Countless companies and industries enjoy making up scary stories when it comes to justifying their opposition to making it easier to repair your own tech. Apple claims that empowering consumers and bolstering independent repair shops will turn states into “hacker meccas.” The car industry insists that making it easier and cheaper to repair modern cars will be a boon to sexual predators.
This, and the propensity for manufacturers to hyperfixate on trying to make everything proprietary, is why I will never buy a prebuilt e-bike. My bike is a converted regular bike, and if any component fails I can just rip it off and replace it with any of a variety of readily available yum-cha components. The prices a lot of manufacturers are asking for these pieces of shit are astronomical, too. If you’re not afraid to run a wire or two, you can build a more performant bike with bigger battery capacity for half the price or less.
This is one of the reasons I haven’t bought an E-bike yet. You can buy a road-legal motorcycle for the price of some E-bikes. It’s just too much for what they are.
I mean sure, but at the low end of the market you can get a decent ebike with Shimano Altus shifters, disc brakes, etc for like ~$1000 which is basically getting a $700 regular bike + $300 for the ebike components.
I got one for ~$700 with that (though Tourney, not Altus). The tradeoff however was power (it’s 250w) and size (plus build quality, probably… also, no suspension or ignition) but it does work. I’ve tried an XP 2.0 so I do have some frame of reference, it still works for me.
I wonder if I’d like an even smaller bike (currently already 20" wheels, somewhat short wheelbase, 45lbs), though I might just want a lighter bike (which would cost more). Well I would wonder, but from what I’ve seen I’d need to buy something used (and it’s more of a UK thing) to get a small (non-electric) bike for under $700. Sometimes just the frames for those cost over that. Also, searching for this size of bike is difficult (results give small motorized things (even w/bicycle), bike models, clown bikes (no gears)).
Right, you’re better off building your own.
Even a cheap car in my country. The car might actually cost less
Ar one time that was true here, but anymore used cars have become as expensive as a new car.
Yum-cha?
Lifted and corrupted from Chinese, broadly: commodity made-in-China parts, gadgets, or other tat that’s all largely interchangeable and cheap. Brandless or with a functionally meaningless non-brand label. The type of stuff you used to get from Chinatown, but these days you’re more likely to get from Amazon, eBay, or Aliexpress.
(“Yum cha” could be less idiomatically translated from Cantonese as “drink tea,” more broadly to “go to the dim sum place,” or later even more broadly than that, “straight from Chinatown.”)
See also.
Given that I understand yum Cha in a different context (drinking tea), isn’t using this phrase to describe shitty Chinese parts a little… racist? Or at least, some form of cultural appropriation (I can’t think of a better phrase to us right now).
Well, is it more or less racist than just calling them shitty and Chinese? Or shitty because they’re Chinese?
I dunno. It’s been in at least semi-common use since the early '90’s as far as I can tell.
Well, I was curious too, don’t have an answer for you. I just feel a little uncomfortable with a phrase that I know (and have used when speaking to Cantonese people) being used in a negative fashion for a completely different thing. But maybe it’s just a cultural clash, so I wanted to clarify.