20.6, Playing with numbers

Last night after work I was again out on my MSuper without my GoPro.  Instead of driving to the school I rode there, the higher top end speed of the new wheel made getting there significantly quicker.  I decided to fire up Strava, an app that is normally used to track running or cycling sessions, to track my ride.  It gives you mapping, time and speed tracking very easily.

While I was at the school I practiced my wheel mounting technique.  Despite now logging almost 300 miles on a single wheel my mounting technique has not improved with distance, I was still hopping my grounded foot on the wheel in a somewhat frantic manner.

When you watch experienced EUC riders they can push off with one foot and then bring the other on board in a smooth and controlled manner.  Well thanks to some encouragement from a fellow rider I decided to try to polish my technique.  Practicing the mount involved taking single steps with one foot on the EUC and the other off where you get a feel for how to hit that balance point.  Like most things, it took me longer than it should to translate the instructions to implementation.  I’m not great at reading something and then executing, I operate a lot on feel and little else.  Once something clicks and feels right I am good to go.  Reaching that point can take awhile for me.

So anyway after a couple dozen practice steps it finally started to feel right.  The key for me was allowing the knee on my left leg which is on the EUC first to bend inward slightly, wedging my leg firmly against the bot, allowing me a stable platform to roll for a second while I bring the other foot onboard.  It’s hard to explain so I will try to demonstrate on video over the weekend.

During the long straight away parts of my ride I could tell I was going considerably faster than I would have been able to on my Ninebot One.  I was surprised just how fast I got up to, touching 20.6 mph according to Strava at one point.  That is road bike speed with a solid tailwind for me.  It won’t be long until I try to do the famous DD ride on one wheel.  The Msuper has the battery power to actually pull it off.

So I have kept the amount of political talk in the blog relatively light, despite this being the most disgusting election of my adult life.  Outside of discussing the eventual result, I plan to try to keep it that way, however….   I wanted to take a moment to just illustrate the type of deception that goes on when portraying scenarios with fuzzy numbers.

One of the things you will hear HRC bashers say is she will continue Obama’s policies that increased the national debt more than any other president in history.  That’s a pretty strong statement that will surely sway the light thinkers.  After all, debt is bad.  So before we dig into that statement you could factor in that when Obama took office the country was in fiscal freefall, the sky was literally falling.  The federal government spent mountains of cash bailing out financial institutions and offering stimulus packages like cash for clunkers, rebates for energy efficiency upgrades, and tax cuts.  Say what you will about agreeing or disagreeing with some or all of those actions, the end result was the nose of the country was unquestionably pulled up from it’s trajectory into the ground.  Of course we still had the uncapped wellhead of money being burned up supporting the Iraq conflict that was created via phantom information by the Bush administration as well. So yea, doing all that cost money, a whole bunch of it.

So when you turn your attention to dollars the numbers look big.  Under Obama’s administration the national debt grew 56% in the first 7 years, adding roughly 6.5 trillion to the national debt.  Growing the debt 56% sounds terrible doesn’t it?  But wait a second, let’s put other presidents to the same scale.  If you flip back only one chapter to the W nightmare years the national debt over his term grew 101%, yes almost double the rate of what has transpired under Obama.

When you look through history the light bulb really comes on.  Ronald Reagan who is still seen by many as a star and the inventor of trickle down economics that has been an absolute disaster for the middle class for the last three decades plus, grew the national debt 186% during his reign. Yes, that is correct, 186%.  So hopefully this information if nothing else gives you some pause to blindly accepting information vomited at you by the people best served by you believing it.

If you would like to open your eyes a little bit, take a look at the debt numbers by president here.  Yep Obama as president has hit a bunch of potholes but he absolutely has done an admirable job of turning what was a very dire situation into merely a bad one.

This weekend there will surely be a lot of EUC riding going on, the weather is supposed to be quite nice.  I would like to catch Dr Strange, run, and do whatever else sounds good at the time, after chores are done of course.