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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The problem is most people don’t live in 15 minute cities and it’s impossible to turn the suburbs into 15 minute cities as most things are just physically too far apart.

    If you live in a gigantic McMansion neighborhood that takes 5 minutes to get out of by car and then your job is an additional 20 miles away there is no bus or train solution - you’ll have to have a car.

    Funny you should mention living in your car. I used to have a 40 mi commute from my suburban town, each way, to work. I lived slightly north of Baltimore and commuted to just outside of DC. I would spend an hour minimum each way driving. When traffic was bad easy 2 hours. I did this for 4 years and it was soul destroying, but it was an extremely lucrative job.

    Then I found a job in my little suburb that pays about the same amount of money and it’s close enough I can ride my bike to, which I do sometimes when it’s not hot, by car it’s only about 5 minutes. The extra time I’ve gotten back has been amazing and looking back I would have taken 20% pay cut to not have to do that horrible commute.

    That is not a solution for everyone as there aren’t enough jobs in the suburbs to support the population. They’re called bedroom communities for a reason.

    I’m really not pro or anti car. I just think you have to be realistic. The realistic part is the suburbs are just too spaced out and too far from jobs to have a functioning mass transit system.





  • The suburbs are inherently compatible with trains and really any public transportation. They were quite literally designed around the car and the expectation that everyone would have a car.

    Unless you plan to bulldoze the suburbs and then force everyone to move into higher density areas your anti-car dreams are never going to happen.

    Although there are many American cities that could get much more anti-car and public transport would work. LA could theoretically not be such a car city with the appropriate infrastructure built in.

    Why are the anti-car people anti-self-driving car? With self-driving cars we could mostly eliminate private car ownership.






  • Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.

    About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.

    The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.

    Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.

    If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we’re in a depression.


  • There’s two problems…

    1. There is no easy to use singular Reddit replacement. (The fediverse is not easy to use to normal people.)

    2. Reddit is such a large social media site now that all the nerds getting angry and leaving doesn’t matter. 10 years ago this change would have killed Reddit, but now that normal people like my mom are on Reddit they don’t give a shit about using the official Reddit app, in fact they were probably already using it.






  • I have a picture with Joel McHale.

    If Joel McHale turned out to run an international child sex trafficking ring would my picture with him indicate that I was part of the ring?

    I HATE Elon, but this whole…

    “See see see! There is a picture of them both at the NYC 9/11 Firefighters Fundraiser event in 2009!!! <Insert celebrity here that was at the event and pictured with Maxwell or Epstein> must also be a Satan worshipping child rapist/murderer.”

    Thing is fucking stupid.


  • The smartphone is the only science fiction thing we have.

    We didn’t get table top fusion reactors, food pills, Rosie the robot, casual commercial space travel, flying cars, hoverboards, etc…

    But we did get a little computer we can carry around that has literally everything in it. It’s a camera, it’s camcorder, it’s a microcassette voice recorder, computer, telephone, book, TV, video conference system, remote control for all my lights, remote control for the TV, a McDonald’s ordering device, instant messenger, magazine, radio, GPS for my car, GPS tracker for my family, health monitoring device, flashlight, Sears catalog - It would probably be harder to come up with a list of things that it can’t do.

    You can take my smartphone from my cold dead hands.