"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.