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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night, I decided to do a little research into the company who produces the duck sauce packets. Hidden businesses like this are always interesting to me, even if I find the quality of soy sauce in these packets to be so far below par I can't stand to use them. The NY Times had a great little article from 1994 on the same corporation. Interesting to see single serve packaging as a somewhat recent innovation instead of so ubiquitous as to be background noise.

As any article would, the footer was packed with items to read next, which led to an expose on the hustlers "gamifying" the load balancing algorithms for Citi bikes. That's a bit too polite of a way to put it. The TL;DR: is that some folks have figured out the precise algorithm used to pay volunteers, including timing intervals and calculations behind the scenes. Volunteers of a high status get unlimited bike unlocks, and have formed gangs that empty whole racks, move them a trivial distance, then move them back, to pull down up to $6,000 a month.

A small group of people purposefully wiping out whole bike racks for commuters, all day every day for their gain is about what you'd expect in 2024. I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.

The comment section is perhaps even more enlightening than the article. The "journalist" spent quite a bit of time running interference for the gang, with the classic playbook of repeating how much money Lyft makes and bitching about the downsides of the gig economy. To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.

To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.

I think what you're getting out of this is less, they don't care, and more that they make more money off of honest people than they would spend on labor to fix the problem and so they pursue a profitable path. They have no problem paying dishonest people, as long as they keep making money they don't care who is getting paid.

I'm of the schizo opinion that things like self-checkout are a form of psychological warfare against trust in society. Every time I self-checkout, I scan everything correctly, but I'm aware of how easy it would be not to. To tuck a couple small items in the corner of my tote bag and never scan them, to scan the $2 switch five times instead of scanning the four $10 switches, to ring up the organic carrots as ordinary carrots. And in my head I'm aware there is nothing the store will do to stop me, and that their profit margin is such to account out of the money they make on me for the person who doesn't scan it all. And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.

We've already seen this happen with "free" media, where internet commenters will act as if it is a personal affront that Youtube has advertisements, while ignoring that they can pay a pittance each month to remove all ads. Once people get used to free stuff, they can't stand the idea of paying for it.

Does self-check-out work differently in the States? At least in the UK, you need to put everything on a counter with a scale, that's pretty sensitive to the point where a minor discrepancy between an item put there and an item scanned and put in the bagging tray will get it to lockup till manual intervention by staff. All on camera too. Everything has barcodes too, so I doubt you can just scan produce differently. Or maybe I'm just naive here, I don't know.

The US mega grocery chain I shop at has all these things, but they are so hopelessly clapped out with no maintenance that the single attendant covering all 8 units spends 75% of their time clearing malfunctions so people can keep scanning and the rest of the time staring at their phone.

At the two major grocery chains near me, most fresh produce does NOT have a barcode to scan, just a four-digit code you have to type in yourself. So if you set an expensive steak on the checkout scale and type in the code for broccoli, it'll ring up as broccoli no problem. The self-checkout does have a voice announce out loud what fruit/vegetable you just rang up, but that's about it for enforcement.

I hate any store with self-checkout that does not disable those scales. They seem to have been designed with the assumption that you will not ever want to reorganize the inside of your bag as you put stuff in it. I end up having to bother the attendant every 2 items.

I think you're being naive here.

The scale exists, but it doesn't know the difference between a pound of ham and a pound of prosciutto, scan the ham, put the prosciutto on the scale, scan the ham again, put the ham on the scale. And they're not constantly monitoring the tape for minor irregularities in movement.

They’re very precise. Steaks are individually plastic wrapped here, so you’d have to find a ham that weighs exactly 454 grams or whatever. They beep very loudly when there’s any issue. The staff meticulously check your bag if the system flags any issues. I’m sure people still steal stuff, but it’s less easy than the original post assumes.

You clearly live in a much nicer area than me; meticulousness is absolutely not part of standard operating procedure at my local grocery stores.

THey have the technical ability to be very precise, but any modern store is going to have them calibrated to allow some gratuitous shifting.

You need only look at the difference between plastic and reusable bags to see how generous they must be by default. If you put a reusable bag down without an item, they're heavy enough to register as one, so there's a bit of technique to putting your first item down.

