Fuckcars is made up of people with little life experience who think they have all the answers, and people who fetishize city living and think it’s normal or healthy for humans to live at a density like NYC (and fuck you if you disagree). They’re oversimplifying to the point of meaninglessness, and handwaving away the problems.
I feel like this point is missing the big picture: people create the demand, and companies supply what the market demands. Like or hate “the free market”, this is essentially what it is. If there were magically 1/10th the number of humans on the planet, we would expect those companies to have 90% less emissions. It’s not that some of these companies aren’t bad actors, and have actions that are at times immoral, it’s that they are amoral actors in a market economy that is only responsive to consumer demand.
The example I like to give is that companies’ race to the bottom on quality. They’re responding to human behavior, where if an item on Amazon is $6, and another very similar item is 10 cents cheaper, the cheaper item will sell 100x more. This is a brutal, cutthroat example of human behavior and market forces. It leads to shitty products because consumers are more responsive to price and find it hard to distinguish quality, so the market supplies superficially-passable junk at the lowest possible price and (with robust competition) the lowest possible profit margin.
I certainly agree based on my previous statement that income is not wealth, but I was trying to make two points and mixed the messages.
One is that amounts of money that were once considered an unbelievable amount for income or wealth - say $100k and $1m - have now been eroded by inflation to fairly modest money. In the 70s or 80s, having a million meant never working again. Earning 100k a year when a house cost $50k was huge money, and might lead to wealth quickly, if one bought several houses with it.
Another point I’d like to sneak in is that there’s almost no modern equivalent to that kind of employed income. On paper, inflation puts it at 400k - so maybe today’s equivalent of a surgeon - but the 50k house now costs $500k-1m. Notional inflation being 4x, while the critically important things have gone up 10-20x means that something harder to quantify is broken, and upward mobility isn’t working the way we expect. The same opportunities don’t exist. We are less likely to turn income into wealth over time than at points in the past, and so the tendency of people to erroneously think high income = wealth may have a reasonable basis in history that has never been less true today.
Edit: and it’s not just houses, it’s the stock market. The advent of the internet and e-commerce resulting in tech stock growth 1995-today is a phenomenon not likely to be replicated in any other area. We may be running out of growth to be had. The ability to get 10-20x your money over 30-40 years of investments is probably gone, and with it the prospect of comfortable retirement for even relatively high earners.
I’ve seen this on Reddit before: Six figures means you’re rich, because that was true in the 80s, right? Obviously people don’t have a clue that 40 years of inflation has made that middle class.
Also: income is not wealth, and the willful lack of understanding on that point blows my mind. A person who is wealthy can live an upper middle class lifestyle or better without ever having to work again. A person who has respectable income may have minimal wealth, or even mountains of debt (student loans, mortgage, etc). A person who makes 100k could be a few months unemployment away from losing their house or lease, while a person with “wealth” may not have to work at all.
People don’t become filthy rich working full time for six figures. The wealthy (~$20-50m net worth and up IMO) are people who made their money with something other than labor - through investments and things that the government doesn’t really classify as normal income.
Edit: It’s like the saying goes: nobody makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars. If you tax the wealthy on income, you collect very little tax, because it’s not classified as income. Meanwhile you’re going to tax an engineer or physician who probably have hefty student loans and work their asses off full time, at the highest marginal rates because we don’t or can’t tax wealth.
Edit2: we’ve got minimum wage internet trolls who think an employee software engineer is basically a cigar chomping capitalist because they make over the median wage. The middle class has shrunk and maybe you’re not in it. Get a clue, dumbasses.
Totally agree. Income isn’t wealth and people are clinging onto 1970s implications of “millionaire” when in 2023 having a million net worth doesn’t even allow you to retire and might just mean you own a house and have little other savings. Similarly “six figures” income meant a lot 30-40 years ago, but inflation eroded that to middle class in the 21st century.
More of an environmental Skyhawk, actually
That was a great watch - it’s cool to find out the history.
I must say, society is much better off without widespread use of TEL, but as someone who used to do racecar things, TEL works like magic. A little goes a LONG way, and Midgely did legitimately stumble upon something with very high effect for the concentration (they also touch on ethanol in the video which has the drawback of needing a lot).
I’m not opposed to using it in a small scale racing context (like definitely not NASCAR) because it’s so fucking useful and the quantity is unlikely to cause harm. Unfortunately so much bad has been done with it at this point, I don’t think that’s a very popular opinion.
