Cars. They are everywhere and are like cigarettes. Addictive, bad for our environment and bad for ourselves.
And we even try to keep using them as long as possible by switching to an electric version, just like cigarettes. “But it’s electric, it can’t be that bad!”
Humanity is not running to its doom, it’s taking a car.
Obviously just outlawing cars tomorrow would cause mass deaths around the world as society isn’t equipped to deal with it, so what could we transition to?
My assumption is that you’d suggest public transport for all? But that wouldn’t save us, as only about 1/4 of transport emissions come from cars, it’d just make us die a little slower.
Edit: if the next 5 people to downvote this could leave a reply it’d be appreciated. I try my best to do my bit for the environment but I depend on my car to participate in my local community given, and so I’d like to know what the ideal solution is? What should I be asking my representative to be voting for?
if you design a city with the assumption that people won’t have cars, you can make it easier to bike and walk to most of the things you need. This kind of urban design is superior to the car centered urban design in that it’s cheaper, healthier, safer, and more environmentaly friendly.
What if you don’t live in a city? We are country folk and operate a farm that feeds you city folks. Cities can’t exist with out us back woods country folk. Our “car” works every day.
I’m talking about urban design. If you live on a farm, this doesn’t apply to you. However, it does apply to the 98% of people in America who don’t live on farms.
Nobody is suggesting that you put a light rail out to the local farm. The urban area will be urban and the rural area will be rural. Where work is needed is connecting up the suburbs and ensuring that you can get to your places of work/school/etc without driving. Some cities never deconstructed themselves for cars (see SF/NYC) and are doing well. Other cities (see Cincinnati, OKC, etc) have room to grow.
So which city are we going to tear down and rebuild first? And we have to come up with some new laws, like you can only own a home that’s within walking/biking distance of your work.
We had a taste of a viable alternative, thanks to the pandemic. Remote work - it accomplishes most of what you propose without totally ditching private transportation. Maybe we should make that a law - business has to show that physical presence is required or they must allow employees to work remotely.
So which city are we going to tear down and rebuild first?
It’s not a good idea to tear down a city and build a new one centraly planned. Don’t be Bob Moses. We want gradual, community directed, increases to the density of cities, and we want to stop building new stroads.
We have to come up with some new laws like you can only own a home that’s within walking/biking distance of your work.
That’s a bad idea. We should just tweak the existing zoning laws to allow high density everywhere, and mandate it in some places.
[Remote work] accomplishes most of what you propose
I strongly disagree. The commute to and from work should not be the only transportation need in a healthy life. People should also visit shops, visit friends, and visit parks. These trips should not require a personal car. Not to mention the large (majority?) number of jobs that absolutely cannot be done remotely.
The pandemic did not cause large changes in uban design, and absolutely did not make streets safer for pedestrians, so I disagree that remote work accomplishes most of my goals.
That’s not what I said, it isn’t 25% of all emissions, and I didn’t say it wasn’t worth it. I pointed out that the deaths from lack of cars without a plan would outweigh the lives saved by removing cars.
It absolutely is worth finding a way to remove cars in their current form. There are also far more effective things we can do, like eat less meat.
LOL nobody said that tomorrow they would be outlawed. People are saying that we can undo the damage that was caused by 70 years of Boomers and their parents who destroyed the world in the name of the open road and “freedom”. It was an aberration and we’ll be returning back to how things were prior.
My comment wasn’t meant to suggest someone was making that argument - I was just setting the premise for my question.
I dont know why my genuine curiosity has triggered so many people…I was hoping for some rational suggestions that I could incorporate into my lifestyle.
As for going back to what it was like 70 years ago…I find it unlikely. There are a lot more people on the planet than there were back then and prosperity is broadly increasing…in reality we’ll transition to more sustainable and healthy living which I think entails better urban planning and greater government action on pollution.
As a person that hates cars, I still have to disagree. For transportation of goods (like building materials) and in remote areas, they are sometimes the only efficient form of transport.
Change “cars” to “personal vehicle” and you’ve got a winner. We still want delivery drivers and taxis and such. What we want to do is avoid the use of a car when it’s unnecessary, and that really leaves those who practice a trade/service and need to transport their tools. Heck, most could probably use a cargo bike.
There is a subtle, but important, difference between letting people know your product exists or improved, and brainwashing people into buying your product.
Is a grocery saleman at the local saturday market allowed to shout about the sale he is doing on strawberries? Because that is also marketing.
I fully agree that the average advertisement you see on youtube is pure cancer. But what about an advertisement for an emergency fund for a disaster?
As usual with “where do you draw the line” questions, I suspect there’s a reasonable way to do it, but I don’t know what it is, and finding a good answer might take some work. It would be worth investigating if there was any possibility advertising would actually be reined in.
The only departement you don’t really need, except your competitors have one, so now you need one too.
And the problem for me is not with a simple ad for the local grocery store. It’s when they made a science out of influencing people and targeting specific groups and working on your subconscious.
I would like to think that I’m not affect by marketing. But the truth is that we all are being led by subtle marketing too, not just the obvious marketing.
So in a way, they affect the choices I make and I don’t want anybody but me to make the choices.
Obviously marketing is not going away now. If anything, it will only get more intrusive and intense. I hate marketing…
But in reality, military aerial drones are much more terrifying. It sounds like a sci-fi dystopia that a billionaire could type your name, press a kill button, and within a few minutes a drone locates and bombs you. But this tech has already existed for over a decade, and is being used by the US in the Middle East and North Africa.