My local grocery stores' self-checkout kiosks all have a special "reusable bag" button - you press it, put your bags on the bagging surface, and continue on with grocery scanning. My one issue with it is that my bags tend to collapse in on themselves when empty, and the scale freaks out when I correct that to put stuff in them.

They make you weigh the bags first here. I suppose this presents the opportunity to finagle the system, but they always seem to watch me like hawks, and I’m hardly the median grocery store shoplifter demographically.

Hmm.. I'd like to claim that I've been prevented from just rescanning the same item twice, but I'm not sure of that. I'll try and see if that works for duplicate items next time I'm shopping.

I just double-scanned some store-labeled bagels today. I had two packages and one of the barcodes was damaged, so I scanned the other one twice. Worked fine. Even when I picked up the first one off the scale (to rescan it) and put the second one on, Indiana Jones-style.

I could 100% see fresh sliced deli meat being unique enough in a barcode (Item, weight to 1/100th of a pound, timestamp down to a second) that simple double scanning logic would catch you messing with this.

For pre-packaged anything meat with similar package weights, though, you'd doubtless be able to double scan.

The most I steal is exotic peppers being coded in as jalapenos or white onions as yellow, and that's 90% convenience of fast scanning and 10% the price difference.

I can scan the same item twice at my local grocery store. (The legitimate use-case is to scan one item X times when you're buying X copies, rather than manually going through the entire stack of the copies).

Maybe the scanners used in other countries are different, but here you will not be prevented from scanning the same item twice, provided that an equivalent item is placed on the scale. I often do this with multiple half gallons of milk for convenience reasons. The UPCs are the same.

This ignores Target and Home Depot, which allow you to use the hand scanner and never weigh the items anyway.

And that sense of being a chump grates on me over time, until eventually I start stealing things.

I don't experience this feeling myself, but I kind of agree that Self-Checkouts exist in an unusual 'middle-trust' zone where they are giving you some benefit of the doubt and yet still making you go through the motions to 'prove' your honesty by scanning everything and in theory if they find out that you took something without paying they could drag you back in and prove that you knowingly failed to scan an item with the intent to steal it. They won't because evidently the losses to such incidents are not worth hiring somebody to man a checkout counter, much less pushing the prosecution of a <$50 shoplifting case.

The real 'high trust' option is Honesty Boxes and that's surely not an option for any large corporation.

And it isn't like they're watching you to reward honest behavior! You don't get a prize for "100 items scanned at self-checkout without incident" or a badge that says "Certified Honest Customer". They just expect to make more money off you than they lose over the course of your patronage, and they are trying to zero in on the minimum level of surveillance needed to get you to follow the rules.

Me, I like the option of self-checkout because most of the time I'm picking up very few things at one time and if the self-checkout can shave 2-5 minutes off waiting in line I'm happy to do the work myself.

yet still making you go through the motions to 'prove' your honesty by scanning everything

As opposed to what? Tallying everything in my head? "Oh, how much was this carrot again? Let me go back to the carrots to check."

Barcodes are a labor saving device, not a compliance mechanism. It's absolutely trivial to circumvent.

Yes, and if YOU have to scan everything, rather than a cashier, that is also a labor-saving device... for the store that doesn't have to pay the cashier.

They're adding in an extra step for YOU, the customer to undertake mostly for the store's convenience. And they expect you to be honest while you do it, while still implementing anti-theft measures.

If you want an alternative, Sam's Club does Scan and Go where you can use your phone to scan your stuff as you shop, pay online, then mosy on past the checkout counter to the friendly staffer at the door who briefly checks if you've paid for all the items you said you bought.

Yes, we live in an era where every single person has a bar-code reader in their possession at all times.

THAT would be one hell of an alternative. Scan everything you're buying, and pay digitally (or pay at some automated kiosk), and then walk out the door.

Amazon Fresh had the best model for this, Just Walk Out. Cameras watch everything you do, associate you with the items you pick up and walk out of the store with, and charge you.

Unfortunately a few weeks back the store near me abandoned this. Now they've got a regular self checkout and "dash carts" that are basically a mobile self checkout, where you still have to scan items. According to Amazon customers didn't like it, which is baffling to me. Here's the press release: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/retail/amazon-just-walk-out-dash-cart-grocery-shopping-checkout-stores

The accuracy was perfect in my experience. To use Just Walk Out you'd have to scan your Amazon app when you entered and exited. Maybe folks figured out a great way to defeat the tech and theft was too great? But if not then they'd be much harder to defeat than regular self check out.