Whatever your views on it, it’s the only thing that can make gasoline legitimately 120+ octane, and that has huge implications for some types of racing.
Yes, some light planes have fuel economy similar to efficient cars (which is very impressive considering how fast they are relative to cars). If you consider the advantages of direct, straight line routing, it’s not hard for planes to do better on fuel economy.
We’re not talking about jets here, though some of those do very well in mpg on a per passenger basis.
I gave up kids to have flying!
Worth noting that the amount of aviation fuel burned annually should make it a negligible contributer to environmental lead contamination compared to widespread automotive use (although I’m sure it contributes on airport grounds).
Edit: All the pilots I know want to use unleaded, and it was recently approved after being stuck in a bureaucratic nightmare process, but market forces may make it hard to adopt.
It was caught in FAA-Bureauctatic hell for 15+ years and just approved last year. It will be still be slow to become available and adopt for reasons that are complicated, but amount to bureaucracy, economics, and an insane degree of risk aversion. The vast majority of pilots want unleaded and it’s also much better for the engines.
Have you seen the unbelievably entitled, self-centered assholes who play music on trails because they’re too cool for headphones and fuck what anyone else wants?
Are you going to be first in line to give up your computer? Your phone? Antibiotics? Vaccines? Electricity?
Innovation is real, even if you don’t personally like it. Motor vehicles are a legitimately good invention, arguably only becoming problematic due to increasing population and urbanization.
This is exactly the point I’ve been making to them. I think it’s a bunch of people who have never lived outside of a major city, or grew up in new-construction actual suburban hell like Phoenix, DFW, Vegas, most of FL etc. Try old Midwest small city suburbs by comparison. Maybe parts of the northeast.
They probably couldn’t afford a car after used car prices spiked sometime between 2000-2010, and never experienced the freedom and autonomy. They can’t imagine not being into a downtown club scene - it hasn’t dawned on them that they will probably grow up and hate living in a congested apartment world and might want to stretch out in a bigger house in a quiet neighborhood. It’s never occurred to them that not everyone works from home and their spouse may need to take a job 20 miles in the opposite direction.
Do you sell your house because your job changed? Get divorced because your partner’s job changed? You can’t have ALL of the employment in easy reach by public transit from your home. This ideal-city with perfect transit and no commute is a handwave. UNLESS you live in a sufficiently small town that has everything but hasn’t blown up yet - and those aren’t dense enough for transit, and require personal vehicles.
Public transit is also more inconvenient than convenient even if you give it a maximum advantage in density and stipulate that the trains will run 24/7 and frequently (NYC).
It’s just inexperience with life or being an urban loving weirdo who can’t imagine that other perspectives exist. I want to spend all of my free time in places you couldn’t service with transit. They can’t even imagine it.
Get in, make as much as possible (with little to no regard for others), get out, retire early.
Arguably, this is what the American dream has become. It used to be we wanted middle class wealth, 2.1 kids, and a nice suburban house. But now all we want to do is sell out, retire, and never have to work again. I can relate, even if I lack the skills to play the game.
That’s where we got antiwork, FIRE, etc. It’s true: nobody wants to work anymore. I sure don’t. Maybe we never did.
Well that was a totally reasonable response from someone who is totally capable of considering the merits of an argument without relying on bad articles trying to drum up weak support for the author’s preordained conclusion with circular reasoning. Nothing to see here folks. This guy has it all figured out and we should totally worship his correctness without debate.
IMO the only myth is the belief that it’s a myth. The evidence is overwhelming.
For reasons I don’t understand, people seem to be incapable of separating any discussion of overpopulation from racism and eugenics. I think it’s at the point where it’s disingenuous, willful, or at the very least a massive blind spot in people talking about the problem. You should understand that bad people can embrace overpopulation with bad conclusions, and that should not taint reality. Hitler was an animal lover - does that mean it’s wrong to love animals? That’s the level of flawed argument we’re dealing with here.
Quite literally, same here. There’s nothing wrong with bikes, but used cars became unreasonably expensive and younger people never tasted the freedom. Planes are like that with even smaller percentages of pilots and even more unreasonable prices (last affordable in the 1960s, while cars were affordable until the early 2000s or so). People hate what they don’t have or understand. Personal vehicles are incredibly liberating for those of us who get it. We’re being shamed for appreciating an independence everyone should experience, but can’t because there are too many people, too much demand, and all the ecological problems that come with it. Yes, human impact could be reduced if everyone lived in abject poverty, but guess what, poor people in developing countries want Western amenities too. Everyone should.
Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.