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I'm sorry you have such strong feelings of resentment towards people's decisions on how they wish to pursue life, liberty and happiness, but it's one of the man

I'm sorry you have such strong feelings of resentment towards people's decisions on how they wish to pursue life, liberty and happiness, but it's one of the many consequences in living in a democratic and diverse society. People will value different things. I am sure there is something you find enjoyable that another finds ludicrous. Try to be a little more understanding!

throwawaygh 6y ago
I might be more inclined to have this attitude if gas were $10+/gal and roads were always paid for at time of use. But this particular life choice has massive, civilization-changing externalities that aren't priced in, and is then additionally subsidized on top of that. Over a 200 year window starting in 1900 or so, the personal vehicle is probably one of the two or three most destructive developments. NB: Not being critical of anyone's personal choice, but of the market/system that enables those choices by failing to properly price carbon and road infra. In particular, I've been known to drive my SUV to work.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  That's an insane analysis. Without the vehicle, the population would be a fraction of what it is and you probably would have never been born.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > Without the vehicle, the population would be a fraction of what it is and you probably would have never been born. Personal automobile ownership is more than double what it was in 1960 (410.37/1K in 1960 vs. 831.9/1K in 2018). Needless to say, our birth rates are just a tad lower today than they were at the height of the baby boom... And that's just in the USA. Look up rates of automobile ownership throughout the world. There are massive variations between countries with similar economies and similar brithrates. And to head off the obvious explanation for the explosion of car ownership in the US being negatively correlated with population growth, notice that other developed economies also experienced a gender revolution and that this lack of strong correlation exists even if you measure car ownership at the level of households instead of at the level of individuals. The hypothesis that cars => population growth just doesn't bear out in the data, even after correcting for a lot of possible confounds. The two are, at best, uncorrelated. (Again, my post mentioned "the personal vehicle", not the ICE or carbonization of the economy more generally, which indeed enabled unparalleled growth) > That's an insane analysis. After looking at the data, I think you're completely wrong. But of course your hypothesis was not even close to "insane".
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      Clearly you couldn't even feed the planet without the transportation network necessary to distribute the food. Nor could you even grow it. Modern agriculture depends on fertilizer, which is made from mined materials. Farms are run with fossil fuel powered equipment. The quality of life and the length of life extended dramatically with the advent of the automobile and electricity (also fossil fuel powered). We wouldn't even be having this discussion right now. Not even to mention the serendipitous effects of expanding human horizons beyond what could be traveled by horse, which alone is a substantial achievement and led to more discoveries and human connection than I can even fathom. Without transport and communication there would be no modern era, no internet, no tech sector. Just an extension of the 19th century.
      - throwawaygh 6y ago
        >> Again, my post mentioned "the personal vehicle", not the ICE or carbonization of the economy more generally, which indeed enabled unparalleled growth As for the rest? The west was settled by track layers.
- centimeter 6y ago
  Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. As far as pollution externalities go, you may be right, but actual level-headed analysis of the dollar cost of global warming are tough to describe as “civilization-changing”. Certainly I think the externalities of my own vehicle usage are worth it, and I would be happy to pay those costs if they were internalized correctly (but good luck not turning that into a pork-barrel monstrosity).
  - morsch 6y ago
    > If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. As opposed to all the rural subsistance farmers who build all their own stuff? I'm sure there's a handful such people out there, but everybody else has their food and stuff trucked in just as much, with a 30 minute car ride added on top to haul things back to the ranch.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    > Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. This is just whataboutism. Externalities from all vehicular use should be internalized. I don't see anyone suggesting otherwise.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    > Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. Yes, but we need substantially wider roads and more roads when cars are a primary commuting method. It's often the case that trucking is simultaneously the largest source of wear and not the largest contributor to road budgets. > it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. How are rural areas any different? Those peaches from the Walmart in northern WI were probably grown in the exact same Georgian fields as the peaches from the corner store in Chicago. For manufactured goods made in $asian_country, trucking stuff out to Montana from the coast is going to cause a lot more road damage than hauling it from a barge to some store in the bay area. The amount of road wear&tear probably correlates more with your distance from the major ports than urban/rural. That can go either way. Unless you live in Iowa and your diet consists mainly of corn and ethanol and you furnish your home with Amish furniture^1, you're benefiting from trucking routes at least as much as anyone in "the city". There are very few "self-sufficient" communities in the USA. The closest you get . [^1]: This is a joke :)
- Spooky23 6y ago
