I’m into mountain biking and it’s fucking criminal what they charge for bike prices these days. A good bike with decent quality components is like $5000-$7000. High end name brand components will bring that up to $9000 easily. Higher end frames and boutique components can bring it into the $11000-$15000 range. It’s fucked lol.
Oh and for an electric bike add $2000-3000 to the price.
Building an ebike is way cheaper than buying one, but off the shelf mid drive stuff from Bafang, etc is generally not as high quality as Shimano, Bosch, TQ, etc. I’ve got a Bafang mid drive bike that’s crazy powerful with 2300w, but it’s heavy as hell and very loud/not super refined. My TQ bike is 25 pounds(!) lighter and while it only has 300w of power, the power delivery is incredibly natural and responsive, and the bike feels more like an actual mountain bike to ride on trails instead of like a motorcycle lol.
Yeah it’s honestly too much lol it destroys cassettes really quickly 😂 but it can almost go 40 mph on the street. This is an M620 with an Innotrace controller.
Your notion of “decent” is certainly not the same as 99.99% of the population. Or you live in a very expensive place and have a very specific use of mountain bikes.
Yes my notion of “decent” is skewed because I’m doing 3000 foot climbs/descents on highly technical and fast trails with drops, jumps, rock rolls, wet roots, etc. You can ride those on a $500 Walmart bike but you might not survive it lol. There’s deals to be had, direct to consumer bike brands are considerably cheaper (like $1000 cheaper in general I’d say) and there’s obviously more budget oriented options, but their performance, longevity, and weight are typically not as good.
I was going off of a ballpark average of what I’ve been seeing in media and bike shops over the last couple of years. Seems like every mountain bike even with lower end components is $5k+ these days, but media tends not to cover cheaper stuff because it’s not as interesting.
I got one for $20 at a garage sale and worked ok until the tires gave out and I haven’t gotten around to changing them yet. But I don’t need high performance tires or anything since I just bike around the neighborhood, so that will be what, another $50? Bikes are cheap if you don’t care if they’re brand new.
Im baffled youre confused, this clearly isnt a direct quote of anyone. This style of reframing a statement to emphasize a specific aspect you want to draw attention to while making clear who made the original statement isnt new.
I saw that video of the group of degenerates stealing hundreds of pairs of socks from a discount store, something tells me they weren’t planning on eating those socks
Maybe they were too poor to buy both clothes and food. Shit’s tight for a lot of people now. Me and my SO both have pretty nice middle class jobs and still have to be really careful with our money. If I was still a pizza cook I wouldn’t be able to afford clothes for both me and my kids, for sure.
Unless you know what circumstances are driving someone to crime, you aren’t in a position to judge them.
I’m more wondering why someone would spend that much on a damn bike. I bought my car for 15k of course that was in 2010 but I’m still driving it to this day. Toyota Corolla before anyone asks.
Edit: I just realized this was posted under fuck cars and now I feel like a dick comparing it to the price of my car. It wasn’t intentional but still holy shit that’s still a stupid amount of money to spend on a bike. Like how can you even justify that price? It has to be a completely insane amount of markup.
Probably a status symbol to some extent. And some people are so rich they will spend a lot more for very slight, incremental improvements. For them, the difference between $5k and $15k might be more like $5 and $15 for an average person.
Someone who spends 10k+ on a bike is probably fit as fuck, so biking 10s of miles to get somewhere is nothing, plus you can take it on the train. New bottom bracket every couple years, maybe 200 in tyres, maybe 100 in brake parts. Cost of getting around, it only takes a few years to pay for itself even at those prices when you add on the actual costs of running a car, saying all this as someone who drives. If you don’t need to move a bunch of stuff or other people around, in terms of transport cost even an expensive bike is cheap of you use it.
Almost certainly competition / training. A bike like this is your exercise, leisure, hobby, your source of competitive spirit, your hobby, and of course its your baby who you love and keep tuned up. A 15k car is a great value, a workhorse. Is it your baby? Maybe it is if you’re still driving it.
These bikes are at the same level as what is being used at professional levels. You can always get a cheaper bike if that’s not what you are into, but it’s like looking at an f1 car and saying it’s overkill for the road, well no shit, it’s made for the extreme end of the sport. Calling these bikes crazy is like conflating the price of an f1 car to the price of a civic.
