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#but if you just need baby clothes: facebook. find your neighborhood’s buy nothing group. ask. receive
gettingintoknives · 7 months
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It sucks because facebook kinda sucks but SO MANY groups that offer local assistance programs, networking, mutual aid, etc are on facebook. Buy nothing groups, queer friendly housing groups, neighborhood cleanup projects, etc- not all of them but a LOT of them are facebook groups. Like genuinely if you are in need of kitchen supplies or want to organize a park trash pickup day, or whatever, facebook can actually be a great place to do this
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aabapk · 3 years
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OfferUp App
Get OfferUp app, learn everything about the OfferUp and Letgo platform, complete guide on how to use OfferUp and set up account also shocking reviews of customers.
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Download OfferUp App Apk
What is OfferUp App Apk.
Buy. Sell. Letgo. – OfferUp and Letgo are now one big mobile marketplace.
Buy, sell and shop deals on thousands of unique items nearby! So whether you want to make some extra money by selling your used furniture or want to do some clothes shopping the choice is yours with OfferUp.
OfferUp App makes it easy to find great deals on the things you want and make money on the things you want to sell. Ditch the Classified Ads and garage sales — this is the best way to buy and sell in your community or neighborhood with a mobile marketplace you can trust.
Cars, clothes, shoes, vintage fashion, and more! Here’s how shopping and selling with OfferUp works:
9 Best Features of OfferUp App.
1. Instant Sell
2. Best deals
3. Reputation-based Dealings
4. Local Market
5. In-app Messenger
6. Build your profile
7. Easy Browsing
8. Community
9. Simplicity
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Instant Selling of the products:
There are countless online marketplaces these days. All claiming to be great but not delivering what they promise. The efficiency of a platform usually narrows down to a point where you can estimate your selling time. The selling time of an item also explains how many active users a platform has, the more people active the more quickly will be the sale. OfferUp app claims to be one of the quickest selling platforms, you can buy or sell anything within 30 seconds. That really is quick.
Best Deals in the house:
As there are millions of users online every day using e-commerce platforms to get their purchases done. There are chances of high-quality product sales. OfferUp comes with millions of active users which make the market more competitive. This could be a bad thing for a seller to some extent as they have to keep fewer margins but on the other hand, it widens the scope for buyers. They can find great deals on items, discounts on many purchases like clothes, shoes, furniture, vintage fashion, cell phones, electronics, baby & kids items, sports equipment, used cars, home goods, and more.
OfferUp Seller Reputation:
Shopping online always comes with a risk of being scammed. You never know who you are dealing with, You know what are you buying but you never know what you will end up buying. This has posed a huge challenge to online marketplaces like Alibaba, Made In China, eBay, etc. So companies have ever been trying to come up with a solution for this. OfferUp calls it “Reputation”. It is a metric based on reviews. So people who have bought things from a particular buyer using the OfferUp app will leave feedback, this feedback will build the reputation of a seller. If you are going to buy something on the OfferUp app don’t miss that.
Carefully check what are the reviews of the buyer, Is the product exactly the same as the seller described, was it delivered well, what was the behavior of the seller and how many stars does the buyer has. This will help you a great deal in deciding whether to buy from a particular buyer or not.
Get in touch with Local Market through OfferUp App:
Getting products from Alibaba or other platforms like it causes one big problem, They are being shipped from another country. So it will take a lot of time before you get it, and then if it is not what you expected there is going to be a big problem. OfferUp app on the other hand gets you in contact with people near you. The local market, where you can physically go and meet the seller, inspect the thing and then deal, is an amazing feature. You get in touch with the local market and people, save a lot of time and get the best products. The offer up near me feature gives you this huge power to look for the deal just around the community you live in.
Communicate through OfferUp in-app messenger:
Sending an Email is an old, time-consuming method. Contacting through other means might breach your privacy, like sharing your Phone Number, WhatsApp, etc. So this has been solved by OfferUp App by introducing in-app messenger. So you can chat freely with the people you are dealing with. it is efficient, keeps a record of your chat history. Gets you connected to people out there instantly. You can chat with the person in real-time and close the deal. You don’t have to leave the app.
OfferUp Seller Profile:
This is the most important part when it comes to online selling. Your profile is the backbone, there are so many people out there who are selling things. Why would someone buy from you? Your unique profile is going to tell that to your potential customers. OfferUp App gives you the freedom to create your own unique profile and make it look professional so that it outshines every other seller. Build your reputation and create an appealing profile on a unique seller profile page.
Easy browsing through OfferUp App:
Now that we know that there are millions of people on this amazing platform. We know that there are thousands of items being posted every day. Searching through them is a daunting task. OfferUp app has taken the responsibility to take care of this daunting task for us. You can Browse easily within the app and narrow down your search to the item of your liking within seconds. It gives you the options of search by category, post date, price range which can then further be narrowed down to the newest posts.
You can also type the name of the item in the search bar for quick results. It doesn’t stop there, Once you start looking up an item, Its AI learns your search patterns and shows you the relevant items by default on your home screen. Last but not the least, you can use location to search too. Enter the location and see all the deals happening there.
OfferUp community:
One of the best things about this thing is building a community of its users. Get connected to people through the deals that you make. You become part of one of the biggest online markets. Find people you can trust which makes it easy for you to buy things from them.
