Your daily intrusive thought that it’s a good time to buy an ebike. Today I rode across my city for around 6 cents in electricity. I spent that time interacting with wildlife, smelling flowers, and being nice to my neighbours as I passed them. I got good full-body exercise while exploring parks. The lifestyle an ebike encourages is so much nicer than cars and will provide you longterm resiliency against peak oil even after this crisis resolves. What if your commute could be the most enriching part of your day instead of something that sabotages the rest of it?Yo, we just gave up our gas guzzler about 2 weeks ago and I couldn’t be happier! Bikes, buses, and trains, Fuck yeah!
Trains are the only thing I need to finally sell my car altogether. It’s existentially important to me that I can at least get to the next city over if I’m doing this as a prepper thing. The big limitation with ebikes is that 80km/50mi is the expected range on a single battery with a 3-5 hour recharge time. As it stands I can replace 99% of my urban driving with the ebike, but I can’t go regional with it until the next generation of batteries starts dropping. A train that could get me two cities over would solve all of my problems except for moving between apartments.
i wish i could reasonably ride a bike to work but my job location varies so much day to day and the amount of tools i might need also can get pretty hefty.
Maybe for putting around town if i can get a kid seat
On my Aventon Abound LR I have a rail system on the rear rack. It can fit an adult below 63kg/140lb, two children/child seats, or a 27L storage box that has enough space for 4-6 bags of groceries. Ebikes show their utility when you can replace individual uses. Now there’s never a time I feel tempted to get groceries with my car, I buy less at each trip to fit on my bike, and I use those trips as an excuse to ride through a park or birdwatch. Every errand becomes enriching and cheap even if I can’t transport my work loads that require a pickup truck. As a kid I never gained anything from riding in a car apart from whiplash and anxiety during accidents, but that time on an ebike would have been an engaging low-stress bonding experience in nature. It’s such a pure connection to the landscape that it makes me wish I had a kid just to force them to do it for my own ideological satisfaction.
Hopefully you job covers your gas?
Still looking at them, my partner has given me the go ahead. But our commutes are areas where some chud in a truck would run us over. We do have some street legal dirt bikes, but that’s some of the same safety issues
Soon the chud truck drivers won’t be able to afford to drive
I did so a week into the war. It’s going to get bad, and I wanted to get an e-bike before their prices skyrocket too. I got one that has plenty room for basic cargo like groceries.
Hell yeah! Cargo bikes are the way to go. There’s something so liberating about being able to store practically anything on it and transport it for practically no cost, no effort, and no risk. It makes transportation into a nonentity and thing that I’m fine doing for whatever.
What if your commute could be the most enriching part of your day instead of something that sabotages the rest of it?
Considering that I’ve worked at a factory, and am working at a walmart now… I don’t think any commute could sabotage my day.
I’m also one of the “freaks” of society who willingly works night shift so I really don’t feel comfortable riding a bike to work, and I sure as shit wouldn’t if I was still working at that factory either (25ish mi trip one way, on mostly 55mph limit roads, at night).
That’s where I approach it from a prepper perspective as much as a left-urbanist one. A supply-side oil crisis is uniquely disruptive in a way that most of us haven’t experienced. When I had a long car commute, I at least had the physical safety of knowing that I could get fuel at any point I needed it along the route. I was destroying that car and barely making enough money to cover the wear and tear on it, but I could use it reliably. When it’s no longer reliable my lifestyle has to bend or break with that. If this crisis worsens, driving isn’t practically sustainable. Even if I made the EV switch today I’d be competing for the two chargers at most fuel stations, dependent on more complex overseas supply chains to even deliver or service those. For me that’s too many variables to feel confident. An ebike as collapse insurance is just giving me an option that I know will work six months from now no matter how bad things get. That’s pretty much the singular point of confidence I can have in this economy.
edit: Though I will say that even for that long car commute, 45 minutes on the highway each way to work tech support for rural boomers with dialup-equivalent internet, it uniquely sabotaged the rest of my day. My brain was flooded with stress hormones within the first hour of waking up and that conditioned me to have a bad start. When I was getting off work and full of stress hormones from that, I’d spend 45 minutes white-knuckling the steering wheel trying to keep from having road rage and then need to decompress from that on top of the work stress. That’s so much additional time lost to that job, all of it unpaid and held against me if I showed up to work angry. Now it’s a lot more pleasant when I show up to work refreshed from gentle exercise and arrive home having put a few good experiences between myself and whatever happened that day. It serves the same role as a morning coffee or evening beer.
Even if I made the EV switch today I’d be competing for the two chargers at most fuel stations
This is the part where I say I live in a rural city, the number of chargers in the whole town is… two that I know of, and they’re pretty well hidden so you wouldn’t know about them unless you just decided to randomly go down the alley on the city block where they just happened to be behind a row of mixed use buildings in the city center. Aka, where nobody would actually go unless the street parking is entirely full, which has only happened once to me sometime last year.
it uniquely sabotaged the rest of my day.
I will add that my commute to that factory was honestly relaxing for me, since it was a going to work at night, and coming home in the morning, hardly anyone was ever in front of me or behind me. I would also have music blasting away, be completely alone for 30min each way, nobody bothering me one bit. It also helped a little that I would occasionally go down some twisty back roads I knew of… Okay look I actually do enjoy driving, I heavily played the gran turismo series growing up, I also did a lot of helping my dad do the oil change (or one time help with changing out a starter, changing a tire, ect, ect.) on the family car growing up too.
What does that math says
“Big O mathematical notation, which I’m sure most Americans are familiar with…”
Big Mac notation is the norm here
The kids seem very fluent in OwO tho
Yeah, Iranians might know about historical figures and mathematics, but can they quote every line from a Spongebob episode? Or have Spider-man show up to their birthday parties? Didn’t think so.
The mathematical expression he included — ΔO_BSOH>0 ⇒ f(f(O))>f(O) — appears to be a signal that any increase in Hormuz blockade severity produces a compounding, nonlinear spike in oil prices, not a simple one-to-one rise.
This is the explanation from the Drop Site News tweet.
positive feedback… which i am sure most americans have studied
I guess this would be because a significant percentage of oil demand is inflexible.
This is bad for burger prices
I have been banging the drum about a transportation crisis in America. This was before the war. My timing was wrong and it’s actually going to be much worse much faster then I thought.
I am infuriated by those smug ignorants fucks who stuck up the Biden “I did that” stickers on the gas pump blaming the president (which while true) was more a product of things outside of Biden’s control and now they swear this directly attributable to the president price increase is just the price freedom. How do they get to be so duplicitous and bad faith?
https://redsails.org/sartre-reason-falsely/
^ essentially this, but applied to every aspect of their sad lives.
The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is “open”; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension.
But they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions; they want them to be innate. Since they are afraid of reasoning, they wish to lead the kind of life wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein one seeks only what he has already found, wherein one becomes only what he already was. This is nothing but passion. Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning‐like certainty; it alone can hold reason in leash; it alone can remain impervious to experience and last for a whole lifetime.
What a nerd.
I bought an ebike just before all this started and every day it’s looking like a better decision.
Interesting how the USA had to kidnap Maduro before going to war with Iran for this exact reason
