7 ms·

Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity.

by criley2 10y ago

Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity. Cars have not been. The earliest proto-human sought shelter from a storm. They did not seek personalized shelter during transportation. I don't like the argument at all, and I think it's a cop out, a slippery slope argument. >Do you AirBnB your bed (at hourly rates)? Do you AirPantsAndT your clothes? Most people don't. This is just a very feeble slippery slope that ignores the very real differences. Yes, clothing and shelter have been humans needs for far longer than civilization itself. Can you say the same for micro-space in a personal transport? Were humans owning personal space inside of pack animals 10,000 years ago? It's a bad argument. There's no slippery slope here. Homes and clothes are fundamentally different than cars. You cannot live a civilized life without a home and clothes. You can live a civilized modern life without a car. Obviously we approach higher order needs differently than lower order.

clock_tower 10y ago
> Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity. > Cars have not been. The earliest proto-human sought shelter from a storm. They did not seek personalized shelter during transportation. Are you familiar with New World Economics' discussion of "really narrow streets"? One thing the author points out (in "Let's Take a Trip to an American Village") is that even in the 19th century, the US was very interested in what he calls "My Personal Means of Transportation" -- the fashionable thing to do was to have a carriage house, no matter how little you actually needed a carriage. I think you see less of this pattern elsewhere in the world (or else you just see less wealth; consider how "pedestrian" seldom has positive connotations and "equestrian" never has negative ones), but there's definitely an enthusiasm for personal transport in the US.
tomc1985 10y ago
> Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity. The need for transportation is just as ancient as the need for shelter. Before cars, it was a horse, or camel, or a chariot, or something else on wheels. I think you underestimate the strength of car culture, and the value people place in personal space (at least in the US). And as with so many things, why can't these unnecessarily-competing worlds coexist? There are millions of overly confident entrepreneurs rationalizing millions of wacky, over-engineered money-grabs and only a few of those ideas have strength to be so culturally and socially transformative as the world you describe. Is the end of car ownership one of those lofty ideas? I am not so sure. Edit: and on a more personal level, I see ideas like that -- the end of ownership, whether it be cars, software, or land -- as an attack on individual ownership, so that moneyed interests can instead own everything and lease it to the peasants at their leisure (and profit). The world needs the opposite: to make ownership easier and less costly, and to restore the the increasingly-stratospheric costs of everything* down to levels that put ownership within reach of the common man. Not owning cars is just another step towards feudalism. * As for how, there could be much to gain simply by analyzing the cost structure of stuff and stripping out unnecessary middlemen, expenses, and materials. Adopting a more restrained form of capitalism, like what one sees in tight-knit economic communities or in idealized small-business environments, could perhaps foster a business culture centered around balancing customer, employee, and shareholder value. The current system of only maximizing shareholder value creates much of the turmoil, unnecessary innovation, and naked profiteering we see today.

by criley2 10y ago

clock_tower 10y ago

> Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity. > Cars have not been. The earliest proto-human sought shelter from a storm. They did not seek personalized shelter during transportation. Are you familiar with New World Economics' discussion of "really narrow streets"? One thing the author points out (in "Let's Take a Trip to an American Village") is that even in the 19th century, the US was very interested in what he calls "My Personal Means of Transportation" -- the fashionable thing to do was to have a carriage house, no matter how little you actually needed a carriage. I think you see less of this pattern elsewhere in the world (or else you just see less wealth; consider how "pedestrian" seldom has positive connotations and "equestrian" never has negative ones), but there's definitely an enthusiasm for personal transport in the US.

tomc1985 10y ago

> Conflating a home and a car is a bad argument. Homes have been required for hundreds of thousands of years. Shelter has been a human need since before humanity. The need for transportation is just as ancient as the need for shelter. Before cars, it was a horse, or camel, or a chariot, or something else on wheels. I think you underestimate the strength of car culture, and the value people place in personal space (at least in the US). And as with so many things, why can't these unnecessarily-competing worlds coexist? There are millions of overly confident entrepreneurs rationalizing millions of wacky, over-engineered money-grabs and only a few of those ideas have strength to be so culturally and socially transformative as the world you describe. Is the end of car ownership one of those lofty ideas? I am not so sure. Edit: and on a more personal level, I see ideas like that -- the end of ownership, whether it be cars, software, or land -- as an attack on individual ownership, so that moneyed interests can instead own everything and lease it to the peasants at their leisure (and profit). The world needs the opposite: to make ownership easier and less costly, and to restore the the increasingly-stratospheric costs of everything* down to levels that put ownership within reach of the common man. Not owning cars is just another step towards feudalism. * As for how, there could be much to gain simply by analyzing the cost structure of stuff and stripping out unnecessary middlemen, expenses, and materials. Adopting a more restrained form of capitalism, like what one sees in tight-knit economic communities or in idealized small-business environments, could perhaps foster a business culture centered around balancing customer, employee, and shareholder value. The current system of only maximizing shareholder value creates much of the turmoil, unnecessary innovation, and naked profiteering we see today.