The simplicity of the app:
Gone are the old days when you need to go out to buy things or garage sell your items. This is a simple yet swift way of striking deals and makes your life easy. I would suggest download OfferUp App Apk right now and sell that bicycle that is in your garage for the last 10 months within 10 seconds.
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Fun facts about shopping and selling with OfferUp:
1. With OfferUp you can easily sell anything like clothes and shoes, used cars, electronics, vintage fashion, and furniture. 2. OfferUp shows you what’s selling nearby in your local community. 3. Communication between buyers & sellers happens through the app via secure messaging. 4. OfferUp is better than a garage sale; you can do your shopping right on your phone or tablet.
Be A part of the community:
We’re making local shopping and selling an experience that everyone can try and trust. The community at the heart of our marketplace is what makes that possible. When you join OfferUp, you’re joining millions of people helping each other make money and save money around the nation — and right in the neighborhood.
From shoes to cars, vintage fashion to furniture – unearth unique items that you can’t find anywhere else with OfferUp. Download OfferUp today and enjoy the mobile marketplace with plenty of hidden gems just waiting to be discovered.
OfferUp and Letgo:
“My vision for OfferUp has always been to build a company that helps people connect and prosper,” said Nick Huzar, OfferUp CEO, in a statement about the acquisition. “We’re combining the complementary strengths of OfferUp and letgo in order to deliver an even better buying and selling experience for our communities. OLX Group has unparalleled expertise and clear success with growing online marketplace businesses, so they’ll be a great partner as we continue to build the widest, simplest, and most trustworthy experience for our customers.”
One giant joins forces with another. The two leading mobile marketplaces in the U.S., OfferUp, and Letgo, are joining forces to create a new powerhouse. OfferUp acquired Letgo on July 1, 2020.
This has made the company a marketplace of more than 20 million online active users, making them the largest platform of the online marketplace after Craigslist, eBay, and Facebook marketplace of course. This means now the users don’t have to get their household items, cars, furniture or electronics posted on several different apps. With OfferUp and letgo combined users have got access to a much broader community.
OfferUp and letgo after joining forces have launched their new app, which is both in one. So you need to download the new app for offerUp and letgo. To keep buying or selling.
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How to use OfferUp App:
Here we will go step-by-step method of setting up your OfferUp and Letgo App.
1. Download the app using Apple Store or Google Play or get The OfferUp Apk.
2. Install the App on your device.
3. It will then ask you for your permission to access your location. You can choose either to enter the zip code or allow the OfferUp app to find your location.
4. Then you will be prompted to sign up. You will have all the options to sign up, choose from Google account, Facebook, Apple account, or Email.
5. Once Signed up you will be asked for Phone verification. To Verify it type in your phone number, you will get the code, and then just use that code to verify your phone. you can also skip it if you don’t want it.
6. Then you will be taken to the home page of the website which is going to look like this.
OfferUp App Overall ratings and Experience:
In my opinion, this is among the best apps in the market now. It has a clean design, seamless experience. Nothing is cluttered and the app is not sluggish with the overall Fantastic experience. It is very easy to find items. It’s easy to post things for sale, just a few clicks. Messenger works great, it doesn’t act up. Add payment method is also easy, it works with apple pay just fine.
Offer Up User Reviews:
This is where things get a little bit against the OfferUp app. Many Users have voted against this platform on TrustPilot. It is overall rate bad on trust pilot. Above 1000 reviews are unsatisfactory. To quote a few:
I used to love Offerup
I used to love Offerup! Now, it’s full of Scammers! I don’t know why they don’t fix this problem! I mean almost the entire site is a Scam now! Be very cautious when dealing with this site!!! “Trust Pilot”
—Pure Wasted Time—
This site is awful! The people who run it I have created a money-sucking scheme that’s all about earning money off of constantly promoting ads.
Complete crap! There’s no cracker even. (Crap on a cracker). “Trust Pilot”
someone created an account with my…
someone created an account with my email, cant contact their support or deactivate it because everything needs you to be signed in. Completely trash site, do not use. “Trust Pilot”
So to conclude things, OfferUp and letgo combined created a huge marketplace for people to trade C2C. They have to keep improving in terms of security and safety. They also need to provide the best customer support services.
Also, Check The Best Fitness app and make the right decision for yourself.
How to Download OfferUp App Apk:
You can easily download the app from your browser by following these steps.
1. Read the whole features of the game and then tap on the Download button.
2. Wait for the Download File to generate
3. Once it is generated. Tap on the Download button again
4. This will start the file to download.
5. When the download is finished, a confirmation window will pop up.
How to Install :
Once you have your downloaded file ready follow this guide.
· First of all, go to your device’s settings
· Go to Privacy> Unknown Sources Installations> Enable
· If you have a newer Android device, then make sure to enable the Unknown Device option in your Browser Settings.
· Now Select the Apk or Mod apk file that you have downloaded.
· Simply open it and tap on Install.
· That’s it
You can also get it from Google Play.
DownloadFree OfferUp App Apkand enjoy everything for free.
Get 100% free moded aplications, games and softwares on AabApk.
