Canuk wrote:'I don't want this particular feature so I am completely unable to comprehend why anyone else would." on this thread.
Hold this thought:
Not everybody is the same as you'
This pretty much sums up at least 50% of the posters on these threads, and they will say anything to denounce it. Its a pretty sad way to look at the world. New technologies emerge, old technologies get left behind, and usually for good reason. Reynolds 531?Rubbish in comparison to the CrMo and stainless tube technologies of today. I have three 531 frames rotting in a cupboard, and there they'll stay. I don't know what head in the sand 1960's mindset one poster above lives in, but almost everyone in the three cycling clubs I ride with regularly (probably 300+ members) does ride a carbon frame as their main bike. Sure they have different bikes for different applications but apart from the odd titanium ride, 100% carbon. They're not 'racers', just ordinary blokes or for a ride and pint of a Saturday. Even among these carbon bikes you'll see dozens of variations and new technologies (Look for example is very popular here)
Everybody is different and not everyone is a conformist. There is beauty in revolt.
Today in France you'll see that idea in action. Non conformists in Yellow jackets, ready to risk their lives and liberty for real revolution. Unwilling to accept the status quo in the pursuit of something better.
Its the fate of human beings: to look for something better. And thank God for it.
Thread drift, but it had to be said. Too many stick in the muds on this forum.
Here I must 'fess-up to being fundamentally a conservative. This is not the Party ilk but the kind that prefers tried and tested solutions to new-fangles that first invent a "need" and then the means to satisfy it. This invention of "needs" is the other face of innovation - the one that serves mad profit-making, resource-squandering and a hundred other evils that even the most rabid consumer is beginning to recognise, as their environment worsens, their economic condition worsens and the monstrous activities of those your yellow-jackets object to wax and wax.
Personally I enjoy many innovations in the cycling sphere. Plastic frames: disk brakes; tubeless tyres; STI gear-shifting; clipless pedals and some others. But why assume that every claimed innovation is nothing but good? That's just naïve.
I too was seduced by the then new computers for bikes when racing in the 80s and 90s. Of all the cycling stuff I've bought these (and one or three inner tubes & chainrings) are the only things I've had to throw away because they're unfixable when they go phut. Moreover, it didn't take long to realise that a computer was spoiling my cycling rather than enhancing it. Riding a bike became about meeting meaningless slave-driver targets rather than about the various joys of cycling.
Another syndrome ... I had a bike for typically a decade or more before selling it to someone else as either no longer suitable for my current cycling modes or because I wanted a significantly better thing. My current bikes are 10, 9, 7 and 5 years owned by me and will satisfy my needs for many years yet. But you "get the latest-greatest" lads seem all too keen to buy something every other week! This is not a good economic behaviour, for many, many reasons - both personal and because of the wider consequences.
It pays (in many ways, not just cash) to differentiate the truly innovative and useful from "induced needs and wants". I refer you to the parable of "needful things".
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes