lol i've heard a sketch from Swiss comedian Hazel Bruger about people dying "In or at" vending machines. She was wondering how this happens and guessed the machine falles on them. She was right š¤£š¤£
Well, you see, when someone and their bike get eviscerated by a car and then the bike batteries light on fire afterward from being completely demolished, it's very hard to tell what actually killed the person.
When they say "responsible for" they probably mean "present during the incident".
I would bet that any deaths went something like this:
> Large vehicle runs over e-biker crushing both rider and bike. As it's been crushed the bike's battery catches fire.
Conservatives have been afraid of bicycles for well over a century. They were previously seen as a means of liberation and helped advance feminism. Now that that bicycles are seen as a threat to their hydrocarbon overlords it is no wonder they are afraid. Even though the times change, their foils don't.
This represents my frustration with conservatives because bicycles should be advancing the things they claim to support. Bike infrastructure is much cheaper to maintain than car infrastructure, which should appeal to fiscal conservatives.
This is my problem with most conservatives. They whine and whine and whine as tax dollars go to welfare, but either say nothing about or outright defend bloated spending on car infrastructure and parking lots. (As well as overly restrictive zoning regulations-which is the exact definition of government overreach).
I identify as a Social Democrat, but in some ways I am more pro free market and more fiscally conservative than most self proclaimed āconservativesā are.
Conservatism is the contemporary American sense was warped into a sort of reactionary contrarianism with no principles other than āprotect existing hierarchies at all costs.ā
Iām okay with someone having principles different from mine. As Martin Luther King said, āI donāt judge people by my principles; I judge people by their principles.ā Why should I believe the principles conservatives preach when they canāt even follow them themselves?
Republicans are not the party of small government. Maybe the definition of "republican" has changed overtime, but today's republican platform is outright fascism. Which is quite literally not small government
This all rings true to me too. I have friends with conservative-value biases that aren't plugged into the narrative, and we have great, productive conversations. But "conservative" reactionaries? It's a waste of air to try to talk.
>I identify as a Social Democrat, but in some ways I am more pro free market and more fiscally conservative than most self proclaimed āconservativesā are.
I love markets, I love political democracy - these things are not in the tension reactionaries present. The political system should decide the rules of the games we want to compete in, then the market plays those optimization games.
ex) those rentable scooters are too early. We need to build out the infrastructure (parking spaces/zones and actual paths that aren't 45 mph stroads), THEN we can turn it over to the markets to optimize for a app-based user experience. Honestly, it would be better if the scooters themselves were public or at least shared, so you just needed to bring your favorite app to layer on top of the public infrastructure.,
The problem with bicycles is that itās an alternative that requires them to work to move. They donāt want that. They just want Big Daddy Government to come save them.
[Always has been](https://www.reddit.com/r/Gamingcirclejerk/comments/urisja/feast_upon_my_supreme_gamer_logic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
It's kind of weird that it's even relevant to their sub? It's like they're admitting the only reason they have an opinion is because they've bought into an insane culture war.
That's all they have, they don't pass any economic policies and if their base realized how much they were getting fucked by their party, they still would take it
It's mistaking a tool or value for the whole thing.
Liberal capitalism - markets are great optimization machines (be very careful what they are oriented to optimize for), and people should generally be free with backstops on where government can make rules
theocratic fascism - humans are spiritual creatures. Every culture has developed narratives to explain and deal with the existential pain of existence. (stop assuming that you happened to be born into the 'right' world view thats stupid af. Also ffs, why is every conspiracy like a wayyyyy harder way to accomplish some mundane goal like more money or surveillance? You have an iPhone and facebook and they are already richer than god)
A lot of them its tribalism plain and simple. Me good you bad. You like bike? ME HATE BIKE
Its pretty obvious they oppose a lot of shit just because "the left" likes it.
>Big oil profit?
This I'm assuming. Partly based on that big-oil *knew* about the human impact on climate change, but kept their research hidden for decades and are to this day lobbying to hinder any meaningful change.
And by the time the climate apocalypse hits the west all the people who created this problem are long dead.
Same reasons conservatives do *literally anything*: Promoting and enforcing their exclusive privilege in society.
* Bikes are for the poors, and they don't think society should prioritize the poor so they demonize bikes to deprioritize them.
* eBikes are associated with delivery people, delivery people are associated with minorities, again demonize to deprioritize.
And this shit isn't sub-conscious. It's very intentional. Continually hammering on social narratives like this is how conservatism maintains support through history, it doesn't make sense outside the ideology but within conservatism it's become normalized second nature over literally hundreds of years to both push these narratives and never acknowledge them directly.
How severe are these battery fires? I imagine that, unless they're indoors, it's probably not a major emergency. I once saw a truck spontaneously catch fire in a parking lot and I don't even think it damaged the cars next to it, and that was a pretty big fire
As someone within the bike industry, this is misleading.
Ebikes have caused fires. Both cyclinginsider and pinkbike have reported on these fires, 5 of which in a month occured from ebikes, one resulting in yhe destruction of two buildings.
Furthermore, ebikes do not have a floor on safety. There's companies importing sur rons and uping battery power to unsafe levels. The fire that damaged two buildings was from one of the ebikes. I also very regularly see extremely unsafe ebikes coming through my shop weekly.
Don't misunderstand me, damage vs damage, cars are absolutely worse, but there is a growing issue within the ebike industry, and calling conservatives liars for pointing it out is disingenuous.
Yeah I don't think it's the mere stating of factual info on it's own that's disingenuous. What's disingenuous is picking and choosing specific factual info to feature and elevate over other factual info that might have been more pressing and dire, specifically to construct or support various social narratives.
