Tires are not “a part of life!” Humanity did just fine without them until not much more than a century ago, despite not having much public transit back then, either.

You know what the real difference, and the real solution today is? Walkable, dense zoning.

The trouble is that motorcycles are generally way higher-performance than cars (in terms of e.g. HP/weight ratio), so putting low-friction, long-lasting tires on them is irresponsible. It’d be like putting Prius tires on a Lamborghini: sure, you could drive the thing responsibly and within the performance limits of the tire, but it’s missing the point of the vehicle.

Now, if more motorcycles were built sensibly – with much less horsepower – then I’d expect the tires to last a decent amount of time. For example, do 49cc scooters have the tire wear problem you’re complaining about? I’m willing to bet the answer is “no.”

There is, fundamentally, one measurement that defines everything about the performance characteristics of a car: the amount of force it can impart on the road (and vice versa). This single measure defines is limits of acceleration, turning and braking. And what determines how much of that force is available?

The tires, and the coefficient of friction of the rubber compound they’re made of, which is directly related to how quickly they wear. Every possible solution that makes tires wear less will also make cars perform worse.

…Well, short of drastically reducing weight (i.e. making a bicycle instead of a car).

…Or swapping them out for steel and running the thing on rails (i.e. making a train instead of a car).

The amount of time a tire lasts ultimately has fuck-all to do with whether it’s airless or penumatic; it has to do with how much traction it provides and how large/heavy a vehicle it’s supporting. Any tire that is good at its job of providing traction to a big, heavy vehicle like an automobile (and SUVs / EVs / EV SUVs only make this worse) is going to pollute a fuck-ton compared to, say, a bicycle tire or the steel wheel on rail public transit.

Yet another example of how pretty much every problem is, at its heart, a zoning problem:

• Microplastics? Too much driving, because trip origins and destinations are too far apart to be walkable.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from cars? Too much driving because not enough walkability.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from housing? Poor efficiency because too many single-family homes exposed on all sides instead of high-density housing with shared walls.
• Greenhouse gas emissions from concrete production? Using way more of it than we really need to build huge amounts of unnecessary parking (and much wider streets than we’d need for bikes + transit + only delivery vehicles).
• High housing prices? Not enough housing density.
• Obesity? Sedentary lifestyles, i.e., not enough gym of life.
• Racism? Redlining.
• Wealth inequality? (Among other things), protecting rich landowners from market forces by eliminating competition from multifamily developers that would build out the land to its highest and best use.

See also, this video: The Housing Crisis is the Everything Crisis. He almost gets it, but fails to connect that very last dot, which is that the housing crisis is itself caused by bad, density-restricting zoning!

G

Trump says he’ll do something he can’t do. So in effect, nothing at all is going to happen.

You say that as if he hasn’t already done literally dozens, if not hundreds, of things the law says he can’t do and gotten away with them all.

Maybe people won’t become billionaires doing this

And that’s exactly why. Even if the founder wants to be altruistic, the venture capitalists he depends on to get his business off the ground sure as Hell don’t.

The more justice is denied, the more people will turn to vigilantism. The two attempts against Trump (so far) and the United Health CEO assassination are merely examples.

Trump is absolutely inciting violence with this act.

I got my parents set-top boxes with Netflix and cancelled their cable and they still mostly watch broadcast TV, with tons of ads. At this point, I dunno WTF is wrong with them – it’s as if they’re addicted to having the worst experience possible.

V

The plain old double-edge safety razors that I (cis m) use for my face and my wife (cis f) uses for her sensitive areas etc. take exactly the same (standard) blades.

In fact, the blades only vary by non-gendered things like sharpness and cutting angle. We bought a sampler pack off Amazon for maybe $10 quite a long time ago and haven’t used it up yet.

The razors themselves are slightly gendered (mine has a short black handle; hers has a longer silver handle with neat blue mid-century starbursts), but that’s only because we chose them to be.

$75/year seems expensive for Zenni, unless you’re going all-out on the fancy features. For that budget, I think it’s worth spending some on the optometrist to update your R_x.

N

Well, except for the “corporate personhood” nonsense.

You say “never really developed beyond” as if that isn’t a synonym for “finished and working fine.”

Synonym of “pilings.” Long rods of material, not heaps of it. Like what you build to support a boat dock.

That said, I’m not so sure that pilings are the right solution there. That kind of foundation is used when the ground is muddy/unstable/subject to liquefaction – when it doesn’t always have good bearing strength, so they rely on friction against the sides of the piles to support the weight instead.

But when the ground has actual voids in it (karst topography, or in this case, a bunch of old mines), you’re just driving the pilings into air and there’s no friction to be found. I think it’s more likely they do try to fill at least the nearby part of the cavity with some substance, like concrete.

From the thumbnail I got concerned that it was a grand wizard instead.

It’s still regressive AF, in the sense that only the owner class / moneyed interests can afford to do it (especially while avoiding serving their punishment in the interim). Meanwhile, the working class rots in prison waiting for years for their overworked public defender to half-ass their case.