dude... where do the imports of petroleum and fixed nitrogen which are critical for Ag come from? hint: look at the US ports and see what surrounds them.
farming and suburbia are subsidized out the wazoo. and a lot of Ag doesn't go to feed people... you're bark is much, much worst than your bite.
> a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.
what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.
since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?
though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.
He’s right, though. There are as many if not more lifetimes saved in aggregate.
You make a decision to get into the car with eyes open and most people are okay with the deal & the odds.
I have a feeling your response is because you’ve lost someone, so sorry about that. Life ends up more or less as a shit lottery and sometimes you get lucky (unlucky)
personally lose someone, no, but i've gotten the chance of being a citizen first responder to a lost of life one. i feel like your's and OP's response are because you've never seen or been impacted first hand what dying by car is like. it is usually horrific and violent that to be able to say those outweigh the time saved traversing the sprawled built environment created for the sake of those very same cars shows a lack of any lived experience. your argument fundamentally relies on the idea "all i know is cars, and there is nothing better". it's uncreative, unrealistic, and devoid of humanity. it's terrifying you and others with your mindset are on the road.
I think that in North America the deal is done, there is no way of going back this far down the path and private vehicles on the road are never going away until the fall of said civilization (or plan B: making the country dirt poor, but this may lead to plan A anyway)
And props for being a responder and seeing it with your own eyes. I actually think it should be more widely spread, showing it on the nightly news, etc. it’s an effective strategy to make more careful drivers.
This has nothing to do with capitalism. Quite the opposite, it’s about the needs of the many outweighing the lives of the few. There’s 200 million+ adults in the U.S., who save 5-10% of their waking lives by the US being car dependent compared to transit dependent places. Road deaths amount to 0.015% of that population. For every person who does, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.
1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
Rethink your misanthropy. We live in a free and rich country, and you hate people so much that you assume they’re being duped by “automobile manufacturers” instead of making their own choices about how they prefer to live. The fact is that Americans live like we do because we can afford to be comfortable. My mom, an immigrant to the US who grew up in Bangladesh, went to Australia recently and came back complaining about how cramped everything was over there and how small everyone’s houses are. She didn’t come to America until nearly age 40–she didn’t grow up being brainwashed into car culture. She just has eyes and can see what’s a more comfortable life.
There’s no country that can afford to be car dependent where most people don’t drive. Even in Sweden and Japan, which have amazing public transit systems, 80% of households own a car.
> For every person who d[i]es, 7,000 live a more comfortable and convenient life.
That you see this tragedy as a benefit reveals the grotesquerie of your world view. You also do not address the downstream effects of that lost life in terms of grief, material loss, and reduced capacity. (You’re not even a good capitalist.)
May you never experience the losing end of a “more comfortable and convenient life”.
You reference the laws of thermodynamics, but I'm not sure which laws you're applying to the human body? Is it the first which requires the measured system to be closed which a human body is not? Is it the second about entropy always increasing? Or is it the third defining perfect entropy at 0 Kelvin?
Bringing up thermodynamics as a generalization for biological systems is pseudo-intellectual. We aren't all equal machines that take in a fuel stock and output work. How do you account for differences in peoples' resting metabolic rates? How do you account for the difference in available energy in the foods you chose to eat, and in the differences in peoples' biological processes that extract that energy? Stress is a common hormonal modifier that impacts how the body stores fat; no where near a "rare" condition that many people experience nowadays, and yeah caused by things like sleep apnea. You betray your own argument anyway by adding an the "hormonal condition" exception (I don't see any exceptions referenced in the laws of thermodynamics, lol).
Biology has more dimensions than you are choosing to look at, and using thermodynamics as a "gotcha" when it comes to others' bodies reveals your lack of understanding and intuition.
Yes the first one. The energy contained in ingested food is far and away the dominant metabolic input.
There is no need to get into the weeds of various details of how that breaks down; the main problem is that calories are way too cheap in the modern day and age, and people's habits and instincts developed in far different eras lead to easily ingesting more than is expended. Yes the OP is not wrong, but it's not a very useful argument unless we're going to roll back the modern civilization.
> don't involve spending an appreciable fraction of your day shopping.
if you're concerned about how your time is spent, i think you're missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle: how much time you spend driving. you could end up saving an enormous amount of time while still going out to shop more if you cut out driving and reduce the scope of your trips.