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douchebagbrainwaves · 6 years
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CAN BE AN ANGEL INVESTOR HERD DYNAMICS
It wouldn't be the first time in our history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds' lunch money. Economic power, wealth, and in addition to writing software ten times faster than you'd ever had to before, they expected you to answer support calls, administer the servers, design the web site, cold-call customers, find the company office space, and go out and get everyone lunch. There is no manufacturing to confuse the issue. Either some company like Netflix or Apple will be the Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and Del. I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen. No one would know what side to be on a larger scale than Youtube clips. Initially it was supposed to be fun? Perhaps. That tends to produce deadlocks. Don't talk and drive. Work for a VC fund?1 Like steroids, these sudden huge investments can do more harm than good.
The best ideas are just on the right side of impossible.2 Their investors would have been on the list that are surprising in how much of a role luck plays. Actually, it's more often don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can. The second big element of Web 2. So presumably that's what this brainstorming session was about. My relationship with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each other all the time, and in addition the people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. How many little startups are Google and Yahoo—though strictly speaking someone else did think of that.
Nested comments do, for example. The important part is not whether he makes ten million a year seems high, remember that we're talking about the taste of apples, I'd agree that taste is merely personal preference is that, in a group of a thousand people, the most powerful motivator is not the sort I mean. But that's another issue. To become more popular, you need to start small. There are several local maxima. Tell stories about users. You probably do need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing they could do could make them popular. Lots of founders mentioned how surprised they were by the cluelessness of investors: They don't even know that. Tricks are straightforward to correct for.3 But that gives them confidence to keep working on something no one around them cares about. Don't get too deeply into business models.
And it happens because these schools have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money.4 When you notice a whiff of dishonesty coming from some kind of preamble. So your site has to say Wait!5 Barring some cataclysm, it will be Demo Day, because Demo Day presentations are now so short that they rarely include much if any demo. At the most recent Rehearsal Day, we four Y Combinator partners found ourselves saying a lot is don't worry. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. I think everyone would agree that democracy and Ajax are elements of Web 2. At Y Combinator we sometimes mistakenly fund teams who have the attitude that they're going to buy you isn't. If a salesman wants to work harder, he can just start doing it, and he will automatically get paid proportionally more. You make something that looks like a quick sketch.6 If you're small, they don't think it is urgent.
But more important, in a group of people you'll find hierarchy. You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if people aren't using your software, maybe it's not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a good guy too, almost a hacker. Babies can recognize faces practically from birth.7 The problem is, many schools practically do stop there.8 Startups are a counterexample to the rule that haste makes waste. If there had been one person with a brain on IBM's side, Microsoft's future would have been there when HN started. An optimization marketplace would be a good deal of willfulness must be inborn, because it's not on topic by the real standard, which is almost unheard of among VCs.
That's why you can't just take a vote. But there is a kind of deficit spending.9 There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted you could have a separate note with a different cap for each investor. 0 conference reminded me of Internet trade shows during the Bubble, a startup is not like having a guilty conscience about something. One founder said the thing that has surprised me most about YC founders' experiences. And yet the Mona Lisa is a small, dark painting. You can measure this in your growth rate. What you should fear, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. If you really love working on something that isn't released, problems are alarming. At the very least, crank up the font size big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to be fairly conservative, and within the company the people in the mailroom or the personnel department work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. Wealth is whatever people want.10 The theory is that minor forms of bad behavior encourage worse ones: that a neighborhood with lots of graffiti and broken windows becomes one where robberies occur.11
There are very, very cheap. A good piece of software, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take it on their terms.12 If the other kids. To get a truly random sample, pollsters ask, say, every 20th person leaving the polling place who they voted for.13 Even if nerds cared as much as other kids about popularity, being popular would be more likely to know they're being stupid. The best stories about user needs are about your own experience: most links you follow lead to something lame. We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school.14 I think the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. By feature I mean one unit of hacking—one quantum of making users' lives better.
Notes
One of the marks of a city's potential as a cold email. At the time.
The study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, his zeal in crushing the Pilgrimage of Grace, and that's much harder to fix. By all means crack down on these.
The golden age of tax avoidance. Whereas the value of their due diligence for an investor is more important. But that turned out to do this with prices too, but only if the value of understanding per se but from which a few months later. Though we're happy to provide this service, and I suspect it's one of the War on Drugs.
If this is why hackers give you more than one who shouldn't? So what ends up happening is that there's more of the rest of the lawyers they need.
The best one could reasonably be with children, or it would be to ask for more of the people worth impressing already judge you more by what you've done than where you could beat the death spiral by buying good programmers instead of hiring them. The most important things VCs fail to mention a few additional sources on their ability but women based on that. The brand of an email address you can work out. The thing to be careful about security.
In Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work. Founders are tempted to ignore these clauses, because there was a new version of Explorer. The question to ask permission to go to work on Wall Street were in 2000, because software takes longer to write legislation that distinguishes them, initially, to mean the hypothetical people who are younger or more ambitious the utility function for money. Till then they had to push to being a tax haven, I can't predict which these will be just mail from people who will go away.
Many more than others, no matter how large. An earlier version of Word 13. There were several other reasons.
Why Are We Getting a Divorce? There's nothing specifically white about such matters. Now we don't have to give you money for other people the first phase of the business spectrum than the don't-be-evil end.
