Buildings like that one (way over the top) have traditionally been built by slaves and/or built with profits from colonisation, invasion etc
You get similar styles in communist countries when the building exists to serve the public. The USSR would often include a requirement for a portion of the budget go to local artists, so you ended up with no less ornamentation.
Well yeah, that particular one is the French Royal library, obviously built to be a monument to French superiority, but in general, the working class building a library for itself isn't exploitative.
I get the sense that you are making your choices based on how intimidating the aesthetics are rather than the actual way they ride.
There's a reason we moved away from that design a century ago. The suspension, wide tires, frame geometry, etc on a modern bike or scooter all make it easier to control.
A small-wheel scooter with a low rake angle sacrifices stability for convenience and compactness.
Stability in this case means how much the thing wants to stay up while under power, a scooter might lean over and start trying to turn if you just reach up to adjust your glasses with 1 hand without being careful to keep the it going straight. The benefit of low stability is that you can lean the scooter over with less effort and stand it back up quicker when you want to go around turns.
Maybe ask friends if you can just try out their bikes before you make any decisions.
brand new $19,000 VW in 2009
Passat? My dad made the same mistake. German engineering lmao.
Meanwhile the 2006 toyota I inherited from him still runs fine, though the paint and the plastics are sad.
When I was in Almaty, Kazakhstan, they had disused trolly rails laid in the median during the USSR. And right next to them, chinese trolly buses with 2 pantagraphs.
Presumably this tells us its cheaper or faster or more politically feasible to steal the parking lane and build 2 pantagraphs on either side of the road and use rubber-tired, electric-overhead buses than to refurbish existing track in unused RoW and build 1 pantagraph.
Buddha never had someone order durian pizza for the group.
Modern machines produce a human-readable paper ballot, and we can do exit polling to check for statistical anomalies, us election integrity probably isn't attacked at the voting machine level.
At least since the 2000s or so.
France has its own empire, not every extension of capitalism is an extension of the US.
You make a bunch of friends, drift away and check back in 5 years later and find out half of them are women now.
"Why is he walking around yelling my name? Well in any case he seems to be enjoying himself, I shouldn't interrupt"
Nice so you don't have to floor it to make a yellow or Kickstart your air-cooled motorcycle when a long red turns green.
The timing is off by 3 seconds to stop people from going just before it turns green. So people go 4 seconds early.
Saw this earlier today, talked to the owner, apparently it can't be on the street because it expired before they fixed the law. The new law merely requires yearly inspections after 13 years, but didn't grandfather in all the old bikes.
It does explain why I've seen so many public motorcycle exhibits; if you can't bear to export it, at least you can display them.
Durian pizza is quite popular in China, people buy it unironically.
I also tried Durian coffee. I could still taste it 4 hours later.