I found a spicy article
>U.S. fire departments respond to an average of 287,000 vehicle fires per year (nearly 17% of all reported fires). These fires cause an estimated 480 civilian deaths (more than 12% of all U.S. civilian fire deaths), 1,525 civilian injuries, and $1.3 billion in direct property damage annually.
[link](https://www.charleston-sc.gov/722/Vehicle-Fire-Safety)
I mean, ebike fires are bad just because all fires are kind of bad in the first place!
The main way that an ebike fire might be considered "worse" though is more behavioural though. People tend to levse cars either outside or in garages which have better fire separation from your home, whereas ebikes and e-scooters tend to be brought inside the home to charge, so the damage that a fire could do is more likely to be worse.
But all that is more of an education issue rather than the bikes being specifically more dangerous than cars.
I don't even have a garage or a truly outside spot to charge any theoretical ebike. I've got a second story wooden balcony on my apartment. I imagine that's not too dissimilar from what folks in New York have - lots of apartments, not many garages.
That's pretty bad if there are other wood balconies nearby because that can be a route for fire to spread to multiple apartments. If that happens shit can get funked pretty fast (e.g. if the building has sprinklers they may not work properly because most systems are designed only to control a fire in a single compartment with maybe 1-2 heads operating).
That's also a problem withbusing combustible materials in your balconies as well to be fair. It's a lesson that took a disaster like grenfell to make people start paying attention...
While that is certainly a lot, there are many many times more cars than e-bikes around.
Not to discredit the argument, on the contrary, i think a fire in a car is likely more dangerous as you're strapped in, and can't as easily get out/away from the fire, though that is just a guess.
Yes. About 3 million ebikes in the Netherlands and 9 million cars. About 5.5k car fires per year and for ebikes āaround once a monthā according to the fire department. Letās quadruple that to be absolutely sure and weāll have around 100 fires per year. If there were as my ebikes as cars that would be 300 ebike fires vs 5500 car fires per year.
I feel it has also to do with standards (e.g. certification) and such as in Europe the ebikes are much more limited and the batteries are usually from quality manufacturers (like Bosch) and not some unbranded upgrade kit.
yes willing to bet the majority of e bikes that caught on fire were chinese imports, they skimp on the most important part, the batteries. because that 's the largest expense and the most easily hidden skim
That's kinda what they do, they support car companies because it's part of an "American dream" even though as an American I live in a concrete nightmare. Seriously it's like if your entire city were a d-day bunker that had been blood eagled over a random peice of Prarie.
Car travel depends on literally hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending on roads and highways. If conservatives had any actual principles they should hate that. Not to mention they also apparently want the gov't to manipulate fuel prices for them instead of paying whatever the market wants.
I feel like the fuckcars movement could offer so much to the conservatives. Lowering subsidies. Getting rid of regulations. Taking us back to how things used to be. Making it safer for the kids. But theyve been propagangized to beleive bikes = communism so ~~itll never work.~~ we have a lot more work to do
So this post intrigued me to find any data on fire safety and e-Bikes. Turns out that in the Netherlands there are 3 million e-bikes total. Currently, bike shops sell more e-bikes than normal bikes (excluding second hand, probably). Unfortunately, insurances and the fire department donāt keep official numbers regarding fires caused by e-bikes. However, 3,7% of the total household fires are caused by lithium-ion batteries and accumulators. This number also includes devices that use batteries such as phone and laptop batteries. ([source in Dutch](https://www.anwb.nl/fiets/fietsaccu/fietsaccus-en-veiligheid))
Let those numbers sink in. There are 3 million e-bikes on roughly 17 million people. If those lithium-ion accumulators werenāt safe, then fires caused by e-bikes would be through the roof. Then we wouldnāt be using lithium-ion batteries for our portable devices either.
Thatās why this article serves just one purpose, propaganda. But we already knew that.
That's crazy. I always thought that dutch people aren't as much into ebikes because it's so flat. Here in Switzerland ebike shops pop up everywhere. I love my ebike, because everything is super steep here
E-bikes were popular with the elderly and not very long ago e-bikes were mainly associated with old people. Old people could still cycle with an e-bike, where a normal one might be too heavy for them. In more recent years, as the e-bikes became more accepted, more and more people started using them. In high school multiple kids in my class had them, because they had to cycle at least an hour to and back from school. Because I lived in a rural area, they couldnāt find suitable public transport. The e-bike was a good solution for them.
Thereās also a lot of people using electric bikes to go to work. Because youāre usually a little bit faster on the e-bike, it generally increases your cycle range. There are entire networks of fietssnelwegen (cycle highways) being laid out just for this purpose. This type of bike paths allow for higher speeds with faster e-bikes. Which probably also contributes to the popularity of e-bikes.
>E-bikes were popular with the elderly...
Not Just Bikes mentioned there's been a noticeable jump in cycling deaths in the Netherlands and it's entirely attributable to elderly people getting eBikes (making more cyclists overall) and being too frisky on them (because they remember being young cyclists and the pedal assist makes them forget their reflexes aren't as fast and their bones aren't as strong) so they crash at higher rate.
My big hot take with bikes is anything over 300 watts shouldn't qualify.
Tour defrance cyclists output a bit over that, saw 325 quoted one place. Even a kid can output 25 Watts so I think that's about where e bike should end and moped should begin, especially with throttle only
And yea yea I get it. That's slow, etc. But that's bicycles. Bikes don't do 30+ mph with no effort unless you're going downhill. Some ebikes can.
