Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

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nonrandomstring

> And it's normal to feel personally attacked when they tell you to give up your car. It's literally a personal attack on your freedom.

It's a really interesting comment which I wish we could explore deeper.

I get the same feelings but about different things. So I know you are sincere. But also, it's cultural and quite superficial. In psychology it's called "identification". An attack on a thing you identify with feels like an attack on you personally.

So for example, for me, attacks on free software, or my "right" to program in a language I choose, or to run a server, feel like actual attacks on my fundamental "freedom" as you say.

In reality though, if the world took those things away, within a couple of months or years I'd have forgotten and moved along with the flow. I know this from the experience of being half a century old :)

Now, if I took away your car, I can promise you'd feel the same in no time at all. Why? I don't own a car, and haven't for about 30 years. I git rid of my car when I moved to London, because private cars are a liability there. One or twice it's been a minor inconvenience. But apart from that I feel as free as ever - I go where I like, when I like, with who I like.... just rarely by car.

Even though I'm a fairly conservative person in some ways, I think we must recognise that many things we cling to as "essential freedoms" are actually just in our minds.

I don't understand what you're getting at. Freedom of movement is absolutely a freedom for humans. In places like London, or even New York for a US example, you may be able to achieve this without a car.

Are you arguing that all it takes is the saturation of public transportation for the entire US? Or are you arguing that people should just all move to mega-cities? I'm genuinely confused about what you're trying to explain to OP.

> I'm genuinely confused about what you're trying to explain to OP

That people adapt. That deeply held beliefs about the importance of some things turn out to be skin-deep.

yea the "well I can do it so you can to" approach is pretty weak. I'm not sure how good faith the original comment is being anyways, but I don't think this response is very effective regardless. It should at least be caveated with "if you are in a similar location to London" or "your car will be replaced by effective public transit".

"You'll adapt just like I did" is not very convincing for the majority of people.

> "You'll adapt just like I did" is not very convincing for the majority of people.

That's not my assertion, nor the point of my comment. The point is that identification (and misplaced sense of ownership) makes us very reluctant to be convinced [1]. A point which you agreeing with.

Nonetheless, people adapt when change comes. Another example, only just in my living memory was "decimalisation" (and for other Europeans when the currency switched to Euro). My grandmother swore blind the world would end if they brought in decimal currency. Within weeks she was the strongest supporter.

In 1752 people in England rioted because the calendars changed from Julian to Gregorian. People thought they were being robbed of 11 days. When the day arrived everybody awoke, got on with their lives as usual and in no time completely forgot it ever happened.

EDIT:

[1] In fact people can be so challenged by identification they'll downvote the most polite and reasoned of comments to feel better rather than respond intelligently.

I like and agree with the general sentiment of your comment (people are more adaptive than they may think) but I think the example isn't a great one... What would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US (we have a lot of them in almost every state)? Public transit would operate at a pretty significant loss in these areas and would be a logistical nightmare. Given enough time, I'm sure some solutions could help make it possible, but there would be significant inconvenience, loss of security/safety in the short term.

> would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US (we have a lot of them in almost every state)? Public transit would operate at a pretty significant loss in these areas and would be a logistical nightmare. Given enough time, I'm sure some solutions could help make it possible, but there would be significant inconvenience, loss of security/safety in the short term.

I honestly don't think I have any suggestions. Not technical ones. I am neither an expert on transportation nor planning. My comment is about psychology, and to some extent about history.

As you say, given enough time maybe new solutions would make changes possible. But also, maybe not. Given enough time it may be that people living in rural areas accept that the world has changed, and travel far less. Given time, maybe the societal pressures to travel will ease. It may be that in time the main attraction of rural life returns to being its pace and relative isolation. These are not necessarily good or bad things, progressions or regressions, just change.

To the extent that change involves loss as well as gain I do think that change is like the stages of grief. The early stages, before acceptance, involve various mental tricks to try carrying on as before.

Yes, the only reason for my comment was that you gave multiple examples where you and family members and historical groups made a big deal out of something and it turned out it didn't have any significant impact on their lives. There are probably few rural folks who wouldn't experience significant life altering consequences of losing their personal transportation autonomy.

> What would be your suggestion for people that live in rural areas of the US?

ALCOHOL FUEL! (Forgive me for shouting.)

If they are that spread out, they almost certainly have room to grow some sugar beets or sugar cane or potatoes or something like that, then they can ferment and distill alcohol fuel. This was pretty common for a long time.

> Before the American Civil War many farmers in the United States had an alcohol still to turn crop waste into free lamp oil and stove fuel for the farmers' family use.

> In 1826, Samuel Morey uses alcohol in the first American internal combustion engine prototype.

> By the 1890s, alcohol-fueled engines are starting to be used in farm machinery in Europe, making countries more fuel independent.

> By 1896, horseless carriages (cars) were showing up on roads in Europe and the United States. Because gasoline is so cheap and abundant, and also because ethanol is taxed at a high level, early US automobiles are adapted to gasoline from the beginning. Racing cars, on the other hand, usually used ethanol (and other alcohols) because more power could be developed in a smaller, lighter engine.

