663 karma · joined October 18, 2014
It's funny you mention that because I remember at the time of HyperLoop somebody said "what about just ... trains?" and we all scoffed at it as if trains were some outdated technology
Let's just say I'm on team trains now.
We would have been much better off with investment in tried-and-true boring old trains.
In hindsight, how could we all have fell for this? What a profoundly stupid idea, but I distinctly remember at the time it felt right.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think a lot of people just wised up and started seeing through his B.S.
I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to lean _entirely_ on personal responsibility. We live in a world in which we were simply not evolved to live in. People literally make a good living by engineering and exploiting our weaknesses for profit.
> raise everyone with the forethought to know what might be addictive, the self-awareness to realize when you are addicted to something, and the self-control (and support systems if and when necessary) to stop
If only it were that easy. If you've ever known somebody who struggles with a serious addiction you'll know that even when they know it's destroying their life they still can't stop.
However I do know people who really do not care. They may say they care but their actions and voting record show that in fact they don't care (or don't want to make it a real priority). But those same people get very upset when they're stuck in traffic
The real problem is that most people don't feel like this is true. It really takes a solid 6ish months of earnest effort (AT LEAST 3x per week, probably more) to develop cardiovascular fitness. For some people, it'll take even longer.
I run an average of 6 days per week for the past 10+ years. At this point running is just about the easiest thing I do, it doesn't take any mental fortitude at all to do it. It wasn't always that way though, I used to dread it.
> apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm
That's an extremely disingenuous interpretation of social media. Huge straw man. We're talking about infinite-scrolling A/B tested apps that are engineered to keep eyeballs on the screen at the first and foremost priority for the primary benefit of the company, not the user.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
I'm ignoring the fact that I don't actually know how government sector jobs contribute to or affect GDP.
Seems like by this logic, why not just cut ALL government jobs? Obviously that's a terrible idea...
but it requires an adult to drive that SUV. Car culture has made it so kids don't have autonomy to move themselves around anymore. When I was 8 I used to be able to walk/bike around the neighborhood to see my friends. Then we moved to car-dependent suburbia and things were so much worse. Having to depend on adults to go places added a lot of friction. The end result is that we'd usually just spend a lot of time inside the house.
Just look at the dystopia we live in right now: some parents literally drive a Chevy Tahoe or equivalent SUV to school to drop their kids off. How many school-aged children can you fit into the blindspot of a car like that? Are we at all surprised that parents don't want their kids walking to school alone?
I literally have to tell my son to hold his breath as we bike by long lines of SUVs idling right next to a school
> People do what works for them within their budget, which often is a larger vehicle when you have kids
It's funny that I don't drive and I transport my 3 kids around almost exclusively by bike. Yet people who live in my neighborhood with kids insist that they need an SUV for all trips. (yes, I can afford any car if I wanted one).
I even organize bike trips so other parents can bring their kids to events by bike so we don't need to get cars involved.
I think we've fooled ourselves into thinking we need cars far more than we actually do.
Yes, there are dystopian places that are completely car-dependent and don't even have sidewalks, but even in places that aren't like that people still insist that they need cars for everything.
What I'm saying is that there are a lot of forces keeping people solitary and anti-social. This is just one of them. I know for a fact that some of these families waiting in their SUVs live a short walk from the school. Yet still they choose to isolate themselves. Sometimes the kids in these cars are literally yelling out the window to my son because they're friends. I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars. It all just feels very anti-social and dystopian.
Sure, school drop off is just one small aspect of life. But because of drop-off culture, there are certain people who I may NEVER have a chance to interact with. Imagine if those parents instead walked with their kid. Maybe I would make a new friend. Maybe we'd have a nice conversation.
Last year there was another woman and her son waiting with me. They walked to school every day. We became friends just through school drop off in the morning. It brought some happiness into my life and made me feel a sense of community. She could have chosen to get in her car and wait in the long line of SUVs like everyone else, but luckily she didn't.
By essentially saying "stop caring about school drop off and look for other opportunities" it feels like you're missing my point: building community means showing up in lots of different ways, and consistently. The school drop-off example is just one example of many. A woman who lived on my street since the 80s said that back then nearly everybody walked to school. By switching to a car-based morning drop-off feels to me like we've lost something, even if it's just a small thing
But this doesn't necessarily mean being richer. For example, many people are afraid of what unchecked climate change is going to mean for kids born today. No amount of individual or country wealth is going to fix that issue.
