• 18 Posts
  • 1.45K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • Yes, and if Democrats continue to refuse to understand why, they’ll continue to lose. This meme is a sterling example of that refusal. Third-party voters didn’t shift the election outcome. (If anything, there were more votes for right-wing third parties than left-wing third parties.) Polls show that Gaza was simply not a major factor, either. (The exception might be Michigan, but with 15 electoral votes, that wouldn’t have changed the ultimate outcome.)












  • SwingingTheLamptoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldWell well well
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    3 days ago

    I strongly disagree with VMT as the proper measure, and here’s a simple, constructed example of why:

    There are two cities of about 200,000 people. One is compact, and easy to get around by transit, walking, or biking. The people drive around 2,000 miles per year each. The other is a low-density, mostly suburban area, and people drive around 15,000 miles per year. They have the same casualty rate per VMT of 3 per million miles.

    Those two cities aren’t equally as safe. Not even close! The one city would have 1,200 crashes, injuries, or deaths each year, and the other would have 9,000. That’s a major difference which should be accounted for in policymaking and land-use decisions.

    As far as the American landscape, it’s spread out not because it was cheaper. How could that be, when it takes more infrastructure to spread out? It was more expensive, and that was actually the point of car-dependent suburbs. They were more expensive to build and maintain, which kept the undesirable people out. Then, the desirable people were subsidized, through the GI Bill, tax breaks, mortgage lending standards (e.g. redlining), and the like.

    I don’t claim it’s a grand conspiracy, but it is verifiable history.


  • SwingingTheLamptoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldWell well well
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    3 days ago

    Aw, c’mon, cars are objectively speaking luxury items today. A modernized Daihatsu Opti with a sticker price of about $5,500 (the inflation-adjusted price of a Ford Model T) would completely meet the requirements for getting and keeping a job.


  • SwingingTheLamptoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldWell well well
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    3 days ago

    Not having a car shaped my life in ways that effectively made me poorer/deeper in poverty.

    Another way to say this is that designing an entire landscape around the car has shaped everybody’s lives in ways that make millions of people poorer/deeper in poverty.


  • SwingingTheLamptoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldWell well well
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    3 days ago

    The danger comes from cars, and the reason the distances are so great is because the landscape was designed for cars. Those fatality numbers are biased to make it seem like bicycles are dangerous by framing it in terms of the mode of transportation the victim was using, instead of the agent causing the fatality, and by comparing the numbers to VMT.

    But, spin it differently: Capitalist elites bribed lobbied politicians to force you to spend your money and time on a motor vehicle to schlep your family around like sacks of potatoes to all your destinations by locating them unreasonably far away, so that the huge amounts of space needed by motor vehicles fit in between, and they could enrich themselves by selling motor vehicles. Now it’s become an arms race of bigger and bigger motor vehicles, further lining the pockets of the capitalist elites, at the expense of people’s (especially children’s, the disabled’s, and elderly’s) agency and freedom—because otherwise they’ll die under the bumpers of the maniacs operating motor vehicles that you’ll encounter in all of those extra miles you’re forced to travel.

    Different spin, different bias, but still 100% fact.


  • The Cannibal Sandwich, which doesn’t actually use human flesh, but is also not a sandwich. Anyway, you take a slice of rye cocktail bread, spread on some raw, ground beef, then top it with some sliced onion, salt, and pepper. You can’t get it ready-made, because nobody likes e. coli or salmonella poisoning. In fact, you have to make special arrangements to get the beef ground by a butcher in a clean grinder, and pretty much eat it the same day.