Alyksett

Hey all, I'm a pretty tall rider at about 195cm with long arms spanning about 205cm and I'm always struggling to feel confident that I'm fit properly to the bike I ride a 2022 hex and I've thrown a 40°(I think)/160mm stem on it (seriously) and it feels like the best fitting setup I can muster. Still though I feel like there's room to go. Might be down to my technique but it's hard to not feel crammed on the back wheel around the cockpit. My bunnyhops are fine with the stem, around bar height maxed out but I'm just curious if there's anyone out there with similar proportions with advice/input or if there's any other options to make the bike feel longer besides stem choice? Or does it not matter much at the end of the day and I'm just blaming the bike instead of my shitty technique? Cheers

+1 with textured paint, I've mixed a bunch of sand with regular house paint and it works pretty well. I've seen others use chicken wire stapled down but I don't feel that'd be quite as good

Admittedly the history of trials does seem like it's had big cultural waves compared to other sports, but I think in terms of skill progression it is pretty slow. Skating is also really cheap- 50 bucks or whatever for a decent setup that will last you a long while versus many hundreds on top of repair costs which will shut out a huge demographic. Another issue is I think digestibility. Comp riding I feel is hard for people to get their head around so for the laymen it can be really foreign. Anything street oriented is better publicity IMO because it's so much more understandable. With the newer street moves it attracts younger people even though it can be tiring seeing another FJ whip. In order to grow it has to be sexy and street is just much sexier for people. The grungy TGS stuff and Danny was pretty easy to understand for people and it still hasn't caught on massively so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's fun ripping on younger generations, but there's still mass appeal for skills that take a long time to develop. Trials develops really slow but most people cant kickflip after 6 months of skating and I see skaters all the time here in the US Skating culture is really attractive for young people so that's probably why It's a shame trials probably won't catch on in a massive way- it would have happened after Danny- but I don't think there's any less young people nowadays that would stick to trials versus back in the 90's/00's.

And unfortunately "mothers life at risk" sometimes only applies when the mother is in immediate risk, so they either have to get it someplace else or wait until they're literally dying to be allowed to get one.

I'd say a street bike is your best route. It won't really hinder you in any way compared to a comp bike when it comes to backwheel/static techniques, and it's also as you said a much more versatile bike.

I mean more how during that time this sport was in a big spotlight. Obviously it didn't lead to trials being a mainstream dicipline at all but it seems like it'd be an interesting time period for the sport. FWIW I think Danny did inspire a lot of younger riders, they just post on Instagram not message boards and are riding street instead of comp style

For those that are seasoned, what was it like seeing trials be blown into global spotlight after Danny started making his massive videos? I can imagine it was great having trials being exposed that much, but I would be interested in hearing how the trials community reacted to that level of exposure

If you mean the 360 nose drop thing, what clicked it for me is to get good at steep 180 pivots, then when I'm doing it over a ledge I do a pivot faster than normal and move my bodyweight upwards/pull the bars up and the rotation will come naturally.

There's never been a piece of research ever published that takes in to account 100% of the variables of what they're looking into. Sure, we might not have the specific vitamin D levels and social behavior etc of every covid case (And I bet if we did track all that people would complain it's a violation of privacy) but it wouldn't make enough of a difference IMO to hold anecdotal evidence of friends and family at a higher regard like madmanmike and others do

"I do appreciate my social media circle isn't large enough to give solid proof, but I don't have access to a lab and 10,000 volunteers." Fair enough, it would be great if there existed some publicly funded organization that had access to world tier labs and millions of cases to analyze the symptoms of Covid with/without the vaccine... And then when these labs publish their findings you discredit it and say "We're just told that"... ?

Just to echo Pete M, there's a lot more impact related to Covid besides deaths. Long term side effects can be crippling, hospitals being full with cases impacts everyone else that needs to go to the hospital (A big reason to get boosted/get the vax), healthcare workers have been getting destroyed the last two years, etc. Hard to really quantify all this but it's a lot more than just looking at the death numbers

Thoughts on Pfizer's Covid treatment pill? I haven't read too much about it, but it seems really promising. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/pfizer-says-covid-19-pill-near-90-effective-final-analysis-2021-12-14/

I'm not familiar with the intricacies of the UK, but I think we have a generally have a good enough idea of the behavior of the virus and the relevant numbers to, at the least, come to the conclusion that if we went hands off and let the it run it's course then millions would die globally (as they already have), at some point in the future the dominate variant may be mild enough to let herd immunity work, especially when our hospitals can handle it. But at the moment I don't think we're at that stage

I was just bringing it up, I see people mention herd immunity when they might not realize the implications. and yeah I wrote it wrong, It's 1.6%, I didn't type the percent converted number out, see my edit for the math. Considering the US has given over 750,000,000 tests, I think that it's close enough to do some basic math to figure out that millions will die if we go with herd immunity. Even if the actual rate is 3 times lower at 0.5%, over a million people will die and that's with a conservative estimate, and not even factoring in immunity decreasing over time which would lead to more deaths.

Yep, sorry. I didn't write the percent version in my comment, the fatality rate is 1.6%. At 2/3 population getting it, its 3.5 million deaths and 2/3 is a very conservative estimate of what scientists think would be needed to reach immunity. See edit for my math So the deaths may be lower, but that's because all of the old people in the country will die? Maybe you're right but I'm not okay with my country letting a generation of people kick the bucket and I'm sure you wouldn't be either. Also there's 15,400,000 people in the US between 75 and 84. As far as your links you sent. This is a great example of why average people without advanced relevant degrees shouldn't be looking into the depths of 40 page scientific publishings. You can't just take the net deaths of vaccinated vs unvaccinated and compare the two. What if the amount of double vaxxed people is 10 times larger than the unvaxxed group? Even if the fatality rate of the vaxxed is 5 times less than the unvaxxed, there would still be way more vaxxed people dying, but it's only because there's way more vaxxed people from the start, you have to take the rates of mortality. Absolute numbers when doing comparisons of rates means nothing. You can't just pull a few quotes out of 160 pages of research and draw conclusions from it, especially when in the first link you sent they say "Several studies of vaccine effectiveness have been conducted in the UK which indicate that 2 doses of vaccine are between 65 and 95% effective at preventing symptomatic disease with COVID-19 with the Delta variant, with higher levels of protection against severe disease including hospitalisation and death." On the very first page....

