• 30 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • That is not how real point of sale systems and stores operate in practice. I actually managed a retail chain of bike shops as the Buyer and back office manager. I was the one maintaining the point of sale connections and system. There are always errors in these systems largely due to new and incompetent sales staff that sell/return/enter duplicates of the wrong items. They can enter almost anything wrong, from gender to color, from model year to brand. I’ve seen them all.

    Connecting these systems online is an absolute nightmare. I tried it with shopify, but had to limit the sku’s to items I could completely control with minimal intervention from other staff. Generally speaking, the POS system in a local retail store can be more loosely managed where the staff can make up the gaps and mistakes when the POS system numbers do not perfectly match the local stock. If you want to track inventory like is required for online retail, you need a whole different kind of micromanagement and responsibility from staff. You also need something like quarterly inventory audits. These are quite time consuming and are a total loss in the labor time involved.

    For online retail to be competitive, the margins with e-tail are absolutely untenable trash for brick and mortar retail. They are not even close. The biggest expenses are the commercial space rent and labor costs. With e-tail, the labor is less skilled, and the space is a cheap warehouse somewhere remote. General retail margins must be 40%+ while e-tail is 15-20%. The two are completely incompatible. This is why real quality brands do not sell e-tail. It has to do with how distribution and preseason wholesale buying works. There is more complexity to this, but overall the two are not compatible. In fact, most high quality brands will not allow most of their products to be listed online except under certain circumstances. This is to keep things fair to all parties and prevent undercutting based on whomever has the lowest overhead cost.

    Selling online is only for low end junk and certain circumstances. If you are a high end consumer, you will likely understand this already. It is hard to produce high end goods and distribute them successfully. It takes local Buyers that know their niche market and can do massive preseason spending to collectively give the manufacturer an idea of what they need to produce at what scale. Otherwise, the business will not last long, or they must produce lower end and more reliable/limited products. This strategy will likewise fail due to over saturation of the market segment. It is far more complex than most people realize.


  • I think, printing more money under the same conditions is the primary inflation/devalue, while the federal interest rate determines the baseline for loan interest rates. If the federal rate of return is high, it makes no sense for anyone to buy loans for a lower rate as the US gov has a longer upstanding record of paying back those debts/returns. If the fed is paying a high baseline rate, so is everyone else. Why would a bank or anyone buy your debt if they can put that money in government bonds and get a higher or the same rate of return. So money is expensive because the federal rate is high. At least that is my most simple understanding.



  • So as far as bike fit and road, if a road bike is fit properly, you won’t have weight on your wrists or hands. It probably sounds a little unintuitive, but a proper bike fit on road is all about balancing your weight so that your upper body is neutral without any weight on your arms. Like, the primary test to see if your saddle position is correct is to see if you can pedal smoothly on a trainer while taking your hands off the bars completely.

    The key here is that the centerline of the crank arms is the fulcrum of the rider’s balance. The adjustment of this balance point is set by sliding the seat fore and aft, thus placing more or less of the rider’s posterior to the rear of center.

    The only reason I can still ride is because my thoracic (spine section where the ribs are attached) is neutral when I ride, which by inference also means my arms must be neutral too.

    I am totally fine with people that don’t wish to try it or cycle for whatever reason. I’m simply trying to relate that road bikes are not like any other kind of bike. They are intended to be fine tuned to one’s anatomy, and this makes it possible to ride even when many other forms of exercise are not possible. I can’t swim or do anything sitting upright, standing, or reaching, yet can ride. GL. I wish you the best.


  • I was overweight in my late teens and by my mid twenties I was in really bad shape at 340lbs at my worst. I was in a Target with serious chest pains at one point. I'm not a whiner type and have a significantly above average pain threshold, but I wondered if I would even make it back to my car and get home that day. That was in '08. By '09 I had to move back in with family and started riding a bicycle everywhere. I had tried running and rowing when I was younger, and when I was overweight, some of that was from semi regular gym visits and weight lifting. Nothing ever really stuck like a real lifestyle though. They were always things I made myself add to my routine. I tend to overheat from aerobic exercise. Overheating in this context is really hard to define in a relatable way because it is such an intimate concept to my self awareness. Mainly my head tends to get much hotter than the rest of my body in such a way that I am extremely uncomfortable. I can easily put up with that unpleasantness. If I had never gotten into hardcore cycling, I wouldn't have known this unpleasant overheating was even a thing separate from exercise itself.

