Agreed, but social media has become an echo chamber for fuckcars and good luck reasoning with them.

What’s far less dense with better public transit than NYC? The most popular example of no-car city design I see is Amsterdam, which is 1/2 the density of NYC, but still 15x the density of where I’m from (not even close to a rural area). I think robust public transit at 1/15th the density of Amsterdam and 1/30th the density of NYC is a pipe dream.

In these lower density places, maybe you luck out and you’re walking or biking distance to work. If you change jobs do you have to move instead of hopping in the car and commuting a bit further? In circumstances like these, transit can’t possibly serve every origin and destination efficiently, and personal vehicles can offer efficient point to point.

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.

That’s what I’m talking about also. Experts who are being paid to express an opinion, but in a circumstance where their peers would hold a consensus opinion that opposes what they are stating in court. Those experts are mercenaries.

That’s a good way to put it - it’s laziness. Maybe it’s laziness though the burden of history where the structure of the system is cobbled together from hundreds of years of increasingly irrelevant procedures and precedent that can’t be modernized with society. I’m not a legal scholar by any stretch, but the whole thing looks suspect to me.

I’ve heard from medical experts that appear not to be mercenaries, but my issue is that there’s no way for the legal system to distinguish between a person who takes the job only when they’re on the right side of an issue, and a person who will craft an argument to make their side seem right regardless of the facts. The process all seems very corrupt from the outside. It incentivizes financial conflict of interest.

That’s the issue I have with the justice system - it’s much too loose with facts because it’s designed around persuading non experts (and arguably jury selection is designed to reject people with high education or relevant background knowledge). The adversarial process gives each side an equal go at persuasion even if one side doesn’t have a leg to stand on scientifically. The judge isn’t in a position to disallow something that would be considered bullshit to an expert, and any qualified expert is allowed to sell out and present a biased interpretation of facts, even if 99% of their peers would disagree. More often than not, your resources determine whether or not you’re right in the eyes of the law. It’s bullshit.

Edit: if you’re a physician on trial for malpractice, “A jury of your peers” would consist entirely of physicians in your area of practice, as they are the only people with the relevant understanding and background knowledge to evaluate whether your actions followed the standard of care or constitute malpractice. The fact that courts don’t operate this way means that findings of guilt or innocence are basically a popularity/debate contest with a veneer of authenticity.

Believe me when I say I’m not on corporations’ side and I think they get away with all kinds of immoral shit through craftiness in the legal system, but I think that the only intellectually honest answer is that suspicious linkages are not causality, and that it should be evaluated by someone wielding scientific impartiality and robust statistical and epidemiological methods, rather than a legal process. Unfortunately courts are a shit place to evaluate science or broadly reality.

PFOA and similar precursor chemicals are one of those areas where I think it should be easy to establish elevated risk of disease with epidemiology (they probably have, but it’s not my field and I haven’t looked), but there are a lot of other areas that are much less clear cut. I’ve seen firsthand the family’s emotional response to cancer being to find a villain somewhere, and it was in a case where I think no villain ever existed. People behave irrationally with mortal disease, and unfortunately some of it is just bad luck.

That’s interesting, thanks.

I don’t mean to seem disrespectful of the loss of your relative in any way, but how were you able to establish a causal relationship between the CPAP machine and a particular illness or death?

It’s not a question based in some sort of absolvence-by-legal-technicality, but I often read accounts of grieving family members who “just know” that that MMR vaccine caused their son’s autism, or that dad using a chemical occasionally in the garage “must have” caused his cancer - because it’s less scary than the idea that bad health problems happen at random to people who didn’t do anything to cause it.

Edit: rarely, some health condition leads to a smoking gun, but most do not. Mesothelioma is only caused by exposure to asbestos, which is why you see commercials for lawyers seeking plaintiffs for injury cases. The causal relationship is established.

That’s an oversight on my part. I didn’t look at tonight l Tokyo specifically

Yeah I made an error there. I wasn’t looking specifically at Tokyo population for some reason.

Doesn’t that all seem a bit silly?

For sure. All of this is pretty silly.

