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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

You know, I often see this faster horses thing quoted to point at how dumb consumers are. Wouldn't you agree, however, that a car which doesn't drive itself home after you've had a bit too many drinks at the local saloon is a downgrade? A car which doesn't graze its own food is a downgrade? A car which doesn't automatically make more cars is a downgrade? Perhaps if someone had figured out 'faster horses' sooner we wouldn't have literally millions of people dead from car crashes. Perhaps we wouldn't have an atomized society with little social interaction.

It seems to me that once people know that something exists, which is possible through way more methods than the constant cognitive assault of our advertising-based culture, then they can do just fine at figuring out if the thing is useful to them.

But yeah, keep gloating about how dumb people are for not just wanting a better version of what works.

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Horses are much more expensive to own than cars. You can't just leave them sitting in a lot for 20 out of 24 hours a day, they only feed themselves if you're living out in the middle of the prairie, and you can't just replace a broken leg.

If horses are more "pro-social" than cars, it's because the only people who could afford them are the very wealthy and people who made their living riding horses like cowboys and taxi drivers. Cars are "worse" than horses because they're too superior, which means the middle class all own personal cars and have stopped financing public transit and pedestrian-friendly city layout that the lower classes would coincidentally benefit from.

>Wouldn't you agree, however, that a car which doesn't drive itself home after you've had a bit too many drinks at the local saloon is a downgrade? A car which doesn't graze its own food is a downgrade? A car which doesn't automatically make more cars is a downgrade? Perhaps if someone had figured out 'faster horses' sooner we wouldn't have literally millions of people dead from car crashes. Perhaps we wouldn't have an atomized society with little social interaction.

You're only saying this because you don't know how much labor it takes to keep a horse in working shape.

Given the choice between a horse and a Model T it's a no brainer.

Oh and plenty of people died or suffered life altering injuries from riding horses or riding in carriages and nobody ever got maimed because they surprised a car.

Faster horses would still leave our streets full of horse manure. "Grazing their own food" doesn't work in a dense urban environment. You're cherry-picking the upsides of the old way, but there were some pretty significant downsides.

My car doesn't die if I don't attend to it for 2 weeks. If my car breaks its "leg" I can swap it out, I don't have to shoot the poor thing. My car can't get me in trouble for grazing in my neighbor's pasture. If horses traveled at car speeds, I doubt death counts would be any lower, and you'd have to figure in the number of horse deaths too.

If horses traveled at car speeds they would refuse to do so when it is unsafe. The same way you won't knowingly run full speed down a ice covered street.

Henry Ford wasn't saying that people are just too dumb to understand how great cars are, he's saying people become so uncomfortable with what already works they don't understand how much better the alternatives could be. Ford understood because he ran a car company.

You may be the exception in preferring horses (although you should note, some states don't look kindly to drunk driving horses), but when people had the choice they chose cars.

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