Is it reasonable to downvote people who post answers to near-duplicate questions without addressing the part that makes it not a duplicate? At the extreme, someone the other day pasted a copy of their other answer and the only change was adding a link to the previous answer. That seems really wrong to me.
yeah seems reasonable. As long as the other answer is relevant and correct, not just a "possible duplicate"
I'm probably guilty of doing it wrong.
Its a matter of finding th esweet spot between keeping the content on topic and useful, and rejecting users who can be good contributors but aren't up to speed on the way its done here.
I answered a few questions on another SE baord , and "no product recs allowed" was in my head so I gave some fairly androgynous answers. Mods were grumpy because that was the expectation, exactly what model and brand and price and where to buy.
@Criggie I'm more interested in avoiding the "20 variations on X, all with similar but confusingly different answers". Which is one reason we avoid product recommendations, because 20 people will ask 20 subtly different questions and the answers will depend on the biases of whoever answers.
@Criggie I nearly gave up on Workplace.SE after one of the mods nagged me in comments based on not reading my answer but seeing a new user as a chance to be patronising. IMO trying to be patronising but being wrong just makes you look like an idiot, and and when mods are idiots it's a bad sign.
Also, Workplace you really need to camp to get rep, it's the early answer that gets the 200 upvotes.
@Criggie wow, I'd heard how your connection was slow...
I watched some of Britain's Davis Cup win yesterday - I quite like tennis - and I think next time I go to one of these live sport events, I should go to tennis rather than cycling. The supporters are far more attracgtive
@Mσᶎ well I try to avoid flag-waving but the people there certainly seemed to be enjoying it
In particular national boundaries seem a bit nonsense to me. I mean, I'll shout for a football team that I chose to support as a kid, but I never had any choice about being British.
I thought it was quite funny yesterday though when (in the context of the Paris attacks) the commentators were talking about "tennis standing up to terrorism". Which is all very jingoistic, but an odd concept
(The final was held in Gent, which is only 30 miles or so from Brussels.)
And which happens to be where I went to see the cycling a week earlier. So, in that sense, cycling also stood up to terrorism.
Interesting that they allow huge crowds at the sports but not at the Climate Summit. Bread and circuses, perhaps. The vichy have gone full authoritarian on the citizen participants in the summit, house arrest for pre-crime and all.
Heh, back to posting links to speed records coz some people like to make unsupported assertions or arguments about same. Bah! "The current speed record is 135kph for a tandem, compared to 139kph for a solo bike and that pattern has been consistent for some years."
Although a 3% speed difference is significant it's also so far out of reach for most people that it's hard to know whether it matters. And with speed bikes I'd be really tempted to go multitrack and 2wd with independent drivetrains and see if that helps (coz it helps with the quad, at least in prototype)
ShemSeger at the bottom is answering a different question and getting a different answer. But it's also interesting as to what "uphill means", one guy is like "if you can go 20kph that's not an uphill" and I'm sort of thinking he needs to stop hanging out with the children in the low grades and ride cat c or higher for a while.
I suspect the a grade boys would consider 20kph evidence of impending death... even on the giro :)
@PeteH I can usually find the dupe. It annoys me when someone has obviously found the dupe but decides to answer it anyway. We just end up with useful info spread over multiple questions, with enough repetition that it's annoying to wade through.
anyway, I should sleep, it's cooled down to 25C in the bedroom.
I have a Trek bike with Avid Elixer 1 hydraulic brake. Not sure if it's a manufacture defect but I have returned to the shop 3 times since I bought the bike this April, for them to rebleed.
The brakes get tighten and the tech told me it's due to bubbles forming and would require a rebleed. They ...
@Criggie about an hour ago I was getting repeated "there seems to be a problem connecting..." messages, just hitting chat.stackexchange.com - the rest of my internet sems fine. So maybe they have an intermittant problem with their servers
Incidentally, I had a problem this morning with having several biros, none of which would work. I must admit I got quite angry but finally managed to "solve" it with an axe. Perhaps this is a solution that SE might consider?
(NB - strictly speaking, not solved in the conventional way!)
That's crazy money for a bit of wire btw, I'd sooner have an axe!