Not really. People tend to have tolerance levels for commute type activities, so while cars enable going farther in the same amount of time, the time budget doesn't change. If they have a walkable city they are likely to find reason to go to a farther away store if it is still in the time budget.
This reeks of being an outside observer. WA has no income tax, but has a sales taxes which homeless people are subjected to. The only taxes are from property which renters also don't pay. When people complain about the rent seekers it's from a place of empathy, not envy. The extraction of wealth done by them always has and always will be more negatively impactful than homeless folks.
> cats in small city apartments are especially cruel.
nah, you're just an uncreative person. you can be involved in your pets stimulation. seeing that you think having a pet inside is just confining, i feel pretty correct assuming you see pets as just an animal you hang out with and feed and not a responsibility to nourish. instead, have the outdoors do your work for you! and if they die, so be it. shows a lot of love and care :)
dude, it isn't a giant SUV divers that are advocating for indoor cats. they are the same people that hold onto the whimsy that "cats a natural and belong outdoors! :)"
Domesticated animals are different species than native flora and fauna. The domestic cat is taxonomically and genetically not the same as a any wild cat. The same goes for dogs, cattle, etc.
By definition, domestic animals and plants have no native home except with humans. This is why we call domestic cats who escape and live in the wild "feral," not "wild," because a feral animal is specifically a domestic animal not living with humans, not a non-domestic native animal. It does not matter whether they 'domesticated themselves' or not, they are a domestic species and therefore not equatable with a wild one.
As a result, your point simply makes no sense. Domestic cats have no 'native lands' because they are not and cannot be 'native' anywhere except in human settlements.
> Can you point out the part of the article that disagrees with the assertion "cats are domestic animals"?
This is neither relevant nor the issue being discussed. It is a straw man, and you all too well know this. No one has at any point claimed that there are not domestic cats.
The entire point made was that cats are a native species in many parts of Europe, and that research shows not only that cats domesticated themselves, but that domestic and wild cats are genetically almost identical. The fact that domestic cats exist does not prevent native wild cats from also existing.
Did you actually read the article I linked to? I ask because actual evolutionary geneticists don't agree with you, and I'm likely to side with them on the genetics of the matter.
from the looks of it, you found an inkling of confirmation and rolled with it. you think you got a science backing for your ideas, but nah, wrong. remind yourself when you read all the articles claiming "near identical DNA!" that human DNA is ~1.6% different from gorilla DNA. geneticists are seeing larger differences between domestic and wild cat species.
Even if you have a good point people are going to be less likely to listen to you if you start calling them lazy. This comment would be better without the last sentence
fair. projection on my part. i interpret seeing people say indoor cats lives are miserable (and using that idea uncritically to affirm their own choices) are doing so from a holier-than-thou position. to me, it's an uncreative and lazy view on pet ownership, but i getcha: flies, honey, and vinegar and all that.
Mine adores her leash walks. Cats are naturally skittish animals, being both prey and predator. So if they trust you as a source of protection the comfort of walking without worries is a benefit that outweighs the restriction of the harness. Plus it's high quality bonding time.
1. those collars don't work. birds didn't evolve alongside cat w/ flashy collars, so it doesn't always trigger flee instinct
2. if your cat wants to go outdoors, you can leash them like any dog-owner is required to do. the whole "cats need to be in nature" argument is rooted in the assumption that you as the owner aren't involved in that nourishment. if you can't be a responsible cat owner (keeping it from roaming on it's own; keeping it stimulated) then don't get a pet. is the cat really a critical unit of your family if you skirt responsibility and are okay w/ it dying violently outside?
3. the US is very much a fragile ecosystem. source on it not being? we, like many other place, have had a huge and trending decline in biodiversity.
4. cats haven't adapted to the human environment; we've developed technology and laws that have protected cats in our human environment. i'm not sure how they've had to adapt as they can interact with humans safely.
5. you don't see everything your cat kills. you may be able to placate yourself that your cat isn't one of the "rampant killers", but that thought isn't based solely on fact.
farming and suburbia are subsidized out the wazoo. and a lot of Ag doesn't go to feed people... you're bark is much, much worst than your bite.