I’m sorry what? What about:

• Shoes
• Gloves
• Tyres
• Elastic bands
• Balloons

All of these are made (partly) from natural (i.e. latex) rubber.

Don’t do that to me!

I’m tired, boss

Latex is just a kind of rubber, and a material produced by some plants used for making rubber. Sure, if you’re not careful when googling, you can get dodgy results with “latex” in the terms, but that seems to me to be of a different calibre.

Is this just a reference to The GIMP or are there other common apps with dodgy names? I’m struggling to think of any.

https://skiesofarcadia.fandom.com/wiki/Pinta's_Quest

Also The GIMP is not named after a slur, don’t be ridiculous.

Aaaaaaaaaa

No, anti-reflective coatings are not matte. They work by producing destructive interference in a target band of wavelengths right at the surface of the coated material from front and rear reflections. Because the effect is wavelength specific, they tend to tint the colour of the reflection, as well, allowing you to tell when they’ve been applied.

Not really. It has to be enough brighter than the reflection that it’s not visually disturbing. And that criterion depends on what’s displayed: a high contrast image is much more robust than a bright single colour which is much more robust than a dark single colour.

Screens nowadays have anti-reflective coatings to make the brightness of a reflection far, far less than the actual light source if you looked directly at it.

That’s true, if you’re replacing a fairly nice car with a bike that’s not for racing, you will always save money.

I first commuted by bike in northwest Germany where most everyone bought their bike from a humongous bike market held every month. It was fairly unusual to see anyone riding a fancy bike, compare to the thousands of bike commuters you’d see every day.

What I always thought was funny compared to some other countries, is that you were as likely to get overtaken by a little old lady in a long skirt as by a lycra-clad young athlete. Somehow that seemed to dispel the concerns a newbie might have about their own pace.

Not a shitpost?

A cheap wheel is like £100 new though and easy to replace. So sure, that’s another point in favour of disc brakes, but buying a new wheel every few years is, I would say, not worth worrying about - even if you are doing that kind of distance. (I wasn’t and had to replace a wheel, either I used worn brakes for too long or something got on the rim and wore it down very quickly) so I would still say used bikes are a good shout.

Also, you can pick up a rideable used bike for £200, maintain nothing except the chain, then buy another used bike, and you’ll likely still end up spending less money than if you’d bought new and maintained everything fussily.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying your approach is bad! But for someone considering getting a bike and worried about the outlay (as the OP was), buying used is very much a good idea.

I dunno what typical yearly mileage on a bike used for commuting is… mine certainly did not do 5000km when I was commuting by bike. So your experience might be a bit more frequent maintenance than what most people need to do.

But either way, a used bike is still likely to be pretty easy to maintain. Maybe you’re thinking of some specific harder-to-maintain parts? Brakes are a good example; rim brakes wear out quite quickly and are harder to replace the pads on than disc brakes. However, they’re still dirt cheap and they’re still not hard to replace. I, a cack-handed moron, learnt how to do it fairly easily.

XD

Jesus Christ, you’re not supposed to eat the tinfoil you know

How waterproof is your laptop?

COOL

<monologue about trains>

DO YOU LIKE TRAINS?

Why can’t they work exactly like a sports bookies?

You may not be fun at parties, but that’s what they tell me, too, so we can hang out in the corner or something.