- cross-posted to:
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- Technology
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- Technology
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36742658
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The linked Hackernews comment thread is so cathartic and car-braindead. Ugh… I need to wash my brain.
Public transport doesn’t work unless you’re China/Japan, cause we have bureaucracy, safety issues, blah blah blah blah blah
as if those don’t exist in China and Japan (edit: heck, these places have even more bureaucracy and concern over safety (particularly Japan!))
Can’t get to mah grocery store or that good grocery store “close by”
That’s what you get when you have wide af stroads
Public transit sucks even in London outside of touristy areas
Ahem, nobody ever said it’s good
Public transit sucks in Germany
Ahem, just look at how Deutchebahn has been operating
Most people can’t bike!
Not everyone has to!
If strawmen were part of our population, they would be the most abused group of people on Hackernews. Just more reason to never visit that site for my sanity.
Shit doesn’t work cause we’ve made it, or some people with a vested interest against alternative modes of transport have made it, hard for public transit to work nicely. And whoever the fuck thinks that it’s either public transport or private transport and nothing in between can go hide in their cave. There will always be both, and it’s only a matter of how much of both.
Edit: Edited the quoted section to properly separate my retorts from the comments
Hackernews is crypto-fash garbage. Ofc car brained.
Totally agree. I live in Denmark now and the public transit is 10/10 even if rural/remote areas. It’s pretty cool what you can do when you fuckin try
Exactly. We can kind of see this in Japan too: trains and buses do reach out to rural areas. There definitely has been a reduction in frequency and train services to some villages there, but living in rural Japan doesn’t necessitate a car immediately: you only need one of you need to get out of town frequently at irregular times, or move large objects frequently. Getting food is still pretty easy even without a car: you could either bike or take a motorcycle, and in some cases, you don’t even need it cause houses are all pretty close together despite being rural.
Sometimes, I think North Americans are slightly insane. They want to live completely on their own land with nobody around, but still want all the benefits of being in society, and demands people to give them that at low prices. You can’t have the damn cake and eat it too.
Those comments really are brain-dead.
I loved cars for yearsssssss. I was just as braindead and car-brained as some of those commenters, but I changed.
When the costs of car ownership, the pain of waiting hours in traffic and the realization that the world is being destroyed for the sake of cars all started to weigh on my soul (and my wallet), I found these online communities that made a ton of sense, and I “took the red pill” so to speak.
The ability to think critically is severely lacking, but it’s not all the fault of individuals, but our social norms and traditions that have been passed down for multiple generations. It sucks even more for people like me, who come from immigrant families, where the innovation of the automobile, in other developing countries, was only now starting to take off for generation X. Immigrant families have even more fascination with cars because they still look at them as wonderful technological developments, meanwhile more advanced cities have moved away from cars towards more pedestrian friendly infrastructure.
It will take YEARS for things to change, globally. Hell, there’s still places where running water and womens rights are still desperately needed, let alone major shifts in public sentiment to urban planning.
All that to say, dumbasses in comments aren’t going away any time soon, I fear.
Several recent generations, especially in the US, have decided to essentially label being smart as an unpopular trait, and ridiculed people who put effort into schoolwork as “tryhards”, discouraging knowledge acquisition and allowing kids to just say “Ah, this is good enough and I don’t have to try hard”. Saying “I don’t understand math” was, essentially, a fashion statement. So of course we have almost whole generations that lack the ability to think critically and realize that they’ve been trapped mentally to be cows for milking. Doesn’t help that Western culture is rather hedonistic, where prioritizing one’s own indulgences triumphs over the well-being of others, and that sort of culture gets spread everywhere. Give them the illusion of freedom, and they’ll let you do whatever you want. Sorry I didn’t mince my words there.
As much as I’d hope to see things change for the better, I don’t really see it happening without some really depressing episodes given the direction that the world is heading towards. There are small glimmers of hope here and there, but none of them are in a position to really move that needle where it needs to go. I try to be positive and do I can, but I can’t shake the vision where we’re heading towards some of the most turbulent times we’ve seen since WW2 and the Cold War. Sorry for bringing up some really dark visions, but they’re all rather well tied together to me.