From what I recall, Amazon Fresh was the one where they needed to outsource the recognition to Indians for double-checking?

That was the media lying about RLHF.

Seems petty to me to complain about scanning your own items when it's a miniscule additional task compared to visiting the store in person, carrying items from the shelves to the exit and (gasp!) bagging your own items.

I also don't see how using your own phone to scan the things and using your own phone to pay makes it easier. What if I have a 10 year old brick that takes a minute to open anything?

We can quibble about who benefits the most from self checkout. The point I'm making is that the reason you scan stuff at self checkout is not to prove that you are honest, it's because that's the simplest way to implement self checkout.

Now, the guy at Sam's club who checks your cart and your receipt - that's obviously a compliance mechanism. It's probably not feasible to stop and frisk every shopper in a normal store, especially since in normal stores you bag your groceries and at Sam's club you don't.

They won't because evidently the losses to such incidents are not worth hiring somebody to man a checkout counter, much less pushing the prosecution of a <$50 shoplifting case.

The places around me that have kept their self-check out counters almost always have some staff at hand that man multiple counters at once, both to supervise and help out if there are any issues. Perhaps 1 staff member per 5+ counters.

And that person is always busy, either helping someone who can't figure something out, or verifying ID for alcohol sales, or taking an item off for a customer who accidentally scanned it twice, or...

And they're always needed, because at some places they'll refuse to accept those shitty mandated-by-law cloth bags are empty when you start.

Pro tip: Don't put the bag down until it already has a heavy item in it (Canned/Frozen food). The scale is more forgiving with heavy items.

Right, there's probably some benefit to honesty by having a real human present, I'd bet on the margins it makes people less likely to cheat.

But that staffer isn't going to catch someone failing to scan a $10 item or scanning something as a different item unless they're aggressively looking for it.

And in the hypothetical where I scan the ham twice and miss the prosciutto, or scan the cheap lightswitch ten times and throw the heavy duty switches in the bag, and they catch me, "Oh man, lucky you noticed! Long day at work, I screwed up, let me fix it quick." No one is getting arrested, no consequences.

Most people put media goods in a different mental bin than tangible physical goods I think, even if the physical good is very cheap. That's why "you wouldn't download a car" didn't land with anyone. The to-go rebuttal is "I bloody damn would, if cars could be downloaded".

I can't say your mindset is something I relate to. Even if I didn't have a reptilian aversion to even looking like I'm in position to take something without paying, I imagine I would feel disgusted with myself for contributing to the lowtrustification of my society for the sake of a few dollars of groceries. (I completely lack that aversion when it comes to downloading pirated media from the internet.)

I imagine I would feel disgusted with myself for contributing to the lowtrustification of my society for the sake of a few dollars of groceries.

How would you be contributing?

To be clear, I don't steal from self checkout, and doubt I will begin to. But it grates on me, as a citizen, that I know that I am paying Home Depot, and they have decided to allow dishonest people to steal from them rather than pay an honest cashier, counting on me to not steal from them.

Truth be told, their pricing reflects the extra "shrink", so you actually are indirectly paying for other people stealing due to their corresponding margins that they choose. It's been a while since I worked there, but I'd hazard a guess that they increase margins by about 2-3% to offset increased theft.

You are paying indirectly for other people stealing, but not because they raised prices, just because they couldn't lower prices as much as they'd otherwise be able to after reducing cashier hours.

If the money they have to spend to offset increased theft was less than the money they'd have to keep spending on non-self-checkout cashiers then they'd happily keep the extra cashiers and the extra profit.

That assumes we all just care about store prices, though. If self-checkout raises shrinkage from 1.5% to 2.5% of revenues and reduces labor costs from 15% to 13% of revenues (all numbers here are 10% from Google and 90% pulled out of my hat) then price conscious shoppers are going to push for self-checkout, but there may be shoppers who hate the extra work, or like or hate the reduced contact, or have opinions on changes in line lengths ... or, while we're on the subject, I suppose there may be a few shoppers who would rather pay 2% more to employ more cashiers instead of 1% more to enrich more thieves.

