How many people die on those roads who would live if they didn’t have to commute? How many pounds of tire end up in the sound killing salmon and orcas? How many pedestrians are those commuters going to kill? How many cyclists? How many kids get asthma from the exhaust? How much could we delay the most catastrophic impacts of climate change if we didn’t try to force people artificially in to the office?

If you want tax dollars you don’t need to force people in to cars. You need to make your city more accessible by bikes and mass transit. Those numbers are never coming back, and they absolutely shouldn’t. Adapt or die.

Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

A lot of people grew up being used to a safe county. The idea that the government didn’t actually keep people safe, and that leaders could be so insanely incompetent, was so shocking it was easier to believe in crazy conspiracy theories.

It’s pretty easy to believe in an incompetent government after 9/11, but W came after Clinton and Bush Sr. The first Bush was the head of the CIA. He was evil, but highly competent. Clinton was clearly a world leader, also highly competent. Before that you had Reagan, who was Machiavellian as fuck running secret wars around the world. You had decades of these people looking like they were playing geopolitical 4d chess, then you had this clown who was playing checkers with pidgins. Then you had this incredible shock of the biggest attack on the US since Perl Harbor. It broke a lot of people’s brains.

Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant -Blue Scholars

Bonus in Dutch - Bent Je Bang - Hang Youth

There’s a Q six letters in. There’s 12 months in a year, which is 6x2. That means THIS YEAR BIDEN RIGGED THE SUPER BOWL! It’s clearly an admission from a secret agent associatied with Q.

/s just in case it’s needed, because we live in the dumbest of all possible time lines.

No, the civil war 2 looks like mass shootings and terrorists attacks. It started with the Oklahoma City Bombing. Liberals just refuse to acknowledge it’s existence.

There’s an argument to be made, though, tha the US has always been in a state of civil war. The Spartans would symbolically declare war on their slaves every year. That’s kind of what slavery is: a constant war on a portion of the population. That’s aside from the whole genocide of native folks. Since the 13th amendment didn’t actually ban slavery, it never ended and if you look at standing rock, you know that whole native genocide thing never ended either.

Then when you contextualize all this with stuff like the Red Summer, you realize the recent violence is just the normal terrorism that white supremacists do every now and then to get control back. There probably won’t be a war with two side, more just escalation violence from one side leading to the systematic murder a huge chunk of the population. The question is if it will be officially sanctioned like the Holocaust, or continue with the ad-hoc stochastic terrorism like the Rwandan genocide and the Serbian ethnic cleansing.

I expected more snipers, bombings, and attacks on infrastructure but if Trump wins it’s definitely gas chambers.

Democrats are too afraid of “real war” to actually do something about this. If they did they might have to deal with the mess for real and open themselves up to political challengers from the left.

Employees aren’t afraid anymore so companies are trying to reinstate fear.

They aren’t two completely different problems, they’re in direct opposition. Making cars more tolerable increases demand for cars. Improving mass transit and bike infrastructure decreases demand. One is sustainable, the other is not.

If you are stuck in a place that actually requires a car then this makes sense. Between the two you’ll save a ton of money.

In the long term though vehicle to vehicle communication will be required for all cars on the road. You will have (probably property) computer in your car controlling it. Unless you go back to like the 80’s or something you’ll still have a proprietary computer in your car that will need to be replaced.

But even getting a bike for occasional trips prepares you for gas prices spiking or your car breaking down.

I wish you did too. The only way to get it is to fight like hell for it.

If people used bikes or ebikes in the overwhelming majority of cases where it’s possible, it would make it a lot easier to fix the small number of situations where it’s not.

Don’t you think it’s interesting that even though the vast majority of car trips are a single person going less than a mile, every time someone brings up bikes the rebuttal is always “what if I need to move my family of 16 and their refrigerator 800 miles in freezing rain!?”

The US was built on rail. The infrastructure could be fixed. It’s a choice not to fix it. It would be better to put in energy to fixing this than creating an open source way to access a proprietary transit system. Infrastructure is the problem, car vendors are just exploiting it.

Edit: correction, 52% of trips in the US in 2021 were under 3 miles and 28% are under a mile according to US DoE (https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021). 2% we’re over 50 miles. Over 60% were under 5 miles, which is still pretty easy with an eBike given functional infrastructure.

Yeah, I have two kids. We used an eBike in the US. The Dutch would find your comment absolutely hilarious. We do not own a car and haven’t needed one since we moved to the Netherlands. The problem is that you have a proprietary transit infrastructure that forces you to use property cars. Infrastructure is your vendor lock in.

The majority of car trips are under one mile and have one passenger. In the vast majority of cases you can replace a car with an eBike.

This just reminds me of someone else saying something like every time you suggest a car replacement suddenly everyone needs to carry a couch 300 miles in the snow.

It is not possible to be free while you have a car. But yeah, some times your forced in to that by the complete failure of American infrastructure. Cars continue to be your worst option, even if you’re forced to use them.

Edit: Correction, over 60% are under 5 miles, 28% are under a mile. Only 2% are over 50 miles. 69% of the total annual vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. occur in urban areas. In 2019, average car occupancy was 1.5 persons per vehicle.

https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/mobility/personal-transportation-factsheet https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021

If you can, get an eBike. Cars need a ton of expensive resources. No matter what car you get, you’re basically renting it for $10k/yr anyway. Bikes can be fixed with a small set of tools in a living room without thousands of dollars of diagnostic equipment.

If you can’t do a bike because of distance, consider a motorcycle. That’s at least a little more free than a car. Cars are the worst.

There’s already an open source bike. Carrying several tons of metal everywhere you go is kind of a bad idea anyway.

My kids, mainly.