No worries, I share a maybe lukewarm fear of the same dark visions. I think hope exists in that with the internet still going strong, access to subversive opinions on culture are far more accessible than they have ever been, so you’ll even find anti-car sentiment or philosophy nerds on tik-tok, of all places.
I just think, if we can raise the next generation of kids to be critical, to look at the world as full of knowledge that only matters if you can filter out the bullshit, and to be capable of questioning authority and cultural norms, which teenagers are very good at, then things can improve. I’m pretty dumb, and even I was able to change my perspective, so I think others can too.
People have been worried about the world ending my whole life, but until the local government enacts martial law and we can’t stay outside after 9pm, I won’t start behaving like there’s bombs in the sky. I do worry about nuclear war though, but where I live, nuclear energy accounts for more than 60% of the energy supply, so the thing I fear most is not technology, but the men who control it, because they own the world if they can decide whether it exists or not.
Hope exists, but I find it hard to convince myself that there’s enough of us to move the needle, in that we’re simply not the majority. There’s a lot of us, and it feels great being in these spaces and chatting about and sharing what we could and should do. But the moment I walk out of my door and start talking to other people, I see many who either don’t care, or is unabashedly cathartic, or cares more about just themselves, or is even happily going about with their lives doing exactly the things that are destroying us, including their own future.
Children are always how we continue to have hope for the future huh. It’s unfortunate that many of my peers in my generation (early adult to adult), especially the well-educated ones, have sort of given up on having children, either thinking that they’re too loud, too disruptive to their lives (either in lifestyle or finance-wise), or just don’t want to bring new lives into this “dying” world. Some of them are teachers themselves, and it’s depressing just hearing their stories on how kids are living their lives these days. There are those who are born into unfortunate families, parents who don’t know better and don’t really do much bringing their kids up, and then there are those who look at the state of society and don’t find much hope, plunging them into depression or making them feel so pressured that they develop behavioural issues. Teenagers are rebellious yes, but many of the issues of the world aren’t something that you can fight back or change with just your will. I wish we as a society would pay more attention to them, and actually look at them, if not just to know how we’re doing as their predecessors. There’s a lot we can learn from them.
I typically scoff at those hyped up world-ending scenarios cause they’re just in it for the TV, but climate change and WW3 are different. WW3, maybe not so much; the threat has always been there, and we live with that, doing things in hopes that we can keep the balance of the world largely in place. There’s definitely an increased likelihood of it happening with the US essentially saying “fuck you” to everybody, as the current world order is definitely unipolar and there’s been a lot (if not too much) reliance on the US being the rather benevolent power keeping peace around most parts of the world (let’s not get started on the shitty things the US has done in the last 40 years, but the reality is that many parts of the world has had relative peace for around that long). Climate change though, that’s absolutely no joke, and many climate scientists and experts have seen sounding the alarm for decades. You won’t see bombs in the sky. You might still be able to keep adapting to ever hotter, colder, or crazier weather patterns, but we can only adapt so much before we hit a brick wall with engineering and economics. We’re still actively making this only planet we have less habitable for ourselves and our future generations. Food production has consistently been going down, and the wars aren’t helping us move food around better, making everything expensive everywhere.
I’ve said more depressing things, and maybe most may think that that’s where I end, and that my answer is that there is no hope, or that whatever hope there is is meaningless. Maybe it’ll surprise some that I don’t think so at all. It’s exactly because I understand the situation that we are in and how dire it is that I think we should continue to do what we can. When it comes down to it, you either do something, or you don’t and you wait and die in regret (anyone who tries to say that they’ll try to enjoy their lives as much as they can before they die so that they have no regrets, you’re absolutely dying with regrets; unless you’re one selfish bastard, you are absolutely going to die with regrets). I would much rather be doing something to change our reality and even challenge fate itself than to just let it do its thing. At the very least, I will die knowing that I’ve did what I can, and that my only regret is that it wasn’t enough to change things.
