You don't think these batteries from China have no standards and will explode burning your house down?

You can still go cheap if you know how to manage & inspect batteries for flaws & avoid potential dangers.
Learning how to operate, store & maintain batteries would likely prevent most of these accidents.
Just like avoid smoking while pumping gas or check for empty before cleaning a gun.
Regulations can only go so far, but education & practice for each individual is what keep yourself safe from accidents.
 
You can still go cheap if you know how to manage & inspect batteries for flaws & avoid potential dangers.
Learning how to operate, store & maintain batteries would likely prevent most of these accidents.
Just like avoid smoking while pumping gas or check for empty before cleaning a gun.
Regulations can only go so far, but education & practice for each individual is what keep yourself safe from accidents.
I guess I am going to stop cleaning my loaded gun at the gas station while smoking a cigar and using my battery operated head lamp.....just too darn risky!
 
I worry more about the people putting Tesla Powerwalls in their garages and basements. If one catches on fire the fumes produced are toxic and no way to take them outside to burn themselves out.

Lithium batteries can experience themal runaway and this has been a problem with cell phones and laptops and even the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. With the counterfeit Canon video camera batteries there were incidents with them exploding in the camera and that would be a problem for the user. It is why I would never buy batteries from eBay or Amazon where counterfeit items are commonly being sold.

I keep our two e-bikes in an outdoor shed that is 20 feet from the house so if a battery was to catch fire it would damage the shed but not my house and no worries about toxic fumes.

We can have an exaggerated notion of the risk thanks to 24-hour news programs and the internet. 40 years ago a fire in another state would not even make it into the local newspaper or on the evening news. But these news distributors need a great deal of content to keep viewers' attention and so troll the wire services and regurgitate articles written by pseudo journalists with zero filtering.

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper you’re misinformed,” Mark Twain

This is equally true today with Fox News and their ilk.
 
I worry more about the people putting Tesla Powerwalls in their garages and basements. If one catches on fire the fumes produced are toxic and no way to take them outside to burn themselves out.

Lithium batteries can experience themal runaway and this has been a problem with cell phones and laptops and even the Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. With the counterfeit Canon video camera batteries there were incidents with them exploding in the camera and that would be a problem for the user. It is why I would never buy batteries from eBay or Amazon where counterfeit items are commonly being sold.

I keep our two e-bikes in an outdoor shed that is 20 feet from the house so if a battery was to catch fire it would damage the shed but not my house and no worries about toxic fumes.

We can have an exaggerated notion of the risk thanks to 24-hour news programs and the internet. 40 years ago a fire in another state would not even make it into the local newspaper or on the evening news. But these news distributors need a great deal of content to keep viewers' attention and so troll the wire services and regurgitate articles written by pseudo journalists with zero filtering.

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper you’re misinformed,” Mark Twain

This is equally true today with Fox News and their ilk.
I would only add......Fox....MSNBC and CNN......none of them are news stations.....simply entertainment for their dumb audiences.
 
I would only add......Fox....MSNBC and CNN......none of them are news stations.....simply entertainment for their dumb audiences.

This.

Journalism is dead, and everything in the media is given a tilt to the right or left, to various extremes, depending on the paper or network.

I often find myself searching for truly neutral, un-spun news sources, which is an impossible task. But I’m old enough and “wise” enough, I guess, to know how the media works and to have a sense of recognition as to which outlets lean which way.

The scary thing is all the folks who believe everything they read and hear and then amplify that on social media, etc.

Free Speech is an important, maybe the most important, pillar of our country. But as they say, just because you have a right to free speech, you don’t have a right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater which is not ablaze.

When the media puts a spin on a story to suit their agenda, it creates misinformation, false news, and can create just as much if not more harm than yelling Fire!

Rant over. :censored:;)
 
I started listening to NPR since I was a teen.
Here's a recent debate for governing free-speech:
 
This.

Journalism is dead, and everything in the media is given a tilt to the right or left, to various extremes, depending on the paper or network.

I often find myself searching for truly neutral, un-spun news sources, which is an impossible task. But I’m old enough and “wise” enough, I guess, to know how the media works and to have a sense of recognition as to which outlets lean which way.

The scary thing is all the folks who believe everything they read and hear and then amplify that on social media, etc.

Free Speech is an important, maybe the most important, pillar of our country. But as they say, just because you have a right to free speech, you don’t have a right to yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater which is not ablaze.

When the media puts a spin on a story to suit their agenda, it creates misinformation, false news, and can create just as much if not more harm than yelling Fire!

Rant over. :censored:;)
I totally agree.......one of the primary reasons we are so divided in this country......money talks......people are lazy....very sad.
 
News reporting should never involve opinion, reporting what is known as facts is journalism; not opinions about the facts.

When news channels start to have reporters, hosts or panels of "guests" to give opinions on the news; that's no longer journalism.
 
News reporting should never involve opinion, reporting what is known as facts is journalism; not opinions about the facts.

