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Posting this here because it seems more bikeonomics related than tech rumours related, but it's sort of in reply or brought about to the discussion going on over there. I'm curious about eMTBs's impact on the MTB "market cap", whether you want to measure that by industry dollars or total number of riders or some other metric ("rider cap?"). I don't think this can be answered decisively as we haven't had enough years of clean data (setting aside any data-gathering difficulties or whether that's really happening industry wide) in the sense that eMTB has really only taken off recently in...

Ive been pondering the e-bike vs regular bike debate a bit recently, and if that conflict is unique to North America only at this point? From what I gather, Europe has heavily embraced e-biking in all forms, to the point where is it somewhat the default choice for most people. Here in the US, the debate of e-bike vs regular bike is still very much a point on contention, but that seems to be something unique to America biking culture, and not so much the rest of the world. Am I wrong on this, or is American protestant work/suffer culture...

Trek would be smart to pull an Orbea. Combine your DH/Enduro into one and base it on your long travel e-bike. 3 in 1.

"emtb can't give me suffering" Spoken like a man that has never run out of battery halfway into a group ride 😁

hey Blake. stay tuned on this, hopefully later this year. I'll try to make announcements. if you follow my youtube/instagram you'll know I've been trying to shut up bikes for 10 years LOL final stages of design making my way to first prototypes this month 😀

If you're ever able to get this project going, I look forward to cheering you on, enthusiastically adopting your new tech, and inviting all my friends to join the platform with me, and then later calling down curses on you and the Brines family for generations to come for the inevitable enshittification of your platform after you've sufficiently saturated the marketplace.

Yesterday I spoke with a guy who rode a couple of EDRs and would always ride xtr mech since forever but he was on a sram. He said not only the chain slap was unbearable on the new di2 xtr but he would also drop chains pretty much daily, to the extend the top of his crank which cought the chain became all scratched... The shifting was absolutely amazing but the reliability is horrible and he also noticed shimano sponsored enduro pros would run full dh chain tensioners or STFUs just to keep the chain on, which is mindboggling how...

The Alpinestars system has been mandatory equipment for motorcycle rally raid (Dakar etc) for a few years now and to my knowledge nobody has yet had an issue with it just 'going off' on a false positive, "I was just swapping out at 100mph in the sand but was totally going to save it if not for the airbag" scenario. The overwhelming majority of people in the world face zero ER fees but my last hospital stay was still 3 nights in, invasive emergency surgery and an additional week off work to recover so $850CAD to mitigate that seems pretty...

I just started listening to a whole podcast season that is about how outdoor gear, including camping, hiking, hunting, and even biking gear can trace a lot of its roots to the military. The Berry Amendment is a big reason why there is any domestic outdoor gear manufacturing industry at all. I've only started episode 2, but it's very interesting and I think a lot of people who are interested in this forum thread would think so too. https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/gear-chapter-1 It also goes into some of the sociology of how fashion developed for different outdoorsmen over the past few centuries and...

Banshee up to something new, the shock cage looks different. Maybe a metric shock uodate?

At the risk of bringing this back to bikes I listened to the second episode of the escape collective podcast (subscriber only I'm afraid). One of the things they highlighted was that Woom bikes has been having significant growth. If you haven't heard of them it might not be surprising because they focus on (pricy) kids bikes. My son's bike is now newer than either of his parents bikes and he's not even hit his growth spurt yet... Whilst it's easy to postpone a pricy upgrade for the adults it's a little trickier when the bike just doesn't fit. I...

The "multiplier effect" is an economic fallacy. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."

It's going to be hilarious the first time one of the Spec guys win wearing one of those vests, then has it triggered by a celebratory slap on the back or hug from teammate.