No, I left because I had the opportunity to get out while there was still a chance. I grew up in the US, and I couldn’t do that to my children knowing I could get out.

https://youtu.be/oHlpmxLTxpw

But if you’re not able to leave the US, you can still make it better.

https://www.strongtowns.org/

The simple fact is that you have to live in a world without cars, or where cars are much more rare, because it simply isn’t possible to build a sustainable society around them. This isn’t even a climate thing, it’s simply geometry. Cars take up space. In order to make space for cars, density has to go down. High population places with low density can’t afford infrastructure because there isn’t a concentrated enough tax base. Basically, most US cities are insolvent and are ticking time bombs that will collapse, like Flint and Detroit in time. As Trump increases economic pressures, American cities will become bankrupt faster.

American infrastructure is crumbling all over the place, because no one can afford to fix it. That’s a car problem. Car infrastructure costs too much to maintain. That’s not even taking into account climate change. The US has never built back from several of the climate disasters that have destroyed critical infrastructure, and these will continue to accelerate.

The US was built around trains, horses, streetcars, and bikes. It’s only within the last 100 years that it’s been completely redesigned around cars. That experiment has been a complete failure, and it was only possible to try because of cheap fossil fuels. That’s gone… and I’m only talking about one of the many headwinds.

So you do have to live without cars. That’s not actually a question. The question is if you will do that on your terms or by the force of complete economic collapse.

I left behind all my friends, a high paying job, a big house with a garden we’d been working on for years, and everything else I lost and sold, to get out because I don’t believe people like you will be able to accept these facts. Oh, and before you say something about me never living outside of a city, I spent the majority of my first 20 years living in places like Gates, OR and Cobb, CA. You can google those if you care to.

It’s not ICE or EV, it’s cars or not cars. Cars are not sustainable.

Ok, what do cars travel on? What lithium do you use to make all the batteries? How do you make the all the steel you need for those wind farms and the power lines you need to get the energy from the farms? How do you store it?

I’m not going to go in to all the problems, but I don’t think you’ve every questioned this story.

0. Stop building everything around cars so people can choose not to buy a car.

Not wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false. Oh where have I heard people reject inconvenient truth before?

EVs were always a way to save the auto Industry, not a way to solve the climate crisis. Add them to the list of greenwashing grifts (carbon footprint, plastic recycling, hydrogen fuel cell cars, etc) and move on to the real solution: bike infrastructure and mass transit, with cars as an absolute last resort until they can be eliminated.

EVs solve one of the numerous problems with cars, and make some of the others much worse. People should have seen EVs as a grift the whole time, it just took the biggest grifter to blow his cover to start making it obvious.

“Direct action gets the goods.”

I used to go backpacking a lot, but I haven’t been since I got shot. I’m looking forward to bike camping now that I’m no longer in the US.

There are trains that go to forests in Europe. That’s not really a far fetched thing at all. There are busses that can take you to national forests in the US of all places.

Yeah, that’s totally a thing and it could be more of a thing if we stopped spending so much money on absolutely the wrong things.

How does this refute the message you replied to?

That money could be building infrastructure to make cars less relevant instead of wasting time on a fake solution.

Oh yeah, I was agreeing, just didn’t really communicate it super well.

Myspace existed for a really long time after it ceased to be relevant. It actually only ceased to be relevant after they lost all the music that had been uploaded. That’s when independent musicians finally abandoned it, and it basically disappeared.

Reporting on “X” is what’s keeping it alive, IMHO. Stop reporting on it and it will stop being used. Alternatively, if there’s some major incident, that would probably be enough to finish it. It may eventually go bankrupt between now and then, but it’s actually pretty useful for people wanting to spread nazi propaganda so the far right will probably keep pumping money in until it collapses.

Basically…

“This serial killer should feel remorse.” Ok… But he doesn’t because he’s a hedonistic nihilist who lives off the suffering of others. You can’t reason with that because you don’t actually have any bargaining power except violence.

Stop trying to pretend that these people care about the survival of humanity. They knew about this, they built their oil rigs taller to account for it. The oil industry and humanity are now locked in a zero sum game: one survives or the other, it cannot be both.

Tell me, when did your democracy exist?

I’ve used lucid dreaming to solve problems in the past. It’s not really that different from trying to solve problems while on mind altering substance. You get a mix of brilliant solitons you’d never think of any other time and complete nonsense.

There’s also a lot you just forget. I don’t know if it would be helpful to recover that stuff or not. It may just feel important or correct without actually being useful in any way.

It doesn’t negatively impact sleeping for enjoyable things like designing. I can’t imagine it would be useful for anything you don’t actually want to do.

But then again, extracting value isn’t really the point of a lot of work. Most of it is about power and control. The work place is basically non-consentual BDSM, so it would make sense for an employer to demand someone works while sleeping just to show that they can exercise power over them.