> In 1902, the Paris alcohol fuel exposition exhibited alcohol powered cars, farm machinery, lamps, stoves, heaters, laundry irons, hair curlers, coffee roasters, and every conceivable household appliance and agricultural engine powered by alcohol.

&c.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_alcohol_fuel

Alcohol is clean-burning, non-toxic, carbon-neutral, much higher energy density than any battery, cheap and easy to make, feed stocks are everywhere (I knew a guy who had a deal with a donut shop to collect and use their old scrap dough!), and the leftovers are a nutritious and valuable animal feed (yeast are protein.)

This is an interesting comment: it makes me wonder if those places that we feel are habitable really are habitable. If humanity needs to inhabit parts of the world that can not be reached unless you have a particular mode of transport then it may turn out that effectively those places are no longer inhabitable. Just like the North Pole isn't habitable. We already give up on some areas of the planet for practical reasons (mountains with too steep a slope, for instance). We'd just add more of those, and the fact that they were habitable in the past probably should not make a difference.

Good creative analysis. I think time not distance may be adjustment we will make first. Barring a catastrophic technology collapse I doubt at this stage of human development we'll withdraw so fully from wilderness and remote rural settlement. But perhaps the change we can embrace is just chilling out. Other than firefighters and paramedics, lifestyles where people "need" to be in a city 1000 miles away in a few hours are untenable. Slower transport like rail and airships will likely make something of a comeback in less dense countries.

> People thought they were being robbed of 11 days. When the day arrived everybody awoke, got on with their lives as usual and in no time completely forgot it ever happened.

Not accurate.

Isaac Asimov pointed out that people only got paid for 19 days' work, but had to pay a full month's rent, so they were perfectly reasonable to demonstrate.

> . I git rid of my car when I moved to London,

Yes, and if you hadn't moved to London then you would indeed have a car and consider it being part of your transportation "must haves"

In most of North America, and now Latin America and bits of Asia, car dependancy is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs

Hopefully eventually most cities will move to a scheme closer to London's, but if anything, things might be moving the other way

> Yes, and if you hadn't moved to London then you would indeed have a car

I've since moved out of London, and still have no car.

> transportation "must haves"

There are no "must haves" in this world.

> car dependency is a serious problem, cities being built, such as in China which are wholly car depending, and designed to punish non-car moving people, it is a bad, bad, bad state of affairs

Yes, that's tragic. And I don't think those places have a long-term future as they are. Fortunately urban areas can undergo radical redesign. I think the post-pandemic is going to force that on us anyway.

There are many places where you can live without a car. However they are overall a minority. Most people in the US live where living without the car is next to impossible. either there isn't any transit at all, or there is transit that only works for someone working 9-5 downtown, but you are still expected to drive a car for all other errands.

Yes in the core of a few other cities (New York is most obvious) you can reasonably live without a car. Most people don't live close enough to the core though.

The bad transit options is the first thing that needs to change. However nobody actually cares about that. Democrats are more interested in union jobs even though it drives costs up to the point where it isn't cost effective. Republicans don't even realize that it would be possible to have useful transit and so they fight throwing good money after bad.

The self indulgence of your comment is laughable (aside from the ugliness of a philosophy in which "you'll adapt" is a good reason for being subjected to restrictions, regardless of their deeper merit).

Because you live in one of the densest, oldest and most public transit-packed urban areas in Europe, you think that your easy shift to not having a car is worth a damn to hundreds of millions of people who don't live in London, or another big, dense, highly developed city like it? A Texas farmer or Louisiana fisherman isn't just being a selfish, green-hating ass when he or she says that they NEED their truck or car. They really do, to live, and almost every day. What kinds of mental bubbles do some of the privileged people who comment on this site live in?

Thank you, your outraged reaction has entirely proved the point I was making about identification and its effects. Change is coming, whether you like it or not. The greatest obstacles are probably not technical, but psychological. It's coming for reasons of ecological fact, not because anyone wants to subject others to meritless restrictions. (As if one guy on the internet had that power.)

And people will adapt to it, because that's what we've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. That's not ugly, it's beautiful. It's beautiful that humans are adaptable, resilient and inventive.

Well most of us anyway.

No, not outraged, just derisive. Change is indeed innate to the human experience and to the course of civilization, but the kind of bubble mentality you display with your comment is if anything especially brittle against practical realities. In a genuine catastrophic climate change context, do you really think your privileged urban lifestyle will be better suited for adaptation? Maybe, I can't be sure, but maybe circumstances cause you to rethink your current idea of change being beautiful.

That aside, it really is absurd to dismiss the needs and complaints of hundreds of millions of diverse vehicle-owning non-urban dwellers based on how smugly easy you think it was to not own a car in London of all places. There's nothing psychologically obtuse about pointing out the closed mindedness of your notion. Yet you speak of identification and its effects.

> just derisive

Well, you've said it yourself. There's nothing a reasonable person can add to that, or hope to gain by doing so. So, have a lovely day. :)

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