The coming recession

 Back when the economy sagged around 1990, mountain biking surged, because it looked like cheap, accessible fun. A thousand bucks was still a lot for a bike, but sporty, capable machines costing $500 to $800 were an easy sell.

The recession in New Hampshire started a little sooner than 1990, because the 1980s had spawned a real estate boom that began to falter as the '80s ended. We went down a little sooner and stayed down a little longer than the official dates for the recession period. But the shop stayed busy because the many families that had been feeding off of the building boom couldn't just uproot and leave. Where would they go anyway, when the economy was spongy all over the country? So they stayed.

People from away still visited. People who might have taken a more expensive vacation to a more distant, bragworthy destination stayed closer to home.

Mountain biking thrived because it didn't require much investment after you bought a bike and a few accessories. You didn't need to buy fuel for it, register it, and insure it. Just buy a bike and go find the local trails.

Trails did exist. We rode for miles on logging roads and snow machine trails, and tried out hiking trails with varying success. During mountain biking's exploratory period, mountain bikers hadn't become as jaded and demanding as they are now. Consequently, there were a lot more of them.

By the mid 1990s, when the economy had revved up again, mountain biking was a habit. The bike industry was busily technologizing it to death, but it was a slow poison in pursuit of perfection. The mountain bike of today is truly an impressive product of evolution, well suited to the style and environment of its use. It's also never going to be cheap again, because you can't make a machine that will stand up to the demands of technical trails and fearless riders by keeping it simple. You want a simple bike? Stay away from mountain biking.

Because the bike industry grew obsessed with increasingly expensive technologies in all categories, their user base shrank, leading to much larger and more rapid inflation than in the rest of the economy. They had to farm fewer people for more money per person just to try to tread water.

Changes to mountain bike design do reflect lessons learned from the period of its greatest popularity. Front end geometry is designed around long travel suspension forks. A longer rigid fork would not provide the secure handling that a suspension fork provides, because it would not redirect the force of bumps and bashes the way suspension does. Front suspension allows you to put the front wheel out in front more, while the rider stays back behind the steering axis, which helps reduce the chances of going up and over the bars. Because the suspension telescopes, the wheel moves toward the bike as it moves upward. With a rigid fork, the wheel would stay out there, exerting its full leverage on the fork legs and lower headset bearing. Your simple bike would have to have the archaic geometry of the 1990s. Your riding style would have to reflect that.

You can still take your old 1990s single speed on many trails. Routes we used to ride still exist. Just make sure you don't impede the rightful masters of those trails who paid a lot more for their bikes, especially if you are on one of the trails that they also paid a lot of money to have built.

The combination of tariffs and economic instability looming before us for this summer spell big trouble for the bike industry. Even the sales of cheap e-bikes will suffer, because they are entirely built in tariff-affected countries. Even with that, cheap e-bikes will stay viable because more and more low-level workers will not be able to afford even a beater car. Hard to say how it shakes out nationwide, when so many urban areas have been designed around the armored cavalry model of transportation.

The way the economy is being collapsed, it won't all fall in at once. This will help the administration, because the people who go down first have the least political leverage. They (we) are quite numerous, but easily divided over trivial matters. But the bike market has been fragmented for almost 20 years now. People in general seem to have less to spend on recreation, and far more options to spend it on than they had in the 1990s.

In hard times, people do pay to repair their older items, but they still have limited funds, and repair parts are subject to the tariffs and inflation.

Endangered species

  One of our ski reps came in yesterday to show us next year's line. He has long experience as a road racing cyclist, as well as competing in cyclocross.

He mentioned that he had completely given up riding the road in the Concord, NH, area, because of traffic volume and how badly people drive. He said that the final straw was when a car shot past him inches from his handlebars. When he caught up to the car at an intersection, the young woman driving was holding a slice of pizza in  one hand and her phone in the other. She was staring down at her phone when the rider spoke to her through her open window.

"Hey, you passed me really close back there," he said.

"Whateverrr!" she snapped back at him and floored the gas to get away.

While an incident like that might make one yearn for a hand grenade in the moment, that wouldn't solve anything. It would make things worse.

He also told us about someone he knows who was hit and injured, and someone else who was hit and killed.

