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E-Bike Industry Blames Consumers For Fires In Effort To Undermine ‘Right To Repair’ Laws
(www.techdirt.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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This, and the propensity for manufacturers to hyperfixate on trying to make everything proprietary, is why I will never buy a prebuilt e-bike. My bike is a converted regular bike, and if any component fails I can just rip it off and replace it with any of a variety of readily available yum-cha components. The prices a lot of manufacturers are asking for these pieces of shit are astronomical, too. If you're not afraid to run a wire or two, you can build a more performant bike with bigger battery capacity for half the price or less.
Yum-cha?
Lifted and corrupted from Chinese, broadly: commodity made-in-China parts, gadgets, or other tat that's all largely interchangeable and cheap. Brandless or with a functionally meaningless non-brand label. The type of stuff you used to get from Chinatown, but these days you're more likely to get from Amazon, eBay, or Aliexpress.
("Yum cha" could be less idiomatically translated from Cantonese as "drink tea," more broadly to "go to the dim sum place," or later even more broadly than that, "straight from Chinatown.")
See also.
Given that I understand yum Cha in a different context (drinking tea), isn't using this phrase to describe shitty Chinese parts a little... racist? Or at least, some form of cultural appropriation (I can't think of a better phrase to us right now).
Well, is it more or less racist than just calling them shitty and Chinese? Or shitty because they're Chinese?
I dunno. It's been in at least semi-common use since the early '90's as far as I can tell.
Well, I was curious too, don't have an answer for you. I just feel a little uncomfortable with a phrase that I know (and have used when speaking to Cantonese people) being used in a negative fashion for a completely different thing. But maybe it's just a cultural clash, so I wanted to clarify.