I think it's worth pointing out that natural herd immunity means that about 2/3 of a given population needs to have had covid so they're immune from it (a conservative estimate. The immunity also wears off which makes it worse.). This means that at a 1.6% fatality rate (The US's rate) then 5 3.5 million people will die in the US alone. Is that really worth it? EDIT: 1.6%, 800,000 deaths/50,000,000 cases; 330,000,000*2/3 = 220,000,000 * 0.016 = 3,500,000 deaths

The problem I have with these sites/yellow cards for people to catalog their negative experiences with the vaccine is that it just reeks of confirmation bias and anti intellectualism. To me, all these sites are just a place where people list every bad experience they have/think they have after they get the shot without any substantiation of the connection between the shot and the symptoms. Not to mention the guy that is writing all this had his medical license stripped from him, denies AIDS exists, and thinks masks cause cancer. This should be more than enough for people to instantly write anything off written by him but instead it's used as "evidence" against vaccines. I think if you're on the side of citing this guy as an expert/ a source of evidence rather than citing sources from an actual team of researchers/a credible scientific organization then you're on the wrong side of this whole thing.

Could be a lot of things but for me it was the racer between my bottom headset bearing and my fork. I'm still not sure how to fix it exactly but try swapping racers, forks, re-tightening everything and putting lube/grease on the racer area. Seemed to help for me but it's still on/off.

Like mentioned, high PSI helps. Also try to find a bit of ground that's slippery to practice on, I've gone almost 720 with pumped up wet tires on slippery ground. As far as technique, getting your weight really far over the bars and to your bad foot side is most of the work. You should be able to get your weight far enough to the point where you have to put a foot down to prevent going over the bars every time and then it's just a matter of dialing it back and controlling it. Getting the bike really steep so your center of gravity is directly over your front wheel point of contact is crucial to actually spin instead of dragging or having to re-twist yourself around with your bars

This might be very bad practice, but when I feel my brakes need to be cleaned I wash my hands and carefully fold a paper towel as to not touch the center, and put water on half it, and then spin my wheel and wipe each side of the rotor with it. I start with the wet side then go to the dry side and it gets a lot of black schmuck off. For the pads I carefully take them out and put them on a clean baking sheet face up and put them in the oven at around 350F for a few minutes, or until the pad changes color/smokes for a bit. After this I usually need to bed them in for a few minutes but they feel better afterwards. I've done this a handful of times and never ran into any issues but I do it carefully.

"A clear advantage of mRNA vaccines is that, unlike DNA vaccines, they do not need to enter the nucleus to express the antigen." (All the main vaccines are mRNA) https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcibr2009737 https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/hcp/mrna.html Small correction here, mRNA is copied from DNA and used to create proteins, I think you're thinking of a regular DNA vaccine, which does enter the nucleus. Using an mRNA in the vaccine skips this step of transcription and it is quickly broken down after it is used. https://www.nebraskamed.com/COVID/where-mrna-vaccines-and-spike-proteins-go mRNA vaccines are new, and it is the first of it's kind but we've known about RNA for decades and is pretty thoroughly understood. And for what it's worth, I think the main reason the media is focused on squashing Ivermectin is because, at least in the US, we've had bad experiences with alternative medications (Hydroxychloroquine) and Ivermectin seems like another one of these alternatives, at least to them. The spikes in poisonings from it are a bit disconcerting though, even though these people took the wrong type.

Or how someone can shy away from the conclusions of an organization that has almost 6 billion dollars of tools and capabilities whos sole purpose is to investigate drugs and medications to ensure their efficacy and safety, but would rather err on the side of unresearched alternatives. I'm not implying anyone here is like that but there are millions out there. Even if I knew someone who is a virologist/scientist and said the vaccine isn't safe I still would take it, because the opinion of thousands of scientists + billions in tools > 1 expert. It sets a lot of bad precedents to mandate a vax so I would never be in favor of doing so, and even if not everyone gets it then it's whatever, but I wish people would just get the jab lol

You have to pay? How does testing work in the UK/EU? In the US (At least where I live) I can get tested whenever/wherever I want for free and have a few different types of test to choose from. Ironic!

In terms of EV's I'd probably disagree, Tesla has made them too sexy and awesome for people to not want IMO. In terms of production they're not very environmentally friendly but most consumers don't actually care about how environmental their purchases are. The biggest concern would be the amount of Lithium available but never bet against humans doing whatever they can to make the world how they want it lol, it'll find a way Covid could have been started in a lab and leaked accidentally, not at all unrealistic. Just important to distinguish it as a lab leak instead of a bio-weapon. 9/11 could have been known, but I bet if the NSA/CIA were to treat every potential threat with the upmost concern then there would be a whole lot of problems, I'd say they probably just made a bad call. Bitcoin prediction is pretty fair and Elon thing is pretty fair but he wont change professional positions. I think Nuclear is absolutely the future. There have been a few catastrophic incidents due to blatant disregard for safety and negligence so that has the public scared of it, but once we get through the high upfront costs and make people understand that it's actually amazing (See: Thorium reactors), then in no time we'll be probably 90% nuclear energy based. Just gotta show people how dope it really is