We both agreed that a large part of the problem is "too many rats in the cage." In densely populated areas, in a population under increasing economic and social stress, we're all just generally sick of each other and are rapidly losing what little regard most of us had for other people's lives.

People are also generally more distracted as they self medicate for the depression and anxiety many might not even realize that they have. And at least one whole generation of new drivers has hit the road with little or no experience as transportation cycling kids. They grew up riding in cars to closed-venue activities.

Road cyclists are an endangered species due mostly to habitat loss. The lab rat metaphor applies to humans in general. The wild animal metaphor applies to the increasingly crowded roads where every vulnerable creature gets crushed. The percentage of malicious or careless drivers may not have increased much, but the sheer population increase means that a small percentage is overall a larger number. And they aren't evenly distributed. You might encounter none for weeks and then get harassed multiple times in one ride.

I haven't ridden in a high-traffic, urbanized or suburbanized area on a regular basis since the 1980s. The same dynamics apply. It's just that now they cover a much greater percentage of the country. Add to that an ever increasing population and two-tiered society in cycling.

The haves, the recreational cyclists, use disposable income to fund their hobby on two wheels. Most of those riders have been driven off of the road, but wherever they are seen in public they are perceived as privileged. No one driving past you in your kit knows whether you're a lawyer or an engineer or a warehouse worker, but they are free to assume that you are not a serious individual if you've chosen to prance around in tight shorts and a colorful shirt, requiring motorists to divert around you.

The have-nots are the transportation cyclists who used to ride department store bikes and now try to get e-bikes instead. But they can't all afford e-bikes, so they're pedaling whatever they can get until circumstances improve and they can get a car. Some of them are discovering the economic benefits of a vehicle that doesn't have to be registered and that's much easier to park, so they might only level up to a more powerful e-bike.

In my own area, traffic has gotten somewhat worse along my commuting route, and vastly worse on the popular routes along the lake shore and on the roads and highways that feed into and out of the area. This refers primarily to summer, when seasonal residents and visitors swell the ranks. Year-round population has also edged upward steadily.

If you're riding a bike, you have to assume that you are invisible. This is especially important at intersections. Even if you have the right of way, you can't assume that you'll get it. On a busy road or street with a lot of feeders that enter or cross it, you have to be alert at all times. That's why I never use headphones or ear buds. No distractions!

I'm part have and part have-not. My income is well below the median, but I don't spend a lot. My bikes and gear are above average because I get my meager income from the industry, so I get lower prices, and can do all of my own work. I don't have kids, but I do take my responsibilities to my cats seriously. That can take a bite out of savings.

Bikes can be a powerful tool for your personal economy. If I lived where wintry weather was less common and winters were shorter, I might not own a car at all. When I lived in such a place, I went without a car for years. That saves a lot of money. I rode to work, to train for racing, and intended to tour much more than I ever did. But that was millions of rats ago. All of the cages are more crowded. Some have infrastructure to help riders, but there's no universal standard. Wherever you find yourself, you have to assess the risk and figure out how to manage it.

"Not all fat bikers"

 Inconsiderate fat bikers ticked me off recently by flaring up again on the cross-country ski trails. The outbreak was brief, overshadowed by an epidemic of foot traffic. Passive aggressive behavior? Impossible to say.

On Tuesday I had one of the cats at the vet. While we were waiting to pay our bill, motion outside caught my eye. A rider on a fat bike pulled up and plunked his bike into the snow pile beside the walkway. He had come to pick up some pet supplies he had ordered. The front desk crew asked where he had come from. He said he lived on a road about five miles away, but he had ridden down the railroad line that the snowmobiles use in the winter.

That right there is the fat bike's original mission: biking on existing transportation trails to conduct practical business or to pursue challenging tours or races. To use trails that they can't hurt, because the intended use is already a heavier impact than cycling. Admirable, though it still calls for a higher level of disposable income than a lot of riders might be able to justify. If I lived where he did I might ski to the vet for anything that didn't require bringing the actual pet.

Anyway, it was refreshing to see a self-reliant fat biker out there representing.

Fat bikers are an invasive nuisance

 Cross-country skiing is on life support on our local trails. After weeks depending on our kilometer of man-made snow, we finally got a storm that delivered six fluffy inches that packed down to a barely slidable two inches on our network.