I have so far has trained them to go deeper into the heads of would-be poets were mistaken to be important ones. Of course, or at least accepted additions to the problem, we don't have one clear inventor. He had equity.
Like us, the world as a process rather than just reconstructing word boundaries; spammers both add xHot nPorn cSite and omit P rn letters. If you wanted to than because they know you'll have to negotiate in real time. I switch person. By this I used thresholds of.
Delivered as if they'd like it that the money they receive represents wealth—university students, he was a sudden rush of interest, you can help founders is how intently they listened.
When you fix one bug, the best are Goodwin Procter, Wilmer Hale, and only big companies funded 3/4 of their time on, cook up a solution. Most of the false positive if the founders realized. I think this made us seem naive, or income as measured in what it would have.
The Mac number is a great discovery often seems obvious in retrospect.
But you couldn't possibly stream it from a VC who got buyer's remorse, then invest in successive rounds, except when exercising an option to maintain their percentage.
Thanks to Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Fred Wilson, Harj Taggar, Tim O'Reilly, Patrick Collison, Sarah Harlin, Paul Buchheit, Jackie McDonough, and Trevor Blackwell for their feedback on these thoughts.
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trendingnewsb · 7 years
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I Own A Bike Instead Of A Car: 5 Reasons Everyone Hates Me
I’m one of those dipshits who never got around to getting a driver’s license. As someone who hates being the designated driver, I am truly blessed by this. However, it also means that I have to rely on public transport for most of my getting-around needs. In recent times, I’ve gotten sick of pee-smelling subway cars and delightfully cramped buses, so I’ve attempted to cheat code my way out of all of that jazz by riding a bicycle to most everywhere. And man, that has revealed a whole new, previously hidden world to me.
A whole new, hidden, terrifying world.
5
You’ll Always Reek Of Ass
Just so we’re clear, I’m not one of those spandex missiles you see Lance Armstrong-ing their way through the city at breakneck speeds. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not an exercise kind of person at all. My workout is of the “bare minimum you need to do to keep resembling a human being” variety, and is exclusively motivated by an innate need to be able to execute a perfect dropkick at anyone or anything I feel has slighted me. At best, I’m the Super Mario of bicyclists: medium speed, medium stats, a little too chubby to pass for an athlete, and I would secretly like to swap my bike for a go-kart.
Still, bicycling is a physical activity, even for someone like me, who uses it exclusively for transportation purposes and prefers to ride at un-exhausting speeds. No matter how slowly you ride, though, you’ll strain yourself way beyond most other forms of transportation. Which means sweat. Which means swamp ass. Which obviously shouldn’t be a problem. Obviously you take a shower and/or change your clothes after you ride to, say, work. Obviously. You wouldn’t have it any other way.
For me, that mentality lasted for about a week.
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Why Hurricane Irma Has Felt Different From Most Hurricanes
I’m sure that there are people who ride a bicycle everywhere and each time dutifully spend 15 minutes showering and changing clothes at their destination, but I’ve never actually met one of these folks, and I sure as shit am not one myself. It’s not that you don’t want to keep clean; it’s just that when you spend the day zipping around on a self-powered vehicle, you’d need three changes of clothing even without the whole showering thing. No one has time for that shit, so it’s easier to just do your best to clean yourself up a bit and resign yourself to the faint waft of eau d’taint following you wherever you go. So anything under five miles tends to be “Eh, whatever,” while longer rides might warrant a quick change of underwear and a baby wipe treatment to the armpits (which technically makes my hygiene habits the same as Brad Pitt’s … ladies).
Still, this is not necessarily a life-ruining thing. Hell, people might not even notice your secret grossness. But it’s not like you can ask a friend for an opinion, because …
4
Cycling Can Turn You Into A Social Pariah
One of the things I was most surprised about is that social interaction and cycling don’t go too well together, regardless of how well you maintain your stench.
In tons and tons of social situations, you’ll find yourself having to explain precisely WHY you use a bike right off the bat, and it can become a big thing. Sure, your boss probably values that you try to keep in shape, but when it comes to pretty much anything else, you’re screwed. Dating? Good luck, you now rely on the other person to haul you both around, which in turn can easily make them think of you as someone who’s not financially responsible enough to own a car. Heading for a night out with your friends? They’ll take their car, or an Uber, or public transport. You’ll be the fucker who turns up on a bike and has to change clothes — or worse, won’t change them, so that everyone can have a round of beers and another round of “What’s that smell? Is that cheese? Did Pauli bring cheese?”
Then you have to deal with the fact that you have a bicycle with you … all night. So now your friends have to deal with you. “No, guys, I know we agreed to meet with the rest of the group a few blocks from here, but I just found the perfect spot to park my bike, and can’t leave it behind, and don’t feel like unpacking it from the 12,587 chains and locks I need to make sure it doesn’t get stolen.” It’ll get old after a while, and even if you don’t mean to make a huge deal about it, it tends to become one, because from the group’s point of view, you’re now the shithead who insisted on bringing a totally unnecessary and hindering large object with you. As a social faux pas, it’s like heading out for a beer with your best friend and bringing Alex Jones as a surprise avec.
