Opinionhaver

I serviced the motor about a year ago and didn’t notice anything alarming inside. One of the bearings was a bit dirty and rusty, but I managed to clean and lubricate it, and the noise doesn’t quite sound like a bad bearing.

I can only hear it on alternating pedal pushes. If I just jump on one pedal, there's no sound, but if I shift my weight from one side to the other, it appears. I'm starting to suspect it might be coming from the motor mounts - maybe there's some flex and it's rubbing against the frame - but I'm not sure, and I don’t really know what to do about it either. Sometimes the noise disappears entirely, while other times it gets exceptionally loud.

All I know for certain is that it's not the pedals or the cranks. I cleaned the mounting surfaces and bolts with acetone, but that didn’t help. Then I tried the opposite and greased them, but that didn’t make a difference either. At this point, I really don’t know what to try next. I’d rather fix it myself than take it to a bike shop.

The bike is GZR Black Raw and the motor is Bafang M400

Drywall jobs are a common occurrence in my line of work. I was fixing a cracked seam at a customer's house and had about a 15 mm deep gap to fill. Generally, I've just used the pre-mixed stuff from a bucket, but that dries so slowly and shrinks so much that a job like this would have needed to be spread over at least four days.

Decided to give the quick-setting bag stuff a shot, and wow - what a difference. Not only could I pre-fill the gap in one day, but I also managed to get the tape over it, leaving only the finish coat for tomorrow. This will save me literal months over my career.

I love discovering good new products and tools.

My school used to have 600 people. 1000 is a huge crowd and it can easily be many times more than that. If it was like 300 years ago, then how would you even get 100 people to hear what you have to say?

Imagine walking onto a stage, in front of a thousand people, and just saying a random thing in the microphone, that you just thought of while stoned and then simply leaving. Alternatively, you could stay by the door and start arguing with the audience members as they're leaving like I'm now probably going to do.

So, in other words: which of your core beliefs do you think has the highest likelihood of being wrong? And by wrong, I don’t necessarily mean the exact opposite - just that the truth is significantly different from what you currently believe it to be.

If a country like the UK decided to ban end-to-end encryption, how would they even enforce it? I understand that they could demand big companies like Apple stop providing such services to their customers and withdraw certain apps from the UK App Store. But what’s stopping someone from simply going online and downloading an app like Session? I mean, piracy is banned too, yet you can still download a torrent client and start pirating. What would a ban like this actually prohibit in the end?

If someone writes about things they think will happen, but those things never materialize, they shouldn’t just get to brush it under the rug and act like they never said it. You’ve made millions of people worried over literally nothing. That should come with reputational consequences - not just for the journalist, but also for the platform that amplified their speculation.

Now obviously, there are things worth writing about even when many unknowns remain. But in those cases, acknowledge the uncertainty - lay out the improbable worst-case scenario, the more likely outcome, and the possibility that the whole issue might just fade away. Just don’t present speculation as certainty when you can’t possibly know, or if you do then own it.

The Japanese have this term "intoku (陰徳)" which roughly translates to good deeds done in secret. What are some examples of intoku in your own life? Doesn't matter even if it's something minor like picking up trash.

The bike has over 7,000 km on it, and this was still the original front tire, while the rear one has already been replaced twice. I got lucky - the tire I had been eyeing on was 60% off, so I managed to get two for the price of one.

The new one is 5.05" wide, compared to the original 4.8". It fits the front just fine, but I’ll have to see if it works on the rear once the current tire wears out. I’d really like to get this wider tire on the rear too - I love how mean it looks.

The knobs on this Snowshoe 2XL variant are almost twice the length of those on the Avalanche model on the right (when new). I bet that, combined with studs, it would give infinite traction on just about any kind of snow or ice.

They say they value truth and honesty, yet they lie when the truth becomes inconvenient. They pride themselves on being accepting and understanding of those who are different, yet they’re the first to label and generalize anyone whose values don’t perfectly align with theirs. They see all the nuance and complexity in their own personality but reduce others to simplistic judgments based on the smallest bits of information. They expect understanding for their own mistakes and shortcomings but are quick to criticize and condemn when someone else slips up. They claim to hate drama and negativity, yet they actively seek it out. They demand to be heard but want to silence those whose opinions they oppose. They call themselves independent thinkers who don’t just follow the crowd, yet they fiercely defend beliefs they’ve never truly questioned.

I heard someone once say that "It's not a principle if it's not costing you any money" and I think there's a lot truth to that. People aren't holding themselves up to the same standards as they do others.