So Eben Weiss has an opinion. Shall we discuss why he is right or wrong?
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I think he’s right*. But it’s nice to have and for most people, a nice bike makes them ride it more. People should just stop caring about what others spend their hard earned money on.
*just the headline. Some of his arguments are a bit far fetched.
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The author is absolutely right. In exactly the same way they you don’t need a mustang, corvette, or any other car that is made to make you feel like a race car driver. It is utterly wasteful. But people want it, have the means to pay for it, so there is a market for it.
I ride a carbon bike lol but only after 10 years of riding alu (and also being a poor student / young adult)
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The pro racers who do need carbon fiber bikes…
Well, his premise falls to the floor immediately for me because Pro’s don’t need carbon bikes either. If the rules only permitted round tube, lugged & brazed bikes with downtube shifters & sew-up tires… they could still race each other to determine which rider is “best”. We’ve been there before and it worked.
Akin to the comment above, none of us needs ANY OF THIS STUFF! We have a 1st world lifestyle that makes it possible & attainable for some people who then take up recreational activities like this. Which level of item they chose in the spectrum of products is up to them and can have any number of reasons with or without any level of logic or rationale.
I just find the whole idea ridiculous because you can cut down pretty much anything that isn’t life sustaining as excessive. Considering my broad dislike for O generally speaking and the click-bait topic, this is about tabloid level trash IMO.
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He’s wrong in that he is regurgitating a bunch of 20 year old talking points as though “carbon” is a material with uniform properties and all “carbon” bikes are the same. He does not seem to grasp that there is a big difference in how composite frames behave, depending on design parameters.
Some carbon frames are light and delicate. Some are practically indestructible. I would challenge him to try breaking a carbon Cannondale Topstone, for example. The thing is a tank. He’d pretzel or coke can his metal frame before he ever managed to break that thing.
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He also seems to be talking about road bikes. I LOVE my ti bikes, but I’d have to think that if someone made a full sus XC bike with the same geo and travel as my Scalpel, it sure as heck wouldn’t weigh 21 pounds.
Don’t get me wrong here, a well made steel frame has a great feel to it, but I don’t want to push the pedals on a 25+ pound XC bike up Columbine & Pipeline.
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Not clicking anything from the big O. They can’t even have my 1/1000th of a penny.
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There’s an old russian saying that translates as “When a cat has nothing to do, it licks its balls”. I’m pretty sure there’s some american english equivalent for that, and I’ll be happy to learn it. But my point is - someone ran out of the ideas what else to write about, so he made this up. And perhaps no one else in the industry but the big O would publish something like that.
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those ads don’t sell themselves, nor do they get much if any ad money from me. (PiHole does a great job of just directing all ad domains into the void, NoScript does the rest)
I don’t know if there is a good English phrase for it. But i’m gonna start using this one 
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Next week: disc vs rim brakes.
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He would probably tell us that we don’t need brakes at all, and should be riding fixies 
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His conclusion is correct, his reasoning less so. But his clickbaity headline got me to read something at outside, so success I guess.
I would have strongly considered an Emonda ALR had the new version been out when I was buying a carbon Emonda last year. Going the other direction, I just bought an Ibis DV9 frame which was barely more expensive than a Specialized Chisel, with the advantages of being a) carbon, and b) not Specialized.
Just say no whenever you see an Outside or Velo link. F them and the damage they did to the cycling media landscape.
The headline is as dumb as ever. There’s no good reason to buy anything except food. Everything else is a luxury!
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I am pleased that the related O post on FB is receiving proper skewering and criticism 
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I mean it’s Eben Weiss, folks. What do you expect.
Can’t say I remember any posts by them before, but this sure doesn’t make me want to rush out to find any more of their work.
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He’s BikeSnobNYC
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Still no idea. Seems my minimal SM following practice is working just as I expect 
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