A helmet is a must if you are doing a halfway serious run – even though NYC has made huge strides with bike lane infrastructure, we do not live in Chairman Mamdani’s Titoist cycling utopia just yet. The people who voluntarily drive in New York City are often NY Post-addled reactionaries who treat driving like the movie Death Race 2000 and face no consequences for it because killing a cyclist is functionally legal if you say “I’m sowwyyyy.” On top of this, cops are huge babies who don’t wanna do traffic enforcement since COVID lockdown, which makes sense because they park sideways on the sidewalk and often commute in from Long Island and the really racist part of Staten Island that doesn’t have good Sri Lankan food. To put it more bluntly, watch your ass on the road.

To live in America is to be drowning in a constant firehose of ideology: wellness, work optimization, hustle culture, and competitive gaming, all those tastes melting into each other, becoming as indistinct as an overly ambitious soda from a Coke Freestyle machine. There is power in the ambiguity between what is and is not work.

Apparently the Switch 2 was more of an afterthought. Interesting read. Sounds like a fun system.

They should nationalize it.

I thought these bikes were just for killing CEOs

This is definitely some sort of replacing labor with gamification thing but I can't get myself to completely hate it.

But damn, $5 per ride is so expensive. Here it's 0.75€.