j_choate69 wrote:
I fought my kindergarten teacher for weeks about learning to tie shoes. I told her "There is no point to this, I have Velcro, duh." She didn't get it and eventually I gave in an learned. The things the NTs hold so important baffle me. Like why do people take the training wheels off of bikes. They aren't hurting anything.
They make bikes go slower due to more rotational mass and actually less manueverable. With training wheels, you cannot shift your weight in a turn (or on a straight for that matter), so for emergency/evasive movement, it'd be slower. The engineering technical reason, I believe, by leaning into a turn, you're giving the wheel more camber, and more contact patch with the ground, basically, it has somewhat of the effect a car suspension would have, allow the wheels to change toe/camber/caster within limits on the road, to better respond. If cars had no suspension, it'd be more like driving a shopping cart, and having training wheels on a bike is just 2 shopping cart wheels in back, yes, good for initial training, or if you're old, disabled, etc, but bad for actually being serious about cycling in any fashion at all.
But I digress.
Anyway, I didn't learn to tie shoes until I think 3rd grade. I felt like a huge idiot because of it. Now I only wear shoes with laces, and don't like velcro shoes at all. They make me feel bad, maybe because of insults I got from others about them. But also, they seem too loose, they do not have a tight responsive feel I like, and I can't adjust everything just right. On my own shoes I do different lacing patterns like straight lacing, over under, etc, depending on the feel. Shoelaces are needed, too. They're practical, they're always always more secure than velcro, which is needed on something like combat boots or something. Especially ice skates, ice skates need shoe laces, and you need to actually lace them up by pulling on each "X" of laces to tighten them, and that can almost make or break your skating, lacing alone. Besides, the shoe tying knot is a good idea to learn anyway, you can tie anything with that knot and then untie it later, nothing bad about that. I understand some things are hard, and I myself know, I was a little late riding a bike, lot late tying shoes, etc, but you must learn things to adapt and overcome, you can't shun knowledge just because it's hard.
But for the main point of this thread, no, I hate velcro, am sorta kinda OK with slip ons, but I like the security of laces and the adjustability and simplicity of them. Oh, and the sound of velcro is really annoying, not like "I'm gonna flip out annoying" but if I'm running on like 3 hours sleep or something, yeah, it could be something that could make me flip out. I don't really like it.