Definitely not my baby. Just a cheap reliable source or transportation in a city that you have to own a car to get anywhere. Paints chipping off and it has rust but still gets me to work everyday so I don’t care. I’m a tightwad so spending like this will never make any since to me. I’m just not a person that wants many material things.
now I feel like a dick comparing it to the price of my car
I don’t think its an unfair comparison. There’s simply nothing that you can do to a bicycle that will make it more complex or difficult to manufacture than the most bare bones automobile. So it is a bit crazy that folks can charge $15k for a fancy frame and tire set, when an extra ton of precision engineered material costs the same.
At some level, it just feels like gouging. A good bicycle should be the sort of thing anyone can afford, not a luxury good reserved for wealthy hobbyists.
Entry level racing bikes are about $3-5k these days. That’s a top end Pinarello with custom paint. It might be $15k, but it’s probably closer to $10-$12k with those wheels.
I’m the guy who puts my $8k mountain bike on the back of my 20 year old shitbox Honda when I drive to the trails
Singapore has some of the best mass transit in the world. It rivals Japan and Spain in quality. And in a city as dense as it is, it kinda has to be or the metro area simply couldn’t function. If everyone in Singapore needed to own a car to get around, the city would be in permanent gridlock 24/7.
I think most people forget when you get these bikes it’s like buying an f1 car in motorsports. That 15k bike is probably nearly identical to what the pros are running, like maybe they use a different hand grip or seat but for the most part that’s a completely custom chasis, redesigned from the previous year and up to spec to compete in a professional capacity right off the bat.
Thank you! Finally someone speaks out, too. Singapore is a totalitarian capitalist dictatorship and the closest thing we have to a true cyberpunk dystopia. It is a horrible place with clean sidewalks.
The law hadn’t been applied decades, male homosexual sex was decriminalised in 2007 and legalised in 2022.
The legal situation before that was inherited from the British Empire, a 1871 law which made all kinds of “sodomy” (oral, anal) illegal for everyone. By now you also have protections against discrimination, hate speech, etc. There’s a gazillion things to criticise about Singapore you don’t need to make shit up. Other things on the list of “don’t criticise about Singapore” include public transit, public housing (though they could ease on the mandatory ethnic mixing a bit), and the food. Oh gods the food.
Dictatorship is also kind of a misnomer… Singapore is one of a kind. Certainly paternalistic as fuck, authoritarian it depends, the PAP is actually listening to people and considers electoral results <70% an issue that must be addressed by fixing shit – and no they don’t mess with the ballot: They mess with media and election timing, as is British tradition.
Two particular things that stand out is the lack of corruption and actual respect for the law, otherwise the whole system would long since have collapsed. That is: All the authoritarianism is actually codified, there’s laws you can read, rights that you have, you’re not going to prison because some big-wig doesn’t like your face or your business idea is interfering with their kleptocracy but because you broke the law, and there’s no easily abused laws like Thailand’s lese-majeste, either. All that is highly untypical for your usual run-off-the-mill dictatorship where favours and loyalty are the only legal currency.
Things to criticise that aren’t caning for littering or insanely hardcore drug laws? Things like the abysmal status of foreign workers. Or, from a more Confucian perspective actually: The failure of the grand daddy PAP to properly see discontent coming, and address them proactively. Lack of connection to younger people who don’t happen to be PAP members.
Chewing gum is not illegal, the importation and sale is. You can bring in gum from abroad and chew it. What you do with it afterwards is also important.
Can do too, Germany, the nicer part of the city here. Left my car with open windows in the summer, with my stuff in it, over night, nothing. Wouldn’t do it in the northern city though. My seats would’ve been gone.
I’ll raise that by the time I left my car window open for 4 days in a semi big German town. After police couldn’t get ahold of me, a neighbour covered it himself with plastic so the inside wouldn’t get wet.
Reminds me of when my friend moved to Las Vegas, the shitty side of town, not the strip. And on the first day he had every wheel stolen off of his car when he stepped in a store for a couple of minutes.
People do that all the time in my area. It’s not because it’s “safe”, it’s because they’re stupid. Then they want to join my communities so they can spam it with their stolen bike posts and get help finding them.
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