  Moral indignation aside, the actual generator functionality will have a meaningful improvement in air quality and pollution. The use case for something like this are scenarios where workmen need to use tools on a jobsite. Running a generator workload on a truck engine with emissions controls is a huge improvement over what people do today -- run standalone generators that pollute far more in terms of particulates, noise and other factors.
  - throwawaygh 6y ago
    Agreed. The conversation became unhinged from the topic of the article, which I guess is why OP is now [flagged].
techsupporter 6y ago
Living in a free society does not mean you have to agree with everyone else's choices, merely that each of you are empowered to make those choices. I, along with OP, am free to be vehemently opposed to the idea that the "default choice" is to drive around, alone, in increasingly-larger vehicles that consume rapidly-depleting fossil fuels and foul up the air for miles. I'm also free to try to jostle, within our political, societal, and governmental frameworks, for changes to those modes being the default or preferred or inexpensive. Acceptance of the freedom of society does not require understanding nor approval. I grant neither of those things to people who choose to tote around far more vehicle and energy use.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  "rapidly depleting" fossil fuels narrative has fallen off a cliff in recent years. Oil became so abundant this year that at one point the price went negative.
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    > Oil became so abundant this year No, the rate of oil being yanked out of the ground has become so abundant this year--especially when contrast with the rate of use since a staggering amount of us are staying at home--that the price went negative. (And it only went negative because futures traders did not want to actually take delivery of the physical oil they'd "purchased" with their options contracts.) The quantity of fossil fuels available to us on this planet is decreasing while our use of them continues to wreck the atmosphere we rely upon. A large component of this is personal transportation (alongside industry).
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      The proven natural reserves is higher than at any point in history. Massive amounts of oil exist which accumulated for millions of years and we are nowhere near depleting those reserves. And no, contrary to the fear over mild warming, CO2 has many fantastic benefits for plant life on this planet. In recent years, this has caused the total plant leaf surface area to increase by 25-50%: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... Photosynthesis quite literally depends on CO2. Thank goodness we're restoring the CO2 back to the atmosphere from which it originally came from. It was buried under ground as an accident of history. Plants evolved to thrive at CO2 levels more than 3-4x what present-day levels are.
CarelessExpert 6y ago
> but it's one of the many consequences in living in a democratic and diverse society. A democratic and diverse society that's structured such that the costs of the negative externalities that result from individual choices are born by the broader community and not the individual. In this particular case, the most immediate and obvious examples include air pollution and associated consequences, as well as additional wear and tear on public roadways. Of course, the solution to negative externalities is always the same: tax the behaviour (in this case, fuel taxes, taxes on large vehicles, and tax breaks for car pooling, transit, and other similarly less damaging choices) so that the costs are born by the person engaging in said behaviour. Naturally, whenever folks are asked to pay for these externalities, the reaction is an immediate and passionate rejection of "big government" curtailing "freedoms"--in this case, the freedom to make everyone else pay for the consequences of their choices. Why? Because people want to engage in the behaviour without having to also own the consequences. While that's a form of freedom, it's an irresponsible one, born of a uniquely self-centered conception of "freedom" that bears a striking resemblance to narcissism. Pity the lack of basic economic education prevents people from understanding that they're free riding on the rest of us by failing to pay for their damaging behaviours. It's especially ironic since these same objections are often associated with individuals who would decry the welfare state, which similarly involves society bearing the costs to support individual behaviours; it's just much more honest about it.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > the solution to negative externalities is always the same Not really. There are lots of actions that have negative externalities and which we choose to treat differently. E.g., consider drug abuse, financial fraud, violent crime. We do not attenuate the incidence rate of these behaviors using the tax code. The idea of using the tax code to shape behavior by manipulating market forces is relatively new and has a mixed track record. This is true even market-based solutions to decarbonization. E.g., "cap & trade" crucially includes a "cap" that has to be enforced one way or another.
  - CarelessExpert 6y ago
    > Not really. There are lots of actions that have negative externalities and which we choose to treat differently. E.g., consider drug abuse, financial fraud, violent crime. We do not attenuate the incidence rate of these behaviors using the tax code. I'm specifically talking about directing behaviours that remain legal. I don't expect governments around the world are gonna ban the F-150. As for things like cap and trade, you're right, that's an alternative mechanism. At bottom it's the same, though: assign an economic cost to the behaviour, and then use the market system to manage the behaviour. Still, your point is well taken!
beering 6y ago
There’s a difference between opposing something because I don’t like it versus opposing something because it has substantial negative effects on other people. Solo commuters in huge cars increases traffic danger, pollution, or congestion. If I value not wearing a mask in public businesses, you would be justified in opposing it. This is not “I enjoy having my house painted orange but my neighbors don’t like it.”

