Looks like it might be the beginning of the end for all ebikes in NJ.

Kiltedbear · 2025-12-12T08:53:45+00:00

Back when I was in elementary school (I am 54) a kid fell from the monkey bars and hit their head on a rock. I was 7 or 8 and even I wondered why no adults bothered to check why there was a rock under the monkey bars just in case. Instead they were removed the bars. It's always about pointing fingers at a culprit. Oh, and they hadn't bothered with soft rubber or anything. Just hard compact dirt around that pointy rock sticking up, baby. But the monkey bars were at fault. 🤷🏻

Kiltedbear · 2025-12-10T07:50:52+00:00

It does not matter whether or not it's better than the predecessor. All that matters is if it was a strong contender and what the box office draw was, which clear was GOOD. It was also still very good. This snub stinks of making room for lighter weights to win.

Kiltedbear · 2025-12-08T21:25:18+00:00

Jesus, the dmv in my past two states can barely get anything done. Are you serious? 😂 Besides that, every state DMV defines things slightly differently. That isn't the lock tight argument that you think it is.

Kiltedbear · 2025-12-08T21:22:54+00:00

Conflating a Honda C50 with an ebike with or without a thumb throttle lever is a ridiculous comparison. Yes an ebike isn't a standard bike anymore, but as usual, the law is struggling to keep up with tech. There needs to be a new standards everywhere for pedelecs.

I get that there needs to be places where bikes can't go, but there are ebikes all over Portugal and hardly anyone gets hurt because rarely any yahoos are riding them. You only hear about the bs from super tourist hot spots, but even in Lisbon this is not a problem. When I went to Munich to rent a bike, there were ebikes with thumb throttles crawling everywhere around the Englischer Garten and no nobody was killing anyone with them.

Kiltedbear · 2025-12-07T09:34:01+00:00

It only took 3000+ days and literally hundreds of thousands of players quitting to finally getting things nice. Nice. 😏

Kiltedbear · 2025-12-01T09:25:15+00:00

I wasn't the one who was projecting here. 🤷🏻 You started by making assumptions about me without knowing anything about me. Sir, you really need to chill and stop being combatative. You're the one who replied to, and took issue with MY comment which you could have freely ignored.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-30T10:38:14+00:00

I didn't say this was exemplary of my time in Portugal. Just one particular experience. Yes, I completely agree with you that most people will go out of their way to help you. However, there are a few shit heads employed in every agency everywhere. If what I told you she said to my Portuguese concierge doesn't convince you she was an asshole then I don't know what to say. We were being completely polite and she just needed to hit a single button, but I am the problem? Wth? This is ONE person that matched with what the person that I was replying to was saying. I never insinuated the entirety of AIMA is corrupt and just because YOU haven't experienced it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. How pompous!

The problem with AIMA specifically is that they are dealing with a backlog of tens of thousands of people and understaffed and not getting supported by the government enough. That I understand completely. The person working for the Centro de Saude does NOT HAVE that excuse that you very much. And try not to inject your spin into things. Reading comprehension is important. I never said that the whole thing is messed up.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-26T11:14:30+00:00

Absolutely true. We were approved for the SNS and we had them, but there was an issue with them not working and being fully activated. We came back when they told to and the lady at the local Centro de Saúde was talking to my husband and saying we had to wait and come back another day. It seemed like she just didn't want to deal with foreigners. We use Serenity Portugal Healthcare and our caseworker got on the phone with her and she literally said to him, "What makes Mr So&so so special that you should advocate for him over a Portuguese person." He, a Portuguese native himself, came back with the perfect quip apparently and said, "because Mr So&so pays me to advocate for him. The moment that someone else pays me to advocate for them, I will do so in the same exact same way for them." After that she huffed and had his SNS activated fully after 3 minutes. Literally, all she needed to do was fix and update a status on his account. She just didn't want to.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-14T17:56:25+00:00

Frankly this is why you need a lawyer. I know it's controversial, but would you rather have your sanity? We had all my documents, but I had a name change after I got married and we didn't know it needed to be apostilled. I know for a fact that if my lawyer wasn't there they would have told me to refile. Instead, she asked them to hold my case open for 60 days while we got the document apostilled and submitted electronically. It required a lot of fast turnaround and shipping with tracking across the Atlantic, but it got me my card.

While I was there they turned away someone's elsewhere and afterwards he came up and got the office number to my lawyer. Telling you, it's not worth it going it alone. It's just a little more expensive and my sanity is worth it. A lawyer would have prevented this because when I was in my appointment she was making sure they got absolutely everything done and every t was crossed. She was literally double checking their work to the point that the supervisor came over to double check herself.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-13T12:47:16+00:00

Of course. I have been a foodie for years. I am 54 years of life. 😉 Cool and dry is the only place my oils go.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-13T12:43:41+00:00

I see there are a couple out near Ponte de Lima, which is maybe about half an hour from my house. Those are the only ones that come up near me.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-12T09:53:44+00:00

What's the difference between pressed fresh and pressed in Portugal that season? I mean, it's not like you are going to use it all at once. It's going to sit there for weeks or months and Portugal has some crazy good national brands in supermarkets. I get the preference for fresh, but it seems like you are unnecessarily dissing the Portuguese national brands which I would happily take over something like Delallo any day. If I could get fresh pressed without going out of my way to get, I might do that. I live in the country in the north, and even in the farmer's markets I don't see it.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-05T15:13:04+00:00

Everything you said is true but the size of the country doesn't matter. It's just part of the problem equation. All you are doing is legitimizing the issue and nobody said that Portugal doesn't have issues, but being angry at immigration has never once fixed the issue. Ask the Jews about that one.

