@freiheit maybe, but my on-bike minipump is a cantankerous despite being a threadded one

Gschenk - are you in Japan? I thought that was the only place that called dunlop and presta "English" and "french".

@RoboKaren in Germany. Dunlop valves are mostly called "Blitz Ventil", which was a brand name for the newer type valve. (Btw, Blitz harmlessly means lightning or flash, not what an English speaker may associate.)

@gschenk Sheldon Brown's page doesn't inspire confidence: sheldonbrown.com/sachs-internal.html

most bikes have been made in TW/CN for a while

its only your upper end stuff that isn't these days.

not really economically feasible to do elsewhere

maybe a few engineers in California / wisconsin or whatever

my Giant has a "designed in USA; made in china" sticker

as for presta vs schrader, i don't see many non-bso's use schrader. in part, its a bit safer/easier to drill out a rim for a presta valve rather than a schrader valve, esp. on narrower ones.

as for spec'ing out a surly, there are certainly alternatives for a lot of their stuff, but there is a dedicated surly cult. they know their market well and there are certianly some interesting models in their lineup

(e.g. big fat dummy)

on a completely different note, i've apparantly visited bicycles.se for 368 consecutive days

@Batman That's quite honest, but kinda sad at the same time.

if you're in china, you can't use google translate unless you have a foreign sim card

(i went to china last year; was sick for a month after)

@Criggie - not much you can do about it though. The entire supply chain is in china/tw

either you pay massively more for having it made in the USA or whatever or you accept it.

aside from some niche products, of course (eg. rohloff)

the most annoying thing is that non chinese maps don't line up with reality

they're accurate within some distance, which causes problems (this was in Shanghai, where at least in some places there are english signs but they're useless since whatever you're using as a guide will have a different transliteration)

i nearly had to call someone a few times cause i got lost and the signs didn't match what i had on a mpa

map* or google maps on my phone (which cost something ridic like 40 dollars for 100 megs)

yeah - data here is insane unless you have a pre-buy pack. I buy 100 Mbytes for $6 NZ or $4.22 USD and that expires in a month if not used. Fortunaltely I can keep buying it every ~25 days. Data off a plan is 50c/Mbyte which gets real expensive real quick.

Ubiquitous cheap cellular data is not global by any stretch.

well buying a local sim in china is cheap if annoying (have to give your passport and other stuff which i wasn't willing to do )

but the main reason is that you can't get english stuff easily with the great firewall

right now, we have a 3 gig plan (shared between me, my parents and my sister) and i think it runs about 160 usd or so pre-tax

shared is good.