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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

When you can't get gas for your car, it's a large, heavy, utterly useless pile of metal.

When you can't get electricity for your e-bike, it's a large, heavy, but still functional bicycle.

If you build your society around automobiles as a form of transportation, you become critically dependent on enormous supply chains beyond your control. Collapse those supply chains, and modern America would be uninhabitable without the automobile.

If you build your society around e-bikes as a form of transportation, you'll be... Mildly inconvenienced if those supply chains break down.

One of the factors that many Amish groups use when deciding to adopt novel technology is determining how reliant that would make them on the outside world. Automobiles generally have a very hard time passing this test. Bicycles, and electric bicycles have a much easier time.

I've also never heard of having no choice but buying into a predatory 20% APR loan to buy a bicycle.

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> When you can't get electricity for your e-bike, it's a large, heavy, but still functional bicycle.

For some definition of functional.

I really do not enjoy using my electric bicycle without electric assistance. Something about the electric engine makes it really heavy to use without that assistance.

I’d much rather have a bike that didn’t use electricity in the first place.

Mine works fine? It feels like a heavy bike, which it is, of course, but it's still very much an adequate bike.

Given that ebikes are more efficient than bikes, and bikes are more efficient than walking/cars/trains, the ebike seems like a fantastic piece of kit.

(Plus, the added benefits of cardiovascular exercise, which it has been shown is still present in ebikes.)

Same, but the fail-state of a car of plane is a block of steel with an indoors, markedly less useful than a heavy-but-functioning bike.

> If you build your society around automobiles as a form of transportation, you become critically dependent on enormous supply chains beyond your control.

Sufficient but not necessary. You can build enormous supply chains on ships and trains just fine

Ignoring of course the very many ways they are reliant on the outside world for their lifestyle to be possible.

No man, or village is an island. That doesn't mean that you should blindly enslave yourself to reliance on things beyond your control, when you can help it.

You tell me, how well has, say, reliance on foreign fossil fuels worked out for Germany last year? What if the winter were a few degrees colder? Or in the US, during the oil shocks? How well is Russia's reliance on trade with the rest of the world, and the decline of its industrial base working out for it?

Is there a community free from someone’s claim of contradiction and inconsistency? Is there a point to this kind of snark?

If you have concerns about the Amish community, tradition, or lifestyle, I’m sure they’re more interesting than the philosophical gotcha games that one could target at anyone.

I am not trying to be snarky or play gotcha games. I am pointing out that the Amish lifestyle is an artifact of American society and would not be possible in many other parts of the world. They are playing life in such an easy mode that they decided to have self-imposed restrictions. The electric grid is one of humanities greatest achievement, one that many places unfortunately still can not afford to build.

And more generally I am criticizing the fetishization of self-reliance in its many forms (preppers, bunker builders, gun ownership, etc.) that is so popular with some people. It is a fundamentally nearsighted privilege by selectively ignoring other forms of reliance. Self reliance is not an attitude of resilience, it is one of isolation, selfishness and ruthless competition.

It is precisely the goals for which people came together in cooperation that are humanities greatest achievements. Cooperation and interdependence are higher moral virtues.

> When you can't get electricity for your e-bike, it's a large, heavy, but still functional bicycle.

Not mine. It has pedals but they are not enough to actually make it move, except downhill. It has a fixed gear ratio.

And there are plenty of e-bikes with no pedals at all.

> I've also never heard of having no choice but buying into a predatory 20% APR loan to buy a bicycle.

You are not required to do that with a car either.

> Collapse those supply chains, and modern America would be uninhabitable without the automobile.

The automobile is the least of your issue. There would be no food or water either.

> And there are plenty of e-bikes with no pedals at all.

That's a moped, not an ebike.

I agree with your points about car loans and supply chains, though.

Mopeds have pedals, hence the ped part of moped. Scooters do not have pedals.

Perhaps it's region dependent, but mopeds in the US typically don't have pedals.

This source is from the UK but applies similarly

https://www.thebikeinsurer.co.uk/learner-guides/scooter-vs-m...

This isn’t true in practice for any country that uses English as a first language, where moped simply means an underpowered scooter.

Hmm for some reason I always thought it was a shortening of "motorised pedestrian" haha.

On the other hand, I have seen models with holes next to the transmission that can accept a pair of removable pedals stowed under the seat. Completely worthless for locomotion, but sufficient to be classified as a bicycle for legal reasons.

in plenty of jurisdictions, you could not call it an e-bike without it being electric assist rather than primarily electric.

It doesn't sound like you have an e-bike, and an e-bike definitionally then has pedals

E-bikes have pedals. If it does not have pedals, it's a different type of vehicle.

I am finding the number of people definitively defining terms with exceptionally high regional variance on this thread to be a little disturbing. Bike, scooter, e-scooter, moped, e-bike all mean different things in different contexts, different places, and different regions.

In the US, at least, there are generally 3 classes of ebikes, and they definitionally have pedals. Some (class 2/3) bikes might also have throttles.

Globally, ebikes are generally broken into two classifications based on whether they are pedal assisted or throttled, with some additional classifications for high speed throttled ebikes.

There do exist low power, throttle only ebikes but they are comparatively rare, and typically classified as a electric motorbike or electric motorcycles depending on jurisdiction. Ontario, for instance, classifies these as "Nopeds". (haha).

In general, broadly, an ebike has pedals and either pedal assistance or a throttle (or both) and can be ridden without the motor. Regional language of course exists, much like how parts of the US call all soda "coke", even sodas like Mountain Dew. They aren't wrong, per se, because regionally they are understood, but they are hardly standard.

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