Wow, it’s 2024.

Welcome to the longer term!

In the event you had requested me once I was 16 yr previous what 2024 could be like, I’d have stated we’ll be residing in some form of Orwellian dystopia during which reality now not exists, omnipresent screens fill us with concern with a purpose to management our ideas and actions, and freedom is a grimy phrase. However thank Lob that’s not how issues have turned out:

Mockingly, it seems all of the bands I listened to again then bought it precisely proper, solely whereas they have been pointing and yelling in a single route all of the dystopian stuff really got here from the opposite route they usually by no means even noticed it coming:

Humorous how that works.

Nonetheless, I be ok with 2024 in the identical approach I do a few actually large sandwich: certain, typically chances are you’ll assume you’ll by no means end it, and it might even lower up the roof of your mouth a little bit bit, however in the end it’s going to be tremendously satisfying, and it goes very well with coleslaw, pickles, and potato chips.

And even in case you don’t purchase into New 12 months’s resolutions and all that crap there’s a particular significance to the bicycle you select in your New 12 months’s Day experience. It’s a image of your hopes, and your beliefs, and your expectations for the yr forward. This was the bike I selected:

I wish to assume it means I’m embracing each simplicity and the truth that I’m getting older, however it in all probability simply means I’m changing into extra obstinate and contrarian because the years go by, and by New 12 months’s Day 2040 I strongly suspect I’ll be using a pennyfarthing:

Other than the precise bicycle and perhaps the crotchal bulge, if that rider have been to indicate up on the 2024 Nutmeg Nor’easter there may be nothing about him that anyone would discover exceptional in any approach.

However whereas general I’m optimistic about 2024, I’m not so certain that e-bikes are a brilliant spot:

Alas, what have we completed to the poor bicycle? It’s a machine so astoundingly environment friendly that it even gave Steve Jobs a boner:

Whereas all of the little refinements over the previous century or so have been good it actually wanted little to nothing in the best way of precise enchancment. Nonetheless, with a purpose to make bicycles barely simpler to experience we’re now strapping costly, simply stolen, and probably flammable batteries to them, which is good in a dense city surroundings like New York Metropolis:

Little question some e-bikes are higher than others, however these Rad Energy ones certain appear particularly incredible. Sure, not solely can you utilize a clean key to take away the battery from them:

However apparently you need to use absolutely anything:

And the extra I examine them from glad house owners, the higher they sound:

After all, in case you’re going to place a battery and a motor in your bike, you may as nicely put a automobile horn on there too: