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Never thought I'd read gravel bikes described as "trendy" The primary purpose of gravel riding is needless suffering

because the numbers are wrong, it was 52.5% ebikes and 47.3% bicycles that were sold in 2025 in germany. in the mtb segment, it was 793500 emtb to 52500 mtb. source: https://www.ziv-zweirad.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Marktdaten-Fahrra…

Seems like a lot of e-bike talk in here lately, can you move this to the e-bike thread?

Previous Leogang Elite winners (last 5 years only) who are on the entry list and aren't injured or retired: 2025: Hemstreet / Goldstone 2024*: Höll 2023: Höll / Kolb 2022**: Walker 2021**: Brosnan Notable previous Junior winners: Alran, Zierl (still in Juniors this year), Bouladou, J. Williams, Gale * Bruni won the men's race in 2024 **Balanche won the women's race in both 2021 and 2022 Notes: In Elite, Höll has 2 wins, one 2nd, one 3rd, and one 6th and has 2 wins as a Junior. Goldstone has only 1 win in 4 tries at Leogang as Elite and...

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

In the last two years my local New England observations of bikes on the trail went from, oh wow that’s the first time I’ve seen a big group ride off all e-bikes, to, oh wow that’s the first group ride of all mountain bikes I’ve seen in months. Even the number of old school solo xc ripper guys is down… Riding bikes in the woods has pretty much changed again, the last big change here was almost everyone “serious about riding” being on a full suspension bike.

That Levo X is weird with that parts kit but put Deore level stuff on it and paint it camo and they'll sell an absolute shit ton of them.

One bubble counter argument to the multiplier effect, defense spending makes stable manufacturing companies that have some free time on the machines that can then be used to make bike components by the enthusiasts working there (5DEV) 😁

The point about defence spending having a positive affect on the rest of the economy- in my lectures this was talked about using the concept of the multiplier effect. This is the idea that if someone, ie the state, spends £1 on something then it increases national GDP by some amount because that’s been spent at a local supplier, who then pays wages, their employees go to the local butcher, who buys from the local farmer, etc etc. The issue with defence spending is it has a comparatively poor multiplier effect vs other forms of government spending. If I spend...

RE: Magnets - something I broadly agree with you on. (china owns the market) As to the future, I know the American Dynamism team at a16z, along with other VCs, has been circling this general problem: rebuilding domestic capacity around critical minerals, magnets, motors, defense supply chains, and industrial manufacturing. A16z wrote directly about the critical minerals side last year in It’s Time to Mine (linked below), and you’re also seeing magnet-specific startups going after the downstream bottleneck. Vulcan Elements, for example, announced a $1B rare earth magnet facility in North Carolina, partly backed by the Pentagon. I know y'all...

all they had to do was add an E and an I haha

Hello sir, you'll need to explain your take a bit better: given design and production timelines, the age of their prior platform, and when Rocky announced receivership, I am willing to put money down that this bike was finished the design stage and already in production at the time they went down. What were the new guys supposed to do, phone up their factories in Asia and be like "oh no, sorry, don't produce those, and we won't pay you for what you've already built. We'd actually prefer to have no bikes for the next 12-24 months and burn our...

I made custom crowns for some dorados a few years ago doing the same thing

I’m dying of thirst over here