When I was in Urumqi, I was hanging out with a guy from Shenzhen. I asked if he liked snowboarding, he said yes, but he doesn’t have a snowboard.

We get to the mountain, and there’s some hints, on the ride over I’m talking about falling on ice, and he says he has fallen a couple times. Maybe it’s translation or he just meant bad falls. He says he doesn’t know how to put his boots on, so I figure maybe he’s only ever used boa laces. We take the gondola to the top of the black diamond, we get our boards on. Guy says “How do I stand up”.

Not only had he never snowboarded before, he had never touched snow before.

So I helped him ride to the bottom and got him practicing on the bunny slope.

I don’t really have a place to do that. I took it to Kawasaki, they took it for a spin and said I should replace the brake disc, the brake caliper, the barely used 2023 tires, and the entire bike. They did this with no diagnostic or tests beyond the ride.

Used calipers to check, disc was within spec, then they changed the story to “the previous owner ran it without pads and the caliper left ridges in the disc”, but the lines were basically cosmetic, you could barely feel them.

They claimed to hear rod knock, I didn’t hear it.

So I took it to an independent shop and paid them 80 bucks to spend 2 days looking for problems for me to be aware of.

Yeah, now the issue that I’ve noticed is that the rear brake does basically nothing and the front brake gets squishy with even the moderate riding possible on Hanoi streets, gonna take it to a kawa dealership see if they can figure the issue, maybe replace all the hoses with braided ones.

The private dealer I bought it from put DOT 3 in while the manual specifies 4 and didn’t inflate the tires so I’m not sure they’ll be much use diagnosing issues.

So turns out the tires were just a bit low, it falls into turns with very little effort now.

You bought a Grom, people want and buy 125s and 150s, despite them costing 4000 dollars. Way more people would buy them if they cost half to a fifth of that like they do over here. The explosion of ebikes is because there has been literally nothing for people who want a small bike or scooter but don’t want to pay 4000 dollars.

2 bikes expensive.

But I’m keeping my 150cc beater, as a backup.

You don’t go to costco and buy 10 lb blocks of cheddar? 1400% more horses for just 15% more money!

OK, and if you were at the dealership and they had 8x more bike for just 15% more money, you wouldn’t be required to buy the bigger one?

Nah, I’m too stubborn for that.

Thanks, if I can’t just get used to it, maybe I’ll look at handlebars have the same width as the crash pegs, but slope back a few degrees so I can get more leverage and are a couple inches higher so I can be more upright.

Groms cost like 4000 USD.

If you could have a Grom or pay 600 more for a z1000, would you be able to justify the Grom?

It is kinda insane to me that nobody sells cheap beginner bikes in the US. Honda Waves cost 800 USD new and have a semi-automatic gearbox, Honda cb150 verzas go for 1400 new, the closest you get is the crf150L which also costs 4000 dollars.

It’s like they know there’s no alternative so they increase prices to used big bike or car territory. I think lack of accessibility is partly responsible for why motorcycles are so uncommon and aren’t considered a legitimate form of transport in America.

No corporation has ever done anything out of the good of its heart because they do not have hearts, you are still treating them like people instead of entities that exist exclusively to extract money from you while giving as little money to its workers as possible.

They’re doing it in lieu of actually making it a good platform to buy from.

Nah, giving the workers more money and me free games does more to make a platform viable than features. But doing shit everyone hates like filling your store with slop games that can’t be identified until you’ve already paid is a dumb decision.

They do that to try to gain marketshare.

This is every single action any entity which exists to extract profit from you that isn’t immediately increasing revenue or decreasing expenses/wages.

They should try to just stop being shitty

Once again, this is done to gain marketshare

It’s weird as fuck to see people with loyalty to one corporation or another.

It gives consumers free games and takes a smaller cut from the developers than steam. All corporations have mutually exclusive interests with the consumer tho.

Someone not paying attention screenshotting a quote of a quote is not AI being good enough to evade detection, it’s someone not bothering to check if it’s AI.

Skill issue.

Carbonara diverts too much attention, a simple mac and cheese is a much better side dish.

If you disagree, you’re not adding enough carmelized onions and butter to your cheese sauce.