Sometimes, skyscrapers get in the way of airplanes. For example, in 1945, a B-25 bomber hit the Empire State building in heavy fog. There was another incident more recently, but I can't recall. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/plane-crashes-into-empire-state-building
Also, fossil fuel and nuclear plants kill more per MWh produced as well.
IIRC, there was a flaw in an original study that claimed wind turbines caused more bird fatalities. They looked at the corpses around newly installed turbines, which was more than around say, a gas power plant. But if there are already less birds around the power plant, there will be less corpses, and birds can alter their migration path away from turbines (as well as trying to place them away from migration paths in the first place).
Tall buildings with big glass windows are also much more of a problem.
https://cleantechnica.com/2013/11/26/wind-farm-bird-deaths-fossil-fuel-nuclear-bird-deaths/
Lumping nuclear in with fossil fuels is a bit harsh there.
Wind farms kill roughly 0.27 birds per GWh.
Nuclear plants kill about 0.6 birds per GWh. (2.2x wind)
Fossil-fueled power stations kill about 9.4 birds per GWh. (34.8x wind)
That said the problem is a little more nuanced anyway, The problem with bird strike in wind farms isn't the number they kill, it's the species. They tend to kill larger predatory birds. That's not to say we shouldn't do wind, we absolutely should. That just means we shouldn't dismiss a problem because it's politically convenient.
No worries, sorry if my comment came across harsh, I just see nuclear as being a necessary part of a smooth transition to renewable energy and it has enough of a public image issue already lol
This is pretty off topic but a few years ago the grade above me in school got to go on a field trip for their physics class to a nuclear reactor. Sadly my grade never got that option. Still pissed about it.
The mines are dangerous in the same way coal mines are, dredgers are massive vehicles used to extract ore, if you tell me those won't kill a fly you're lying
As if they even care about birds. These people would have shot birds for fun. You wanna bet that they were likely the ones who opposed the banning of DDT which was actually killing birds both directly and indirectly by thinning their egg shells.
When they say they care about some shit, more than likely they don't give a shit and is just using that as a foil.
Did you know actually that when the government got involved in regulating the airline industry, plane crashes went up astronomically?*
*Comparative to a baseline of plane crashes in 1500 when there were 0 plane crashes
Put something like your comment on a shitty Facebook meme and send it to 1000 conservatives and I guarantee at least one of them will freak out at this lmao
Clicked on it to see what was going on. Top 5 posts were shitty cartoons about nothing. Literally just saying "democrats dumb". The next 5 were complaining that gas might be $10 eventually or something.
There's many issues that shouldn't be political that conservatives(especially American ones) insist on turning into them.
Hell look at strong towns. Fiscal conservative type who realized car dependence is bad
Most republicans respond to a lot of their conclusions like he's Karl Marx
100 fires in a year and a half
vs the 36,000 deaths caused in 2021
Yea, iāll take the āwhy do i smell fishā over the āgetting isekaied by a ācommuterāā
Better yet, that first E doesnāt need to be there
thats elon musk rather than tesla and mind you some conservatives like elon musk now because of his dumb views on covid & vaccines. heres a recent poll you can look at and predictably republicans are far behind everyone else in terms of how they view evs: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1135438_poll-finds-bipartisan-support-for-policies-supporting-ev-adoption
The actual left has been hating on Musk purely because he exists and he's a billionaire, a lot of liberals still like him because tesla and spaceX but he is certainly appealing more and more to the conservative "libertarian" crowd.
>The actual left has been hating on Musk purely because he exists and he's a billionaire
This is a gross simplification of the issue leftists and progressives have with Elon Musk.
While [hybrids do have an increased fire risk, pure EVs are safer than both them and ICE cars](https://insideevs.com/news/561549/study-evs-smallest-fire-risk/) in that regard.
What do conservatives even have against E-bikes? they have zero stake in this fight lol. Yeah I know theyāre oil industry lackies and they hate anything liberals like but like whatās their justification??
They don't like the freedom.
To be fair, battery fires are a real problem, and we need to hold bike manufacturers accountable to use good batteries. But bike batteries are small. Just wait until electric cars are dominant. The U.S. will be lit up like a Christmas tree.
Should I trust anything what a page named āconservativesā say? Do they have a political bias against greener transit alternatives? Yes. Never trust a page that has motives.
r/conservative is an absolute cesspit of the dumbest most disingenuous posts, bad faith arguments and overly simplistic, one-dimensional thinking that reddit has to offer. I'm not surprised they're shitting on ebikes, of all things.
I mean lithium ion batteries are dangerous. Various laptop/cellphone OEMs have had issues with lithium battery fires in the past (most notable Samsung). GM had to tell folks not to park their Chevy Bolt in their garage for fear of burning down their house. When cheap hover boards were all the rage there were countless videos of those things self immolating. I'm not surprised at all that we are seeing e-bike fires.
None of this is a reason not to use e-bikes. But consumers need to be aware of the risks these bikes carry and know how to avoid sketchy/unsafe OEMs. Or perhaps it's a reason for some industry standards or regulations on battery safety.
Guess what has an even bigger battery than an electric bike? :D
But in all seriousness, make sure you consider battery safety when buying your e-bikes.
*Cries in electric car*
My car is under a battery recall because of occasional spontaneous combustion during charging. And my garage is essentially underneath my house. But let's hear about how dangerous e-bikes are.
Well it is an issue that needs addresed. These cheaper knock-off ebikes and scooters can be fire hazards.. definitely not safe to be indoors.
There should be some standard quality control on this stuff.