And in fact slightly nicer grocery stores (and fancy ones) both currently still exist and at least appear to be doing well for precisely this reason! Hard to separate out the geographic effects, and I do have an admittedly suburban bias, so can't say that the tradeoff you describe is for sure the reason why, but seems reasonable despite that.

I still opt for the line almost every time though. Scanning, let alone bagging, really does feel like work to me, so if someone will do it for free? Sign me up. I'll wait a little longer in line, no problem (though shorter would be better, and long lines do actually drive some people away -- my mother hates WinCo for this reason)

There's lots of high-end options out there these days. We tried delivery and curbside pickup in 2020, and the former wasn't worth the price but the latter is still how we do our regular grocery shopping. A few bucks extra, and we can't pick produce ourselves, but saving 40 minutes per trip is usually more than worth it.

Presumably, shops go from "self-checkout" to "hiding shit behind metal bars" because they found out that if they leave things out, they get stolen (more than the shop could absorb through raising prices). Thus, every additional thief contributes to the removal of high-trust features.

(Compare and contrast with media, where several game developers famously endorsed piracy, presumably due to the additional popularity being worth more than the loss on the unsold copies. And music gets uploaded to Youtube by the artists themselves.)

(Compare and contrast with media, where several game developers famously endorsed piracy, presumably due to the additional popularity being worth more than the loss on the unsold copies. And music gets uploaded to Youtube by the artists themselves.)

But here the transaction isn't between the developer or the musician, it's between you and the host who builds the platform and pays for it so that you can view the video. Why is youtube obligated not to turn a profit on you?

Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service, if they find that adblock is making them struggle. They don't seem to be struggling. (Wikipedia famously makes money from donations. I wonder if Youtube could do that, even in theory.)

I find that letting people who watch ads provide Youtube's profit margin instead of me doesn't make me feel guilty. Perhaps it's because I don't believe they're watching ads out of civic duty, but rather out of indifference/ignorance of adblock.

Compare: freemium mobile games where a couple of whales make it profitable, and the rest of the players are just there to bulk the audience up. Should the f2p players feel guilty, or whales feel like chumps? (Whales should feel like chumps in my opinion, but due to vastly overpaying for pixels, not for being taken advantage of by f2p players).

Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service, if they find that adblock is making them struggle.

And my point is what right do you have to any experience of their service without paying for it?

Because I can and there is nothing unethical about this?

I can download youtube videos and strip out ads added by creators with sponsorblock, Youtube can try blocking this actions.

And Youtube's free to choose a profit model that doesn't enshittify my experience of their service.

And I am free to not pay for Twitter and Youtube.

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The same right as I have to play a freemuim game without paying for it, or use a donation-based service without donating. There's no explicit or implicit contract that says I must pay; they simply expect me to willingly make some money for them.

Like I said, I simply don't viscerally parse it as stealing if I'm not taking any physical items away and they're clearly thriving. Whatever their contract is with their ad providers, or a game developer's contract with a publishing platform, it is beyond my inner morality. If and when it turns out that free ad-based platforms are dying out in favor of paid access only, I will consider how my actions contributed to that. Until then, it appears that my eyeballs are payment enough for Youtube.

P.S. Advertisement and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, in general. If I watch a thousand ads for a product I don't want and would never buy, or in some cases would avoid out of spite, it appears that both me and the ad provider are worse off.

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I've always wondered why the soy sauces in the packets always tasted off compared to the real sauces I've had. I always just thought that they were of extremely low quality. I never knew that they were simply not soy sauces. Thanks for the heads up.

The other throwback from that article is the listing of the ingredients without sneering at them as a contemporary journalist would - Hydrolyzed Soy, Corn Syrup, Sodium Benzoate, and a metric fuckton of dye.

The day I learned that there existed fake soy sauces (like La Choy) was a sad day indeed. Soy sauce is great. Now I check any new soy sauce to see if it's fake or not, and sure enough, last time I went to a takeout place, the soy sauce there was fake.

My boss insists La Choy is the best soy sauce and Kikkoman is inferior. This might say something about his tastes.

Here's that cyberpunk future you ordered.

Seriously though "e-bike load-balancing grifter" is a job description right out of Snow Crash.

I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.

More than likely its some ex-programmer for the company who wrote or worked on the algo and just let someone else have it.