After you hit a billion dollars, you should get a party and a nice trophy that says “You Won Capitalism!”, and then you should start from scratch again.
Uncured bacon doesn’t exist. It’s a lie. Uncured bacon is cured with celery nitrates and nitrites instead of synthetic nitrates and nitrites. It is all cured bacon.
And that’s fine. If people want a more naturally cured bacon that tastes worse and has zero health benefits, and costs more, calling it “uncured” is still deceptive. It’s also crowding out the actual bacon market on the low end.
Yes, American grocery stores sell a product called “uncured bacon.” It’s bacon cured with celery juice, which is a natural source of nitrates. You can also buy pork belly if you have the right butcher.
Sometimes my grocery store also has it, but in a specialty meats section. I didn’t want to presume that every store would. I’ve heard good things about Costco but I don’t live near enough to one to justify a membership.
I believe the bacon cured with celery nitrates actually has more nitrates than regular bacon as well, because it’s not regulated like using regular nitrates.
So it’s much worse for you than just eating normally cured bacon.
You’re right, but that’s the ‘paradox’. Given our most pessimistic estimates for the chances of life we should have seen at least something that was a huge give away by now. Maybe better telescopes and observation methods will find them, we can get a spectrum from exoplanets. That’s incredible; but so far all we see with our telescopes is more lifeless space. That doesn’t mean they’re not out there, it means our estimates are wrong. It probably means that we just don’t understand what factors are required to create life very well and advanced life is incredibly rare.
Yeah, but we have like a billion years of “observation time” minimum, since there’s every reason to think one of the alien species will be expansionistic. They’re not here yet, blurry photos aside.
There is a very good chance that this is the first truly habitable era in milkyways history and species now active are truly the first in sensible distance.
Source? Like, sure, there probably wasn’t enough heavy elements in the first few billion, but it only takes one planet to grow aliens, and aliens could colonise the whole galaxy in just a few million years, so you have to constrain things pretty tightly for us to be early at however many billion years in we are (the exact count is uncertain these days).
Well you can find this material usually with “we are the first”-solutions to the Fermi Paradox.
If dust and gas is too hot it can’t form new stars. So star formation has it’s own cycles. Too much new big stars and star formation halts for some time till things cool down. There are plenty of collisions in Milkyways early history that caused a star birth eras when there was very little heavy elements present. There is also probability that milkyway had an active center in early days that kept things nice and sterile.
Okay, yeah, I’m familiar with the argument. I’m not alone in being unconvinced, though. There’s a lot of exoplanets, including rocky ones around very old stars. Honestly, I felt assuming just a billion years of potential alien arrival was conservative.
There is also probability that milkyway had an active center in early days that kept things nice and sterile.
I don’t know enough about the radiation one of those galaxies produce to comment on whether it could be sterilising. A thick enough atmosphere can block pretty much anything, though.
What if I’m in my own home minding my own business and an attacker named Enola comes and waltzes right in my door and how do I protect my property then?? Some people smh
Public transport too. It really seems like every time a public service is privatised it goes to shit, almost as if for-profit motives aren’t aligned to public interest.
Let me say it with a quote of Richard Dawkins on the example of the God from the old testament:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
Well, I hope you did read The Bible by yourself to make these statements, rather than leaning only on Dawkins, who seems to seek for reasons to be an atheist. I also hope you did understand the context of what is written in Bible, relating to people’s norms, God’s treatment of those norms, history of nations, prophecies, etc. Besides, the same “Old Testament” God had sent His Son to the Earth to save humanity, rendering The New Testament and the doctrine of forgiveness, love, friendship, and being the better human being.
Did God instruct people to hate each other? Did He say “kill, murder, hate everyone, and destroy the world” or something like that? I thought He said the complete opposite. Like, love each other, don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t bear false witness, don’t be envious, etc. What’s so bad about all of it?
Also, we’re talking about God, but you said “Gods”. Why’s that? What do you have against other gods or gods in general?
Absence of evidence is absence of evidence. And let’s be honest here, we are very similar, we both don’t believe that 99,9% of the gods don’t exist. I only have one more god than you which I don’t believe in. You see no evidence for Zeus and Thor existing same as me.
I’m not trying to blame you for not believing or anything like that. We’re just discussing, that’s all. I’m trying to say that various things can exist or not exist, regardless of them being proven or not. Even not being proven, God still can exist. As well as there are various things in the past that were once proven, but didn’t actually exist and later were deemed as mistakes or misunderstandings or some other phenomena.
Yes each of the gods anyone can come up can exist, even those people don’t come up can exist. But as long as there is no evidence for any of them a reasonable stance is to live your life as if none of them exist.
But sadly what people do is not just doing a thought experiment that some hypothetical god could exist, they use the god they came up with to justify all sorts of terrible things.
Agreed, but why not attach it to the side of town they’re on, or at least give them a normal, full road like all the others if your going to bother the rail traffic?
I’m guessing it was a driveway originally, and crossed the tracks way back when that was no big deal, and became a public road later somehow. It’s still cursed.
Well the waste of land part doesn’t really matter much cause if we ever did need that land for other things, it’s still there. It’s not as though building a golf course makes that patch of land into an irradiated wasteland that can never be used for anything else again.
Golf is equivalent to licking an entire countryside so nobody else can use it. The only activity in human history that used more space for less people were the Apollo moon landings.
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