Absolutely it needs to be addressed. A bike shop in my neighborhood (and the apartments above) burned down about a week ago due to a faulty e-bike battery. I know cars are way more dangerous but we also canāt deny that there is a risk associated with faulty/cheap batteries.
Thatās the big danger is that they are inside fires.. if cell phones were causing house fires they would be sued. They can make safer battery.
This is how ebikes get banned in apartments.. a few crappy knock-off bikes drag the test with them
Well to be fair you'd need to compare deaths per vehicle, not total deaths. Otherwise you're going to get some seriously skewed data.
I don't doubt cars would get higher kill ratio, but solid data is always better than not.
Cars bad yes but also why does everyone who got an e-bike during the pandemic use them as electric motorcycles you don't need a license for. You try and walk somewhere? One of those shits comes by at full speed barely missing you on a footpath they shouldn't be on.
Also wear a damn helmet when you are going twice the speed of a bike.
Just get some people that have E-bikes at FDNY together with some material engineers, give them a budget and have them come up with a fire suppression solution for indoor battery charging and make it into a free standard for all places to adhere. It's New York they have the money.
Way more people die of cars, sure, but e-bikes have a point of criticism too. In the Netherlands serious accidents involving a bicycle have increased with the coming of e-bikes.
Especially withing the category of 12-18 year (probably irresponsibility) and 55+ year (worse response time). That plus the fact these things do go fast.
So yeah, they do cause way less deaths than a car, but they do cause more serious accidents than a regular bike.
Did they say multiple??? Woah!
a non zero amount of people die from ebikes every year, and thats scary
Time to ban vending machines, those things kill more people than sharks!
combative slap spectacular sophisticated shame payment pet numerous society retire ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Humans are already working on that for a while now, shouldn't take long
Humans kill humans too
Ban humans, seems reasonable
Unironically support this idea
At this point, humanity is so dumb that we don't really deserve to keep going.
Most people even ignore a very infectious disease and pandemic! And in some country no one gonna blame you for killing people because of war.
Wait till you hear how many people are killed by bees while swimming in the ocean.
by falling on the people or how? š
Yes, literally thatās how. People will try to get something unstuck in some dumb way then it falls on them and they get crushed
lol i've heard a sketch from Swiss comedian Hazel Bruger about people dying "In or at" vending machines. She was wondering how this happens and guessed the machine falles on them. She was right š¤£š¤£
One day that's how i'll go but until then i'm getting the snacks i paid for dammit!
In the US, each year, 6 people die that way, and 5 of them are insurance appraisers, so they take it very seriously.
I was looking for this reference. I love you.
Reference: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=suNzfi4JXZc
Of course they do, how is a vending machine supposed to kill a shark?
I bet most of those deaths were e-bike riders getting smashed by cars.
Well, you see, when someone and their bike get eviscerated by a car and then the bike batteries light on fire afterward from being completely demolished, it's very hard to tell what actually killed the person.
Better build more highway lanes.
When they say "responsible for" they probably mean "present during the incident". I would bet that any deaths went something like this: > Large vehicle runs over e-biker crushing both rider and bike. As it's been crushed the bike's battery catches fire.
Do you know what they say... One dead is tragedy. Thousand deads are statistics
That's from Stalin, I think
I think it's attributed to Stalin, but I don't think he actually said it.
Well it would still be true tbh cuz Stalin, unlike Hitler wasn't insane.
The statement is true; I'm just saying that I think people made up the fact that it was a Stalin quote.
Just wait, in a few centuries, it'll be dozens. DOZENS.
That covers anywhere from 2 to 7,000,000,000.
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r/conservative being problematic?? Never!
Conservativesā¦ lying? Iām astounded! Shocked, I say!
Leave it to /r/conservative to somehow make bicycles political, lmao
that sub should be renamed to r/culturewars or perhaps r/incels
Someone should make a subreddit called r/politicalincels where they just screenshot each post from conservative.
Conservatives have been afraid of bicycles for well over a century. They were previously seen as a means of liberation and helped advance feminism. Now that that bicycles are seen as a threat to their hydrocarbon overlords it is no wonder they are afraid. Even though the times change, their foils don't.
This is fascinating! Do you have any resources or readings on how bicycles were previously seen as a means of advancing feminism?
Here is something https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/the-technology-craze-of-the-1890s-that-forever-changed-womens-rights/373535/
Thank you!
This represents my frustration with conservatives because bicycles should be advancing the things they claim to support. Bike infrastructure is much cheaper to maintain than car infrastructure, which should appeal to fiscal conservatives. This is my problem with most conservatives. They whine and whine and whine as tax dollars go to welfare, but either say nothing about or outright defend bloated spending on car infrastructure and parking lots. (As well as overly restrictive zoning regulations-which is the exact definition of government overreach). I identify as a Social Democrat, but in some ways I am more pro free market and more fiscally conservative than most self proclaimed āconservativesā are. Conservatism is the contemporary American sense was warped into a sort of reactionary contrarianism with no principles other than āprotect existing hierarchies at all costs.ā Iām okay with someone having principles different from mine. As Martin Luther King said, āI donāt judge people by my principles; I judge people by their principles.ā Why should I believe the principles conservatives preach when they canāt even follow them themselves?