Maybe abolish slavery? Perhaps actually honor treaties with indigenous people?

Yeah, no. This would become “8 hours for working, 8 hours for working while you’re asleep, and 8 hours working because ‘fuck you’ that’s why”

So… Trump has promised to carry out a coup if he doesn’t win. A good coup would be indistinguishable from him just winning… Yet, people keep saying “vote harder.” Like, yeah, this is all super important stuff and the more people vote the harder it will be for Trump to carry out the coup… But a lot of people have put in a lot of money to make this happen so he’s going to have another coup attempt. This time it won’t be a bunch of idiots, it will be Eric Prince and the Academi soliders who got deployed in Portland.

If you are in the US, you need to prepare to fight. If he wins, democracy is over. If he doesn’t win, democracy is probably over too since he’s already rigged the supreme court so he can steal the election and make it look legal. Police all over the country have already pledged allegiance to him. When you come out to protest they will run you over with SUVs and just open fire on you. They’ll shoot at reporters to make sure no one can see what’s happening, just like they did during the George Floyd rebellion. But this time they’ll just kill people and claim they were violent.

You all need to be ready for the absolute worst. You also need to vote to make it harder, but voting will absolutely not be enough. You need to prepare.

Parking is a problem only in cities. 20% of the population lives rural.

I was specifically talking about cities. I’m glad we can agree that 80% of people should not own cars. Let’s talk about the rest.

As someone who grew up in actually rural areas, I need to point out that there are two types of “rural.” There’s farm land and there’s suburbs. Suburbs are a parasite that kills cities. They drain city resources without having a high enough density to pay for those resources with their taxes. They fill cities with cars and they don’t produce anything of value. Suburbs must be destroyed.

Farmers actually do something useful. They, and the communities that support them, should be treated like full citizens instead of as a second class. This means they also deserve the same infrastructure, bike lanes and train stations, as cities. There are some trade offs to living in rural areas. Things do take longer and are harder to get to. You have to do a lot of things yourself.

When I was growing up we drove our trash to the dump because we didn’t have garbage service. Personal vehicles sometimes make sense here, but absolutely not giant trucks to haul some milk and eggs. Motorcycles and kei cars are more than enough in most cases. Even for kei cars you should have to justify it purchasing it by providing you live in a rural area and to have a truck should require a commercial license.

But people who just want to use rural areas to defend their use of cars in cities often don’t realize how many people in rural areas can’t drive. They don’t know the absolute hell of being completely isolated and reliant on a parent to do anything. They don’t know how hard it can be to take care of someone who’s disabled or elderly, who relies on a caretaker to get to every appointment or activity. Functional infrastructure would significantly improve the lives of a lot of rural people, and cars often get in the way of that. You will grow old and you will be part of that group. Do you want to be trapped? With functional infrastructure, elderly people can use mobility scooters or microcars safely in bike lanes.

Rural areas don’t have to be car centric. There’s nothing innate about rural areas the forces people to rely on cars for everything. They’re designed that way. They can be designed differently.

Excellent? Sort of inconvenient, people have to walk to the nearest station. Especially with groceries. And impractical for the elderly, disabled and small children.

The elderly are often not safe to drive, so your solution is not more convenient. It’s to trap them at home or have them risk killing someone. A functional city that’s not designed around cars makes it easy to get groceries by other means, more convenient means that don’t involve the potential of accidentally murdering someone. There aren’t really any places in Amsterdam, for example, where you’re more than a few minutes bike ride from one or a half-dozen grocery stores.

It can be inconvenient to walk to a station, but it’s far more inconvenient to not be able to walk or bike anywhere because your whole city is just roads and parking lots. Cars kill cities by decreasing density below the point where commerce is sustainable. Go look at a picture of Huston if you want to see what happens when you let cars win.

If everything is so efficient, why on earth needs a tram 15 kWh per passenger per 100 km?

As opposed to 20 for EVs? Even cherry picked numbers beat cars. Oh and why are those numbers even that bad? Cars. Cars decrease demand for transit. The London metro is 4.4.

And that 20 kWh per 100p-km doesn’t take in to account manufacturing, shipping, and disposal or any consumables like…uh… tires, which are a petroleum product. Well tuned vehicles operate more efficiently, which is why personal vehicles can never be as efficient as well used mass transit.

There’s a fundamental limit on the efficiency of large scale transit and it’s realized by mass transit. Any possible improvemnt that could be made for individual transit could just as easily be applied back to mass transit for a higher efficiency.

Your ride sharing example highlights the same thing again. That’s actually pretty similar to the last mile soliton for Sound Transit in Seattle. They send a van to pick people up and drop them off at transit stops, which reduces the justification for personal cars even more.