Living under capitalism is living under the yoke of devils. You cannot escape them, and you sometimes make deals with them, whether because you have to, or you think the deal will work out for you. But that doesn’t mean you should love the devils, and if you can get away from them you should.

Yeah, most people’s phones or shoes or whatever probably have some dirty pasts, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up on making any kind of good or moral choices. We’re locked into capitalism, and we will have blood on our hands whether we are aware or not, but using that as an excuse to give up on trying to do better is not a coherent moral position.

I think there’s a significant difference between “any shoe I try to buy is shady, and if a wholesome option even exists it is incredibly hard to find/buy/pricey”, and “sure Amazon workers literally die in warehouses, but next day shipping on my random knickknacks is soooo convenient!”

There exists real and valid use-cases for prime, as several other people in this thread have expressed. But just shrugging and saying “eg whatever” because you want to save $1 on random junk isn’t one of them.

Maintenance and Repair, regular batteries, etc

I don’t think you understand how simple E-bikes are, they are essentially just bikes, and their maintenance and repair vs any car is miles away, even if we only consider the savings vs oil changes, not to mention things like car batteries or tires.

I ride an e-bike exclusively to get around, usually several hundred miles a month, for the past 3 years, and my battery is still at near the capacity when it was new. I don’t think a new battery every 10 years (if that) counts as “regular replacements”, again comparing to the amount of waste involved in automobiles.

Yes, comprehensive public transport would be better overall, but that requires large amounts of public coordination and money, and still takes away agency from the commuter. An e-bike is relatively cheap, and can be a switch made on a person-to-person basis, so you don’t need to fund a billion dollar train to make progress, you just need to get as many people as you can on bikes.

And, crucially, if the batteries all die and we’re in the apocalypse… It’s still a bicycle. You can still pedal around like normal

Heck yeah! Got my first one recently too (Ace), since mines fairly invisible I wanted a big ol flag to let people know what’s up haha