When I last bought Freerider Pros directly from Adidas in October 2023, they had a list price of $88 but were on sale for $62. Now Adidas is asking $160 for them, which sounds like a combination of inflation and tariffs. They’re great shoes, but not $160 great, and I don’t expect you’ll find a good enough sale any time soon. I think you’d get more bang for your buck by ensuring you have great pedals with great pins. My favorite is the Stamp 1 Gen 2 by Crankbrothers. I love them whether I’m wearing FiveTens or hiking boots, because of the really meaty pins and large platform.

That’s great to hear. I only have experience with a few finishes, but a little reading tells me your combo is popular for wooden food contact surfaces. What else do you like about it?

It’s oak (Q. agrifolia), pruned from an old tree on private land in a mature forest. It’s a struggle to find branches of an appropriate thickness and length that are generally straight enough, at least when considering only what actually needs pruning. So that one isn’t the best shape for a walking stick, but I had slim pickings and was motivated to find a piece to work with. It’s strong enough to be a serviceable walking stick and hold weight while flexing only slightly.

I like the look of keeping most of the bark on, though I hit all the smaller branch points with the belt sander. I only stripped bark in the area where it’s likely to be held, and sanded only lightly. The apparent striations aren’t perceivable by touch as grooves - they’re filled with inner bark that was incompletely scraped, and the color contrast is accentuated by the finish. I put multiple coats of tung oil over the entire stick, including saturating some moss on the outer bark. It cures to a nice finish, although I’ve never seen any instructions that suggest using it on rough bark.

I might see shrinkage and bark separation from the wood over time, but I’m hopeful it will last several years without substantial deterioration. I think the stick dried for over a year before I finished it.

It’s the most curved but it’s oak and so far it has been strong enough for my hiking use.

Only one of them features a piece of quartz at the top to concentrate the wielder’s magical energy.

I, however, have no such power, so it’s functionally just a stick.

Thanks, that one is my favorite! It does have some curve to it, but only in one dimension so it hides when leaning against a wall like this. But it does feel like the heftiest choice to fight off a coyote that wants my little dog for a snack.

What features do you use? Their website seems pretty slim but makes it appear that their apps are primarily about home fitness training, not necessarily trail mapping. Being a Polish company might help as they would have designed everything with GDPR in mind, even if they’re not required to avoid invasive tracking of international users.

Thanks for the recommendation, but I’ll have to pass on it. I’m sure Gaia GPS is great for hiking, especially with offline topographic maps, and presumably good for MTB as well. However, it’s owned by the same folks as Trailforks. They started with a bunch of venture capital in 2020 and went on a tear buying other companies in 2021 and 2022 including Trailforks, Pinkbike, and Gaia. It took a couple years for them to start enshittifying Trailforks, but now that the process has begun I have little doubt that I want to avoid giving them data through any of their other brands as well.

If the carpool stickers had come with a 20 year guarantee then nobody could reasonably be upset about the rules changing later because “forever” turned out to be too good to be true. This would be like solar, except that they want to change the rules later anyway.

If they simply left the original EV carpool stickers grandfathered but stopped giving out new ones, people who missed their chance would be upset. But the program would have worked exactly as intended, to incentivize early adoption of EVs by giving out a priceless benefit. It should never have gone on as long as it did, but government reacts slowly.

You’ve articulated well a lot of good points, but you’re missing a few key considerations. One elephant in the room is that the Investor Owned Utilities (which cover the vast majority of accounts in California) are abusing their monopoly powers as much as possible (including regulatory capture). That is sadly inextricably linked with the resentment felt by their solar customers, even as it is also felt by all of their non-solar customers.

You’re talking about the kind of tradeoffs that make sense in an ideal system, pricing things according to what they actually cost to provide. But the IOUs price things at “how much can we get the CPUC to allow us to charge?” And they love to stoke class warfare politically when it suits their business purposes. It’s just one more area where the actual problem is the billionaires (or just call it capitalism) against the 99% but they keep the water too muddy for most people to see it.

I believe it’s also still generally either illegal or at least infeasible to disconnect from the grid entirely in most of urban and suburban California, because it’s tied to occupancy permitting. I think the best hope of ending the madness does lie in that direction though. Solar customers tend to be much wealthier than non solar customers, which in aggregate means many of them will have the means to go full battery off grid as the pricing disparity continues to grow. This loss of legally-mandated captive market is the only chance to force monopolies to behave better.