Yeah, this is really no joke.

Cube is a German company, and one of the largest bike manufacturers. Their bikes are ubiquitous here.

And German vehicle regulations are extremely strict. It‘s only an e-bike if it’s limited to 25 km/h, anything above is a „light motor bike“, which indeed needs a registration and a license.

Driving a vehicle without those is a misdemeanour* in Germany.

And I assume Cube did everything to reach out to all owners directly, so Police will assume you know those bikes are illegal.

Edit: * Technically. I mean, most likely they’ll just find you and impound the bike. But if they want to fuck you up about this, they totally can.

What ever it is you're taking, you need to either take more or less of it. And you should see a mental health expert rather soon. Also, please do the world a favour and stay away from vehicles of any kind.

Well it rubs many people the wrong way when people who are clearly not the addressee of an article walk into a room stating things like, "one is a hobby and one is a form of transportation" as if that's some kind of general life advice that applies to everyone.

Maybe if you lived in a city and worked in office

It might come as a surprise to you, but that's the vast majority of people.

Here is some general life advice: you are not the center of the universe, nobody is coming for your car, stop feeling addressed by things that clearly aren't about you, stop wasting other people's time with "well that wouldn't work for me".

Sure, I understand. It's still much cheaper than a car in the long run.

And prices will eventually drop with more competition and there's not a really functional second hand market for these things since they are too new.

But yeah it really was just an FYI in case at some point you realize "I can't do this by foot alone" you know there's a variety of options that's not a clunky "bakfiets".

I don't want to defend gulags but they didn't have poison shower rooms or child corpse disposal staff.

Neither did concentration camps:

"Interned persons may be held in prisons or in facilities known as internment camps (also known as concentration camps). The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.

The term "concentration camp" and "internment camp" are used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law. Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps"."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment

Don't minimize the Holocaust on your way to agree with everyone else that tankies are delusional assholes.

The singularity of the Holocaust lies in the extermination camps, where millions of people were murdered with industrial efficiency:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_camp

Saying that concentration camps exist(ed) in other countries is not Holocaust relativism.

That’s because you only metricated 40y ago.

No, they said they don’t like public transport…

Yeah, you absolutely need a wankpanzer to install a child seat 🤡

I live in Germany and know some people that are dependend on Cars and do not like it at all. Mostly outside of cities its just not possible to get to work without a car. If they would have alternatives they would switch.

Pfff, cry me a river. I know many of these people as well, and none, absolutely none of them has ever given any thought about where they live and work, but then complain that there’s no train running between those places. Yeah, trains do not go where you want them to, news at eleven.

And no, don’t start with the „not everybody can choose“ speech. Owning a car in Germany is expensive. You know who cannot choose where to place home and work? People who cannot afford cars. They have to find something that’s either walkable, bikeable, or on a public transport route.

For the vast majority of Germans, owning a car is a deliberate choice.

you cannot copyright ideas

I don’t know about US law, but in Europe you certainly can, and it’s an issue over and over again ending up in courts.

simply mentioning Zaphod Beeblebrox doesn’t trigger anything to do with copyright

Yes it does. Fanfiction e.g. is considered infringement of the creator’s right, and that doesn’t extend to the exact verbatim text but to general plots, names, etc. It’s even infringement if you write a story about „Härrie Pötter“, since it’s immediately obvious that it’s based on Harry Potter.

Some years ago a German discounter sold a costume that was an obvious reference to the TV depiction „Pipi Langstrumpf“, a famous character by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. Mind you, in essence it was just a really cheap wig and a dress somewhat resembling a tv character. The company owning the rights on the character sued and won.

Edit: oh! I missed the part where there were two courts that decided it was infringement but in the end the highest court overruled that and said it’s not: https://www.lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/bgh-urteil-pippi-langstrumpf-romanfigur-urheberrecht/

Which only proves that all of it is completely arbitrary and just a matter of opinion. /Edit

In another case, someone took a photo of a soldier, cut out the soldier, turned it into an outline, and printed and sold t-shirts of that. If you took the shirt and put the photo next to it, it was immediately obvious it was based on the photo. Here the court had no issues, because in their opinion it was too far away from the original work to be compared with it. 🤷‍♀️

So, it’s quite impossible to draw a line between an idea and an implementation, and that’s why thousands and thousands of infringement cases are ending in front of courts, and in the end the only relevant factor is the opinion of the court.

Yeah well, so you’re an orthodox Marxist and I disagree with you ¯\(ツ)/¯

But when people refer to base or true communism, the answer is just one.

Aha, is that so?

I dislike that naming since others played a big role on forming it as well

Yeah, you could say that!

So! Let’s talk about Restif de la Bretonne who was using „communist“ and „communism“ 60-70 years before Marx writes the „Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei“. Babeuf (who called himself a „communalist“) already tried to incite a communist revolution in the 1790s. De La Hodde calls the Parisian general strike in 1840 „inspired by communist ideas“. In 1841 the „Communistes Matérialistes“ publish „L'Humanitaire“, which Nettlau calls „the first libertarian communist publication“.

And how come that a certain bloke named Karl Marx in his 1842 essay „Der Kommunismus und die Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung" finds that communism had already become an international movement. Hey, I know that name! 🤔

Tell me, how exactly is Marxism (or whatever you want to call it) the one and only trüe communism™ when there’s decades of different variances of communism and movements of people calling themselves communists before the „Manifest“?

Just face it: your beloved Marxism is just one variant of communism, which for a variety of reasons has become the best known. But it’s certainly not „base communism“.

Since the joke doesn’t translate to English, for those who haven’t already guessed:

Zeuchs (pronounced „Tsoishs“) is a pun on Zeus (pronounced „Tsois“ in German)…