Ehh if you are on a reputable tracker that has scene releases it’s generally downloading a torrent, copying a crack into the game directory or running some crack software, and play. It’s not in the least bit difficult.

Realistically most people don’t care about things like automatic updates enough to justify spending money on it.

Many games are trivially easy to pirate and this has been the case for decades. It’s literally as easy as downloading it from Place B.

People still buy the games.

Their heritage line are descended from classic men’s work boots, intended for iron workers, miners, that sort of thing. You know what you like, but they’re stereotypically masculine workwear style boots.

Unfortunately, quality boots that last a long time tend to be handmade and therefore quite expensive. The bummer is that some brands have gotten really good at making boots that look high end but aren’t.

The YouTube channel Rose Anvil cuts boots apart to look at build quality and construction. They do some solovair boots. If that’s something you are interested in I highly recommend you check it out.

I’d argue that “the last word” is the rOtring 600

Pentel makes great stuff though

In the case of bikes, it’s luckily mostly true that you get what you pay for and that bikes in bike stores tend to be reasonable quality. They aren’t all great but at the minimum they’ll generally accept readily available replacement parts and not fall apart right away. The nicer bikes will last many decades.

The thing about bikes is that running a bike store is a very low margin business that barely pays the bills. Most bike shops are purely in the business for the passion of it. They love bikes, they love sharing the hobby, and they hate seeing people turned off of cycling because their department store bike stripped out the crankset two weeks after purchase. They also don’t make much money on bike sales; they mostly rely on servicing and parts/accessories to keep the lights on. This means customer relationships tend to be important to them.

If you have a good bike shop like this near you, you can have a frank conversation with the people at the shop about your needs and they will steer you towards something decent.

The problem with modern bikes is that it’s a minefield.

I don’t disagree with you. Low quality bike manufacturers have gotten very good at making their bikes appear high quality to uninitiated while being cheaply constructed.

Unfortunately I think this holds true for a lot of things these days. Back to the analogy of boots, high quality footwear is undergoing a renaissance right now where resoleable long lasting shoes are more available and more affordable than they have been in decades. However, that comes with the undercurrent that some brands have sold out on construction quality to make a quick buck because they know how to keep the “indicators of quality” on the outside while using cheap materials on the interior construction of the boot.

Luckily there is a great, passionate, community for bikes that will happily help people find quality products. I just don’t want to discount the work of the engineers, the bike shop owners and the manufacturers of quality bikes. There are an insane number of really incredible modern bikes that blow anything from the 60s or 70s out of the water in nearly every way.

If you look at my post, I qualified this with “if you buy a good one”.

Mongoose bikes are literal cheap throwaway trash bikes. This is exactly why people with knowledge about bikes try to steer people towards good quality stuff from bike shops. Cheap department store grade bikes are built to a price for people who rarely ride them. They fall apart under normal use and are not intended to be repairable.

Good quality bikes are very much long lasting, durable, and repairable goods. This is kind of like buying cheap fake leather boots off of alibaba and bemoaning that they aren’t as reliable as the handmade leather boots of your childhood. Of course they’re not! You chose not to buy good boots.

Steel frames have become less common, in favor of aluminum and other metals that are more energy intensive, and carbon fiber which significantly degrades over time.

I’d like to address this directly. Perhaps aluminum is more energy intensive but this seems like an odd thing to focus on considering the long lifespan of bikes, relatively small amount of metal used, and how much better cycling is for the environment than cars in general.

On the properties of the materials, steel is still readily available for those who want it. However, carbon and aluminum are better in most regards than heritage style lugged/brazed steel frames. They’re:

• Lighter. CF is the lightest, obviously, but even AL will be about 25% lighter for a given quality level than steel.
• Better in terms of lateral vs vertical compliance, combining great pedaling efficiency with good compliance over bumps. Steel frames are known for their unique ride, but high end hydroformed aluminum frames use complex shapes and butting schemes to get more control over the structural properties. The result is that you make less compromises in terms of pedaling stiffness and ride quality. CF takes this a step further because the fiber orientations can be manipulated to tune material properties.
• In many cases more durable. Nice steel frame bikes have very thin walled tubing. Thin walled steel tubing is damaged much more easily than similar quality AL or CF. The idea that CF “degrades over time” is a carryover from before manufacturers knew how to make long lasting CF frames. CF as a material can theoretically withstand unlimited stress cycles, and modern CF bike frames have effectively unlimited lifespans short of crash damage.

Bicycles in general are not flimsy products with short lifespans if you buy a good one. A modern, run of the mill, road bike with mechanical groupset will likely last many decades and tens of thousands of miles if well maintained and looked after.

It’s honestly weird to me that we are talking about 1960s bikes in a good way here. Bikes now are just so tremendously better than anything you could have gotten in the 60s.