Fat bikers consistently underestimate the impact that their tires have on the ski trails. They push constantly for unlimited access. If they are denied permission, their most diplomatic ambassadors just go in anyway, even when a trail is posted. They're doing it now, probably believing that they can't hurt the meager cover because it's not deep enough for them to sink in. They're shredding the cover that we can't replace.

If the cover is so thin that you don't sink in, you don't need a fat bike. Go ride on the rail trail, and leave us alone. Go ride on snow machine trails that no one is using, because the motorized users don't want to tear up their machines.

Fat bikes were developed for intrepid riders doing unsupported rides, sometimes for days. But sport fat bikers are some of the neediest whiners in the off-road demographic. They also consistently overestimate their economic value. For a ski area, they do more harm than good. Someone needs to establish fat bike touring centers to run the complete economic experiment. See how much revenue they actually generate after you have arranged for land, built and maintained the trails, and established a rental fleet for the visitors who don't want to invest in their own bikes.

Fat bikes are like a recurring infection that dies down for a time and flares up. I'd say they were like herpes, but you at least get to have a little fun once to get herpes. Oh, or you could get it as the result of rape. So maybe the analogy does hold up. Fat bikers certainly don't seem to understand consent.

The Culture of Mediocrity

 Vivek Ramaswamy recently annoyed the rank and file of MAGA by saying that the United States has embraced a culture of mediocrity for years. We have to hire immigrants for tech jobs because Americans are just too dumb.

Let's brush past how he is correct and why, because it encompasses too many factors in the conservative attack on public education, various parenting shortcomings that have worsened generation after generation, and the inevitable impact of cramming more and more people into a consumerist economy. At the foundation of his statement is the tech-savvy person's contempt for the majority of people, who don't know what's going on inside of the magic mirrors and boxes that we've been tempted into accepting as indispensable to everyday life.

Remember "user friendly?" It seems so quaint and antiquated. Now every operating system update takes more and more of the power away from the user. You just have to figure out how to communicate with the various clouds on which everything is stored away from your grubby, fumbling hands.

The computerized world can be delightfully convenient except when it is insanely frustrating. It's here to stay, at least until we collapse civilization to the point that we can't generate enough electricity to feed it.

From Ramaswamy's lofty perch, all of the barely human grunts who don't have engineering backgrounds deserve their struggles and serve no real purpose. Maybe he's right. Maybe the future holds only a small number of tech overlords served by entirely robotic retinues. Getting there might even be fun, if the first couple of generations of overlords are willing to let the grunts kill themselves off in pleasurable ways. Party until you drop! No one needs you! No one wants you! Overdose, or die of sexual exhaustion, or pack your arteries with the residues of a tasty but deadly diet.

At the moment, the overlords need at least some of the mediocre masses to do the jobs that haven't been automated. Someone needs to unclog the toilets, with no higher aspiration than to put in a week's work and spend the weekend fishing and drinking beer. The overlords need people proud of their simple skills like construction and maintenance.

Some of the overlords like to ride bikes. I doubt if they maintain and repair those bikes themselves. I suppose the richest of the rich can just buy a new one when they get a flat tire. But they have to have someone assemble it. Who ya gonna call? Your handy mediocre bike person.

Our shop works on bikes for quite a few wealthy patrons, most of whom only show up for a short time in the summer, because they have an obligation to visit all of their estates in the various weather zones of their choice. Some of them are in tech. Others are in industries like hospitality, or the investment sector. None of them are super rich, with only one or two cracking the billion dollar threshold. Are they upper-middle mediocre by Ramaswamy's yardstick, or small-fry oligarchs? They have voted to advance the oligarchy since the project began in 1980 to put it firmly in power. 

As far as wealth and power go, Ramaswamy himself isn't worth a billion. That's got to irritate him, dangling there with 960 million or so, while Elon farts around swapping back and forth between world's richest and second richest.

The real world is a product of the labors of the mediocre. Yes, Americans have preferred recess and phys ed to academics. The Baby Boom grew up with romanticized fiction about the wide open spaces, and quite a few actual wide open spaces in which to live pretty simple lives. Previous waves of plutocracy had left large stretches of places like Appalachia forced to live simple lives because the extractive industries exploiting those regions paid poorly and killed a lot of people. Men died in the forests and the mines. Women died in childbirth. One way or another, rural life figured heavily in both actual history and fantasy.

