One underlying problem for American safety activists is that over the last 40 years citizens have been encouraged by media and the government to believe that driving a car is a right instead of a privilege.
It’s bad enough that the story is misleading, and that it provides no useful news. What makes it dangerous is that it is misleading precisely to draw readers; and by becoming popular it then causes things to happen.
It’s as if I went around to all the employees on the floor and handed them little badges, telling them: “Please hold on to this badge. It says whether I like you or not.” It’s not the way things work in the real world, and OOP is supposed to model the world.
Did I tell you I heard The Doors “Riders On The Storm” mashed with Blondie’s “Rapture” the other day? Surely there’s a law against that somewhere. If there is, I’d like to make a citizen’s arrest against whoever did that
No, I don’t mean a Prius/vegan sort of consciousness, just the basic kind where we are aware that all of our actions have a blast radius, and other human beings are in it.
Nightclubs are machines for turning music in to beer sales.
Every company’s dream, right? A base of miserable customers who stick with you only because they have no choice.
We don’t listen to music in the office. We listen to US Army audio transcripts from the front lines of the Vietnam War. The power of these bits of history really help us focus on fixing bugs in Basecamp.
If real productivity had risen just 1% pa, it would have almost doubled since 1955, which means that people could live a 1955 lifestyle working only three days per week. This is clearly not the case
our automobile design, our road design, our laws and the way they are interpreted, our law enforcement and our city planning continue to be focused on moving more automobiles faster, on isolating the driver from his/her surroundings, and on requiring less and less of the driver in terms of awareness and interaction with their environment
If we spent $4 billion on affordable housing in Portland, Schools in Portland, Jobs in Vancouver, and College in Oregon - could we help society way more than if we put it all in to one 5 mile stretch of freeway?
Capitalist industry has thus won the game: the superfluous has become necessary. There’s no longer any need to persuade people that they want a car; it’s necessity is a fact of life.