throwawaygh 6y ago

I might be more inclined to have this attitude if gas were $10+/gal and roads were always paid for at time of use. But this particular life choice has massive, civilization-changing externalities that aren't priced in, and is then additionally subsidized on top of that. Over a 200 year window starting in 1900 or so, the personal vehicle is probably one of the two or three most destructive developments. NB: Not being critical of anyone's personal choice, but of the market/system that enables those choices by failing to properly price carbon and road infra. In particular, I've been known to drive my SUV to work.

chrisco255 6y ago
That's an insane analysis. Without the vehicle, the population would be a fraction of what it is and you probably would have never been born.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > Without the vehicle, the population would be a fraction of what it is and you probably would have never been born. Personal automobile ownership is more than double what it was in 1960 (410.37/1K in 1960 vs. 831.9/1K in 2018). Needless to say, our birth rates are just a tad lower today than they were at the height of the baby boom... And that's just in the USA. Look up rates of automobile ownership throughout the world. There are massive variations between countries with similar economies and similar brithrates. And to head off the obvious explanation for the explosion of car ownership in the US being negatively correlated with population growth, notice that other developed economies also experienced a gender revolution and that this lack of strong correlation exists even if you measure car ownership at the level of households instead of at the level of individuals. The hypothesis that cars => population growth just doesn't bear out in the data, even after correcting for a lot of possible confounds. The two are, at best, uncorrelated. (Again, my post mentioned "the personal vehicle", not the ICE or carbonization of the economy more generally, which indeed enabled unparalleled growth) > That's an insane analysis. After looking at the data, I think you're completely wrong. But of course your hypothesis was not even close to "insane".
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Clearly you couldn't even feed the planet without the transportation network necessary to distribute the food. Nor could you even grow it. Modern agriculture depends on fertilizer, which is made from mined materials. Farms are run with fossil fuel powered equipment. The quality of life and the length of life extended dramatically with the advent of the automobile and electricity (also fossil fuel powered). We wouldn't even be having this discussion right now. Not even to mention the serendipitous effects of expanding human horizons beyond what could be traveled by horse, which alone is a substantial achievement and led to more discoveries and human connection than I can even fathom. Without transport and communication there would be no modern era, no internet, no tech sector. Just an extension of the 19th century.
    - throwawaygh 6y ago
      >> Again, my post mentioned "the personal vehicle", not the ICE or carbonization of the economy more generally, which indeed enabled unparalleled growth As for the rest? The west was settled by track layers.
centimeter 6y ago
Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. As far as pollution externalities go, you may be right, but actual level-headed analysis of the dollar cost of global warming are tough to describe as “civilization-changing”. Certainly I think the externalities of my own vehicle usage are worth it, and I would be happy to pay those costs if they were internalized correctly (but good luck not turning that into a pork-barrel monstrosity).
- morsch 6y ago
  > If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. As opposed to all the rural subsistance farmers who build all their own stuff? I'm sure there's a handful such people out there, but everybody else has their food and stuff trucked in just as much, with a 30 minute car ride added on top to haul things back to the ranch.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  > Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. If anyone is benefiting from uninternalized road damage subsidies, it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. This is just whataboutism. Externalities from all vehicular use should be internalized. I don't see anyone suggesting otherwise.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > Road damage disproportionately comes from freight vehicles, not consumer vehicles. Yes, but we need substantially wider roads and more roads when cars are a primary commuting method. It's often the case that trucking is simultaneously the largest source of wear and not the largest contributor to road budgets. > it’s people in cities who need to truck in all their food and stuff. How are rural areas any different? Those peaches from the Walmart in northern WI were probably grown in the exact same Georgian fields as the peaches from the corner store in Chicago. For manufactured goods made in $asian_country, trucking stuff out to Montana from the coast is going to cause a lot more road damage than hauling it from a barge to some store in the bay area. The amount of road wear&tear probably correlates more with your distance from the major ports than urban/rural. That can go either way. Unless you live in Iowa and your diet consists mainly of corn and ethanol and you furnish your home with Amish furniture^1, you're benefiting from trucking routes at least as much as anyone in "the city". There are very few "self-sufficient" communities in the USA. The closest you get . [^1]: This is a joke :)
Spooky23 6y ago
Moral indignation aside, the actual generator functionality will have a meaningful improvement in air quality and pollution. The use case for something like this are scenarios where workmen need to use tools on a jobsite. Running a generator workload on a truck engine with emissions controls is a huge improvement over what people do today -- run standalone generators that pollute far more in terms of particulates, noise and other factors.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  Agreed. The conversation became unhinged from the topic of the article, which I guess is why OP is now [flagged].

