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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

God help the one's with a Y chromosome come time to pay the insurance

In the UK gender discrimination of this kind is illegal. Are you in the US? I am surprised your very vocal activists have not tackled this.

think of the freedom gained by one who learns to operate a vehicle. You unlock a form of mobility unmatched

A car is a powerfully democratising technology. Any regular person can have at his or her disposal a machine that can take them and their friends/family and stuff anywhere they want to go at any time and act as a base while they are there. It’s people who socialise entirely online, get their entertainment via streaming etc who have the unhealthy lifestyle, not the ones who drive to the coast at weekends...

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It’s not really discrimination if it’s based on evidence, which is the only thing insurance companies care about. Younger men are far more likely to act like they are in a Gran Tourismo race than people of other ages and genders. This is borne out by evidence from car crashes, etc, not just something someone decided because they don’t like men.

funny enough with the advent of texting and driving its starting to shift to women being more expensive to insure. My sisters insurance for the same vehicle was surprisingly more expensive.

Men used to have higher insurance in EU due to causing more damage on average, but the court found it to be discrimination. Both genders have to pay the same in EU.

sounds nice but I wonder how it works in practice. Did they just raise premiums for women to match the higher men’s premiums?

Dunno, it was few years ago, so prices moved anyway overtime due to other market influences. Effectively, it does not matter whether it moved up for women initially or down for men, as wish to earn combined with competition among insurance companies should move prices over time somewhere to middle.

Did they just raise premiums for women to match the higher men’s premiums?

Well, that’s equality, it goes both ways and either you believe in it or you don’t. I am fairly sure they just averaged out the price.

Women also had their retirement age raised to match men’s only recently too.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jan/09/state-pension-...

and ... one can waste time and money for a few hours every day in it driving to and from work, so that one can then complain about having a shitty life.

Or do the same journey by other means? In a car you have a seat, your choice of temperature and ambient sound, your stuff secured, etc. Infinitely more pleasant that being crammed in like a sardine on the train.

Or work from home, or start your own business, or travel at different times, or move closer to work and save money, or rent a room near work, or change jobs, or ...

I commute daily to work. By car it would take about an hour. Taking the train takes 1:15 (of which 40 minutes is train). However, I can use this time productively (in my case studying). Because of this I'm most of the way in getting the AWS certifications.

Taking the car just makes me really grumpy at other cars and people, such that I've often found I'm arriving home in a bad mood.

Each to their own, but I wouldn't rule out public transport (even with terrible rail operators).

Yes it's comfortable, but super space inefficient - 18 feet of road space times a lane for one human.

By all means cars are great, until our devotion to them makes us build 12 lane freeways rather than civilized mass transit. Nothing screams civilized country like high speed and efficient trains.

Again, though. That only happens when wages gained from one's job are insufficient to allow time to be spent doing anything else but going to and from work.

It is indeed a common phenomena, but the problem is a great deal more complex than the automobile and the road. When you have corporations acting as turbopumps, doing their damnedest to absorb consumer spending power in the name of never-ending growth... It is not surprising that urban road use quite literally sucks the quality out of one's life.

I find it interesting that there seems to be so much fascination with modes of transport controlled by someone else in this day and age. I'd think cloud computing and most of the shenanigans tech companies get away with would have caused people pause when it comes to pawning off their control over their means of travel.

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