SkepticalButOpenMinded @ SkepticalButOpenMinded @lemmy.ca

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Joined

2 yr. ago

You can still buy commercial grade fridges and washing machines for half the price.

Yeah sorry it sounded like I was correcting you, but I meant to say I agree with you too.

Canada spends a LOT less on policing than the US and has MUCH less crime. Crime severity is basically half in Canada, and per capita police spending is half. For example, the safest major city in North America is Toronto.

Not coincidentally, Canada also has better social services like public healthcare, more equitable access to schooling, and higher social mobility. This is the argument for defunding the police. We need police, but other things have a much bigger effect on safety.

There can be a deterrent effect in very specific situations. At crowded public events, like a parade, a police presence can lower crime at that event. Sometimes. But otherwise, police don’t work like that.

Newsom and Whitmer come to mind. Not saying they’re sure to do better, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least.

I agree, but just to clarify a minor point: small rural towns are actually some of the most walkable and bikable because they were built before cars. If you’re staying within a rural town, you don’t need a car.

No urban designer or transportation expert thinks that cars scale with population. Talking about rural and small cities is the opposite of scaling with population. Car dependent big cities like LA or Houston have hellish traffic.

At least have a cursory look at the link I posted in my last comment. Cars play a huge role in bad land use. This is why they have an enormous effect on housing supply.

You seem to be lost. You made the point that walking from a train station to your final destination was some major problem. I’m not even sure what point you think your last paragraph is responding to. Yes America is bigger than a few blocks. So is Europe and China. So what?

The fact that cars mathematically cannot scale with population is “so very minor”? Or that cars are the most expensive form of transportation? Or that cars require tons of parking and wide roads that lead to inefficient use of land, contributing to a housing crisis and ugly sprawl?

So what is a “major” problem? Ah right, walking a few blocks.

nowhere near where I live

Even the Netherlands or Japan have many places where only travel by car makes sense. We will always need some cars. Maybe your situation is like that. But your personal situation doesn’t dictate whether or not it makes sense for society to build a lot more trains, which is what we’re talking about.

Also, describing how much less convenient trains are for you presently than driving is kind of missing the point. Everyone already agrees that train lines don’t exist to service many places. We’re not talking about what exists now, but how things should change.

It’s pretty obvious that a single train full of passengers is more energy efficient than the same number of people driving a bunch of individual 4000 lb SUVs.

Cars are even more restricted in travel time. Unlike trains, which typically come multiple times an hour, car travel has to be planned around rush hour and gridlock.

Honestly, I don’t even know how we can be debating this. Car dependence is a dead end. Cars don’t scale because a linear increase in drivers requires a non-linear increase in surface area. Car dependence makes it impossible to meet our climate goals. These catastrophic failures are so much worse than needing to walk a few blocks. There are so many flaws that car people just fail refuse to see.

There are many places in the US with the density of Europe or Asia. And those are all the places trains are being built.

From what I’ve read, it didn’t sound completely like an accident to me. Working conditions were apparently so bad that the camera crew had walked off the set earlier that day. Non-union replacements were brought in, which is why safety standards were low and the set was chaotic.

This was a labor dispute, and Baldwin was careless with safety in order to avoid the costs of providing decent working conditions and pay.

How has Biden gone right? He’s clearly farther left than Obama or Clinton. Even Bernie has said that Biden is a much more progressive president than he was a senator.

“No consistent correlation” means that likely nothing dramatic will happen. Police don’t prevent crimes. They come after a crime has already occurred.

If you’re worried about cost: car infrastructure is the most expensive per capita. Unlike public transportation, roads are almost entirely government subsidized, with virtually no tolls or pay roads anywhere in the country. The worst part of subsidized highways are the spillover costs: oceans of subsidized parking lots and wide subsidized roads to service all the cars. In most NA cities, 60% of surface area is devoted to cars. What a waste.

That’s not counting the private costs, which people massively underestimate. Cars cost an average of $14k a year. This is why Canadians and Americans spend more on transportation than almost any country in the world.

And what do we get for all that extra cost? A lower quality of life: The longest commute times in the world, amongst the highest traffic deaths in the developed world (which is the biggest killer of children in Canada), a housing crisis due to low density, obesity and cardiovascular disease due to lack of incidental exercise, and high property taxes to maintain all that inefficient asphalt.

Canadians are also amongst the highest per capita carbon emitters, in large part due to tailpipe emissions and car centric urban design.

Canada today is almost certainly less corrupt and rent seeking than the literal Gilded Age, when the country was founded! In fact, the Pacific Scandal was our first major political scandal, involving political bribery by railroad investors and leading to the resignation of John A Macdonald.

I really have to push back against this pessimism about government. It only serves conservative pro-privatization interests to push that narrative. The problem is political will. Voters easily approve major new highways in ON. We would get rail if voters demanded it. So let’s start a movement!

Yes it should be something like: “Audio of Ohio police raid that left a baby injured contradicts police report”

The RCMP has its own history of suppressing and murdering indigenous people. Colonialism, apartheid and genocide are some of the main reasons the RCMP exist.

That said, I agree that the RCMP are much better on virtually every measurable metric, as is policing in Canada in general.

¿Porque no los dos?

These aren’t mutually exclusive categories. For my part, I’m not prepared to attribute competent malice to everything the police do.