techsupporter 6y ago

Living in a free society does not mean you have to agree with everyone else's choices, merely that each of you are empowered to make those choices. I, along with OP, am free to be vehemently opposed to the idea that the "default choice" is to drive around, alone, in increasingly-larger vehicles that consume rapidly-depleting fossil fuels and foul up the air for miles. I'm also free to try to jostle, within our political, societal, and governmental frameworks, for changes to those modes being the default or preferred or inexpensive. Acceptance of the freedom of society does not require understanding nor approval. I grant neither of those things to people who choose to tote around far more vehicle and energy use.

chrisco255 6y ago
"rapidly depleting" fossil fuels narrative has fallen off a cliff in recent years. Oil became so abundant this year that at one point the price went negative.
- techsupporter 6y ago
  > Oil became so abundant this year No, the rate of oil being yanked out of the ground has become so abundant this year--especially when contrast with the rate of use since a staggering amount of us are staying at home--that the price went negative. (And it only went negative because futures traders did not want to actually take delivery of the physical oil they'd "purchased" with their options contracts.) The quantity of fossil fuels available to us on this planet is decreasing while our use of them continues to wreck the atmosphere we rely upon. A large component of this is personal transportation (alongside industry).
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    The proven natural reserves is higher than at any point in history. Massive amounts of oil exist which accumulated for millions of years and we are nowhere near depleting those reserves. And no, contrary to the fear over mild warming, CO2 has many fantastic benefits for plant life on this planet. In recent years, this has caused the total plant leaf surface area to increase by 25-50%: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer... Photosynthesis quite literally depends on CO2. Thank goodness we're restoring the CO2 back to the atmosphere from which it originally came from. It was buried under ground as an accident of history. Plants evolved to thrive at CO2 levels more than 3-4x what present-day levels are.

CarelessExpert 6y ago

> but it's one of the many consequences in living in a democratic and diverse society. A democratic and diverse society that's structured such that the costs of the negative externalities that result from individual choices are born by the broader community and not the individual. In this particular case, the most immediate and obvious examples include air pollution and associated consequences, as well as additional wear and tear on public roadways. Of course, the solution to negative externalities is always the same: tax the behaviour (in this case, fuel taxes, taxes on large vehicles, and tax breaks for car pooling, transit, and other similarly less damaging choices) so that the costs are born by the person engaging in said behaviour. Naturally, whenever folks are asked to pay for these externalities, the reaction is an immediate and passionate rejection of "big government" curtailing "freedoms"--in this case, the freedom to make everyone else pay for the consequences of their choices. Why? Because people want to engage in the behaviour without having to also own the consequences. While that's a form of freedom, it's an irresponsible one, born of a uniquely self-centered conception of "freedom" that bears a striking resemblance to narcissism. Pity the lack of basic economic education prevents people from understanding that they're free riding on the rest of us by failing to pay for their damaging behaviours. It's especially ironic since these same objections are often associated with individuals who would decry the welfare state, which similarly involves society bearing the costs to support individual behaviours; it's just much more honest about it.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> the solution to negative externalities is always the same Not really. There are lots of actions that have negative externalities and which we choose to treat differently. E.g., consider drug abuse, financial fraud, violent crime. We do not attenuate the incidence rate of these behaviors using the tax code. The idea of using the tax code to shape behavior by manipulating market forces is relatively new and has a mixed track record. This is true even market-based solutions to decarbonization. E.g., "cap & trade" crucially includes a "cap" that has to be enforced one way or another.
- CarelessExpert 6y ago
  > Not really. There are lots of actions that have negative externalities and which we choose to treat differently. E.g., consider drug abuse, financial fraud, violent crime. We do not attenuate the incidence rate of these behaviors using the tax code. I'm specifically talking about directing behaviours that remain legal. I don't expect governments around the world are gonna ban the F-150. As for things like cap and trade, you're right, that's an alternative mechanism. At bottom it's the same, though: assign an economic cost to the behaviour, and then use the market system to manage the behaviour. Still, your point is well taken!

beering 6y ago

There’s a difference between opposing something because I don’t like it versus opposing something because it has substantial negative effects on other people. Solo commuters in huge cars increases traffic danger, pollution, or congestion. If I value not wearing a mask in public businesses, you would be justified in opposing it. This is not “I enjoy having my house painted orange but my neighbors don’t like it.”