So you become Bicycle Guy within your circle of friends. “We’re heading out for a drink, should I call Bicycle Guy?” “Nah, fuck him. He’ll just haul that damn bike with him all night, whining about how he can’t leave it out of his sight.” Your range of operations is also waaaay shorter than it would be for someone with a car — after a certain geographical distance, you’re going to be thinking long and hard on whether or not the strain to get there is worth it. And then there’s the fact that the carrying load of a bicycle is you and a backpack. Buy a new piece of furniture, and you’re shit out of luck unless you can bug some friend with a car to help you. Basically, you’re extra baggage to all of your acquaintances — from your point of view, everyone is that one friend with a pickup truck who people are always asking for a favor. From their point of view, you’re that fucker who keeps asking.
3
Maintenance Is Bullshit In Ways You Wouldn’t Believe
Because you don’t have to bother with gas or parking, cycling can seem like a pretty simple mode of transportation: Just hop on and pedal until you’re where you need to be. I know that’s what I thought when I first started. However, the grim reality is that you’ll be spending way more time on hands-on maintenance than with a car. 50 percent of bike ownership is shouting “What the hell is wrong with you?” at it.
For a relatively uncomplicated mechanical device, there are so, so, so many ways a bicycle can break down — which it absolutely will at the slightest provocation, unless you keep tabs on it. You have to constantly check that the nuts and bolts are tightened. Brake pads and lines need replacing. The tires will pop if you give them a sharp look, and magically keep leaking tiny amounts of air so that you have to check ’em all the time. The more often you take off the wheel and chain in order to replace tires, the more wear and tear you get on the stuff that holds it all together, so it becomes super easy to strip the bolts or make it to where they simply won’t stay tightened. Almost all bikes eventually get loose handlebars. The chain needs to be kept oiled and clean. Everything that can rust will rust super easily, so rain will wreck your shit. And that’s just the beginning. Here’s a handy list of 101 fucking things you’ll need to keep in mind unless you want to turn your bicycle into an expensive faceplant machine.
Sure, you could just take the bike to the shop every time something breaks, but lets face it, you won’t. That shit will set you back hundreds and hundreds of dollars over time just to keep the thing in working condition. You have to know how to fix all that shit, and how to recognize the various irregularities in the riding experience and minuscule noises that indicate potential problems. It’s a pain in the ass to the point where it’s easy to just end up ignoring the issues and ride on the solid principle of “Man, I really hope nothing breaks today. Better look into that strange noise tomorrow.”
This is obviously not the best move, as I once found out when one of the pedals (which had been acting a little funny for a week or two) snapped straight off mid-kick. In related news, completely and unexpectedly losing your balance while riding is a strange feeling that apparently leads into a kickass somersaults and a keen newfound interest in bicycle maintenance. In even more related news, turns out helmets are not just for decoration.
Not that maintaining your bike helps jack shit if you don’t know what you’re doing. I once accidentally tightened a nut holding the back wheel too much, so it chose to snap when I was riding down a particularly steep alley. This caused the wheel to partially jump off its fork, which also fucked up the brakes, seeing as they rely on the wheels to be where they’re supposed to. With no way to brake and the wheel stuck jumping up and down in the fork in a way that effectively turned the bike into a rodeo horse, I did the only thing I could do: I let out a passable impression of the Wilhelm Scream and rammed my feet against the asphalt, trying to ignore the fact that this also meant that my dick was slamming with equal force against the top tube. That was the longest five seconds of my life. I managed to stop roughly 15 feet before a wall. I still have the pair of Converses with the soles burned through somewhere in my attic.
2
Cyclists Are Despised By Everyone Else On The Road
The neighborhood I live in has a Facebook group, because of course it fucking does. I joined because area news and various local grievances are generally great for entertainment purposes, but I immediately found out that roughly 70 percent of all conversations in the group revolve around two subjects: the acceptable and unacceptable places where a dog can poop (nowhere and everywhere, respectively), and the way bicyclists are unrepentant assholes who endanger everyone’s lives.
This is not an isolated thing. Bikes versus cars is a famously bloody flame war, both online and in real life, and once you bring pedestrians in the mix, the shit soup is good and stirred. If you’re invested in the subject, you know the arguments: “Bicyclists are law-breaking dicks who zoom dangerously around in traffic.” “Cities are designed for cars.” “Cyclists are weenies who are trying to save the environment, or hipsters, or annoying fitness nuts.” And that shit bleeds way into real life. There are drivers who more or less deliberately hit cyclists and lose their complete and utter shit when dealing with them. There are cyclists who fatally run into pedestrians and call it “unavoidable.” I was kind of hoping I could find stories about pedestrians who eat cars or something to make this a rock-paper-scissors analogy, but it turns out pedestrians are just generally fucked.
Of course, this entire situation is because of a very specific group of people: assholes. Every mode of transport has its share, and for cyclists, it’s the jerkfaces who zip around in the traffic with nothing but an “I could squeeze through here” mindset, and often at way too high speeds. No one notices the people who ride their bikes carefully and follow the rules. It’s the assholes and their various accidents and close calls who hog the publicity, which leads to many drivers perceiving cyclists as hostile yet fragile meat missiles capable of nothing but erratic, borderline-illegal turns and twists. For pedestrians, it’s the same, but you’re a silent, fast meat missile riding on 30 pounds of cold murder steel.
But hey, let the rest of the world hate you. At least you still have your fellow bicyclists, who totally understand your thing and like you. You can always hang out with them, right? R-right?
