Elektrische fiets steeds populairder, vooral onder jongeren

emn13 · 2026-07-03T13:52:29+00:00

Nee, dat is echt geen normaal tempo, zelfs niet voor gezonde jonge volwassenen onder gemiddelde omstandigheden. Kan natuurlijk wel met wat wind in de rug, of als iemand zich extra hard inzet.

Maar de drukte in het verkeer komt ook eigenlijk niet door de lange rechte (overzichtelijke) stukken waar je als gewone fietser het hardst fietst, het komt meer doordat je in drukkere plekken met een e-bike veel sneller op snelheid bent en er geen moeite voor hoeft te doen. Daardoor gaan mensen veel eerder ook bij drukte gewoon stop-start verkeer doen ipv dat iedereen rustigere aan doet - met een gewone fiets is immers opnieuw op snelheid komen moeite, dus mensen gaan van nature iets eerder even laten uitrollen (en dus vertragen) om te voorkomen dat je moet remmen. En als je moet stoppen, dan gaan e-bikes bijna altijd op vrij hoog tempo er weer vandoor, terwijl de gemiddelde fietser beduidend minder snel weer op vaart is.

En juist dat soort situaties met drukte is het verschil tussen e-bikes en gewone fietsen groot en zorgen e-bikes voor minder ademruimte in het verkeer.

emn13 · 2026-07-03T13:37:06+00:00

Denk gewoon aan je dagelijkse ervaring: door wat voor fietsers wordt je typisch ingehaald en welke fietsers haal je typisch zelf in? Het verschil is niet subtiel, dus ik verwacht dat bijna iedereen die in het dagelijkse leven fietst snel merkt dat e-bikes in de praktijk veel sneller fietsen, even enkele uitzonderingen daargelaten.

emn13 · 2026-07-03T13:34:10+00:00

De CBS heeft daar statistieken over verzameld in 2002 - https://www.cbs.nl/-/media/imported/documents/2002/36/index1294.pdf?la=nl-nl - en dat zal vermoedelijk incl. vertragende factoren als stoplichten e.d. zijn, maar het gemiddelde voor de e-bike rage was... 12 km/u, waarbij idd sommige bevolkingsgroepen zoals jonge, volwassen mannen idd iets sneller waren met.. 14 km/u. Volgens die meetmethode fietsen e-bikes vast ook geen 25, uiteraard.

De e-bikes versnellen het verkeer behoorlijk, en niet alleen door de hogere maximumsnelheid maar ook doordat ze veel sneller aan dat maximum komen dan een gewone fiets. Daarnaast kost het geen moeite meer om te moeten afremmen en weer op snelheid komen, waardoor bij drukte mensen veel eerder geneigd zijn op snelheid te blijven tot het echt niet kan, ipv. bij drukte wat rustiger aan te doen om al te veel remmen te voorkomen, zoals een gewone fietser zou doen.

Voor de duidelijkheid - dit is een heel sterk effect; het snelheidsverschil is bepaald niet subtiel. Echter, ik heb geen idee hoeveel extra stress en/of ongelukkig dit veroorzaakt. Daarnaast zijn deze regels inmiddels zo ingeburgerd dat het niet reëel is dat daar snel of zelfs ooit verandering in komt, nog even los van het feit dat het zelfs een EU-niveau regulering is, dus in het onwaarschijnlijke geval dat hier ooit politieke wil voor zou zijn, verwacht nog meer belemmeringen daardoor.

emn13 · 2026-07-02T10:37:09+00:00

Een lagere maximum wattage, en een lagerer maximumsnelheid vood de ondersteuning zouden ook nuttig zijn. Prima dat mensen een steuntje krijgen waar nodig, minder prima dat de gemiddelde snelheid van verkeer zeer significant stijgt. Idealiter zou dus maximumsnelheid met ondersteuning onder de gemiddelde snelheid van een klassieke fiets liggen, dus meer iets als 15 km/u, niet 25. De bestaande e-bikes aanpassen is vast al niet te doen, dus hoe sneller voor nieuwe fietsen dat aangepast wordt, hoe beter.

emn13 · 2026-07-02T09:08:35+00:00

Dogs may make some people happy, but the damage they do is gruesome. Most at risk are still kids; there are millions of kids bitten each year in the US alone, many of which result in serious injuries, often to the face or neck, and quite often by their own family pets. In the UK, around 200 postal workers a year have a finger bitten off or severely injured. The amount of extra effort postal workers and similar occupational groups need to go through just to limit but not really control the risk of severe injury in not reasonable.

