Women will buy from women in a bike shop but not from men in most cases. Likewise, the demographic of male cyclists that shop in brick and mortar retail stores, is very partial to female staff. Therefore, by the back office numbers, a girl is statistically far more valuable for shop staff in almost every circumstance regardless of personality, intelligence, or skill. I would like to say otherwise, but the numbers in the shops with ~60 employees across 3 stores and years pointed otherwise. The thing that really sucks is how women’s retail stuff for cycling is always a loss or breaks even at best. The lack of volume leads to major issues with overburden inventory over time. Overburden is why most nice shops fail within a decade or are a hobby business with someone willing to inject considerable funds in the $100k-$300k range to bail out the shop about once a decade. Every time a wrong part is ordered or a poorly planned size run of clothing sells lopsided, or some niche lineup of bikes is suddenly unpopular, it chips away at cash flow and eventually strangles the business slowly from the back office causing a default on a major distributor’s credit account. This causes all the mainline distributors to pull the shop’s credit for cash only access. Next preseason order cycle, the margins will be garbage and no popular products are accessible. No shop will last more than 2 years like this.

So like, I hired any female cyclist at a much higher starting wage. I was the Buyer and back office manager for the chain. From my perspective, I viewed women on staff like a life vest and triage. My job was to keep the thing alive for as long as possible without losing access to credit. Women were an opportunity to triage a large open wound where my alternative is to give up entirely on 5%-15% of the entire market.

Maybe that is an interesting counter perspective. I only cared about the unbiased numbers. In most instances I rarely interacted with these people. And at work, I have a strict policy of ‘never shitting in my own back yard.’

The sad thing is how close we are to getting into a space civilization and so much more but how we can’t get our shit together long enough or priorities straight. One m-type astroid accessed in low Earth orbit – there are several already there – has more mineral wealth than all that humans have ever accessed in the Holocene on the surface of this gravity prison with its differentiated gravitationally sequestered artificial resource scarcity that hoards all the good stuff in the core. All we have are the scraps that have landed on the surface after it solidified and got mixed around. The m is for metal. Those are remnants of differentiated, read - concentrated, cores of planetesimals. That kind of wealth makes resource scarcity obsolete and creates both wealth and infrastructure resources to get into space colonies. Space colonies cannot have waste systems. Their primary constraint is heat radiated into space. The wealth to fund and create such a sustainable environment fixes much of what we fail at now. It moves populations into space too. We’ve known about how to build the stations since Dr. O’Neill did the studies in the 1970s about only using established materials science and engineering to create the O’Neill cylinders at up to 9 kilometers in diameter and 30 kilometers long with just steel and concrete. The wonder of such innovation would accelerate our passage into the next age of technology – biology. One day the masters of biology will look back and pity us in our primitive stone age of silicon. The foundations of that world are stones of the future orbiting around us now.

That is what I see when I look up. I see the twinkling reflections of cislunar stations much brighter than the background stars, a place where most humans live a few centuries from now. It is a remarkable place after the end of the age of scientific discovery at the beginning of the engineered expansion, but still centuries from my Parsec 7 that I call home.

All distortion is just how badly messed up you want the sound. You can build the circuits. I’ve made several in the past. Germanium diodes create more tube like gradual clipping. LEDs and silicon diodes are fairly similar. The rest is pretty simple. A jfet buffer on the initial stage will help pick up more initial tone. The rest is just a couple of op amps for buffering and frequency filtering.

The easiest way to mess with the stuff is actually to get an old home theater powered sub and reverse engineer the active filter. Adding effects in place of the frequency filter is a great way to learn. Any sub is basically a guitar amp. There is no real difference in practice. In fact, the amplifier circuit and power is usually better than entry level guitar junk. Like I have a fender amp someone tossed that has a single TDA2030 chip on a 12 inch driver. That is a joke $0.80 chip. I have a cheesy junk RCA 5.1 channel computer surround sound system someone junked that is made of 6 of these TDA2030 chips, and that was junky as fuck. I’ve seen crap home theater sub amps with much much higher end chips.