I kind of hate it in the same way I really despise hackers/exploiters in online multiplayer games. Yes yes, very clever, you're technically staying within the confines of the rules as defined by the computer code, but any other player can tell you that isn't how they intended to play the game and it ruins the point for them, can you spare any thought for that?

Sure, maybe the game dev/Lyft can update the code and fix things to be less hackable. But in the meantime you're making everything subtly (or not so subtly) worse for everyone.

Grumble grumble low trust society grumble grumble

ON THE OTHER HAND. I'm also not a fan of gamification intended to save a company money by offloading labor to users by using incentives that explicitly aim to change their behavior patterns. At least this one pays out actual money rather than amorphous reward points or 'achievements' that have no intrinsic value.

Ultimately it is impossible to make any system that is even slightly complex 'perfect.' There are always weird edge cases, and always tons of people motivated to find and exploit those edge cases until the weakness is patched. Either you foster a level of social trust high enough that people will intentionally not exploit these loopholes (and indeed, will be white-hats and report them on sight!) OR you can have a society that is wealthy enough that these niche 'parasites' aren't worth addressing.

Me, I would never even consider this kind of approach to making money (unless I was truly desperate) because there is absolutely nothing about it that is fulfilling to me, and I'd be very acutely aware that I'm basically imposing an externality on other users of the bikes.

But I understand and mostly accept that there are people who get a lot of 'fulfillment' out of finding out ways to exploit systems and 'get one over' on the powers that be and for them the mere knowledge that they're getting away with an unintended boon is probably enough motivation to do it. They like this better than being a sucker with a 9-5.

And they have a role in society too. It doesn't do to have your entire society simply ignore weaknesses in their critical systems because everyone is too polite and honest to comment on them, and thus vulnerabilities can persist until a catastrophe emerges.

And at least in theory this type of person, it must be said, might still end up contributing quite a lot. A very significant number of big tech players in the early internet era got their start as phone phreakers, scamming the phone companies in a sort of similar way.

Yeah.

My preference for a high trust society isn't because I want all systems to be designed naively so that they only work if everyone does things the specific way and break as soon as people start doing things to exploit the system.

Its more like I want everyone to have a shared goal of keeping systems intact AND in generally improving them over time, rather than breaking them for immediate personal gain.

Phone phreakers weren't causing much damage (that I'm aware of), and the personal gain was minimal.

While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night

A succulent chinese meal? Hopefully you go through it without experiencing any manifest democracy!!

I’ve long wondered why people are habitually renting e-bikes. They’re much cheaper and easier to store than cars, so I’d point to the usual reasons given as not applying.

Like, it might be trendy social contagion, but you’d think people would notice that just buying the things is the better deal.

just buying the things is the better deal

You're paying for the ability to ditch the bike literally anywhere, and someone stealing it or wrecking it is not your problem.

In places where property crime is actively encouraged that is an underrated part of the package- and people don't bother stealing them anyway, because even if they weren't all GPS-tracked, they're very obviously stolen to pawn shops whereas private e-bikes are not (and if you want to be more cynical, the police will go where the local rental company tells them the stolen scooters are, where private citizens don't generally enjoy that even if you can prove it with an AirTag or similar).

I do own a bike but I rarely use it because using it involves bringing it in from my back balcony, through my apartment to the front door, then carrying it downstairs 2 floors (and all that in reverse when I'll be back, maybe tired). Then I have to carry a lock, I have to find a place to lock it at my destination and hope it's still there when I go get it. And that's a normal bike, NOT an e-bike, which is usually heavier, more expensive and appealing to thieves, and adds the concern of having to have it topped off before I take it out.

Browsing quickly, it seems the low-end of the "worth buying" ebikes starts around 750$ (so close to 1000$CAD). Mechanical components and batteries wear off on bikes, and those bikes at the low-end of the spectrum are likely Aliexpress specials that you cannot expect to get any significant post-sales service for. This is also no counting any electricity cost.

The local bike share program is 107$CAD from mid-april to mid-november (the months non-crazy dedicated "bike people" would consider riding in). After that it's 0$ for any number of "up to 45 minutes" rides in non-electric bikes, or 17c CAD/minute for an ebike.

Unless it's for daily commute, and/or you live at the ground floor and have a safe place to keep your bike, I can see the bike share system having massive appeal!