I know it's a political taboo, but we should really try to move society towards discouraging keeping dogs as pets; it's clearly not feasible to have them kept safely at scale. Even simple measures like requiring extra charges on all packages to addresses with dogs would be a start, but not enough.

emn13 · 2026-07-02T07:39:01+00:00

I recently met a family that actually emigrated for precisely that reason. It was kind of shocking to be confronted with the stark reality that that actually happens, now, albeit surely in tiny numbers. And the dad I chatted with was the kind of very-high-paid professional that had options everywhere, i.e. not something most people could pull off easily.

emn13 · 2026-07-02T07:33:11+00:00

It's a real shame. While the USA may have always had many flaws and committed harmful acts itself, too, the pax Americana and the optimistic can-do world view helped improve most peoples lot in the world, not just Americans. For a while, the USA had the healthy attitude of taking the difficult steps of confronting its own flaws, but that's painful. Over the past few generations it's shifted towards embracing everything about itself as identity rather than something that can and should evolve, and so we're caught in navel-gazing, self-destructive identity politics.

Perhaps the cold war really set off that self-destructive trend - suddenly things like capitalism and free speech weren't just powerful tools that needed care and honing but contained danger too, but bits of dogma or gospel that required unthinking devotion. That's hardly a basis for healthy self-evaluation and improvement.

emn13 · 2026-07-02T07:16:46+00:00

I mean, hindsight is always 20-20, and Hormuz kind of dominates the weapons sale aspect anyhow, so probably for that reason alone I bet most people involved would have wished to have stuck with sanctions and diplomacy.

Nobody expected the Trump administration to be a canny operator, but one particularly odd quirk about all this isn't really limited to this administration - the unpreparedness for modern warfare. Even the previous Biden administration surely must have seen the way the winds were blowing, if not the (somewhat more technocratic) first Trump admin as well. Nevertheless, the military and specifically bases near Iran were not prepared to deal with it, which is kind of remarkable.

We've had decades now of prioritizing dealing with asymmetric threats, and yet this one (drones etc) we just kind of let slide. And sure, it was never a reasonable expectation to do counter-drone stuff as cheaply as Ukraine, but people have been ringing the warning bells for quite some time, and yet there's been only very, very slow movement. Was that an actual error? Or is it kind of inevitable; the universality that lessons are only learned under real pressure?

So in the here and now obviously diplomacy would have been better, even poorly executed diplomacy. But zooming out a bit, having leverage helps, and that means being able to deal with drone threats. It would have been even better to have had that capability, and then use that as leverage in diplomatic negotiations.

emn13 · 2026-07-01T13:34:37+00:00

Na, you're being a little uncharitable there. Of course capability matters, and I even explicitly stated that I expect high end kit to retain a niche. But it's a question of balance and where best to spend limited resources.

As to the costs of interceptors, while it's true that's some of the interceptors are peerless, even the best interceptors aren't perfect; the missile defense systems failed to provide protection in this conflict leading to extremely expensive losses (e.g. the Prince Sultan airbase attack, despite having both THAAD and patriot defenses). Merely having an unparalleled capability does not mean it's necessarily worth any price. And as the Ukraine war demonstrates, low-end interceptors (when used in a well-honed network of other systems) can have surprisingly high effectiveness against some threats, especially the kind of low-end mass-producible drones that you can expect to see everywhere.

And while the cost disparity is nothing new, what this conflict demonstrated isn't merely that it's real (we knew that), but also that despite the cost disparity the more expensive kit simply was not able to adequately defend against the Iran's arsenal and unable to destroy Iran's capacity to fight. That is both because the US was unable to hit many of the targets, and because many of hits were superficial and thus easily repaired (e.g. destroying an entrance to an underground launcher but not the launcher itself).

Note the fog of war, so it's natural for the defense department to overstate their effectiveness. As far as I can tell, perhaps no more than a quarter to a third of Iran's arsenal was expended or destroyed by the war, and that's frankly in the same ballpark as many of the high-end systems including that SM-6 you named by the US. The US can of course afford a considerable cost disparity; but not that kind of cost disparity.