I have kids myself, but man... I really really worry about this. I do personally know people cite climate change as one factor in having no kids (or fewer kids). Some people even think that having kids will make it worse. They're not wrong...
Sure people can just move to a remote dying town and get a house for super cheap, but turns out people want to live within a reasonable distance to jobs.
Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars. The long line of SUVs extends all through the neighborhood. My son and I are alone because people just won't leave their cars until the doors open. A vast majority of the kids live within one mile of the school.
It's just one small anecdote, but I feel like it illustrates an attitude I've seen.
You're conflating people with cars. You want people and you're assuming that all those people must be attached to a car. There are other ways to get people to be populate an area which brings me to my second point...
> If you rip out the parking you won't get a vibrant walkable downtown
You will if you build a lot more housing in that area. If thousands more people are able to live right there then of course it'll become more vibrant. That parking garage could be home to hundreds of people. Instead it's temporary storage for cars. The problem is that suburbanites are going to fight tooth-and-nail to bring their cars. So what you get is cars.
If that's what you want, so be it. That doesn't sound like a vibrant place if everybody has to drive a car to get there, though. It's traffic by design.
And parking is a time sink. There's a place in my city that has huge parking garages with lots of parking but you still have to drive through a few levels of the garage, park, and then walk back down a few flights of stairs, then walk to your destination. I just park my bike right outside of my destination with the wheel lock. Street parking is always awful in populated cities, and I never have to worry about it. I always park right at my destination, where ever it is.
In suburbia, cars are faster because the average distance per trip is a lot longer. But it's ironic that the reason why the average distance is longer is BECAUSE it was built for cars so everything gets spread out! Cars are a solution to a problem that they created.
I use our car approximately once per week. In 2024 I used my car a total of 32 times (I actually tallied it out for the whole year)
It's really just a matter of city design. Do you think there aren't families in Copenhagen who need to get to their job and shops? They manage with much lower car mileage than the average American. American suburbs are car-centric and those cars end up clogging up urban cores where people are trying to live their lives.
Many Americans/Canadians probably cannot even imagine what my life is like. They can't even picture what it means to pick up a week's worth of groceries for a family of 5 on a bike (with a kid!). It just doesn't even register that this is a possibility.
Maybe some people are fully car-pilled, but many people want to live in an area that isn't so car-dependent, it tends to make everything more spread out, noisy, polluted, and congested. It also imposes very large personal costs.
I agree we need strong community in close proximity, but still people need to travel to destinations a few miles from their houses sometimes. Biking is a great (this is my primary form of transportation) but even I know biking and walking cannot fill every transportation need. We need the trifecta of biking/walking/transit to ween ourselves off of cars and develop denser communities with more people to interact with in our day-to-day lives.
This isn't an issue of limiting myself. This is just an issue of safety.
The roads where I grew up had no shoulder and people frequently whipped around the windy roads at 35 mph. The only bikers I ever saw were fully lycra-clad race cyclist type of people. I never saw a mother biking with her kid, for example. I was afraid to be on a bike on the streets. At least with walking I could take a step or two off the road when a fast moving car was coming.
That sort of thing was impossible for me. No sidewalks, no pedestrians, barely any bikers. It was just cars everywhere all the time. One time I decided to make the 6-mile trip to the mall on foot. It was a harrowing experience, but I was a rebellious teenager and I just wanted some independence, even if it meant spending half a day walking just to go to a mall.
What's difficult is that it's hard to communicate the nuance of what a study actually studied. How many people were involved? What were the methods used? What was the effect size? What were the confounding factors that couldn't be controlled for? None of this can be effectively communicated in a world that reads headlines and probably not much beyond that.
And of course, the media does sensationalize because they're incentivized to. You'll click a headline that says "alcohol is good for you, says science" but probably won't click a headline that tries to communicate the nuance.
Becoming a great musician is more about developing your ear, technique, repertoire, etc. It's more similar to learning a foreign language than learning math, in my opinion.