I do it all the time. Renting is not opposed to owning. I own my bike and rent e-bikes all the time.

Few reason:

  • I use it when riding my own bike isn't an option. It's normal to be going to some event where I don't want the hassle of carrying around my own bike. * * Renting is expensive. But, it's cheaper than an uber.
  • Can be faster and more pleasant to some. (me)
  • Bikes get stolen all the time.
  • Some employers give free memberships, which're significantly cheaper

You're paying for the optionality here -- you can take the bike for one ride then pivot to bus/Uber/walk for the next.

Buying is the better deal in money but severely constrains options.

Because, depending on the program, it can be significantly cheaper than owning. In Pittsburgh, the bikeshare program charges $120/year for a subscription with unlimited 30 minute rentals. Compare that to owning one, which is going to cost at least $2,000 for one that's worth buying, and comes with the attendant maintenance and theft risk. Compare that to transit, which in Pittsburgh is over $1,000 for an annual pass and requires you to operate on their schedule. Compare that to a parking lease, which is going to run you between $170 and $350 per month depending on where it is. And the network of stations is much larger than I would have thought, covering pretty much the entire East End plus the South Side and most of the lower North Side. (It should be noted that other parts of the city are cut off from any potential bike network by extreme topography and dangerous roads. This is doable for some people, but most will balk at the idea and it's certainly a liability nightmare.) For a certain kind of person, this subscription makes sense. Based on the pay-as-you-go rates, this makes sens for anyone who thinks they're going to use the service 20–30 times per year. I can't speak to how this works in New York or any other city.

In Pittsburgh, the bikeshare program charges $120/year for a subscription with unlimited 30 minute rentals.

Ok, this makes sense why you wouldn't buy one, but I have questions about the economics- are there just huge numbers of people who buy a subscription but prefer cars and only use it twice a year, or is this the product of a low interest rate environment?

Seems like the math will make sense for any young person who doesn't have kids nor a need to carry large loads around, and for whom a car + insurance + gas + parking would be a serious burden.

I don't know as much about the associated expenses of owning a bike, but reducing the risk of theft takes a pretty decent concern off your mind.

Bikes are hard to lock, and easy to steal, and police generally aren’t going to do a single thing about your $1500 bicycle being gone.

Ubiquitous e-bike/scooter rentals are preferable because almost all of the downsides are hidden from me.

They're also much easier to steal than cars [citation needed], so I could see that driving behavior in some cities. Being able to just drop it off at a dock rather than making sure you're locking it in a good, visible location could be worth a few bucks to people. For small apartments, storage could become relevant as well - small studios aren't exactly rare and storing a bulky e-bike is kind of clunky.

But e-bikes aren’t much bigger than a regular bike, and most people don’t rent those?

You have a point about theft, but I don’t know that it’s a huge one in a world where existing responses to theft are already priced into major purchases with things like insurance.

These folks do have the answer. The cycle in every American city has been:

  1. Pedal Bikes - The obese and the stylish simply won't use them.
  2. Electric Scooters - Cheap to produce, but a friend who works for the CDC has mentioned these are a public health nightmare. The fast-twitch nature of scooter handles, no suspension, and the tendency to be on the sidewalk meant cracked skulls everywhere. Plus they're easy to steal.
  3. Electric Bikes - These can be made heavy and difficult to steal, store bigger or auxiliary batteries, and are far more stable than a scooter. We'll see if they stick.

As a cyclist I can say that the risk of thievery is high enough there's no way for me to justify ever leaving my nice, light bike out of my sight. I'd rather outsource the risk to someone else, and they're great mobility enablers for tourists who misjudge the relative risk of public transport vs being on their own two wheels.

Pedal Bikes - The obese and the stylish simply won't use them.

To be hard to steal and stand up to abuse at all, they're also heavy and slow. My 20 year old boat anchor of a low-end hardtail mountain bike is far nicer to ride than a Citibike.

Before ebikes became common there were plenty of similar rental programs for pedal bikes, and the program in Pittsburgh still has pedal bikes. They're just slowly replacing them with e-bikes because they're an easier sell to the typical American who's allergic to exercise.