My generation began immediately after the most destructive, wide-ranging war in human history. It was truly a world war, although the technology at the time allowed certain areas to be difficult or impossible to hit. There was a home front as well as battle fronts. But no area was unaffected. We absorbed stories of war. A theme throughout them was that life becomes pretty basic when you're under fire. You may be operating the best technology that your species has developed, but it can devolve to knives and fists. Although we welcomed the advancements in creature comforts, medicine, and entertainment that came along in the second half of the 20th Century, we were reminded constantly that World War III was inevitable and probably imminent. Anyone not vaporized instantly would be dumped into a world of desperate survival in a matter of hours.

Preppers are mediocre people. They imagine the world unplugged after whatever brings down the house of cards in which we all shelter right now. Poor people are mediocre. I still burn wood in iron boxes to heat my house, although I also have what passes for high speed internet around here. I'm not a prepper, because prepping is expensive and futile, but I could probably function, with a few adjustments, depending on the degree of catastrophe.

I have written before about the superiority of reliable mediocrity in bicycles. When someone tells me that they have an old bike and they wonder if it is worth fixing, I tell them that they are lucky if they have a bike that is old enough still to be fixable. The newest of the new might be supported for a few years, but something ten years old could be tough. Twenty years old, your odds get better. Last century? Excellent.

It's getting harder. The industry offers less and less, but a few companies are hanging in there. You may have to hunt a bit. In bigger cities you might find co-ops where mechanics farm old parts to keep simple bikes in circulation. Eventually we will run out of frames, unless nice steel comes back into fashion for production bikes. There are also a handful of frame builders left, but they deserve to be paid what their work is worth. Those are hardly everyday beater bikes. Even so, simplicity and steel are holding a bit of territory. Maybe it will form the basis for a new civilization when mediocrity inherits the earth.

Support your local pedestrian

 On my bike commutes I was seeing a moderately tall, bearded young man walking toward Wolfeboro along Route 28. Usually I would see him somewhere along the north slope between Route 171 and the crossroads at North Wolfeboro Road and Pork Hill Road, but it might be further north before 171 or a little further along, past North Wolfeboro. It took me a while to notice that he was walking all the way into the town of Wolfeboro and walking to various destinations while he was there. If he also walked back out the way he came in, he had to be logging well over 20 miles a day on foot.

I never saw him hitching a ride. He walked on the correct side, facing traffic. I can't recall if I ever saw him walking back northward toward Ossipee, but I might have forgotten it. Whether you see someone along a route depends entirely on your schedules. Our mornings coincided regularly. In bike season I might be starting toward home anywhere within a span of an hour or more. Going in was much more consistent.

The walker wasn't sauntering, but he wasn't speed-walking or jogging, either. When I would see him through the workshop windows, it was generally a couple of hours after I had arrived. The transportation pedestrian maintains a cruising pace, not a racing pace.

Because I hate driving, particularly with other drivers on the road, I have considered various ways to cover the distance to work in the seasons of darkness and frozen precipitation. The obvious first choice would be cross-country skiing. That depends on snow that will provide grip for the skis and smooth running. In New Hampshire, especially with the changing climate, ungroomed snow is often like soapy porcelain or wet concrete. And the skier would have to stay out of the travel lanes, probably outside of the plow drift.

Native Americans in New England invented the snowshoe, not the ski, because terrain and snow conditions here made the short, wide flotation more practical. I do not know if they experimented with some form of traction device lashed to the bottom of it, for the hard, refrozen conditions. However, when snowshoe hiking was the only way to get around, trails would get packed down to a smooth surface. The system worked for a few thousand years.

That was before cars and snowplows. In our modern world, a transportation snowshoe hiker is rare to nonexistent. I have not seen the summer pedestrian pushing into darkness and snow.

On snowshoes, the pedestrian would not be able to maintain more than about 3 miles per hour at best. Skis glide, but snowshoes give nothing away. Plod, plod, plod, you have to take every step. Along the highway, a walker might consider bare-booting it on the pavement when no vehicles were passing, hopping out of the way as necessary. On the stretches with a guardrail, that would require vaulting over the rail and whatever plow-piled snow was in the way. You wouldn't want to chew up the snowshoes on the pavement. Good luck leaping over the guardrail with them on your feet, too. Because a commuting pedestrian is on the road with commuting drivers, traffic will be heavy, requiring frequent leaps out of the way. Or you square your shoulders and forge ahead, leaving it to drivers to do the right thing.