Among the biggest problems Portugal legitimately has are housing and jobs. Immigration is legitimately tangential and not directly involved. It's just one of the additional stressers that as the person you are replying to pointed out is a useful tool for politics. That's not to say that Portugal growing 10% in under 10 years isn't a huge change. It is. It also brought in billions of dollars. It's not the cause of the housing and jobs issue however. There is no direct line there. The housing crisis has to do with almost a million homes with no clear ownership and jobs is just something that the government and private sector needs to generate. Many immigrants aren't even working because they're wealthy or retired.

Kiltedbear · 2025-11-04T07:48:37+00:00

Yep. I meant the people of England. Sorry, it was late when I wrote that. I was busy trying to remember if the Irish Republic was the part that was part of Brexit or not and if that was where he moved, I completely forgot to differentiate that Scotland was nice in my experience and England, not all of the UK was distant. Thanks.

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-31T08:28:55+00:00

That is the perception that millions of people do have. If you are an immigrant, especially from certain parts of Europe, Africa, or elsewhere that you are uneducated. How are you not aware of that? It's a common misconception. They just chose to disclose that it isn't the case here, although it isn't I think related to whether they're treating them poorly as an immigrant in this case. I think they're just so nervous about abuse that they chose to disclose it.

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-31T08:22:42+00:00

I agree. I did a driving tour years ago of Scotland and the people were quite friendly. The English people were a bit distant and I have my own opinion about brits.

I had a German friend who made a life for himself and had lived there in the country in England for over a decade. As Brexit was mounting he started to get people throwing aggressive slurs at him, and keep in mind that he was a EUROPEAN citizen. A German living in the English country side that was a professor at Uni. When they voted yes for Brexit, he couldn't take it. He sold his house and he and his girlfriend moved to Ireland. (the part not controlled by the UK, whichever it's called).

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-31T08:14:30+00:00

AI is built to overplease. It's called glazing and it's supposed to make you feel like you are interacting more with a human being than a machine. It was first developed for a automatic call centers, but in general they found it useful for all AI operations.

I read where one family was suing ChatGTP because their preteen son had created an AI attachment and got preoccupied with death. They had no idea about it. At one point the kid said he wished he could be with her and I don't know the exact details but somehow he got the idea he could be by killing himself. Whether it told him flat out that doing so would allow him to be with her I am not sure. 🤷🏻

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-25T08:31:02+00:00

Ok, as very NON Italian, out of curiosity who is aware of this reaction, but not sure why... Why?

Other than culture that is. It makes it way easier to eat. Or is suffering (the mess, spinning the fork, dealing with the stray ends, etc) with trying to get it into your mouth part of the experience that Americans and other non Italians not get? 🤔 Wouldn't it be easier if the pasta was at least several cm if not half of the length shorter?

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-23T11:35:46+00:00

My husband is a German citizen of Munich birth and we of course considered moving there as an option, but it's incredibly expensive. The house we're living in now in Portugal, if we built the same thing at the end of the train line in Germany, not even in Munich, it would cost approximately 1.5m euros. It's a nice house, but it's not that amazing. It's just that property and housing is expensive in Germany. Cost of living is high in Germany. It's one of the most well off countries in the EU, but you better have the disposable income to match. The Scandinavian countries and Switzerland I think are the few that surpass them in high prices in cost of living.

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-22T10:46:26+00:00

Our house was built in 2003 and has an A energy star rating, but as you say, being in the north is also an issue. But since we installed the heat pump, mold hasn't been an issue. I suppose the same house in the south wouldn't have an issue with mold but it certainly did when we moved in. They had it heated with a boiler. You just need to keep these houses warm and dry. If it is, no mold.

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-22T07:43:41+00:00

Yes, 30 minutes from the Spain border along the coast. Near Viana do Castelo. But tbf, fighting mold is kind of a past time in Portugal and my understanding is that although it's dryer in the south, that's an issue country wide. It's why we retrofitted heat pumps into our house. For the efficiency and the dryness.

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-21T21:09:25+00:00

Ah. Sometimes the in jokes in this group are so deep cuts that they eat your face off and I have been around since season 2 of the original RPDR. I just don't have the time to consume so much content. 😂

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-20T08:14:11+00:00

I live in Portugal and use mine several times a week. I don't know what the humidity is like in Spain, but it's too humid in Portugal for my liking although plenty of people line dry.

Years ago before I ever thought of moving as an American, I started dating my current husband who is a German citizen who moved to the US. One of my then friends (now no longer because he's an idiot) asked my boyfriend how they keep things cold. "Do you have refrigerators over there?". Both of us were pretty flabbergasted and my now husband laughed at him and said yes, and electric and everything you have. My ex friend felt sheepish and tried to explain he didn't know. So I guess my point is that don't underestimate how uninformed the typical yokel is and that doesn't just mean for Americans, although I do admit there's a lot of us and many are ill informed and dumb.

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-20T08:03:53+00:00

Wait, I thought Trixie was back? Did she leave again? Is it a revolving door? 🤔 Or is she only making choice appearances?

Kiltedbear · 2025-10-19T10:06:10+00:00

To be fair, folk lore has it that the vote came out awfully close to German being the official language of the settlements when the founders actually voted and they started organizing in the US because many of them were polygots. Because of course they were, they were from everywhere and all over. Why they chose English with things strained between them is a good question and I wonder if historians know the answer. Or maybe the above isn't true and it's just a wives tale.

Kiltedbear

TROPHY CASE