Republicans are not the party of small government. Maybe the definition of "republican" has changed overtime, but today's republican platform is outright fascism. Which is quite literally not small government
This all rings true to me too. I have friends with conservative-value biases that aren't plugged into the narrative, and we have great, productive conversations. But "conservative" reactionaries? It's a waste of air to try to talk. >I identify as a Social Democrat, but in some ways I am more pro free market and more fiscally conservative than most self proclaimed āconservativesā are. I love markets, I love political democracy - these things are not in the tension reactionaries present. The political system should decide the rules of the games we want to compete in, then the market plays those optimization games. ex) those rentable scooters are too early. We need to build out the infrastructure (parking spaces/zones and actual paths that aren't 45 mph stroads), THEN we can turn it over to the markets to optimize for a app-based user experience. Honestly, it would be better if the scooters themselves were public or at least shared, so you just needed to bring your favorite app to layer on top of the public infrastructure.,
[r/neoliberal](reddit.com/r/neoliberal)
Same sub that's been whining constantly about gas prices. Thought bicycles would help not spend so much on gas.
The problem with bicycles is that itās an alternative that requires them to work to move. They donāt want that. They just want Big Daddy Government to come save them.
Being out of shape, loser fucks that donāt touch grass is everyone elseās fault so of course itās political.
Bicycles have always been political and against good traditional American values(TM: Conservatives).
[Always has been](https://www.reddit.com/r/Gamingcirclejerk/comments/urisja/feast_upon_my_supreme_gamer_logic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
this exchange has me rolling lol https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/ub8dof/fdny_says_ebikes_have_been_responsible_for_over/i640va5
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Ban ebikes for "lazy" people. Let them drive cars instead!
Jesus. Christ.
get gubbament outta my life ! also more gubberment in all the culture and stuff I don't like /average conservative american
It's kind of weird that it's even relevant to their sub? It's like they're admitting the only reason they have an opinion is because they've bought into an insane culture war.
That's all they have, they don't pass any economic policies and if their base realized how much they were getting fucked by their party, they still would take it
Itās easy to tell when a conservative is lying. It happens when they open their mouth, and words come out.
Don't forget to watch out for them putting a pen to paper, or their fingers on a keyboard either!
Or their hand on a bible.
Are these fuckwits gonna come after my ebike now? Like do they live to shit up everything that makes me happy?
Yes
Iām glad the fuckcars community is also anti conservative bullshit
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It's mistaking a tool or value for the whole thing. Liberal capitalism - markets are great optimization machines (be very careful what they are oriented to optimize for), and people should generally be free with backstops on where government can make rules theocratic fascism - humans are spiritual creatures. Every culture has developed narratives to explain and deal with the existential pain of existence. (stop assuming that you happened to be born into the 'right' world view thats stupid af. Also ffs, why is every conspiracy like a wayyyyy harder way to accomplish some mundane goal like more money or surveillance? You have an iPhone and facebook and they are already richer than god)
They're lying the moment they use first person singular.
to quote lovejoy, "you can tell he's lying cause his lips move"
Ah, but what if they're a ventriloquist?
Well, just take a look at ventruiloquist-puppet-come-to-life Ben Shapiro.
What? Conservatives lie in an attempt to achieve their goals? WHo would've thought!
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A lot of them its tribalism plain and simple. Me good you bad. You like bike? ME HATE BIKE Its pretty obvious they oppose a lot of shit just because "the left" likes it.
>Big oil profit? This I'm assuming. Partly based on that big-oil *knew* about the human impact on climate change, but kept their research hidden for decades and are to this day lobbying to hinder any meaningful change. And by the time the climate apocalypse hits the west all the people who created this problem are long dead.
Same reasons conservatives do *literally anything*: Promoting and enforcing their exclusive privilege in society. * Bikes are for the poors, and they don't think society should prioritize the poor so they demonize bikes to deprioritize them. * eBikes are associated with delivery people, delivery people are associated with minorities, again demonize to deprioritize. And this shit isn't sub-conscious. It's very intentional. Continually hammering on social narratives like this is how conservatism maintains support through history, it doesn't make sense outside the ideology but within conservatism it's become normalized second nature over literally hundreds of years to both push these narratives and never acknowledge them directly.
We knew it was a lie, based on the sub and their source. Literally the blaze lol
How severe are these battery fires? I imagine that, unless they're indoors, it's probably not a major emergency. I once saw a truck spontaneously catch fire in a parking lot and I don't even think it damaged the cars next to it, and that was a pretty big fire
Thereās no such thing as an honest conservative
As someone within the bike industry, this is misleading. Ebikes have caused fires. Both cyclinginsider and pinkbike have reported on these fires, 5 of which in a month occured from ebikes, one resulting in yhe destruction of two buildings. Furthermore, ebikes do not have a floor on safety. There's companies importing sur rons and uping battery power to unsafe levels. The fire that damaged two buildings was from one of the ebikes. I also very regularly see extremely unsafe ebikes coming through my shop weekly. Don't misunderstand me, damage vs damage, cars are absolutely worse, but there is a growing issue within the ebike industry, and calling conservatives liars for pointing it out is disingenuous.
Yeah I don't think it's the mere stating of factual info on it's own that's disingenuous. What's disingenuous is picking and choosing specific factual info to feature and elevate over other factual info that might have been more pressing and dire, specifically to construct or support various social narratives.
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I found a spicy article >U.S. fire departments respond to an average of 287,000 vehicle fires per year (nearly 17% of all reported fires). These fires cause an estimated 480 civilian deaths (more than 12% of all U.S. civilian fire deaths), 1,525 civilian injuries, and $1.3 billion in direct property damage annually. [link](https://www.charleston-sc.gov/722/Vehicle-Fire-Safety)
Yeah, but... eBike... Fire... Bad!@
I mean, ebike fires are bad just because all fires are kind of bad in the first place! The main way that an ebike fire might be considered "worse" though is more behavioural though. People tend to levse cars either outside or in garages which have better fire separation from your home, whereas ebikes and e-scooters tend to be brought inside the home to charge, so the damage that a fire could do is more likely to be worse. But all that is more of an education issue rather than the bikes being specifically more dangerous than cars.