1
Bicyclists Hate Each Other, Too
Ha! Plot twist!
Individual groups of cyclists may be tight, but even casual bike-riding will reveal that cyclists as a whole are an insanely fragmented demographic, and most of the splinter groups are wary of each other. When you buy a motorcycle, it’s like joining a club, and you happily wave your hand at passing bikers. When you buy a bike, you get passive-aggressive “11 types of cyclists we all know” lists from Cycling Weekly which make no secret about the fact that all 11 types are kind of dipshits. That article is exclusively about the spandex-clad hardcore riders, by the way — the very people who read fucking Cycling Weekly in the first place.
It’s the same all across the board. The cycling community is pretty tribal, and as befits an individual sport, most cyclists tend to be fiercely independent in their particular biking style and preferences. So even when everyone technically follows the law, the stink eyes cyclists give to everyone who differs from their preferred parameters can be something to behold. And how many stink eyes is that? Well, let’s look at some of the different types:
– The spandex-clad dudes with expensive sports bikes and a midlife crisis who hate everyone slower than them, which is everyone
– The laissez-faire people riding slow, one-gear bikes super erratically, swerving wherever the fuck they like and never letting on where they’ll turn next
– The men who can’t accept that some women have better bikes and/or pedal faster, and deliberately block their paths or attempt to overtake them regardless of what happens around them
– Drunks
– People who for some reason genuinely think laws don’t apply to them
Consciously or not, each and every one of them thinks that their brand of cycling is the right one. And whenever someone does something that differs from their narrow specifications of What’s Right, dirty looks that would make Ivan Drago take a step backwards fly through the air.
Of course, it doesn’t exactly help that every once in a while, every one of us earns those looks. It’s so fucking easy to make mistakes when you’re cycling. Know those times when you’re driving on a highway and there’s just miles and miles of open road in front of you? That chill cruise mode normally associated with driving can totally hit you when you’re cycling, too — and when it does, you’re not in a heavy, protective metal box. The monotone repetitiveness of pedaling and the sense of silently gliding over the ground can zone you out really quickly, right up until you notice that you’ve veered a little too close to the center of the road, or nearly collided with someone else, or stopped for a red light and somehow ended up at a 45-degree angle blocking pedestrians, bikes, and cars alike like a complete dipshit. It’s not something I’d call extremely common — it’s not like every cyclist out there is driving like a clown 24/7. But you see someone’s zoned-out bumblefuckery almost daily out there, and I’m not even going to pretend that I haven’t done my share of that shit as well. Hey, I just understood why drivers sometimes hate us.
In all fairness, that’s just my personal experience of bicyclists, and I’m a notoriously grumpy fucker. It’s entirely possible that to someone else, the cycling experience is way more of a “unicorns farting rainbows” thing than the Mad Max world I’ve described. Despite my tendency to give cycling a hard time, at the end of the day, I do enjoy it a lot. I enjoy it enough to write thousands of passionate words about it.
Besides, it sure as hell beats riding on a bus that someone has used as a toilet.
Pauli Poisuo is a Cracked columnist and freelance editor. Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.
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I Own A Bike Instead Of A Car: 5 Reasons Everyone Hates Me
I’m one of those dipshits who never got around to getting a driver’s license. As someone who hates being the designated driver, I am truly blessed by this. However, it also means that I have to rely on public transport for most of my getting-around needs. In recent times, I’ve gotten sick of pee-smelling subway cars and delightfully cramped buses, so I’ve attempted to cheat code my way out of all of that jazz by riding a bicycle to most everywhere. And man, that has revealed a whole new, previously hidden world to me.
A whole new, hidden, terrifying world.
5
You’ll Always Reek Of Ass
Just so we’re clear, I’m not one of those spandex missiles you see Lance Armstrong-ing their way through the city at breakneck speeds. In fact, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not an exercise kind of person at all. My workout is of the “bare minimum you need to do to keep resembling a human being” variety, and is exclusively motivated by an innate need to be able to execute a perfect dropkick at anyone or anything I feel has slighted me. At best, I’m the Super Mario of bicyclists: medium speed, medium stats, a little too chubby to pass for an athlete, and I would secretly like to swap my bike for a go-kart.
Still, bicycling is a physical activity, even for someone like me, who uses it exclusively for transportation purposes and prefers to ride at un-exhausting speeds. No matter how slowly you ride, though, you’ll strain yourself way beyond most other forms of transportation. Which means sweat. Which means swamp ass. Which obviously shouldn’t be a problem. Obviously you take a shower and/or change your clothes after you ride to, say, work. Obviously. You wouldn’t have it any other way.
For me, that mentality lasted for about a week.
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I’m sure that there are people who ride a bicycle everywhere and each time dutifully spend 15 minutes showering and changing clothes at their destination, but I’ve never actually met one of these folks, and I sure as shit am not one myself. It’s not that you don’t want to keep clean; it’s just that when you spend the day zipping around on a self-powered vehicle, you’d need three changes of clothing even without the whole showering thing. No one has time for that shit, so it’s easier to just do your best to clean yourself up a bit and resign yourself to the faint waft of eau d’taint following you wherever you go. So anything under five miles tends to be “Eh, whatever,” while longer rides might warrant a quick change of underwear and a baby wipe treatment to the armpits (which technically makes my hygiene habits the same as Brad Pitt’s … ladies).