A skier wouldn't be able to match bike pace. Skiing is generally faster than walking, but even on the downhills you won't hit the speeds that a bike can reach. Uphill skiing speeds are totally comparable to walking. So the trip to work and back would take much longer than a bike commute.

Winter rain screws everything up. Especially now, when torrential rains have become more frequent, crossing ten or fifteen miles without a vehicle, along routes designed for vehicles, would take many dangerous hours. Warmer than average temperatures are still much colder than your body temperature. Wetness saps your heat. You can dress for it, but things still have to go smoothly for you to arrive at a safe, warm destination where you can strip off your wet clothes. Arriving at work, that can be awkward. If you have no place to dry the clothes you wore to hike to work, you'll be putting on that clammy mess to head home.

On my particular route, there is a path option for the last three miles into town. The Cotton Valley Trail follows the old rail line, so it is basically straight and level. But you have to survive to get there. Homebound it only covers the first three miles, leaving you to navigate the highway after that. The trail is used by snow machines, bikes, dog walkers, skiers, and the rail car drivers who have demanded that the rails remain in place. They don't specifically clear the rails for winter use, but if the snow and ice cover is low enough I suppose one of them might give it a try. So, depending on surface conditions and time of day (or night) you might be completely alone or in the middle of a bustling winter scene like Currier and Ives only with more dog poop and attitude.

If I lived close enough to work I would definitely walk most of the time. I lived for nine years without using a car to get to my various jobs in the Annapolis area. Only when I moved to a place with snowier roads and a much longer commute did I get a car and start acting somewhat normal for at least part of the year. I like my spot here, so I can't reduce or alter my commuting route to make human-powered methods work safely for the entire year. Maybe if civilization collapses before the climate does I'll be able to ski the abandoned roads to get to work. Someone will have to start making wooden skis for the winter travelers, while we nurse along the simple bikes that survived from the 20th Century and the first few years of the 21st for the summer travelers.

Like all post-apocalyptic fantasies, that one glosses over the violence and destruction that would precede it. We'll never just flip a switch to the post-apocalyptic utopia. Then again, with consensus, we could flip the switch without the apocalypse. Add a human-powered travel corridor to all travel ways. Not everyone can do without a motor vehicle, but the ones who could do it would be more likely to try it if they had a guaranteed route.

The best thing about a snow-based winter system is that you don't have to pay to plow it down to a bare surface. Grooming snow requires machinery and skilled drivers, but it still takes less time and brute force than pushing snow out of the way. Along my route, a human-powered commuter or transportation cyclist could revert to the regular road when snow season ended. The side path would not have to be maintained for summer use. Most likely, the majority of users would like it year-round. That's a fine option. But a ski and walking path could have somewhat steeper climbs, requiring less massive re-grading to establish the route.

Here I am, planning the practicalities of something that isn't going to happen. I did want to be a fiction writer...

Gig workers come with built-in ADD

 This fall, our shop rat moved on to higher paying gigs. We even upgraded his title to Respected Repair Rodent, but the prestige was not enough to overcome our meager pay scale.

Shop rat also served as lab rat for my grossly amateur sociological observations. Based on a totally random sample of one home-schooled teenager, added to broad generalizations and jumbled recollections of other part time coworkers, I reached the stunningly predictable conclusion that someone working multiple jobs will have trouble paying full attention to any of them.

The type of job makes a difference. Specialty retail means working in a toy store for a certain target clientele. Part time workers who enter that realm probably have some degree of personal interest. In the bike business, intense interest can lead to frustration and a quick departure, if the shop's customer balance doesn't provide enough outlet for the enthusiast's personal satisfaction. For instance, a shop in a nearby town, run by a hard-core mountain biker, had to cater to the full range of bike shop customers, which made it hard for the owner to keep mechanics who only wanted to work on the cool stuff. The majority of repair work in most bike shops does not focus on the cool stuff.

Side note here: the cool stuff is much more time consuming and precise to service than repair work on the contemptibly primitive machines scorned by the technolemmings. Forced to find a balance between an hourly rate that actually covers the overhead and a competitive price that attracts customers, shops probably make a lot less money on high dollar repairs for tech addicts compared to tune-ups and traditional services on simpler machines.