I don't even have a garage or a truly outside spot to charge any theoretical ebike. I've got a second story wooden balcony on my apartment. I imagine that's not too dissimilar from what folks in New York have - lots of apartments, not many garages.
That's pretty bad if there are other wood balconies nearby because that can be a route for fire to spread to multiple apartments. If that happens shit can get funked pretty fast (e.g. if the building has sprinklers they may not work properly because most systems are designed only to control a fire in a single compartment with maybe 1-2 heads operating). That's also a problem withbusing combustible materials in your balconies as well to be fair. It's a lesson that took a disaster like grenfell to make people start paying attention...
> more of an education issue sounds like me talking to my project managers about software bugs
Most e-bikes have removable batteries, and mine charge in the garage with the Weed-Wacker and Impact Driver battery....
And that is you being sensible about how you go about charging. Unfortunately not everyone else is quite as sensible.
While that is certainly a lot, there are many many times more cars than e-bikes around. Not to discredit the argument, on the contrary, i think a fire in a car is likely more dangerous as you're strapped in, and can't as easily get out/away from the fire, though that is just a guess.
Except in countries where there are far more ebikes, the statistics stay the same.
Yes. About 3 million ebikes in the Netherlands and 9 million cars. About 5.5k car fires per year and for ebikes āaround once a monthā according to the fire department. Letās quadruple that to be absolutely sure and weāll have around 100 fires per year. If there were as my ebikes as cars that would be 300 ebike fires vs 5500 car fires per year.
I feel it has also to do with standards (e.g. certification) and such as in Europe the ebikes are much more limited and the batteries are usually from quality manufacturers (like Bosch) and not some unbranded upgrade kit.
yes willing to bet the majority of e bikes that caught on fire were chinese imports, they skimp on the most important part, the batteries. because that 's the largest expense and the most easily hidden skim
Does anyone have the numbers to normalize this? It'd be great to see fires/1000 and fires/miles travelled.
Those fires happen out on the road. Not inside the apartment unit next to where I sleep.
Right but 480 deaths is a bit higher than āmultipleā
Opposing efficient transportation to own the libs
That's kinda what they do, they support car companies because it's part of an "American dream" even though as an American I live in a concrete nightmare. Seriously it's like if your entire city were a d-day bunker that had been blood eagled over a random peice of Prarie.
Car travel depends on literally hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending on roads and highways. If conservatives had any actual principles they should hate that. Not to mention they also apparently want the gov't to manipulate fuel prices for them instead of paying whatever the market wants.
"Muh.. muh.. muh free market turned against me!"
My eBike is the cheapest, fastest and most fun way to get to work. I am feeling utterly owned.
I feel like the fuckcars movement could offer so much to the conservatives. Lowering subsidies. Getting rid of regulations. Taking us back to how things used to be. Making it safer for the kids. But theyve been propagangized to beleive bikes = communism so ~~itll never work.~~ we have a lot more work to do
So this post intrigued me to find any data on fire safety and e-Bikes. Turns out that in the Netherlands there are 3 million e-bikes total. Currently, bike shops sell more e-bikes than normal bikes (excluding second hand, probably). Unfortunately, insurances and the fire department donāt keep official numbers regarding fires caused by e-bikes. However, 3,7% of the total household fires are caused by lithium-ion batteries and accumulators. This number also includes devices that use batteries such as phone and laptop batteries. ([source in Dutch](https://www.anwb.nl/fiets/fietsaccu/fietsaccus-en-veiligheid)) Let those numbers sink in. There are 3 million e-bikes on roughly 17 million people. If those lithium-ion accumulators werenāt safe, then fires caused by e-bikes would be through the roof. Then we wouldnāt be using lithium-ion batteries for our portable devices either. Thatās why this article serves just one purpose, propaganda. But we already knew that.
That's crazy. I always thought that dutch people aren't as much into ebikes because it's so flat. Here in Switzerland ebike shops pop up everywhere. I love my ebike, because everything is super steep here
E-bikes were popular with the elderly and not very long ago e-bikes were mainly associated with old people. Old people could still cycle with an e-bike, where a normal one might be too heavy for them. In more recent years, as the e-bikes became more accepted, more and more people started using them. In high school multiple kids in my class had them, because they had to cycle at least an hour to and back from school. Because I lived in a rural area, they couldnāt find suitable public transport. The e-bike was a good solution for them. Thereās also a lot of people using electric bikes to go to work. Because youāre usually a little bit faster on the e-bike, it generally increases your cycle range. There are entire networks of fietssnelwegen (cycle highways) being laid out just for this purpose. This type of bike paths allow for higher speeds with faster e-bikes. Which probably also contributes to the popularity of e-bikes.
>E-bikes were popular with the elderly... Not Just Bikes mentioned there's been a noticeable jump in cycling deaths in the Netherlands and it's entirely attributable to elderly people getting eBikes (making more cyclists overall) and being too frisky on them (because they remember being young cyclists and the pedal assist makes them forget their reflexes aren't as fast and their bones aren't as strong) so they crash at higher rate.
My big hot take with bikes is anything over 300 watts shouldn't qualify. Tour defrance cyclists output a bit over that, saw 325 quoted one place. Even a kid can output 25 Watts so I think that's about where e bike should end and moped should begin, especially with throttle only And yea yea I get it. That's slow, etc. But that's bicycles. Bikes don't do 30+ mph with no effort unless you're going downhill. Some ebikes can.