Still, this is not necessarily a life-ruining thing. Hell, people might not even notice your secret grossness. But it’s not like you can ask a friend for an opinion, because …
4
Cycling Can Turn You Into A Social Pariah
One of the things I was most surprised about is that social interaction and cycling don’t go too well together, regardless of how well you maintain your stench.
In tons and tons of social situations, you’ll find yourself having to explain precisely WHY you use a bike right off the bat, and it can become a big thing. Sure, your boss probably values that you try to keep in shape, but when it comes to pretty much anything else, you’re screwed. Dating? Good luck, you now rely on the other person to haul you both around, which in turn can easily make them think of you as someone who’s not financially responsible enough to own a car. Heading for a night out with your friends? They’ll take their car, or an Uber, or public transport. You’ll be the fucker who turns up on a bike and has to change clothes — or worse, won’t change them, so that everyone can have a round of beers and another round of “What’s that smell? Is that cheese? Did Pauli bring cheese?”
Then you have to deal with the fact that you have a bicycle with you … all night. So now your friends have to deal with you. “No, guys, I know we agreed to meet with the rest of the group a few blocks from here, but I just found the perfect spot to park my bike, and can’t leave it behind, and don’t feel like unpacking it from the 12,587 chains and locks I need to make sure it doesn’t get stolen.” It’ll get old after a while, and even if you don’t mean to make a huge deal about it, it tends to become one, because from the group’s point of view, you’re now the shithead who insisted on bringing a totally unnecessary and hindering large object with you. As a social faux pas, it’s like heading out for a beer with your best friend and bringing Alex Jones as a surprise avec.
So you become Bicycle Guy within your circle of friends. “We’re heading out for a drink, should I call Bicycle Guy?” “Nah, fuck him. He’ll just haul that damn bike with him all night, whining about how he can’t leave it out of his sight.” Your range of operations is also waaaay shorter than it would be for someone with a car — after a certain geographical distance, you’re going to be thinking long and hard on whether or not the strain to get there is worth it. And then there’s the fact that the carrying load of a bicycle is you and a backpack. Buy a new piece of furniture, and you’re shit out of luck unless you can bug some friend with a car to help you. Basically, you’re extra baggage to all of your acquaintances — from your point of view, everyone is that one friend with a pickup truck who people are always asking for a favor. From their point of view, you’re that fucker who keeps asking.
3
Maintenance Is Bullshit In Ways You Wouldn’t Believe
Because you don’t have to bother with gas or parking, cycling can seem like a pretty simple mode of transportation: Just hop on and pedal until you’re where you need to be. I know that’s what I thought when I first started. However, the grim reality is that you’ll be spending way more time on hands-on maintenance than with a car. 50 percent of bike ownership is shouting “What the hell is wrong with you?” at it.
For a relatively uncomplicated mechanical device, there are so, so, so many ways a bicycle can break down — which it absolutely will at the slightest provocation, unless you keep tabs on it. You have to constantly check that the nuts and bolts are tightened. Brake pads and lines need replacing. The tires will pop if you give them a sharp look, and magically keep leaking tiny amounts of air so that you have to check ’em all the time. The more often you take off the wheel and chain in order to replace tires, the more wear and tear you get on the stuff that holds it all together, so it becomes super easy to strip the bolts or make it to where they simply won’t stay tightened. Almost all bikes eventually get loose handlebars. The chain needs to be kept oiled and clean. Everything that can rust will rust super easily, so rain will wreck your shit. And that’s just the beginning. Here’s a handy list of 101 fucking things you’ll need to keep in mind unless you want to turn your bicycle into an expensive faceplant machine.
Sure, you could just take the bike to the shop every time something breaks, but lets face it, you won’t. That shit will set you back hundreds and hundreds of dollars over time just to keep the thing in working condition. You have to know how to fix all that shit, and how to recognize the various irregularities in the riding experience and minuscule noises that indicate potential problems. It’s a pain in the ass to the point where it’s easy to just end up ignoring the issues and ride on the solid principle of “Man, I really hope nothing breaks today. Better look into that strange noise tomorrow.”
This is obviously not the best move, as I once found out when one of the pedals (which had been acting a little funny for a week or two) snapped straight off mid-kick. In related news, completely and unexpectedly losing your balance while riding is a strange feeling that apparently leads into a kickass somersaults and a keen newfound interest in bicycle maintenance. In even more related news, turns out helmets are not just for decoration.
Not that maintaining your bike helps jack shit if you don’t know what you’re doing. I once accidentally tightened a nut holding the back wheel too much, so it chose to snap when I was riding down a particularly steep alley. This caused the wheel to partially jump off its fork, which also fucked up the brakes, seeing as they rely on the wheels to be where they’re supposed to. With no way to brake and the wheel stuck jumping up and down in the fork in a way that effectively turned the bike into a rodeo horse, I did the only thing I could do: I let out a passable impression of the Wilhelm Scream and rammed my feet against the asphalt, trying to ignore the fact that this also meant that my dick was slamming with equal force against the top tube. That was the longest five seconds of my life. I managed to stop roughly 15 feet before a wall. I still have the pair of Converses with the soles burned through somewhere in my attic.