But honestly, even my very-fit parents for example still ended up springing for e-bikes, because... have you ridden one? The feeling is at least that you still get a workout (with lower assistance settings) but without a lot of the misery. They are wonderful (in everything but the price) Now, I'm well aware that in some sense, misery is a sign that exercise is working, and is not a "bug", but anyone who has biked a steep hill will tell you that they might wish that specific part of the ride would disappear. And lo and behold, with e-bikes, it has! Plus, the lower effort might be at least partially offset, or surpassed, if an e-bike gets you to ride more often than you otherwise would.

I'll counter @Rov_Scam here. The studies (admittedly that bike companies have done) suggest that people with e-bikes burn more calories and go further. I know with a high-class e-bike I'd feel more comfortable on the road to connect non-road sections for instance and open up my total range.

I also know that the appeal of a top-end E-MTB is fucking huge. Going downhill is 10/10 on the fun scale, but masochism is required to go up. An E-MTB lets you... double? the number of runs you get in a given day or carb bucket, so even very serious mountain bikers I know either have or would consider one.

From my perspective E-Bikes let people with a tiny fraction of my fitness level come with me on journeys. That's reason enough to consider them compelling for other people and me as a second-order effect.

I also would be able to use one as a substitute for my desire for a motorcycle. I can pedal very fast but only rarely get the experience of controlling the turning and maneuverability of a cycle which is super fun on its own. An E-bike would let me do that, so I've definitely thought about getting one.

I have to say, as an accomplished and fast road cyclist, e-bikes have ruined everything. People’s skills and awareness generally rise with experience and the shortcut (e-bike) means the roads are now packed with idiots who don’t know what they’re doing. You expect a rider who can pace at 20-25 mph to have the skills commensurate with their fitness. E-bikes ruined that. It’s decidedly worse now for actual cyclists. Delivery guys and out of shape people without the situational awareness of a seasoned rider have no place on a heavy, dangerous electric moped going 25 mph.

As an avid cyclist, I've taken a couple of test drives, and I'm honestly not that impressed. To be fair, the one I took the most extensive ride on was a mountain bike, so it's not exactly typical commuter conditions, and with that in mind, the whole experience felt kind of stupid. I felt less like I was riding a bike and more like I was driving some kind of motorized vehicle. Pedaling felt less like moving the bike and more like actuating the motor, as if i was just flipping switches. Shifting seemed pointless; why bother with the higher gears when I can just keep it in low gear and adjust the power output as necessary? Now, I don't want to knock e-mountain bikes particularly, because I know a lot of older riders who are only able to stay out because of them. I also don't have any problem with people who use them for commuting or otherwise as a form of transportation.

My issue is with the people who buy them for recreation and take them on bike trails. It used to be that the only people who would do 20 mph on these trails were serious riders on serious bikes who were skilled enough and had enough courtesy that they weren't a problem. It also didn't hurt that there are few people in good enough shape to do 20 for any distance. Now that any schlub can do 20 there are regular near-collisions with teenage jackwagons who think they're on dirt bikes. At a state park near me, where several concessionaires run e-bike liveries, they're having serious problems with erosion on the crushed lime surface. This isn't a problem with e-mountain bikes, because the terrain naturally limits speed (the only advantage is on uphill sections, which already see much faster speeds from downhill riders). On a wide open trail though, it doesn't take much skill to open up the throttle.

Beyond that, what's the point? I fail to see how much advantage there is to an ebike when riding on a relatively flat path at normal speeds. As much as I dislike the asshole riders, there are plenty of normal people riding them slower than I'm riding my pedal bike, and all I can think of is "Why?" Only the frailest among us would have trouble pedaling a normal bike at reasonable speeds, and these people don't seem to ride their ebikes any faster, or at least much faster. And I lied about e-mountain bikes. One problem I do have isn't with the bikes themselves, but the people who claim they get just as good of a workout on them as they did on pedal bikes. Bullshit. I went on a weekend trip with friends this past summer, a couple of whom had ebikes. A friend of mine had a gizmo you could use to estimate wattage, and we took turns trying it out. Those of us on pedal bikes averaged about 225 watts, and the hardest riding guy peaked at over 700 watts on a tough climb. The ebike guys averaged around 70 watts of output at the cranks, with little change on hills. Like I alluded to earlier, it's an equivalent workout to riding a pedal bike in low gear at low cadence.

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