SwingingTheLamp @ SwingingTheLamp @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

Yes, but it's a hair-splitting distinction that it's not a law is not an individual mandate that each citizen own one. There are plenty of other laws that do literally require cars. For that matter, it's required by law that we have Social Security Numbers, and that's just a side note in a discussion about their role in our society.

Is this one of those canned arguments that Americans are programmed to pop out when somebody questions the car-based lifestyle? Okay, then, if the United States is so big, then shouldn't we have room to build amenities closer to where people live, so we don't need to drive everywhere for everything?

I'm going to stipulate here that you don't get to have it both ways, to say that a car is both essential to American life, but not required by law. See, it's laws that shape the human environment to make one essential: Parking minimums, building codes, zoning, lending standards, driver's licenses as default photo ID, and so on.

If it's laws that make cars required to live, then they're de facto required by law.

Those are fine examples to prove my point. Even the low-end, just-get-around cars have climate controls, entertainment systems, and plush seating. They're about more than utility, just getting from one place to another. For the CRV, the web site for it really wants to sell the image of adventure, like driving one means you're ready to head out on road trips, and listen to the Bose sound system while doing so. The base model is also 190hp. The Sentra is 149hp, and over $20,000 base price. Compare that to the Ford Model T, at around $6,000 (inflation adjusted). That was 20hp. Twenty horsepower, no air conditioning, no power steering, no Apple CarPlay, and people drove them across the continent.

Anyway, I just got home from some errands, and while out, I saw a guy driving a big, shiny, white Ford Model F truck, and wearing a cowboy hat. There are no cattle ranches in Wisconsin. Also, it's January and he wasn't wearing a coat; he doesn't plan to go outside. The car one drives is totally a fashion statement. Driving a low-end car conveys a message about you, just like wearing off-the-rack versus bespoke clothes. Even Warren Buffett's econobox is a statement.

And that's leaving aside the assumption that getting from place to place has to involve a car.

Why does it need to remain? Because that timeline was populated by 8 billion human, and who knows how many non-human minds. I think it would be solipsism to think that only your own mind was the "real" one keeping the timeline in existence, and it collapsed because you leave it.

If the time travel power does overwrite everything, all of those minds and all of their subjective experiences are just, nothing? That's where the existential horror comes in for me.

That's 100% due to government policy. Those places are highly desirable places to live as evidenced by the high prices, but they are limited in supply only because it's illegal to build new ones. We used to build efficient places out of economical necessity, then for the usual reason (racism), we codified an extravagant, wasteful built environment as the default, or only, option.

Cars are still luxury toys, they're just required by law.

Of course! The part that Americans don't want to hear is that we are wealthy because of that theft of labor. It's not just an immoral peccadillo of our ancestors.

As an American, I'm gonna barge in with my loud opinion, 'cuz that's what we do. Here's something which people living elsewhere might not know that Americans aren't ready to hear:

Automobiles are luxury toys and fashion accessories, and we shouldn't base our entire lives on them. No, the car industry didn't make our economy strong; it took off after we already had a lot of extra wealth to burn after becoming a world economic powerhouse. We can't afford to keep wasting all that wealth on them as the world starts to burn, and half of our citizens sink into poverty.

Yeah, in addition to having a super-endowment of natural resources, remember that we also stole the labor of about 20 generations of Africans to help turn that into wealth.

Fuel tax in the U.S. doesn't even come close to paying for the road system. The federal fuel tax covers less than half of federal transportation spending. I don't know about all of the states, but Wisconsin's fuel tax covers only about 2/3 of the road spending. And, local streets get built with local property and income taxes.

Holy existential horror, Batman! By time traveling, you've just caused an entire universe full of new alternate-timeline versions of people to pop into existence. What happened to the timeline you left? It must still exist. You couldn't have been the only consciousness that was experiencing it. To think otherwise is some extreme solipsism. Gosh, did some other time traveler create the timeline you left by entering it? For that matter, are you actually a duplicate, having just popped into existence with the memory of having time-traveled, but the timeline was created by another time traveler?

Alternatively, perhaps it's another timeline out of an infinite number of possibilities that all co-exist? Yikes! That means there's an infinity of each person across the multiverse. Therefore, you could just murder everybody within reach, and time travel back before your started the rampage. The lives in a particular timeline don't matter, there are an infinity more. I think Rick & Morty did an episode with that premise.

Stereo vision isn't very different. Human pupils are only 5-6cm apart, so the effect is only useful for objects less than 20-30 meters away, maybe 50 tops. It only works in the center of our visual field, not in the periphery (that only one eye can see). And then, only on the horizontal, left-right axis. Beyond that, we do depth perception the same way: mostly through experience, parallax, context clues, motion prediction, atmospheric distortion, and the like. It doesn't change the imagery at all, it's the same scene if I close one eye. I'm guessing that most people who woke up in a familiar environment (e.g. their bedroom) without stereo vision would take a while to notice.

100 years ago it was nothing more than a back yard event in your Sunday best and a community potluck with no extravagance beyond.

Fun fact: The reason that wedding dresses are white has nothing to do with symbolizing purity. It was about conspicuous consumption.

Before modern laundry detergents, white fabric that got worn would never be truly white ever again. Rich women would wear white dresses to show off the fact that they could afford to buy a dress to wear just once. Everybody else wore their Sunday best.

This is a lot, but I'm on mobile, which means responding in-depth is a pain. Anyway, the hitch here is in the idea that women entered the workforce only after WWII. That'd be quite a shock for our feudal and working class ancestors. The idea of a nuclear family with one parent staying home was a nice dream for the middle class, fought hard for by labor and progressives, and enabled by the post-war economic boom. Only decades earlier, not only the mothers, but the children were working in the factories. My grandmothers were housewives, but their mothers certainly were not.

That is to say, the growing necessity of 2 income families, and women in the workforce, is just a symptom of the old economic order re-asserting itself, not the cause. Having one parent stay home isn't going to reverse course, if it were even possible for most families. So, yes, we should do all of these things, but it's not like we don't because we hadn't thought of it. The reasons that we don't are a lot more intractable.

Exactly, but somebody already mentioned that.

Do you have some suggestions for a novice sharpener on how to get started?

Oh! Oh! I have an answer for this. I remember around the time that The Day After aired, one of the local news stations ran a story simulating what would happen to my city were it hit by an ICBM. We lived on the far side of a hill, far enough away from downtown for it to be potentially survivable. I decided that if we got the warning, I'd grab my bike and light out for ground zero. Fuck surviving, I don't wanna take the chance of being alive but horribly injured, and that aftermath shit just wasn't worth it.

Oh, so if you ever wonder why Gen X/Xennials are so fucked up, there ya go.

I have this pet theory about how people who learn that their privilege lets them bend or ignore human laws subconsciously believe that they can bend or ignore any law. So I always enjoy it when rich assholes buy super-cars and wrap them around trees, a surprisingly common occurrence, because the laws of physics aren't impressed by your financial portfolio.

I was looking at Insta posts from August. Difference of opinion, I guess.

I did, and I would still say that. You wouldn't happen to have her confused with Rep. Cindy Crawford, the Arkansas politician?