I think a lot of car enthusiasts are coming around to this point of view. Cars are fun, but traffic isn't. Give people alternatives and they'll be off the road.
Plus, car dependency makes cars suck. The reason they're all egg shaped CUVs or boxy SUVs is because they're essentially appliances. Everybody needs one so they make them for the lowest common denominator. Fun, affordable cars just don't exist anymore. And even Ferrari is making an SUV.
Finally, I think every car enthusiast will recognize that there are a lot of terrible drivers out there. Making licensing more stringent would weed a lot of these people out, but unless they have a viable alternative they'll just drive without a license.
Republicans love big government so I won’t be surprised if they do. Just like they prevented Austin from enacting a city-wide requirement for construction workers to get a mandatory 10 minute water break when working outside in +35c heat.
This is stupid. We understand people need to use a car for certain jobs. If you have to transport people or materials throughout the day, then yeah - I think most people agree that you should use a car or truck to do so. We make this point over and over again on Reddit or here.
I saw that video of the group of degenerates stealing hundreds of pairs of socks from a discount store, something tells me they weren’t planning on eating those socks
Maybe they were too poor to buy both clothes and food. Shit’s tight for a lot of people now. Me and my SO both have pretty nice middle class jobs and still have to be really careful with our money. If I was still a pizza cook I wouldn’t be able to afford clothes for both me and my kids, for sure.
Unless you know what circumstances are driving someone to crime, you aren’t in a position to judge them.
I’m into mountain biking and it’s fucking criminal what they charge for bike prices these days. A good bike with decent quality components is like $5000-$7000. High end name brand components will bring that up to $9000 easily. Higher end frames and boutique components can bring it into the $11000-$15000 range. It’s fucked lol.
Oh and for an electric bike add $2000-3000 to the price.
Your notion of “decent” is certainly not the same as 99.99% of the population. Or you live in a very expensive place and have a very specific use of mountain bikes.
I think most people have no idea how fast ebikes are in a city environment. Yeah my bike is capped at 30km/h but I make a lot of that time up by never being stuck in traffic. Short trips are always faster than driving and medium trips are usually comparable.
People also don’t seem to understand how bikes (and good transit) are completely unaffected by rush hour, accidents, or construction. My buddy (who is pretty sympathetic to urbanism) seemed confused when I said my trips always take the same amount of time, the concept seemed outlandish to him.
@Moneo@Eheran I live in a city that constantly shows up in the top 5 for worst traffic in the world. BUT, we also have a sizeable bike path network. I almost exclusively move on my bike (I don't have a car, but sometimes I take a taxi or a bus). The other day I told someone I haven't been stuck in traffic in years, and they couldn't understand how (the answer is easy, you don't get stuck in traffic in a bike path. Even when there's a lot of people, you keep moving along).
I think this is the only comment I’ve ever seen anywhere referencing Chicago. Congratulations! Your prize is the knowledge that my wife and I still occasionally use jazz-hands as code for “that person had it coming.”
Fair enough. I enjoy musical theater, but that one never grabbed me. So the movie’s my only point of reference, and I wasn’t a big fan. Don’t think it deserved to beat out Gosford Park or Fellowship of the Ring for best picture.
I’m in my early forties and live in an area where no one can fathom that I live without a car. I don’t make a lot of money and spent most of my adult life hovering around the poverty line. I have not had a car for twenty years. I understand that living car free is difficult but global warming is going to be a lot more difficult. Our addiction to convenience is a problem. Additionally until a significant minority of people decide to make life choices that allow them to live car free capitalism is just not going to cater to a better model. I feel like defensive reactions like this come from people who know that they are doing harm but don’t have the willingness to change their own behavior. I know it’s not easy but when has doing the right thing ever been easy.
This is why Singapore is the safest country in the world. You can leave your laptop overnight on a bench and pick it up tomorrow. The death penalty for drugs is a worthy sacrifice considering the extremely positive societal outcome.
Rich people or not, it doesn’t matter. Both rich and poor abuse drugs. Following this logic US would be the poorest country with 1% ultra rich utopian-like people as well.
Also cannabis is a legal drug in only 10 countries worldwide. It’s not universally approved and won’t be any time soon.
I don’t think the issue is “I want to do illegal things in public without consequence.” It’s more, “I don’t trust the mechanisms of enforcement to use this power justly.”
For example: Radio City Music Hall used facial recognition tech to identify and ban a lawyer whose firm was suing them. She wasn’t even working the case. RCMH just issued a blanket ban. It’s abusive.
And there are other risks. Stalking is a huge one. (Some creep takes your pic at the supermarket and now you spend a year of your life getting creepy messages and feeling unsafe everywhere you go.) Or there’s the risk that people who participate in lawful protest will face retribution or punishment by corrupt law enforcement.
I got one for $20 at a garage sale and worked ok until the tires gave out and I haven’t gotten around to changing them yet. But I don’t need high performance tires or anything since I just bike around the neighborhood, so that will be what, another $50? Bikes are cheap if you don’t care if they’re brand new.
Im baffled youre confused, this clearly isnt a direct quote of anyone. This style of reframing a statement to emphasize a specific aspect you want to draw attention to while making clear who made the original statement isnt new.
Thank you! Finally someone speaks out, too. Singapore is a totalitarian capitalist dictatorship and the closest thing we have to a true cyberpunk dystopia. It is a horrible place with clean sidewalks.
The law hadn’t been applied decades, male homosexual sex was decriminalised in 2007 and legalised in 2022.
The legal situation before that was inherited from the British Empire, a 1871 law which made all kinds of “sodomy” (oral, anal) illegal for everyone. By now you also have protections against discrimination, hate speech, etc. There’s a gazillion things to criticise about Singapore you don’t need to make shit up. Other things on the list of “don’t criticise about Singapore” include public transit, public housing (though they could ease on the mandatory ethnic mixing a bit), and the food. Oh gods the food.
Dictatorship is also kind of a misnomer… Singapore is one of a kind. Certainly paternalistic as fuck, authoritarian it depends, the PAP is actually listening to people and considers electoral results <70% an issue that must be addressed by fixing shit – and no they don’t mess with the ballot: They mess with media and election timing, as is British tradition.
Two particular things that stand out is the lack of corruption and actual respect for the law, otherwise the whole system would long since have collapsed. That is: All the authoritarianism is actually codified, there’s laws you can read, rights that you have, you’re not going to prison because some big-wig doesn’t like your face or your business idea is interfering with their kleptocracy but because you broke the law, and there’s no easily abused laws like Thailand’s lese-majeste, either. All that is highly untypical for your usual run-off-the-mill dictatorship where favours and loyalty are the only legal currency.
Things to criticise that aren’t caning for littering or insanely hardcore drug laws? Things like the abysmal status of foreign workers. Or, from a more Confucian perspective actually: The failure of the grand daddy PAP to properly see discontent coming, and address them proactively. Lack of connection to younger people who don’t happen to be PAP members.
Chewing gum is not illegal, the importation and sale is. You can bring in gum from abroad and chew it. What you do with it afterwards is also important.
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