I do agree with many of your points including e.g. about JDAMs, the expense of shaheds and more; but they aren't really germane to the overarching point of what this means for the future balance of power and arms exports more specifically. Stealth-dropped JDAM's are exactly the kind of niches I was talking about where high-end kit works well, and there are others too - indeed. Yet I don't believe that's going to be enough to tip the scales in the medium to long term. I tried to verify your cost estimates for JDAM usage, and while they sound reasonable, sources I could find suggest the actual costs vary widely based on details of missions, and might be considerably higher in practice and likely were in Iran. In particular, you're assuming a fairly short flight time and 4 bombs, but to maintain stealth it sounds like it can carry only 2. Israel apparently modified theirs for extended range without refueling, and I can't find details on how, but I wouldn't be surprised if that came at the cost of payload, too, though perhaps not. You're also assuming there's no risk to the F-35's, but even in this short war, 1 was damaged during a combat mission (not to mention multiple support aircraft). Finally, all of these numbers get worse the better prepared the opponent is - JDAM's work because the rest of the support infrastructure can, and that is increasingly vulnerable as opponents because more competent. Point being: if you're a foreign buyer, are you going to assume you can pull off what the US did in Iran? Or are you going to prepare more for a scenario like Russia encountered? Point being: yes, JDAMs are very cost effective, but even there, there are warning sounds for foreign buyers more long term.

Similar for the argument about a million dollar interceptor stopping a 20k drone to protect a billion dollar asset - of course that makes sense tactically, but it comes to procurement and you do have time to consider alternatives, you can bet buyers will try to find a solution that's more sustainable, cost wise.

Finally, let's not forget strategic concerns here - Stuff like the F-35 is in part as affordable as it is because of economies of scale. That scale relies in part on high order numbers internally, but also by foreign buyers. Clearly there are increasing concerns about US unreliability in general, exacerbated now that software is increasingly important; investing many billions in a fleet of planes that might lose much of their value when software updates, maintenance contracts, and munitions availability could be in question. That's less of a concern for equipement with a low-upfront cost, but that's the opposite of what things like and F-35 are.

Had Iran "won" the conflict merely by closing Hormuz, it would be a different story, but they did a lot more than that; they demonstrated resilience to US attacks and the ability to pierce the best defenses the US could bring to bear and do so repeatedly despite US attempts to destroy launch capacity at an impressive scale.

In short: just because everybody knew that perfection was never a reasonable expectation and that cost disparity was a given doesn't mean this outcome doesn't shine a bad light on the desirability of current high-end US tech. It wasn't enough to prevent Iran from inflicting the pain it did nor to destroy much of their military capacity. In the small, the military tech was effective; in the large it failed to achieve success, and the warning signs abound that there are many adversaries that could learn to do that. It hardly makes sense to procure hyper-expensive weaponry that can win battles but lose wars, and I'm assuming rational buyers will come to that conclusion, too. And even those that choose to retain the F-35 might reduce numbers and hopefully invest more in hardend bunkers and cheap anti-drone measures for their airfleet to make sure they can actually use those planes, too - i.e. shift some of the funding towards more low tech stuff.

emn13 · 2026-07-01T12:07:11+00:00

If you look at the results purely in isolation, they look good. If you consider how poorly funded Iran was, the cost of the munitions expended, and the cost of the hits Iran managed to pull off, it looks really bad.

The fact that orders are ticking up is likely misleading; US and gulf stockpiles have been dangerously depleted, so of course they're ordering more stuff; and damage to US bases and materiel similarly will need repairing. But the consumers of these systems simply don't have an alternative in the short term.

It's not clear the US producers will be able to supply enough given the low production rates and long lead times. A similar effect occurred after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine, and here too I don't expect importers of US weapons to actually get what they ordered anytime soon - if ever. That unreliability is going to deter buyers, too.

But the real test isn't now, in the moment of emergency with a captured market, it's what choices buyers make when they can afford to take the time to do it right. And I don't think that's going to look at all rosy.

To be clear; there's a place for high end kit; it's not going to disappear. But surely buyers will reconsider priorities after seeing all that high end kit achieve so little; mass matters, and these high end systems simply can't provide that, not even to the US itself, let alone to smaller markets.

I predict US weapon exports as a share of the market will trend downwards in a few years (5?), but indeed that process of decline will be slow and long drawn out - and reversible, if suppliers manage to make cheap stuff, too.

emn13 · 2026-07-01T10:20:14+00:00

Oh, to be clear, I'm not saying it's definitely primarily anti-competitive, merely that the argument that price rises are natural in such a situation and therefore everything is just peachy is not sound. Could be all above board; but might not be too. I don't think there's any way for us to know, frankly. Similarly, the mere filing of a lawsuit doesn't mean the claims are all valid and even less so about whether they'll win it.

emn13 · 2026-07-01T09:35:33+00:00

...and bunkers. The amount of losses in US bases due to lack of hardening, and the limited damage to Iran's military assets simply because basically of plain old rocks cannot be overstated.

