Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it’s normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They’re oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.
I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.
The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.
That’s what I’m talking about also. Experts who are being paid to express an opinion, but in a circumstance where their peers would hold a consensus opinion that opposes what they are stating in court. Those experts are mercenaries.
That’s a good way to put it - it’s laziness. Maybe it’s laziness though the burden of history where the structure of the system is cobbled together from hundreds of years of increasingly irrelevant procedures and precedent that can’t be modernized with society. I’m not a legal scholar by any stretch, but the whole thing looks suspect to me.
I’ve heard from medical experts that appear not to be mercenaries, but my issue is that there’s no way for the legal system to distinguish between a person who takes the job only when they’re on the right side of an issue, and a person who will craft an argument to make their side seem right regardless of the facts. The process all seems very corrupt from the outside. It incentivizes financial conflict of interest.
That’s the issue I have with the justice system - it’s much too loose with facts because it’s designed around persuading non experts (and arguably jury selection is designed to reject people with high education or relevant background knowledge). The adversarial process gives each side an equal go at persuasion even if one side doesn’t have a leg to stand on scientifically. The judge isn’t in a position to disallow something that would be considered bullshit to an expert, and any qualified expert is allowed to sell out and present a biased interpretation of facts, even if 99% of their peers would disagree. More often than not, your resources determine whether or not you’re right in the eyes of the law. It’s bullshit.
Edit: if you’re a physician on trial for malpractice, “A jury of your peers” would consist entirely of physicians in your area of practice, as they are the only people with the relevant understanding and background knowledge to evaluate whether your actions followed the standard of care or constitute malpractice. The fact that courts don’t operate this way means that findings of guilt or innocence are basically a popularity/debate contest with a veneer of authenticity.
Believe me when I say I’m not on corporations’ side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.
PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it’s not my field and I haven’t looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I’ve seen firsthand the family’s emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.
That’s interesting, thanks.
I don’t mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?
It’s not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who “just know” that that MMR vaccine caused their son’s autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage “must have” caused his cancer - because it’s less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn’t do anything to cause it.
Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.
Maybe you happen to be on a route that runs well from home to work without lots of stops and no need to change lines. Can you find a destination in your city that would require a change of bus or train and incur a larger time penalty? What if your job was located there instead?
I think most people buy sensible vehicles but there are certainly people who have a truck fetish that is not justified. Unfortunately it creates an arms race where all cars get larger because there are very real risks of a collision with a larger vehicle.
It’s hard to tell the intent of any poster, and there is a vehement anti-car movement here (and on Reddit) that allows for no exceptions to the idea that living should be done at high density, and without personal vehicles. It’s hard to read your intent and beliefs because the things you said before are very similar to what I’ve heard from the zealots.
I’m trying to make the point that public transit easily misses on serving every origin, destination, and timing efficiently. Usually it misses badly, and my average experience with specific commutes is a 3x time penalty for transit vs driving. The penalty gets worse if done at especially early or late hours. Maybe this is exacerbated by car infrastructure and lower density, but the anti car crowd would have you believe it’s intrinsic and not a function of history and preference. At any rate I usually disagree with them on almost every premise.
You’re off by a factor of 4 on the grocery distance for the last 3 places I’ve lived, and those stores were CLOSE. It’s like 100cc of petrol to go that far, 200cc round trip, in lieu of 40+ minutes of fast walking (in which you can only carry limited groceries). I know all about it because I’ve done the walk many times when I didn’t have a car, and it fucking sucks.
I’d say freaking out about 200ccs of petrol to get groceries is an insane degree of austerity, and the fact that people like you are proposing that is evidence of either an irrational need to control impact, or (if justified) evidence that the world is grotesquely overpopulated.
Nobody owns 3 ton cars around here. Mine isn’t even 2 tons. In fact it’s pretty close in weight to a Fiat 500, while being generally more useful in every way. Everything you’re presenting is a strawman/caricature of what you imagine typical suburban car owners to live like. And yes, we should all be driving electric cars, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
Edit: damn near nobody on earth would drive to get groceries if the store was 300m/1000ft away. Most people will never be able to live that close to the grocery store, work, or any other place that they routinely need to visit. That’s why your example is insane.
Are you going to be first in line to give up your computer? Your phone? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Electricity?
Innovation is real, even if you don’t personally like it. Motor vehicles are a legitimately good invention, arguably only becoming problematic due to increasing population and urbanization.
We’re very quickly moving to a place where the QUANTITY of people is so high, the QUALITY of their lifestyles have to be sacrificed to cut down on human impact. The impoverished/developing world has very low impact, at huge cost to their quality of life. Who wants to volunteer to live like sub-saharan Africans, or Indians in abject poverty to cut down on human impact? I’m certain they don’t want that life - and why should they? I’m sure they would like to travel on a jet to a beach vacation like those in more affluent countries do.
I’m calling this eco-austerity. Instead of publicizing overpopulation and promoting low birth rates, we’re expected to belt tighten and give up on quality of life. It’s bullshit. We should have <1B people living like kings, not 10B people living like peasants.
This is exactly the point I’ve been making to them. I think it’s a bunch of people who have never lived outside of a major city, or grew up in new-construction actual suburban hell like Phoenix, DFW, Vegas, most of FL etc. Try old Midwest small city suburbs by comparison. Maybe parts of the northeast.
They probably couldn’t afford a car after used car prices spiked sometime between 2000-2010, and never experienced the freedom and autonomy. They can’t imagine not being into a downtown club scene - it hasn’t dawned on them that they will probably grow up and hate living in a congested apartment world and might want to stretch out in a bigger house in a quiet neighborhood. It’s never occurred to them that not everyone works from home and their spouse may need to take a job 20 miles in the opposite direction.
Do you sell your house because your job changed? Get divorced because your partner’s job changed? You can’t have ALL of the employment in easy reach by public transit from your home. This ideal-city with perfect transit and no commute is a handwave. UNLESS you live in a sufficiently small town that has everything but hasn’t blown up yet - and those aren’t dense enough for transit, and require personal vehicles.
Public transit is also more inconvenient than convenient even if you give it a maximum advantage in density and stipulate that the trains will run 24/7 and frequently (NYC).
It’s just inexperience with life or being an urban loving weirdo who can’t imagine that other perspectives exist. I want to spend all of my free time in places you couldn’t service with transit. They can’t even imagine it.
Get in, make as much as possible (with little to no regard for others), get out, retire early.
Arguably, this is what the American dream has become. It used to be we wanted middle class wealth, 2.1 kids, and a nice suburban house. But now all we want to do is sell out, retire, and never have to work again. I can relate, even if I lack the skills to play the game.
That’s where we got antiwork, FIRE, etc. It’s true: nobody wants to work anymore. I sure don’t. Maybe we never did.
You can’t fill up an EV at home if you rent, most of the time. Higher wattage charging requires a charger installation.
They really aren’t. I have a couple friends with them and they can go months without buying gas.
I’m one of those people, I guess, but I’m not such a Luddite that I don’t think electric is the way forward. Had to replace a very old car recently and low-end new was better than buying used. Bought a gas car that gets great fuel economy for a variety of very good reasons, but if I could have bought a Tesla made by Toyota/Honda, with huge range for economy car prices, I would probably have an EV.
Also worth noting: owning an EV is harder if you don’t own a house you can install charging hardware in.
What’s far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I’m from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.
In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you’re walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can’t possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.