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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

Reading the comments here, let’s take a moment to mourn another technology that so called HN hackers want to see regulated en masse by their big daddy government.

Like drones, 3D printing, and now the simple pleasure of building your own e-bike. It seems like a certain demographic of NIMBY/Karen has taken over and is hell bent against makers and anything remotely cool, DIY, that could even be slightly more dangerous than a game of Pickleball.

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Every time a cool thing becomes popular I only envy the early adopters who didn't have to worry about regulation too much, and build their companies or brands when the rules were still light. Then with the resources they get, they can spend some of them on adhering to the new requirements, which newcomers have to struggle with. Oh well.

Gotta keep on the edge if you want to enjoy things or be successful.

Like it or not, if people who aren't big brained HN genius hackers like yourself do reckless things with powerful technology, like a stupid teenager killing someone's baby by running them over with an e-bike at max speed on a sidewalk around a sharp corner, then broader society will hate that technology, and then that woke freedom you crave will get wiped out by those small brained normies. The point is that it is better to set some rules ahead of garnering that hatred, so that the whole practice doesn't get wiped out by the 95% of the public who are those aforementioned idiots (at least as you see them).

But as a morally righteous big brained HN edgelord, feel free to live your anarchist life on a seastead in the middle of the ocean running drones into icebergs and enjoying the whiz of throttling your exquisitely powerful ebike on the deck of your boat if you please.

> like a stupid teenager killing someone's baby by running them over with an e-bike at max speed on a sidewalk around a sharp corner,

Replace e-bike with bike or tricycle and you still have a smushed baby.

Not if the bike goes significantly slower than the e-bike. Which is the whole point.

Idk, I think baby becomes pancake no matter the speed. With my naive understanding of the physics involved, the weight of the teenager and their bike compared to the relatively tiny baby is going to be the deciding factor here.

This doesn't seem to actually be the case. A stupid teenager ran over a baby by driving onto the sidewalk and killing the child there and broader society does not actually hate cars. In fact, last night another stupid person killed a two-year old by my home. The eye-witness accounts are unholy things (you can go find them on /r/sanfrancisco but I honestly am trying to purge it from my mind). It is not actually the case that the "woke freedom is wiped out by small-brained normies" in my experience.

They won’t change their tune unless they are directly affected by China eating their lunch.

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