I used to love parallel parking the little bus a friend owned. Tight turning circle plus mirrors that let you look down on the full length of both bumpers. I could park with less than half a metre plus the vehicle length. I suspect the car owners were not best pleased, since the bus was just slightly shorter than a standard car park... so we could get into standard high street car parking spots :)
@Mσᶎ that sounds horrendous. The biggest thing I ever drove was when I hired a removal van to move into my new house. I tried to get it up the driveway, realised it was a bad idea, and reversed bacl out - dismembering a tree along the way...
A splendid way of introducing myself to the new neighbours
@PeteH I drove trucks for a while at uni (got good money being a relief driver, usually overnight runs), so a little bus was no problem. When we moved in Melbourne it was a bit scary, I only have a medium rigid license now (up to 12-ish tonne) so when we went to pick up the truck I'd booked they swapped me into a 10-tonner so they could rent the 3.5 tonne one I'd booked to someone with a car license.
I nearly changed lanes on top of someone in the first 100 m... it had been about 3 years since I'd driven anything at all.
I fear that if I tried to back a B double now I'd be all over the landscape. Like anything, you need to recertify if you haven't done it for a while. In my case, I drive for one day every few years. Make the license cost a bit part of my motor vehicle use.
@Mσᶎ Yeah, it sucks being out of your comfort zone. I think my worst has been a couple of times I've gone on city trips and have deliberately asked for a small hire car, and been "upgraded" to something far larger. In European cities they are just a liability.
Plus, my first visit to Geneva, I parked this enormous estate car outside a school, figured it would be ok as it was a Friday night. When I went there the next morning it had been towed. Bloody Swiss go to school Saturday mornings.
@PeteH in a way the worst is visiting my parents when I'm not on my touring bike. For a long time they didn't have any bikes, just two cars. So I'd visit and if I wanted to go anywhere they'd be like "take the car", so I'd walk 2km to the bus stop, take the bus an hour into town to borrow a bike off a friend, then ride it for a few days and reverse that to return it. These days they have bikes but unfortunately they also use their bikes...
Actually, the real worst was hiring a car when I took the girly over and discovering that even when we had an automatic she was scarily prone to going "oooh, something to look at" and veering all over the road. Stopping to look was not really her thing, so I drove. For two weeks. 3/4 the length of NZ (Christchurch to Picton, Wellington to Auckland... only 2000-ish kilometres, but all little windy roads. Not really my idea of a holiday.
@Mσᶎ yeah, you're forced to adopt their lifestyle. You just reminded me, they are considering building a foot/cycle bridge in our village. Currently, to get to the main shop, it is about 2km along roads, with the worst bit being a traffic-calming single carriageway. Bikes have prioroty, cars ignore bikes and will almost run you over
Now they're talking about building a cycle path which is not only car-free and paved, but reduces the distance to 1.2km (as it cuts across fields)
heartofbiking.org.nz/our-trails/tasmans-great-taste-trail this has made a huge difference to how people in Nelson (where my parents are) see bikes. Now they're acceptable for nice middle-upper class people to pootle around on, because there's the huge bike highway project. It's also nice to commute on, should you be more of a commuter, because the cycle community have worked hard to make it usable at a nice even 30kph.
I used to ride through town when urban speed limits were 50kph and everyone did 70kph... luckily I could hold 70kph through the crucial bit most days (getting a bit of draft from cars next to me)
These days I suspect few people ride that road, they all use the much more attractive cycle highway.
@PeteH I think it is. I left before any work on it was done, my stuff was more MTB trails which have a much longer history in the area. These days the council is all over that stuff, for a while it grew slowly from "we won't ban you" to "ok you can fix some patches" to "ok, it's officially a bike trail"... nelson.govt.nz/recreation/recreation/cycling/…
of course, now I live in Sydney which is going through the same process, just at different stages for each of the 38 councils. So you can be cruising along a nice one-road separated path then it ends abruptly and there's a dead-cyclist painted on the road then nothing. Or a painted "bike lane" that ends 8m before the intersection and resumes 8m afterwards (coz intersections are hard).
