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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

Parents—in many places—already let themselves rely entirely on driving their kids to every activity, which puts them at much higher risk of getting maimed in an accident under a guise of efficiency and spurious claims of other danger imposed by living closer to people and the activities that their kids could get themselves to. Many people are lazy, fearful, and prioritize comfort and control over all else, therefore it doesn't surprise me at all to hear people would opt for the convenience whenever an opportunity strikes.

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This reads like a comment from a non-parent, or a comment from the kind of parent who argues its okay for their kid to spend 16 hours with their eyes glued to a screen because "blippi is educational".

> a comment from the kind of parent who argues its okay for their kid to spend 16 hours with their eyes glued to a screen because "blippi is educational".

This seems like the opposite of what I wrote

So, just to make it abundantly clear that this is all a bunch of unfounded generalization: the kid in question takes the bus, can get home and get inside independently, and the reason I'm asking this convenient machine for a reminder is just to avoid being surprised.

Asking my phone for a convenient reminder makes me lazy, fearful, and prioritizing comfort and control over all else. Never change, HN. Actually, you know what? Please change, HN. This shit is tiresome.

No, I wasn't commenting about your kid, I was commenting on my generalized observations about the tendency for people, including parents, to accept the possible cost of risk when there's the prospect of even minor amounts of increased convenience. A friend of mine who doesn't earn much took out a large amount of debt to get a car so he could drive just himself to and from work even though there's a train that would get him there faster and more safely because he has weird prejudices and has control issues, which are not uncommon among parents who move to the burbs to raise their kids and keep a watchful eye in an isolated environment. My comment was about why I wouldn't be surprised by any shortcuts people take even if there's some risk involved, because being alive is time intensive and many people intentionally put themselves in situations where they feel they need a stack of shortcuts at their disposal to get even extremely trivial tasks done. Could be smoking or not going to the gym or not having a strong social circle or whatever.

I don't take transit because I don't like microtransactions. I'd rather have one car payment and be able to go anywhere I want whenever I want than have to pay a few bucks (or more) every time I move. A train ticket to visit some relatives would be like $70 while the same trip only costs me $20 in EV fast charging. (Would be less if I had access to home charging)

> I don't take transit because I don't like microtransactions.

HN is beyond parody sometimes

As an example, it costs like three dollars to board a bus here. The maximum cost per day is two of those, but come on. If I needed even just to take a bus to work and back each weekday, that's already over a third of my car payment, and I lose carrying capacity, climate control, social distancing etc.

Also I have to walk to/from bus stops, which I can't easily manage due to my disability. That's why I keep an electric scooter in my vehicle nowadays, but I highly doubt a bus would allow me to bring one of those on board. So at that point just use the electric scooter without bothering with the bus, except when I did that, I got hit by a pickup and needed to go to the hospital and counseling, etc.

I prefer to just pay in bulk. I care about more than simply raw cost, but the little microtransactions always seem to be a worse experience.

I mean it seems like you have a valid reason, but the raw cost in terms of just the loan payment isn't a trivial difference. "already over a third of my car payment" means your car payment alone is 3x the total cost otherwise, which is... a lot. Once you factor in maintenance, insurance, depreciation (which has been lower in recent years), it seems like it would be quite a leap if you didn't have a disability that made public transit more difficult.

I think the difference between transit methods within a city that has built-in alternative options has been interesting to examine now that I have a motor vehicle myself (that I got for free, but costs a lot to actually drive). I went without one for 8 years before someone offered it to me, and I do value the flexibility to occasionally get out of town wherever I want, but the tires alone will cost $2000 when I need to replace them, and the gas is crazy, so it's perfect in the sense that it sits there taking up street parking until I really need to get someone that a bike, scooter, bus, train, or walking doesn't work as well for. I'm not encouraged to use it for anything that it's really not needed for, and if it died tomorrow I wouldn't replace it with anything.

Relying on only the bus, even if the transit system is well-funded, has never been a particularly ideal situation, but the advantage is that I get that time back instead of being singularly occupied by driving. If there's traffic, I'd wildly rather be on the bus, but the train is always better.

It truly is, I couldn't even think of a joke like that if I tried.

And you were doing this in response to someone using the voice assistant on their phone to make a reminder about their kid getting home from school early.

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