    I come from a background of hot rodding cars. Internally, I always had this notion that I was failing at life if I could paint cars, airbrush graphics, build motors, and fabricate at such a high level, but couldn’t do the same with myself and my body as the driver. This curiosity is a major driver in why I rode so persistently through the first couple of months to get past the worst discomfort and made it to a routine. The part that made it different from all aerobic efforts previously was the airflow on a bike, it’s massive. The cooling effect got me. I resisted the clothing at first, like everyone does, but after realizing its utility and purpose, it unlocked the cooling effect even more. I made it to under 190 lbs, worked in a bike shop, and raced. It was really the best I had ever felt in my life by a long shot. The lack of impact with cycling also has a fantastic effect on loosening up your body and improving aches and pains. I had felt like I was aging in addition to chest pains and other problems when I was 340lbs but that all went away with riding.

    I was super unlucky and was partially disabled by a driver in '14. I had a bunch of broken bones and barely survived. I now walk around slowly, and can’t hold posture for very long at all. Still, I can ride. It is nothing like it was in the past. I can only do ~30 miles in a day regularly when I could pull a 100 mile day weekly in the past, and have ridden 200+ miles in a day before. At the present, it does not feel like I can or should be riding, but so long as I maintain my routine that includes nearly daily cycling, I am empirically in my best shape in terms of the least aches, pains, and problems even with severe chronic problems. There is no chance I would be able to establish such a cycling routine from my current state, but I came into my condition as an amateur racer, so I had that advantage and never lost my race legs. If at all possible, consider road cycling. Get a proper bike and get someone to fit you on the bike (adjust and swap required components to fine tune your anatomy to the bike) because with road, the little details are super important or you’ll cause issues from that level of repetitive motion. There are a lot of disabled people on bikes too. In a shop, I was the Buyer and often helped people with unique needs. It may not be right for you, but is maybe something to think about. Cycling changes more than your physique, it impacts your physical and mental health in profound ways. Cycling really is a lifestyle. On a bike your both free and anonymous for the most part.


  • Not really. There are very few lobbyists for a non dystopian future. The battle for the right to own your tools is the absolute fulcrum of the future and the next several centuries. The loss of ownership rights is the largest sociopolitical issue and regression of the past millennia. The atrocity of feudalism was already hashed out as a terrible and failed social structure. Allowing it to reemerge will have extreme long term impacts

    The way people fail to see and understand this issue speaks to the potential force needed to shift the trend and trajectory. All it takes are a few influential and connected people working to shift the political conversation and momentum in the opposite direction to alter the course of the future. Funding a few individuals to speak up for us could make an enormous impact. Ownership IS citizenship; IS democracy. Trusting others while renting tools and property IS feudalism. It is a path to slavery in all but name. It happened before, and is always the inevitable outcome of this situation. Putting up any fight against the lackadaisical complacency of our present culture absolutely has the potential to impact the future in a substantial way.





  • I will counter that the definition of intelligence is needed. Yours OP seems to be emo intelligence, maybe social intelligence. One can be very intelligent in other areas while not within these.

    My quality would be a person’s ability to abstract and understand subjects through inference and intuition; to see all the layers of bigger pictures and the uncertainty of truth when contextualized.

    In many ways, I fail at my own stupid, but it is a striving in life. After all, what use are achievable goals.

    Stupid is subjective, circumstantial, and non binary.







  • Yes .docx.

    It appears as though the encoding is missing in such a way that nothing in Linux recognizes the file. The underlying CLI tools don’t have a way of converting the file. I tried with Python’s docx tool and with iconv. It has to be encoding related because some tools initially load the file with several sets of Asian characters instead of English. However, there is no hexadecimal or sections of entirely binary looking data. Archiving tools do not open up the the file to reveal anything else like a metafile or header. Neo vim shows garbled nonsense throughout. Bat warns of binary. Python won’t load the file, nor will Only Office. Libre Office and Abi Word load initially with Asian characters before crashing.

    The only option is likely gong to be setting up the W10 machine and converting a bunch of files within it.

    Ultimately, my old man thinks he can be an author all of the sudden and is trying to write. He’s not very capable of learning. I’m not confident that he can learn to use FOSS to do the same thing he has been doing. This post was just to see if there are options I am not already aware of that might actually work in practice. I can easily do everything I need in FOSS. I can do everything he needs to do. I’m more concerned about becoming his tech support when he forgets how to copy pasta. He already fails to separate the internet hardware connectivity from the web browser and operating system within his mental model of technology.