Also, it seems you are willing to discount discussion out of hand because of your perception of the person on the other side instead of based on the merits of the argument.

Well, I mean, yes, but I’m basically trying to say that social media in it’s various forms is full of armchair experts who have massive blind spots but argue passionately, and the pro-urban, “fuck cars” crowd comes off as particularly cranky in this way.

It’s basically people who didn’t get a driver’s license, or couldn’t afford a car, or lived in an urban traffic nightmare like LA trying to invalidate the personal freedom others experienced as a result of car ownership - and I’m certain it’s a generational thing because boomers, Gen X and the older millennials grew up at a time when anyone could own a car, gas was cheap, and it was woven into the independence of early adulthood. You’ll never convince me that it’s not empowering to get 50-100 miles out of your small city and explore an unpopulated place that public transit could not service. It annoys me to no end that people on socal media hate on this without the lived experience to understand it.

20 years ago, Japan’s population was basically flat. It has the same population today as it did in 1995, having gone up and then down by only a couple million people in between.

Land prices in the US were also low 20 years ago, before we added another 45 million people to the demand side of the equation.

I’ve lived in a lot more places than most people, with a lot more diversity of experience. I certainly can’t guarantee more experience than any random commenter, but it will be more than the vast majority. I’ve lived in several small towns and cities. Many suburbs. A few large cities. I’ve walked to work, biked to work, taken public transit to work. I’ve driven 10m to work and commuted 2.5h to work with a combination of trains and cars - and everything in between. I’ve regularly been to places where you’re within sight of >20 people at all times, and places that haven’t seen a human in 10 years. The vast majority of people live within 20 miles of where they were born, and less than half of gen Z adults have a driver’s license. I’ve owned over two dozen cars and have a pilots license. I live thousands of miles from where I grew up. I have degrees, certifications, or substantial work experience in 5 different fields. I have several hobbies more substantive than many peoples careers. I know things about stuff.

And also, because many, when pressed, will admit to living in a big city, maybe in Europe, or someplace with fucked, hellish sprawl like LA that’s a victim of a half century of compound growth, or some insane new construction suburb in TX or FL that was designed to enrich a real estate developer at the highest possible profit margin. Either urban hell (from my perspective) or a strawman of hellish sprawl that isn’t very similar to older suburbs and the original “American dream” - not having tried much else.

Edit: in one case I was talking with someone who thought the travel distance to a normal suburban grocery store was 500% the straight line distance due to some comical maze of roads. I have to drive/walk/bike 25% further to my suburban grocery store than its straight line distance, and it’s been the same in the last 4 suburbs I’ve lived in, in radically different places. It tells me that a lot of people don’t know WTF they’re talking about.

NYC has more resources to function than just about anywhere. High tax, both state and city, combined with a massive number of taxpayers. Extremely high road and bridge tolls. Best-case, near-universal ridership of the long-established public transit (and significant rider fees). Very small land area over which to spread its city income.

If they can’t maintain a clean and tidy city with the resources they have, the taxation and manpower required is probably not achievable.

I think that unless you have a non-American (e.g. Japanese) community caretaking ethic that comes with other baggage (and can’t easily be recreated in American culture), the residents will wear it down and trash it faster than it can be fixed. If you put 10m rats in a proportional land area, they’d kill each other - I don’t know why we think it’s healthy for human habitation to exist at that level

Maybe I’d be less vocal about it if there wasn’t a loud minority of people - I suspect mostly born after 1990 - who have these opinions largely as a result of lack of other experience. Maybe I’d be less pissed off about it if they stopped moving from huge cities to small ones and fucking up the cost of everything whilst trying to convert everywhere to NYC and Amsterdam.

I’m sick of the Zennial/euro anti-car, ultra pro-urban densification, unopposed bandwagoning online, and I feel compelled to speak up about it.

Maybe 40s-50s for some of them. Maybe never for others, but I think the only way they can idealize apartment living is lack of life experience. City living is hip and fun for young people but it gets old. Maybe we’re dealing with extreme extroverts who can’t bear the quiet of a green suburb, and having private space in a personal vehicle instead of being crammed on the bus or train with the general public.