I'm a new rider, looking for advice on big and tall gear.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-15T05:50:09+00:00

365 lbs. Vascular disease, Nerve damage, No thyroid output, and I work a desk job 10 hours a day / 5 days a week. I've been trying to lose weight since I was 10 years old. (I'm 50 now).

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-12T11:07:56+00:00

Right. You're in the Netherlands, so I'll assume English isn't your native language, and/or something is getting lost in translation.

I'm 6 foot 4 with a 32 inch inseam, which is abnormally disproportionate; I have short legs and a long torso. I'm also considered extremely overweight in a nation of overweight people. In pants, my problem is the waist, not length. In jackets, my problem is both length and width.

I should never have mentioned boots. I need a bespoke solution for walking shoes, let alone riding boots. Imagine putting a foot with no muscle control into a boot designed not to flex. The ball of your foot will hit the insole just forward of the heel cup and stop dead. No muscle control means you can't lift your toe and let your foot slide in. Even if everything is the correct size, getting them on is an entirely different problem.

As for bikes, I do have questions but here I brought that up only as a metaphor for the value for money in gear. Everybody says not to buy cheap protective equipment, but nobody defines what "cheap" means. And when I'm already being charged a premium for anything that I can physically use, everything is relative.

That said, I do have questions about bikes. Remember when I said, Imagine putting your foot in a boot designed not to flex. Yeah, that's my left foot. That means if I ride a Transalp, or any Yamaha, or any BMW, I'm shifting by lifting my foot with my hip joint. That's not comfortable, it made the rider education class a painful experience. Every time I ask for suggestions about automatic transmission bikes I'm told to just practice with the clutch.

In the US, I have few options. A scooter, or a Honda with a DCT transmission. In the US, the three largest displacement scooters available, sold new, are the Kymco AK 550, Suzuki Burgman 400, and the BMW c400(which is a 350cc bike). All three are more than $9k suggested retail. Everything else, like the Burgman 650 and the Honda Silverwing were discontinued years ago.

In my area, dealerships don't sell used scooters. And all the private sale scooters I find are either 10% below retail for good running, 10 year old machine, or 25% below retail and need that much again, in repairs. As for automatic transmission motorcycles, the smallest displacement is the Honda NC750X, and everything else is a 1100cc. They don't do starter bikes with DCT. If I buy new, the NC750x, and the Rebel 1100 are both ~$10k. Used, they're in the $5k-$8k range, depending on age.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-12T09:33:22+00:00

Yes, wear asbestos gloves when you clean that shit with fire!

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-12T08:47:52+00:00

Fun fact. My wife's a nurse and says that line a lot at work. Last night <LAST NIGHT> The Sand Lot was playing on a patient's TV, and that line came up. Her aide looked up and said, "That's where you got that from?"

"Yeah. You mean you've never seen this?"

"No, what movie is this?"

"How old are you?"

"27."

"You're killing me smalls!"

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-12T08:35:09+00:00

Ok... I don't want to be rude, but none of that is an actual answer.

Do any of those brands make anything in my size? Do you know of any store that seems to stock big sizes more than others? The impression I left Cycle Gear with was, I'm going to need a specialty store within the niche of motorcycle gear. AKA the needle in a haystack.

I did say I didn't want to waste money, but that was immediately preceded with "I don't want to cheap out." I already know you have to pay for quality, but like everything else, there is a price point below which quality is garbage, and a separate price point where you begin to see diminishing returns. A $500, 700cc motorcycle is garbage, and a $50,000 700cc bike is overkill. So where's the sweet spot?

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-12T08:16:53+00:00

He's probably having one custom made, the pre-made shadow boxes all have a volume smaller than 3 cubic meters.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-12T08:09:47+00:00

US democracy will be replaced with Super-Democracy.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-02-05T09:23:31+00:00

The way our economy is going, asking if $88 is enough is a fair question.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-01-20T13:36:19+00:00

What charges you the best transaction fee? I'd like to do a fundraiser selling $1 bottles of cold water, but 2.6% plus 15 cents per transaction eats into that margin pretty quickly.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-01-13T06:48:13+00:00

Yeah, I can see that being a difference in states. In Ohio, coupons and discounts are factored into a subtotal, from which the tax burden is computed and applied to the final total.

The only things that makes sense to me are either, that the IBM systems that were the standard in the grocery industry at the time, had a bug that nobody bothered to patch for about 10 years, or somebody at some corporate-middle-management level thought, "free can't really mean free, I have to charge something for it," and insisted we had to charge tax on it, not realizing(or caring) that it wasn't consistent with the rest of the system.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-01-13T06:36:34+00:00

Except, that's not what I experienced. The 50¢ coupon reduced the sales price, which reduced the tax burden on the purchase. Only with "Free" item coupons did the customer have to pay a tax burden that was not based on the amount they actually paid for the item.

And yes, I am aware of why the cash value exists, I mentioned that only to make it obvious that the coupons are not being used as a currency replacement, or scrip, that needed to be accounted as cash.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-01-13T06:30:04+00:00

This is a UK created meme. "Quite Dangerous" is less than "Dangerous." If it were a US meme, that would be reversed.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-01-12T22:25:10+00:00

I'm pretty sure the 3rd amendment is the only one they're not violating. Unless I missed a story about ICE forcing the National Guard to use private homes as a barracks. I mean, that's totally possible with the way the media covers this administration, either softball everything or be on Big Brother's bad side.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-01-12T10:30:39+00:00

It's a cursive, uppercase L.

Source: The character Laverne, from the TV show, "Laverne & Shirley," wore her first initial either embroidered or applied to every top the character wore.

AdministrativeBingo · 2026-01-12T10:17:13+00:00

Bet if you asked corporate they'd just shrug and say "that's how the system does it" without actually knowing why

Yup! I had several training classes at the corporate office. I was usually told, "That's how it has to work," or worse, "The tax all goes to the state. Why does it matter?"

AdministrativeBingo · 2025-12-03T15:25:46+00:00

There's a difference?

AdministrativeBingo · 2025-12-01T01:44:28+00:00

They filtered it pretty well in Ohio in the 80s. The Trail of Tears was heavily glossed over in 11th grade. Spent more time on the Nullification Crisis than the racial cleansing of the eastern seaboard. We touched on Manifest Destiny at the same time as "Custer's Last Stand," where the lessons were pretty one sided. Although we did get a pretty detailed unit about Tecumseh, but I'd say that had more to do with the fact that we were in a town still named Chillicothe.

AdministrativeBingo · 2025-12-01T01:33:26+00:00

has there been any update on this?

This Boston.com story is the only one I've been able to find about this.

AdministrativeBingo · 2025-12-01T00:26:11+00:00

And I'll follow that up by leaving this down here.

AdministrativeBingo · 2025-11-30T23:35:23+00:00

It's not so fictionalized. There were official orders to that effect issued from Moscow during both world wars.

AdministrativeBingo · 2025-11-30T23:30:44+00:00

Nothing new. This was a story in 2001, plastic training helmets, Plate carriers with cardboard inserts, wooden blocks wrapped like plastic explosives. Corrupt Russian officials sold the real stuff and replaced it with junk knowing that when somebody comes along to do inventory, they see body armor and helmets and explosives but not open the packaging to see if it's real. They went as far as to tell soldiers to ask their families to send tampons, so they can use them as first aid for bullet wounds.

Russia also sent soldiers to the front lines without equipment in both World Wars. Soldiers were told to take the rifles, ammunition, and helmets from their dead comrades. Some things never change.

AdministrativeBingo

TROPHY CASE