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Comment by suneilp | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof. We sitting in front of our computers too long or wearing out the couch too much eating potato chips.

Exercise, or just a simple walk, is critical for our lives. It affects our outlook on life. We don't lack the ability to handle the busyness of modern life.

We lack the priority of taking care of ourselves.

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>Pretty much everything described in this article applies to other activities or lack thereof.

Except the most poetic part of the article that recounts the results of heavy car traffic and lack of foot transportation — a huge negative impact on our sociology, not just on our physical health.

I have become a proponent for walkable cities, public transportation reform, streets hidden from pedestrians, and narrow city roads. I'm extremely pessimistic about everyone else getting on board with these studies, though. People are quite proud of driving and their cars. We need to move forward and evolve transportation for the sake of our physical and mental health and for the sake of our society. I'm wondering how to get that national conversation started.

I don't think it's essentially a national conversation. I think it has to be a thousand local conversations that borrow from one another.

When people visit me in SF from more car-heavy areas, they're shocked to learn that I never have owned a car here. But by the time they've ridden our 4 mass transit networks, used a rental bike, taken a ferry, and gone with me somewhere in a CarShare car, it makes more sense. When they hear that I don't pay for car repairs or insurance or gas, they really start to get it.

We got this over decades of local conversation and iteration, consciously borrowing from other cities like New York and Amsterdam. Other cities can do it too if they want. And I think many are. I hear lots of of good things about cities being increasingly friendly to pedestrians and cyclists.

> We lack the priority of taking care of ourselves.

We're definitely not wired to weigh long term consequences properly :(

If only there were some sort of venue where people could socialize some sort of set of shared values to connect the daily struggles of the individual in the present moment to the community, and to the future... a way to build stories around what it means to be a good human being, and to teach the next generation how to live a better life. we could call it something like, say, "organized religion". funny thing, though, it seems to get a bad rap on these pages more often than not :b

for further reading, consider: http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-A...

If only this venue thing you speak of hadn't been cutting off heads and burning at stakes and filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting outrageous superstitions and unjust persecutions for the past several thousand years it might be worth investigating. As it is... it does indeed have a bad rap. Deservedly.

Oh, don't worry! These days we have plenty of other venues for filling the pockets of fraudsters and promoting unjust persecutions and the like. (Will have to get back to you about the beheadings, though - secular beheadings have been pretty minimal since the French revolution.)

Can we nip the climate change religion in the bud?

I hope you find these examples horrible regardless of your opinions on CO2-governed climate change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFO0ayOz9FY (Warning: This is a horrific video that shows climate change activists graphically executing children and others who disagree with the climate change orthodoxy. It was produced by the climate change activist group 1010uk to promote reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.)

Or maybe we should only strangle doubters and "their kind" in their sleep (Joe Romm). Or just have trials with unspecified consequences (James Hansen).

Persecution and execution are more strongly correlated with tribalism and ambition than religion. See French Revolution, Nazi-ism, high school, and internet comment forums.

Religion is an excuse for persecution, not usually a cause.

See, you jumped to "organized religion" when you only needed to go as far as "organized." Not an uncommon mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

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