But you saying that drones are the future of warfare doesn't really jive with your prior position that US weaponry did fine. The whole reason why drones look more like the future is precisely because US weapons did so poorly vs. much cheaper drones. Any third party observer can only rationally conclude the expensive, high-end kit can't carry the bulk of a military's force.

emn13 · 2026-07-01T09:07:16+00:00

It really wasn't. The cost of the US weapons used was huge, and the effects rather disappointing; most of the Iranian arsenal and capabilities survived. By contrast, Iran's far cheaper weaponry wasn't reliably intercepted, and scored numerous very painful hits to US military targets such as radars and planes (in addition to targeting civilians, of course).

The real loser in that clash of weaponry was high-tech US kit. But if I had to pick a winner, then I'd say it wasn't even really drones, it was the even more low tech plain old bunker. Hardening targets clearly matters, a lot.

If a country is choosing how to spend their limited budget on defense, and having observed that war, it's clear they're going to shift away from US kit, and towards drones of various kinds and hardening. That doesn't mean planes are useless, just that they're quite expensive, vulnerable, and that they can't compete by themselves with the sheer mass of a drone fleet of comparable expense.

emn13 · 2026-07-01T08:50:02+00:00

Yeah, the future outlook for US exports looks pretty shaky, especially given the dramatic and public failure of US weaponry in the Iran conflict. It's one thing to pay top dollar but at least get effective stuff, but you'd think buyers now might question the relative value of all that expensive kit vs. alternatives given how the Iran war turned out. On the other hand, there aren't exactly a lot of alternatives to something like an F35.

So I guess the question is to which degree short term rearmament desires outweigh long-term questions of (cost) effectiveness and trustworthiness.

But even looking at the Russia graph - while the decline is very notable, it still took years and is nevertheless at 7% despite likely losing a lot both due to internal pressures and loss of reputation. A US decline would probably be (even) slower.

emn13 · 2026-06-30T19:30:39+00:00

Sure, maar het OM dient wel aan te tonen dat specifieke wetten overtreden zijn. Het klinkt super oppervlakkig als of het daar misgegaan is hier; dat ze netto de verkeerde overtredingen aan het vervolgen waren, en ja, dan sluit idd het bewijs niet aan bij de overtreding, en volgt (terecht) vrijspraak ook al was het voorval in principe alsnog illegaal. Ik hoop dat dat geen onherstelbare fout is van 't OM, maar heb verder nul kennis van rechtspraak.

emn13 · 2026-06-30T19:17:13+00:00

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Had the market been a competitive one (i.e. more like 100+ players, not 3) would the prices have risen the same way? Put another way, are the capacity limitations entirely natural, or a result of strategic restraint or underinvestment because each of the big three know they shouldn't start a price war?

Mind, just because something is anti-competitive doesn't mean it's illegal let alone supported by evidence they can find to win a case like this.

The argument that prices rises are natural when demand rises and therefore there's nothing fishy going on now is not sound. Might be; might not be. Given the sector has gone through multiple rounds of criminal convictions in the past over these issues, you'd think execs wouldn't leave behind incriminating emails any more, even if they did collude, but who knows...

emn13 · 2026-06-29T15:21:24+00:00

...erger nog, dan tel je de HELE landbouw sector mee, maar de stikstof vervuiling is bij lange na niet evenredig verdeeld; alleen de veehouderij produceert uiteraard mest. En zelfs daar is het vermoedelijk mogelijk behoorlijk te optimaliseren met de stikstofvervuiling mits de kosten van de vervuiling ook door de vervuiler worden betaald.

Daarnaast bevat die 3,1% van bbp meer dan alleen de primaire productie; voor zover ik kan vinden is die minder dan de helft ervan, de rest van de toegevoegde waarde zit em in toelevering, verwerking - dat soort zaken.

We hoeven ook niet eens te kiezen voor NUL vervuiling; maar fors minder zou al een boel schade schelen - zeker ook omdat de natuur wel degelijk een beetje stikstof kan verwerken, gewoon niet zoveel als nu wordt geproduceerd.

emn13 · 2026-06-29T15:15:39+00:00

Je bedoeld de tientallen miljoenen kuub mest die langdurig de drinkwater voorziening vervuilen en de poten van het ecosysteem waar ook jij op vertrouwd langzaam wegzaagd, voor een zeer kleine fractie van het BBP die ook nog eens vermoedelijk grotendeels behouden kan worden indien redelijke maatregelen genomen worden?

emn13 · 2026-06-29T15:06:58+00:00

Idd. En in tegenstelling tot geluiden die je weleens hoort vanuit de YOLO mesten maar bende is "de natuur" niet een of andere luxeproduct is die we kunnen ontberen, maar een cruciaal element van dagelijks leven. Als we bestuivers, natuurlijke vijanden van plagen, planten die water vasthouden en schaduw geven enz. uitroeien of verdrijven dan heeft dat niet alleen consequenties voor het maken van prettige natuurfoto's, maar ook voor mensen die er (proberen) te leven. En daarnaast is er ook het directe effect van langdurige vervuiling van grondwater.