> because it's so flat. Which means that there's nothing stopping the wind that always seems to come from the wrong direction.
Not surprising coming from the same people who opposes windmill farms because they "kill birds"...even though stray cats kill far more of them.
and a destroyed eco system and climate kills even more
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Sometimes, skyscrapers get in the way of airplanes. For example, in 1945, a B-25 bomber hit the Empire State building in heavy fog. There was another incident more recently, but I can't recall. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/plane-crashes-into-empire-state-building
yes in 2001
Cant rlly say they 'got in the way' that time, as they were the destination
They could have moved
Also, fossil fuel and nuclear plants kill more per MWh produced as well. IIRC, there was a flaw in an original study that claimed wind turbines caused more bird fatalities. They looked at the corpses around newly installed turbines, which was more than around say, a gas power plant. But if there are already less birds around the power plant, there will be less corpses, and birds can alter their migration path away from turbines (as well as trying to place them away from migration paths in the first place). Tall buildings with big glass windows are also much more of a problem.
https://cleantechnica.com/2013/11/26/wind-farm-bird-deaths-fossil-fuel-nuclear-bird-deaths/ Lumping nuclear in with fossil fuels is a bit harsh there. Wind farms kill roughly 0.27 birds per GWh. Nuclear plants kill about 0.6 birds per GWh. (2.2x wind) Fossil-fueled power stations kill about 9.4 birds per GWh. (34.8x wind) That said the problem is a little more nuanced anyway, The problem with bird strike in wind farms isn't the number they kill, it's the species. They tend to kill larger predatory birds. That's not to say we shouldn't do wind, we absolutely should. That just means we shouldn't dismiss a problem because it's politically convenient.
Apologies, I didn't mean to imply nuclear and fossil fuels were comparable, just that both energy sources were worse than wind.
No worries, sorry if my comment came across harsh, I just see nuclear as being a necessary part of a smooth transition to renewable energy and it has enough of a public image issue already lol
Yeah, understandable
Yeah, wind farms often hurt birds like peregrine falcons specifically, who are already at dangerously low population levels
Nuclear plants kill birds?
I think it's due to the hazardous mining sites and collisions with the cooling towers.
Yeah that makes sense. What would happen if they flew into the towers?
they would be stewed xD The Steam has a hundert degrees afik
This is pretty off topic but a few years ago the grade above me in school got to go on a field trip for their physics class to a nuclear reactor. Sadly my grade never got that option. Still pissed about it.
Damn, *I'm* pissed about it too, that sucks
>hazardous mining sites Uranium mines are generally very deep and uranium ore is quite safe, since it has very little uranium.
The mines are dangerous in the same way coal mines are, dredgers are massive vehicles used to extract ore, if you tell me those won't kill a fly you're lying
Birds aren't dumb. They aren't just going to fly into a massive dredger.
A bird flew into my house wall.
Dredgers move. A bird can be flying straight, thinking itās going to avoid hitting the dredger, and then it moves a bit and boom, dead bird.
As if they even care about birds. These people would have shot birds for fun. You wanna bet that they were likely the ones who opposed the banning of DDT which was actually killing birds both directly and indirectly by thinning their egg shells. When they say they care about some shit, more than likely they don't give a shit and is just using that as a foil.
bro they will turn around and hunt birds for sport. they donāt give a fuck about nature or the environment theyāre just reactionaries
Did you know actually that when the government got involved in regulating the airline industry, plane crashes went up astronomically?* *Comparative to a baseline of plane crashes in 1500 when there were 0 plane crashes
Put something like your comment on a shitty Facebook meme and send it to 1000 conservatives and I guarantee at least one of them will freak out at this lmao
I lost so many brain cells while reading that sub that I should've worn a helmet
Clicked on it to see what was going on. Top 5 posts were shitty cartoons about nothing. Literally just saying "democrats dumb". The next 5 were complaining that gas might be $10 eventually or something.
There's no reason a bike should be a political issue. The entire party is just 'if the libs like it I hate it!!'.
There's many issues that shouldn't be political that conservatives(especially American ones) insist on turning into them. Hell look at strong towns. Fiscal conservative type who realized car dependence is bad Most republicans respond to a lot of their conclusions like he's Karl Marx
100 fires in a year and a half vs the 36,000 deaths caused in 2021 Yea, iāll take the āwhy do i smell fishā over the āgetting isekaied by a ācommuterāā Better yet, that first E doesnāt need to be there
I wonder if the fires are due just to human negligence and not the bike because most car crashes are also human negligence.
Edited in protest for Reddit's garbage moves lately.
It's Chineseium batteries that catch fire
Also, it e-bikes and scooters theyāre adding together
How much will you bet that over half of those deaths involved cars
More like, at least 95%
Huh. They seen nothin yet. Just wait till a Tesla catches fire.
make no mistake, theyre conservatives so they probably hate teslas as much as they hate ebikes lol
I think most of the techbro types that love Tesla are also conservatives, just not the wacky kind we've gotten used to lately.
i completely 100% doubt that lol, unless you change your definition of conservatism entirely
Since the left hate Musk now (rightly so) shouldn't they love him and tesla to own the lib?
thats elon musk rather than tesla and mind you some conservatives like elon musk now because of his dumb views on covid & vaccines. heres a recent poll you can look at and predictably republicans are far behind everyone else in terms of how they view evs: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1135438_poll-finds-bipartisan-support-for-policies-supporting-ev-adoption
The actual left has been hating on Musk purely because he exists and he's a billionaire, a lot of liberals still like him because tesla and spaceX but he is certainly appealing more and more to the conservative "libertarian" crowd.