Or worse, in one particular case, a contraflow lane drops you at an intersection with bad sight line and no legal way to ride your bike from where the lane ends through the intersection. It took more than five years to fix one of those, but the same council promptly built another one 3 km away.
yeah, most trails around here you either (a) drive to, or (b) are normal roads, just quiet normal roads, but you're still likely to encounter cars.
I fear that for the UK to progress someone is going to have to take some hard, unpopular decisions. Probably first by bnanning traffic from city centres
In Salisbury, they built a ring of Park and Ride schemes, including bus services out to then, but did nothing to make the city centre inaccessible. So why should anyone use the P&R when they can get 2 hours parking in the centre for the same price?
I see one of the P&R car parks, it is a 500-space car park, regularly has a sign saying there are 480-something spaces
Australia does have a right wing party that is committed to opposition for the sake of it. They don't care about some issues except that because they're important to their enemies, they're important to the right wing. Tony Abbott was the exemplar of that, rolling back a bunch of legislation purely because that evil witch brought it in.
@PeteH Sydney CBD has a bunch of retailers who are vehement that any move to reduce on-street parking will destroy their businesses. They hold to that even in the face of contrary evidence.
I'm not convinced that that tax should apply only to range rovers. I think congestion charging should be everywhere, all the time, based on actual congestion. They could measure it using the multitudinous CCTV cameras the UK is afflicted with. And reduce it further by a Singapore-style tax-and-permit system that put cars increasingly out of reach... like cigarettes. And feed the money into PT and cycling to make it easier not to ave a car.
@Mσᶎ Yeah, it is difficult here now though because in manyu places, there is no real alternative to the car. But that's fifty years of short-sightedness. Can't be corrected quickly
I think the best place to start is in the cities, where there is some semblance of infrastructure
@PeteH no, but right now most places are not trying to correct it, and many are trying to make it worse. In Australia most new subdivisions are explicitly designed to be impossible to drive a bus round, for example. They have nice winding roads with "traffic calming" and lots of cul-de-sacs.
The good news is that there's an intensification push on round railway stations, and dramatically so near us where there are ~8 multistorey apartment blocks under construction, I suspect more than 3000 new apartments. NFI how they're going to get those people onto the trains, but I'm sure that will be the next step in someone's cunning plan.
Yeah, my expectation is that there will be a period when every train into the city during rush hour that's not full when it reaches that station will be packed solid when it leaves, so anyone towards the city from there (5 or 6 stations) will be unable to get on a train. Used to be like that Where I lived for a while, there were ~12 trains between 730 and 830 and you'd often have 3 go past before you could force your way onto one.
In part, admittedly because Sydney people like to travel in the vestibule and will fight back when someone tries to push them into the seating area. So some of those "full"trains had spare standing room next to the seats that couldn't be used because someone on the stairs was refusing to move.
I decided that I'd ride my bike to work even in storms very shortly after moving to Sydney :)
@Mσᶎ That sounds very much like the UK way. I remember when I used to get a 1st class ticket, there was one particular woman who got on at the last stn before London, when the train was already full. She used to complain to the guard that, why should she have to stand when she had a first class ticket?
I was fortunate because I lived sufficiently far from Ldn that there was always a seat. Got caught a few times on the way home though
"full train" here is more like the Japanese cliche. It's not "no spare seats" it's "everybody breath in, we can get one more through the door". Maybe we should have some big boofy sportsballers to help people fit into the trains...
I replaced my chewed up retainer bearing with a rusted but not so chewed up retainer bearing. What happened to the old one was that it was installed backwards and the retainer itself was completely trashed as it was doing the job of the balls.
The new bearing is a bit rusty and it's balls are s...
This is our trains - two levels of seating. High capacity, slow to load and unload... but our longer routes go two hours out from the CBD which is a long time to stand. http://i1.wp.com/www.raillynews.com/wp-content/uploads/Sydney-train-delays.jpg?resize=460%2C300
BLAM is back: bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/35775/… and if you look at the other question from that user it's also closed and also has 20+ comments where Blam argues with others. Stay away.
I replaced my chewed up retainer bearing with a rusted but not so chewed up retainer bearing. What happened to the old one was that it was installed backwards and the retainer itself was completely trashed as it was doing the job of the balls.
The new bearing is a bit rusty and it's balls are s...