Even a good and interested Respected Repair Rodent is likely to have distractions, since the role often attracts school-age youth in their first jobs. Our previous trainee was a sponsored young racer still in high school. He rated everything on the basis of athletic challenge, but having been in bike racing from a very young age, he also understood and respected the machine itself. After high school he went on to join the Marine Corps because it appeared to offer the most satisfying athletic challenge among the services vying to recruit him. His first choice was rescue swimmer for the Navy, but he just barely failed the eye test. The bureaucracy made it needlessly complicated to retake the test. His distractions from work consisted not only of academic needs as he worked toward graduation, but also his training days, first with the Navy pre-induction group, then preparing for the Marine Corps test. Bike racing does not provide complete fitness.

We do have an unlikely part timer who had only ridden a bike much before he was old enough to drive, and never took an interest by the later forms. His main thing is climbing. Our shop is not a pure bike shop. Cross-country skiing during the Telemark ski craze merged with a lot of mountaineering technique and technology through back-country skiing, and the local tourist economy favors a bit of light hiking merchandise. We have been able to offer the climber access to deals on gear for his primary interest. In return, he has mastered a range of bike skills, and is willing to cover a couple of crucial days of the week reliably.

The masters of the financial universe have decreed that workers shall be insecure, and that many shall stitch together their incomes from multiple sources. As a result, workers don't feel invested in the success of any company, and they pick their favorites to receive anything approaching their full attention. Management has been trying to make labor obsolete since the dawn of industrialization. Labor-saving devices aren't meant to ease the crushing physical burdens on the toiling masses. They're purely meant to reduce payroll expenses. Management may frame your layoff as the gift of free time. "Now you can go find that dream job, or start your own small business! Don't think of this as the terrifying revocation of your financial lifeline! Think of it as an opportunity for self-actualization."

Motherf*ckers who moved your cheese want to give you a cheesy book about adapting to changing times, when the aspiring autocrats haven't evolved their outlook toward the general population for centuries, if not millennia. Their cheese is well aged and fully protected.

Evolution is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the most adaptable. When it comes to humans, however, that really means survival depends on being able to use intelligence and ingenuity to repair the consequences of massive group stupidity. We have faced mostly self-created problems for centuries. Disease challenges us because pathogens evolve. Weather challenges us, but its intensity has increased because of greed and obstinacy. Our mania for "productivity" keeps us gouging and gashing at the earth in a frenzied grab to exploit resources for profit, when profit exists nowhere in nature. Other than that, interpersonal conflicts at every level are humans creating problems for other humans.

In my own working life, I have tried to maintain space for self expression that I hoped would become marketable. The financial channels that irrigate the creative world have changed drastically over those years. I never managed to put more than a small siphon into the main reservoir at the best of times. Regardless of the near certainty of poverty and obscurity, I haven't been able to reconcile myself to shutting up completely. I can add my own lived experience to the profile of the distracted gig worker. 

Drawing on the example of friends of mine who make things, I did try to take jobs in areas that interested me, so that I could earn while I learn. They had practical skills in mechanics and machining, so they fared better financially. I didn't always manage to score the most interesting part time jobs, and they typically paid as little as an employer could get away with paying. Paying as little as an employer can get away with paying is Payroll 101. Pay as little as possible for any service. That may not mean taking the lowest bid, if a little more money will bring in someone less likely to incur extra costs by making stupid mistakes, but it will always be as little as the employer can be forced to pay.

For a super small business like our shop, the entire pay range is limited by the gross revenues of the business itself. This time of year, with its Small Business Saturday, and admonitions to support small businesses helps very little when the economy remains stacked against small businesses at all. You can't send a flood of customers to a struggling business and expect a miraculous recovery. Look at what happened to the bike industry in the Covid surge: an already struggling industry, further crippled by the pandemic's attack on production and delivery, had nothing to sell to the suddenly interested public until the public had moved on a year later.

There's more insecurity than security in the economy that real people inhabit. People are really good at seeing only what is right in front of them, so an individual who is doing well will not look to the dark precipice just coming into view. A successful person in the moment will scorn the less successful and relegate them to their fates.