micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
Ebikes, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, longboards, eboards, motorcycles, skates, unicycles: Whatever floats your goat, this is all things micromobility!
"Transportation using lightweight vehicles such as bicycles or scooters, especially electric ones that may be borrowed as part of a self-service rental program in which people rent vehicles for short-term use within a town or city.
micromobility is seen as a potential solution to moving people more efficiently around cities"
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It's a little sad that we need to actually say this, but:
Don't be an asshole or you will be permanently banned.
Respectful debate is totally OK, criticizing a product is fine, but being verbally abusive will not be tolerated.
Focus on discussing the idea, not attacking the person.
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The YouTuber BigClive observed through dismantling many so-called disposable vape pens that they tend to have new, high quality, high amp cells, paired with decent or good charge controllers. He posited that this is to prevent them from going bang in people's faces, which would be quite bad.
Around my area, I still find discarded vape pens in bike lanes or road shoulders, so I'm continuing to collect them. Although I never imagined stringing them together into a battery pack for an ebike haha
That's pretty frustrating... that these are made to be disposable, but the majority of the components (apparently, good quality components!) aren't even reclaimed.
Why aren't these sold with a $200 deposit, so the user MUST return them or be SOL?
People in the community used to take pride in our harm reduction methods, rebuilding our own coils/pods for pennies on the dollar, mixing our own liquids in a safe and sanitary manner for pennies on the dollar, using rechargeable 18650 cells with BMS and smart chargers…
Capitalism perverts all things in time.
In a lot of ways, it follows the same trend of hobbies or necessities being developed by a community of the most devoted (eg ham radio, BBS/forums, electric bicycles) which then get taken/co-opted by investors and salespeople until the community is barely involved at all, and is actively harmed by commercial interests.
In the case of ham radio, commercial radio stations stood on the backs of brilliant engineers at Marconi as well as experimentalists doing odd things that were then refined. Things would be alright, until the commercial entities found that the allocated spectrum for ham radio would be "of better use" for privately-operated communications networks or whatever.
The rich history of BBS systems led to modern web forums, but then led to things like Facebook groups where it's a requirement to sign-in to read, let alone engage in the discussion. The Fediverse is more aligned to independent web forums (using a common protocol) than it is to a monolithic social media platform.
And then electric bikes. Or initially, motorized bicycles, which were a new concept when brought to the USA from Sweden in the 70s, as a solution to the oil crisis. That trend quickly faded, but left a group of hobbyists dedicated to homebuilt two-wheel mobility within a narrow yet still legal framework to run on the road. Who could have predicted that the advancement of lithium ion cells -- documented well by the flashlight community, btw -- would set off a renewed passion in electric motorized bicycles, which ultimately gave us commercially-produced ebikes with massive uptake? In Germany last year, the number of ebikes sold exceeded the number of acoustic (read: conventional) bicycles. What do these initial hobbyists have now? Mostly burdensome regulations because a small number of shoddily-built commercial ebikes went bang too often. And now a homebuilt ebike is viewed with great suspicion despite not accounting to much of the total population of ebikes at all.
Can you tell what some of my hobbies are? :)
I wish we had more options for repairable, reusable, rebuildable, sustainable products.
Companies can still make money if they are selling quality goods... people die and are born every day, so it's not like they would run out of customers.
The problem is that there are too many incentives for making products disposable, and not enough to make them future proof.
I've been vaping off and on for over 10 years now, and I'm utterly disgusted by the way so called disposables have become mainstream. Truely capitalism has turned out the most ecologically damaging way to ingest nicotine imaginable.