Silly exhaust trick. But the sound coming out sucks anyway.

At a certain point in the price of a vehicle, fuel mileage no longer is a significant factor in the economics of purchase.

I meant that when I said Russians, I was speaking about Putin and the regime.

In a sane world, he would be committed to a mental hospital. I keep reading about his rumored Parkinsons’ diagnosis. That can’t be helpful either. 

I don’t think ‘Putin has no morality’ accurately reflects his ethos. Like many sociopaths, his view of action and consequence, is that those who end up with the short end of the stick deserve it, because they allowed themselves to be put there. Thus he has no compassion for the thousands (millions?) of Ukrainian…

At least if it’s someone a good bit younger, the chances of it being yet another Soviet stooge is greatly diminished.

I would clarify that when you say that ‘Russia does not gain in any way’ that you are referring to the Russian people. They certainly are not benefitting from any of this.

There’s a pretty huge amount of Russian assets that are currently seized in Western countries. Not just frozen - seized. What Russia has just done WRT these planes (and is threatening to do with other Western owned assets within Russian borders, such as manufacturing facilities and oilfield equipment and what not -…

Communism has nothing at all to do with atheism. It has to do with ordering the economy collectively. The early Christian church was communistic.

I don’t see how Putin is overthrown, he’s spent decades establishing a system that makes it pretty much impossible for anyone to challenge him or undermine his power.

I think you’re missing some of his previous statements on the subject. His perception of the Russian identity is ‘patriotism, collectivism and solidarity’; derzhavnost and gosudarstvennichestvo. He perceives Western individualism as a weakness, and instead reorders history by claiming that authoritarian control of…

Putin wants nothing more than a return to full Soviet Era lock down and control. People can’t leave? He loves it. Western companies lose a couplr decades of capital investments? Perfect. Just in time to seize their assets and reassert collectivisation.

From his other piece on riding a Livewire:

“The thing about riding an electric motorcycle is that you’re constantly doing mental math to calculate how far you’ve come, how much range you’ve used to get there, how far you have to go, and what percentage over that mileage you’ll need in range to achieve it. Percentages,…

I agree. I don’t even look at the speedo on my motorcycle. Its eyes off the road. Most of them, it comes off as well as all the front fairings that are now made without support and break. Using the ram air instead of a proper fairing stay. I had a fairing break on a newer bike because I brought home paper towels.…

I once got into a conversation with a neon green adv rider about my black helmet and leathers, “people won’t see you”

Putting a touch screen on a bike, then saying ‘you don’t need to use it’ means it’s a useless feature, and needs to be removed, or its human interface is poor, and you’ve decided it’s too hard to operate, so you can’t/won’t use that functionality.

About what motorcycling is, as an activity. Humans already spend too much time in front of a screen. ‘Let’s put a computer screen on our motorcycle’ is a stupid idea. Motorcycles are designed to put you out there into your environment and engage all your senses. Computer screens take your focus off of that…

Saying ‘weight doesn’t matter’ is so fundamentally wrong, that it calls into question the reasoning of anyone who says it.

Because to most brain-dead cagers, you are.

This is a very heavy motorcycle, with a touchscreen.  Think about that for a minute.