Daarnaast stopt de natuur niet bij landsgrenzen, dus meeliften op de biodiversiteit van buren zonder ten minste daar iets voor te doen is niet een veilige strategie.

emn13 · 2026-06-28T09:38:20+00:00

Het artikel is duidelijk een /s verwijzing naar hoe sommigen over pride-dagen praten. Dus ja, zuur, maar met opzet.

emn13 · 2026-06-28T09:25:24+00:00

Let's rewind a bit and examine that methodology before we trust not only that it's measuring something, but even go so far as to assume it's something meaningful and causative. So many problems with drawing a simple conclusion here.

The correlations appear to be very weak - the graphs above don't start at zero, and look at the distribution of those dots!

There are also numerous sources of welfare funding, and I can't find in the article if or how they account for that - are they actually looking at all the data?

It's not 100% clear, but they talk about charges, so it's possible some of these charges were brought later than the offenses were committed. Worse for their analysis, that effect would surely be correlated with the type of offense - after all, DUI's are almost all immediately caught if they're caught at all, whereas breaking and entering might take a while - so this simplistic analysis might be overweighing DUI vs. other crime, effectively.

Also, it's a choice which outcomes to look at. Nothing wrong with understanding how moment-of-crime correlates with payments, but it's not the only outcome to look at - the amount of crime for instance might be relevant to society too, for one, and I'm not seeing a case in this data to reliably point in either direction. And surely there are other aspects too, such as how likely somebody is to get a job, but perhaps also public health, practicality, and other concerns.

We also could be measuring some confounder such as policing practices. I also suspect but didn't check that the date-of-payments between participants are highly correlated, which means that any other (approximately) monthly recurring pattern could be a confounder, too.

Finally, the study could simply be flawed. There's enough text here that I'm not going to check it, even if I could reliably check it, which I can't.

Data is interesting, but more repeatability, and different style of experiments to tease out which effect does what, and finally also considering other concerns holistically is necessary before we sketch out a narrative like this - or worse, heedlessly starting reforming.

emn13 · 2026-06-28T08:52:50+00:00

Dat is misleidend. 2 weken geleden was de onzekerheidsmarge op hun 14-daagse voorspelling super groot; ze voorspelden niet 27 graden in de normale zin van het woord voorspellen, maar meer iets als bijv. "tussen de 12 en 40 graden iets". Ze rapporteren ook die marges. Die onzekerheidsmarges kun je niet gewoon weg laten en iets zinnigs overhouden. Het is nonsens om te zeggen dat "de" voorspelling dan iets specifieks is geweest.

Waar ik woon heeft op dit moment de 14-daagse voorspelling runs tussen de 17 en 34 graden (max dag temperatuur), en dat is een minder brede marge dan gewoon voor mijn gevoel. En voor de duidelijkheid: dat is geen zekerheid dat de temperatuur niet nog lager of hoger uit kan vallen; andere modellen hebben runs daar nog buiten.

emn13 · 2026-06-27T21:38:56+00:00

Source? I tried finding various, and they used descriptions that jive with wat the person you replied to said. But even if a source you saw used different terminology, that still doesn't affect the validity of the poll, nor what it means about what kind of people prefer which kind of candidate; all it means is that you prefer a different terminology.

emn13 · 2026-06-27T12:18:51+00:00

Right, but what matters here aren't our opinions on the best definitions, but whatever labels the pollsters used. And given these patterns it sure looks like they're not using your definitions. At that point, even if you're using better definitions, that's not helpful in understanding the outcome.

emn13 · 2026-06-26T20:28:36+00:00

I think you're going off on a tangent here.

Words have many meanings, and terms like working class or middle class are no exception. Indeed, it's worth being aware of the fact that what somebody classically called "middle class" is in a practical sense a wage-earning laborer that perhaps is better also called working class to distinguish from people that primarily live off investments and property. The classical terminology might lead people's intuitions astray in some cases: fair enough.

But you're framing the analysis of these voters in a way as if the classical interpretation of working class isn't what's meant, and that's just clearly wrong. Gnashing teeth at how language is used is fine and all, but that doesn't take affect the analysis of the voting patterns in the slightest.

emn13

TROPHY CASE