2
Cyclists Are Despised By Everyone Else On The Road
The neighborhood I live in has a Facebook group, because of course it fucking does. I joined because area news and various local grievances are generally great for entertainment purposes, but I immediately found out that roughly 70 percent of all conversations in the group revolve around two subjects: the acceptable and unacceptable places where a dog can poop (nowhere and everywhere, respectively), and the way bicyclists are unrepentant assholes who endanger everyone’s lives.
This is not an isolated thing. Bikes versus cars is a famously bloody flame war, both online and in real life, and once you bring pedestrians in the mix, the shit soup is good and stirred. If you’re invested in the subject, you know the arguments: “Bicyclists are law-breaking dicks who zoom dangerously around in traffic.” “Cities are designed for cars.” “Cyclists are weenies who are trying to save the environment, or hipsters, or annoying fitness nuts.” And that shit bleeds way into real life. There are drivers who more or less deliberately hit cyclists and lose their complete and utter shit when dealing with them. There are cyclists who fatally run into pedestrians and call it “unavoidable.” I was kind of hoping I could find stories about pedestrians who eat cars or something to make this a rock-paper-scissors analogy, but it turns out pedestrians are just generally fucked.
Of course, this entire situation is because of a very specific group of people: assholes. Every mode of transport has its share, and for cyclists, it’s the jerkfaces who zip around in the traffic with nothing but an “I could squeeze through here” mindset, and often at way too high speeds. No one notices the people who ride their bikes carefully and follow the rules. It’s the assholes and their various accidents and close calls who hog the publicity, which leads to many drivers perceiving cyclists as hostile yet fragile meat missiles capable of nothing but erratic, borderline-illegal turns and twists. For pedestrians, it’s the same, but you’re a silent, fast meat missile riding on 30 pounds of cold murder steel.
But hey, let the rest of the world hate you. At least you still have your fellow bicyclists, who totally understand your thing and like you. You can always hang out with them, right? R-right?
1
Bicyclists Hate Each Other, Too
Ha! Plot twist!
Individual groups of cyclists may be tight, but even casual bike-riding will reveal that cyclists as a whole are an insanely fragmented demographic, and most of the splinter groups are wary of each other. When you buy a motorcycle, it’s like joining a club, and you happily wave your hand at passing bikers. When you buy a bike, you get passive-aggressive “11 types of cyclists we all know” lists from Cycling Weekly which make no secret about the fact that all 11 types are kind of dipshits. That article is exclusively about the spandex-clad hardcore riders, by the way — the very people who read fucking Cycling Weekly in the first place.
It’s the same all across the board. The cycling community is pretty tribal, and as befits an individual sport, most cyclists tend to be fiercely independent in their particular biking style and preferences. So even when everyone technically follows the law, the stink eyes cyclists give to everyone who differs from their preferred parameters can be something to behold. And how many stink eyes is that? Well, let’s look at some of the different types:
– The spandex-clad dudes with expensive sports bikes and a midlife crisis who hate everyone slower than them, which is everyone
– The laissez-faire people riding slow, one-gear bikes super erratically, swerving wherever the fuck they like and never letting on where they’ll turn next
– The men who can’t accept that some women have better bikes and/or pedal faster, and deliberately block their paths or attempt to overtake them regardless of what happens around them
– Drunks
– People who for some reason genuinely think laws don’t apply to them
Consciously or not, each and every one of them thinks that their brand of cycling is the right one. And whenever someone does something that differs from their narrow specifications of What’s Right, dirty looks that would make Ivan Drago take a step backwards fly through the air.
Of course, it doesn’t exactly help that every once in a while, every one of us earns those looks. It’s so fucking easy to make mistakes when you’re cycling. Know those times when you’re driving on a highway and there’s just miles and miles of open road in front of you? That chill cruise mode normally associated with driving can totally hit you when you’re cycling, too — and when it does, you’re not in a heavy, protective metal box. The monotone repetitiveness of pedaling and the sense of silently gliding over the ground can zone you out really quickly, right up until you notice that you’ve veered a little too close to the center of the road, or nearly collided with someone else, or stopped for a red light and somehow ended up at a 45-degree angle blocking pedestrians, bikes, and cars alike like a complete dipshit. It’s not something I’d call extremely common — it’s not like every cyclist out there is driving like a clown 24/7. But you see someone’s zoned-out bumblefuckery almost daily out there, and I’m not even going to pretend that I haven’t done my share of that shit as well. Hey, I just understood why drivers sometimes hate us.
In all fairness, that’s just my personal experience of bicyclists, and I’m a notoriously grumpy fucker. It’s entirely possible that to someone else, the cycling experience is way more of a “unicorns farting rainbows” thing than the Mad Max world I’ve described. Despite my tendency to give cycling a hard time, at the end of the day, I do enjoy it a lot. I enjoy it enough to write thousands of passionate words about it.
Besides, it sure as hell beats riding on a bus that someone has used as a toilet.
Pauli Poisuo is a Cracked columnist and freelance editor. Here he is on Facebook and Twitter.
These shorts for men may make you look like you pooped your pants after eating Smurfs, but they will protect your delicate man area.
If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.
Read more: http://ift.tt/2f1RIpd
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