Blog/2025-11-28/A Better Class of Thief

The brown Radpower Radster Trail I now have.

I recently bought a Radpower Radster Trail since it was on sale for something like $850 post tax. That's not the cheapest thing in the world, but I did want an e-bike that I could use, be willing to lose, and that would accept a child's seat in the back at some future time.

A typical R&M bike. It can actually carry two children in little child seats

The last thing is something I've wanted to do until about two weeks ago, until I saw a Riese and Muller cargo e-bike, which I really want to buy to transport my kids in when they're older. But if I don't decide to spend the $7k (+tariffs) on an e-bike for the kids, I still want to be able to take Astra around in a little child seat.

Motorcycle Theft

Anyway, the number one problem in a city like San Francisco is theft. I've had my motorcycle stolen before in this town, and it's unpleasant. At the time I used my motorcycle for all commutes and I really enjoyed riding it. It was a real pleasure to use. Traffic didn't matter, and any time I was on the freeway and wanted to get away from a mess of cars I just punched it.

Notably, the mistake I made with the motorcycle is that I thought that since the motorcycle was unusable by anyone but the most sophisticated thief, and it wasn't valuable enough for a sophisticated thief, it was safe from theft. That's not true, and it should be obvious.

There is a class of very stupid thieves. They will put in a lot of work to do things that will never work. They will make their lives and yours hard and it won't even be a zero-sum game, or even a simple negative-sum game, it will just be a strictly negative payoff game: nobody wins anything. The Winning Move Is Not To Play.

E-Bike Theft

My Radpower Radster is not particularly useful stolen either. You can't really use it unless you're stripping it to parts. And if you're doing that, it's not worth doing it for a $850 bike. But the problem, of course, is that you cannot count on stupid people knowing that.

To avoid the problem of needing to secure a bike, I have relied entirely on Lyft e-bikes in the past. The downside is, of course, that there are no bikes when you need them or that you need to park them where there is no station or there is only a full station, and so on. But lately I've noticed that these are popular in my neighbourhood and I'm frequently failing to get a bike when I want one.

My e-bike needs a key fob or a code to unlock, without which it is just a 20 kg bicycle - not particularly useful in a city full of hills. But the thieves do not know that. So they will probably try to steel it. Consequently I need to carry around an annoying U-lock. Once again we are at the mercy of the idiot.

A Better Class of Thief

This makes me long for a different world. One in which the thieves are smart enough to only chase opportunities that are of high value. But perhaps that's impossible. So I'll settle for one where the thieves are scared enough of repercussions that they only chase opportunities of high value.