall", right?
Since we only went metric officially in 1895, and it's been, what?, 3 Democrat Presidents since Jimmy Carter's road speed signs were removed, I don't have a "feeling" on metric length or temperature or torque. I have to read the torque wrench. 34 degrees is when the bridges freeze, not heat stroke weather. And I appreciate that Toronto suburbs let me ride 100!
If I'm doing physics, engineering calculations, metric is easier math, no doubt. But I cross check with Imperial estimation to see if I got it right.
( let's see, 6G at 220 pounds including helmet, that seat needs over a half ton of sandbags to test. Then I cross check to the actual math and check if the number of grams is about right. And that's the ONLY conversion I make. I'm not NASA, & can't afford to throw away Mars probes or have my seat fail in flight. ) I'm serious.
It's just lack of practice that I don't have a feel for metric in daily life.
I can do a 40 second rant on screw threads , but base ten is just easier to teach and leaves more time for History & other subjects for the schools to lie about. ( cynical? Duh. Sarcastic too. )
Unlike some mechanics, I don't use the closest wrong wrench and haven't memorized the unholy conversion for rounded bolt heads. I own both sets of wrenches for a reason. 'Murica! And you can hear me a block away when I get to a Chinese 11.3 mm bolt that was made with badly adjusted tooling by slave labor that doesn't care.
I even worked with a aviation mechanic who's tool cart had The Stars and Stripes flag on his Imperial wrench drawer, and a separate one with the French & Soviet flags for metric. We got along.
The latest "no conversions!" Attitude Reinforcement is the carbon fiber bicycle boom. You need a torque wrench on everything, or $3000 cracks. 4 Newton Meters for that seat bolt! German Torque won't do.
I freely admit metric is generally easier, I'm just a dinosaur.
And I do miss those Carter era speed signs. I thought that was a great learning aid for a measurement transition that's just not happening smoothly for nearly 150 years. Or 0.64 Queen Elizabeths.
Clear air turbulence over Burma. Serious mountain & jungle terrain.
A guy in a Piper Cub would have had a wild ride, ( though it would take a miracle and pressure suit to get one that high ) but he's doing maybe a hundred. At 600 mph, the speed of the drop is made more severe.
If the plane had hit the other side of that downdraft, the up side ( miles away probably ) It could have gone up and stalled, both engines and Aerodynamically.
