Rick Vosper

My current piece for Bicycle Retailer is all about authenticity, and why the cycling industry could use a whole lot more of it.

Read the whole thing here:

www.bicycleretailer.com/opinion-anal...

List of dates predicted for apocalyptic events - Wikipedia

Speaking of The Rapture, Wikipedia lists almost 200 predictions about the end of the world. To date, about 165 of them never happened. The rest are for dates yet to come. Me, I'm betting on the heat-death of the universe.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

DISNEY: "OK, we are putting Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. You can resubscribe now."

ME: "I unsubscribed because you immorally bowed to fascism. I'm not going to resubscribe because you immorally bowed to finances."

"Taiwan has been the top overseas supplier of screws to the US for more than three decades, but steel and aluminum tariffs are now forcing some factories to close." —The New York Times

Sometimes the punchlines just write themselves.

Things I think About (That No One Else Ever Would):

Why isn’t "anagram" an anagram? If it was, it would be an "anagramargana", which, in addition to sounding a whole lot cooler, would be far more appropriate.

Vosper: Another Fine Mess, Part Three As the industry continues its business-as-usual post-COVID death spiral, there is still an opportunity to put a stop to it.

Part Three of my three-part series for Bicycle Retailer on oversupply on the bicycle industry is up. In it, I tie together some of the ideas from the first two installments and suggest some changes for how we might move forward as an industry.

www.bicycleretailer.com/opinion-anal...

Image caring more about stopping a memorial for people killed in a mass shooting than stopping mass shootings. #Priorities

Thank you Mrs. Bowers. You nailed it again.

Just a word to the wise: the autumn equinox isn't until September 22nd, which means it's still summer for almost four weeks yet.

This whole summer-ends-at-Labor-Day business is just a plot hatched by the nefarious international Pumpkin Spice Cartel. Don't fall for this scam!

Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action Advocates fear such settlements will “financially ruin” the AI industry.

Score one for the Good Guys. AI maker Anthropic caves following its blatantly illegal use of copyrighted material from authors to train the company's LLMs.
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

This poster is currently up in Washington DC. We'll see how long it stays up. Because They hate it when we laugh at Them, no humor will be permitted in the coming shining city (or cities) upon a hill.

Please govern yourselves accordingly.

So now Trump has claimed 10% of Intel's revenues. As Molly Ivins put it, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." She attributes this quote to Benito Mussolini, although it's never been confirmed.

Of course not. But the shot was too cheap not to take.

Air Canada is stalling negotiations since they realize their traffic will be curtailed in any case because so few Canadians want to go to the US anymore.

"For grifters who prey on angry, bitter rubes, stealing from the rubes only makes them angrier and more bitter—and thus easier to fleece."
—Cory Doctorow, Conservatism Considered as a Movement of Bitter Rubes, 22-July-2025

Any relevance of the above quote is left as an exercise for the reader.

Vosper: Another fine mess, part two What happened at SRAM and Shimano in the oversupply debacle, plus the root causes that brought us to the current impasse

My latest Bicycle Retailer piece is "Another Fine Mess We've Gotten Ourselves Into, Part Two."

www.bicycleretailer.com/opinion-anal...

From this morning's Morning Brew newsletter:

A Wall Street Journal reporter attended the wedding of two friends who were married by the Hellman’s Mayonnaise mascot, Manny Mayo. There’s nothing as beautiful as seeing two people bonded in aioli matrimony.

An Occasion Worth Celebrating.

51 years ago today, Richard Nixon resigned. As a young man, I remember feeling an enormous sense of relief, triumph, and personal validation.

Score one for the Good Guys.

Thought for the Day:
“What does the AI machine eat?
It eats youth, spontaneity, life beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity.
It eats quality and shits quantity.”
—Paraphrased from the Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (Burroughs originally said "money")

Microsoft adding its Copilot AI to Word and Excel is exactly like bringing back Clippy. Only not as cute.

Do better.

"Based on the information provided in the Snopes Archives, there is no mention of any professor at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) claiming Donald Trump was the dumbest student ever." —snopes.com

Lest we forget.

I note that Joey Chestnut has once again won the Fourth of July Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest.

If there's a more All-American sport than Competitive Binge Eating, I'd surely like to know what it is.

Image: NYT

Decisions, decisions.

By literal definition, the majority of people have average or below average intelligence.

47 wants to host a UFC Cage Match on the White House lawn.

My Modest Proposal: use members of his own cabinet. Winner sleeps in the Lincoln Bedroom plus a lifetime supply of Trump-branded merch. Loser gets a warrantless abduction by masked ICE "agents" and a 1-way ticket to Alligator Alcatraz.

Vosper: Another fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into, part one Some more thoughts concerning our never-ending oversupply crisis

My latest piece for Bicycle Retailer is the first installation in a multipart series (3, as of now) exploring how the industry got itself into the current oversupply imbroglio, where the responsibility lies, and what we might do to prevent its recurrence.

Get the full story at the link.

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
—Dorothy Parker, of course

Thought For The Day:
"Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth."
Lucy Parsons, African-American Labor Organizer
(c. 1853-1942)

I don't have any insider knowledge, but I can tell you that for literal decades, Netanyahu has been been telling US Presidents that Iran was "weeks away" from having nuclear weapons. Boy, meet wolf.