When news channels start to have reporters, hosts or panels of "guests" to give opinions on the news; that's no longer journalism.
Yep.....it's a big money game......facts are not important....just hook your followers and tell them what they want to hear.....they'll belive their truth.
 
Yep.....it's a big money game......facts are not important....just hook your followers and tell them what they want to hear.....they'll belive their truth.

Important to differentiate between entertainment vs journalism.
Critical thinking takes practice to develop,
practice to differentiate facts from opinions; journalism from entertainment.

"Destroying any nation does not involve the use of atomic bombs or long-range missiles..
It only requires lowering the quality of education and allowing cheating in the examinations by the students.
Patients die at the hands of such doctors.
Buildings collapse at the hands of such engineers.
Money is lost at the hands of such economists & accountants.
Justice is lost at the hands of such Judges.
The collapse of education is the collapse of the nation." -Mandela
 
News reporting should never involve opinion, reporting what is known as facts is journalism; not opinions about the facts.

When news channels start to have reporters, hosts or panels of "guests" to give opinions on the news; that's no longer journalism.
People still have opinions tho. I agree that you can't go around dressing up your opinion as a fact and calling it the truth, but you also can't banish opinions entirely from public discourse and act like all "real" journalistic conclusions are reached in a mathematically perfect bubble of logic.

"Journalism should be based on fact instead of opinion" IS an opinion. Yet we can still agree it's one that's worthy of trying to enforce. But in doing so we've let a commonly shared opinion become our guiding principle here, and that's why we still need to know what they are sometimes even if they don't carry the same cold hard weight of proof as tried and tested numbers and evidence.
 
People still have opinions tho. I agree that you can't go around dressing up your opinion as a fact and calling it the truth, but you also can't banish opinions entirely from public discourse and act like all "real" journalistic conclusions are reached in a mathematically perfect bubble of logic.

"Journalism should be based on fact instead of opinion" IS an opinion. Yet we can still agree it's one that's worthy of trying to enforce. But in doing so we've let a commonly shared opinion become our guiding principle here, and that's why we still need to know what they are sometimes even if they don't carry the same cold hard weight of proof as tried and tested numbers and evidence.

No one ever said people cannot have opinions.

Journalism should always be based on facts, period.
Opinions are not journalism, period.
Opinion without evidence, is just BS, period.
When you allow opinions without evidence to be reported in the news as journalism, that's when journalism lose its credibility;
that's how people distrust the news, since it is no longer based on facts, no longer journalism.
 
For my day job, I'm a regulatory project engineer. One of the things I deal with is certifications of lithium ion battery packs, their chargers and in combination with the products.

We love lithium batteries because of their light weight and energy density, but they are fussy. They need to be treated in a certain way in order to not be a fire hazard. They cannot be hit too hard, nor charged to too high of a voltage. They need constant current charging until the pack reaches a certain voltage, and then they switch to constant voltage charging with the charge current tapering off.

They also cannot be too hot, so there has to be a temperature sensing scheme. Over time, cells can fail within the pack, but the pack and charger have to be smart enough to detect this and not try to charge to the original voltage, or else the rest of the cells in the pack are subjected to overvoltage conditions that could be dangerous.

My point is that a lot of things have to be done correctly for lithium ion batteries not to be fire or explosion hazard. As some have pointed out, it is not common, but the stakes are high enough that we have to address it with proper safety testing and certifications or else people are going to be hurt.

Certain people ridicule me for pointing out improper or missing safety certifications, claiming it's not important, but then when someone's house is burnt down for lack of them, the same type of people are out for blood, wanting to know how it happened. The hoverboards several years ago were the latest thing like that. Those people were quick to say: "Chinese junk, burning our houses down!" The good stuff is made in China too; the difference is in the thoroughness of safety certifications.

Remember the Samsung phone a couple years ago that exploded in a guy's shirt pocket, shot something up into his neck and killed him? The culprit was an aftermarket battery pack that was not properly certified. Yes, the odds are low, but the stakes are high. (life and death!)
 
What are the odds of your ebike battery going up in flames vs your car catch fire in an accident?

What are the odds of car fires getting reported as much as ebike battery fires in the news?

Knowing the odds put things in perspective.
 
For a five minutes read of the news, I use 1440. It seems to be free of political bias. It reminds me of the pre-CNN days where all you got was the 5 minute spot on the radio, or the 30 minute program on TV at night.

I blame CNN for all of this. Not because of their obvious bias, but because they created 24 news hamster wheel. What can you possibly talk about for 24 hours? The answer: Opinions.

 
Amid fire concern, NYC banning sale of electric bikes without UL-listed batteries


"So yes, I definitely support the idea of improved e-bike safety. But let’s all keep the scope of this problem in perspective.
At risk of some type of moral relativism here, I’d say there are some significantly bigger threats to public safety rolling around that we could be committing this type of energy and legislation toward fixing.
Around 300 pedestrians are killed by cars in NYC every year.
So far this year NYC has reported two deaths from e-bike fires. While each is a tragedy, the difference in scale is obvious."
 
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