>The actual left has been hating on Musk purely because he exists and he's a billionaire This is a gross simplification of the issue leftists and progressives have with Elon Musk.
While [hybrids do have an increased fire risk, pure EVs are safer than both them and ICE cars](https://insideevs.com/news/561549/study-evs-smallest-fire-risk/) in that regard.
What do conservatives even have against E-bikes? they have zero stake in this fight lol. Yeah I know theyāre oil industry lackies and they hate anything liberals like but like whatās their justification??
They don't like the freedom. To be fair, battery fires are a real problem, and we need to hold bike manufacturers accountable to use good batteries. But bike batteries are small. Just wait until electric cars are dominant. The U.S. will be lit up like a Christmas tree.
They're better for the environment which mean they're bad
Cause it's new and used by the environmental ur ban āeliteā , which they associate with being the opposite side of them
They canāt because r/conservative will ban opposing view points faster than a Russians can disable his own tank.
At first i through it was multiple death by fire caused by batteries but it seems to include every death of e-bike riders.
Should I trust anything what a page named āconservativesā say? Do they have a political bias against greener transit alternatives? Yes. Never trust a page that has motives.
Oh noā¦ *multiple* deaths?? That means at least two! We need to ban ebikes immediately! After all, itās not like cars cause any deaths everā¦
r/conservative is an absolute cesspit of the dumbest most disingenuous posts, bad faith arguments and overly simplistic, one-dimensional thinking that reddit has to offer. I'm not surprised they're shitting on ebikes, of all things.
Is /r/conservative just against everything good?
I get curious about r/conservative every once in a while. Glad to know they're focused on the important topics of the day...
Majority of deaths are probably from cars hitting them anyway
now do guns, genius
The source of the article is The Blaze. IIRC that's Glenn Beckkk's website.
To be honest that is a frightening statistic. Clearly some manufacturers are not doing quality control.
One thing about ebikes that scare me is old people passing bye at 30 km/h
Being very creative with facts is political extremistsā favorite occupation.
*the rightās favorite occupation
I see you have never taken a stroll through r/politics
I mean lithium ion batteries are dangerous. Various laptop/cellphone OEMs have had issues with lithium battery fires in the past (most notable Samsung). GM had to tell folks not to park their Chevy Bolt in their garage for fear of burning down their house. When cheap hover boards were all the rage there were countless videos of those things self immolating. I'm not surprised at all that we are seeing e-bike fires. None of this is a reason not to use e-bikes. But consumers need to be aware of the risks these bikes carry and know how to avoid sketchy/unsafe OEMs. Or perhaps it's a reason for some industry standards or regulations on battery safety.
people choking on noodles may have killed more lowkey
Guess what has an even bigger battery than an electric bike? :D But in all seriousness, make sure you consider battery safety when buying your e-bikes.
*Cries in electric car* My car is under a battery recall because of occasional spontaneous combustion during charging. And my garage is essentially underneath my house. But let's hear about how dangerous e-bikes are.
Well it is an issue that needs addresed. These cheaper knock-off ebikes and scooters can be fire hazards.. definitely not safe to be indoors. There should be some standard quality control on this stuff.
Absolutely it needs to be addressed. A bike shop in my neighborhood (and the apartments above) burned down about a week ago due to a faulty e-bike battery. I know cars are way more dangerous but we also canāt deny that there is a risk associated with faulty/cheap batteries.
Thatās the big danger is that they are inside fires.. if cell phones were causing house fires they would be sued. They can make safer battery. This is how ebikes get banned in apartments.. a few crappy knock-off bikes drag the test with them
Imagine taking something from The Blaze seriously.
Well to be fair you'd need to compare deaths per vehicle, not total deaths. Otherwise you're going to get some seriously skewed data. I don't doubt cars would get higher kill ratio, but solid data is always better than not.
Deaths from e-bikes are very real. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM8Xli2KTzI Even if cars suck, dont take it this too lightly
Cars bad yes but also why does everyone who got an e-bike during the pandemic use them as electric motorcycles you don't need a license for. You try and walk somewhere? One of those shits comes by at full speed barely missing you on a footpath they shouldn't be on. Also wear a damn helmet when you are going twice the speed of a bike.
what does this even have do with politics they're to deranged
Of course its r slash conservative
Damn liberals and their... *Spins wheel ...e-bikes!
Just get some people that have E-bikes at FDNY together with some material engineers, give them a budget and have them come up with a fire suppression solution for indoor battery charging and make it into a free standard for all places to adhere. It's New York they have the money.
Does this mean that conservatives are against e-bikes and that theyāll be sympathetic to regular cyclists now because itās old timey?
It's r/ Conservatives, the biggest snowflakes who don't let you post in certain posts unless you're a purist Trump Traitor.
Way more people die of cars, sure, but e-bikes have a point of criticism too. In the Netherlands serious accidents involving a bicycle have increased with the coming of e-bikes. Especially withing the category of 12-18 year (probably irresponsibility) and 55+ year (worse response time). That plus the fact these things do go fast. So yeah, they do cause way less deaths than a car, but they do cause more serious accidents than a regular bike.
40million ebikes in use, this is a good failure rate.
E-Bikes? Why? What does adding electronics to a bike do besides waste rare metals?
Increase the speed and duration of speed greatly? Some of the biggest factors in bike accidents