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Anyone who's working on making driving a car unbearable has my vote! My bicycle has a single chime and it's manually operated.
by phoronixrly 3mo ago
Anyone who's working on making driving a car unbearable has my vote! My bicycle has a single chime and it's manually operated.
- zelphirkalt 3mo agoWait until they mandate a panel of warning LEDs on your bike or a cam on your bike recording your face.
- newsclues 3mo agoWait until manual bikes are banned and only gps tracked e-bikes exist for citizen safety!
- cavoirom 3mo agogiving up your freedom to limit others in the name of safety seems unwise. too much control creates a generation behave like the kids.
- phoronixrly 3mo agoOh, the good old cars are freedom cliché? Thank you, I feel perfectly free when I don't have to worry about parking, gas, maintenance, taxes, inadvertently killing anyone, polluting...
- lan321 3mo agoMobility is freedom, yes. During communism movement within countries required a written permission slip, movement outside even more so. The longer it'll take you to leave or organize against your leaders, the less freedom you have. See DPRK for an extreme example.
- phoronixrly 3mo agoStraw man aside, I find the notion of cars being used as a tool to escape from or even to overthrow an authoritarian regime extremely funny... Even without a big brother: cars are heavily regulated and controlled; current cars are a privacy nightmare; cars are (as yet) mostly dependent on fossil fuels (that you can't produce yourself, and are heavily regulated and taxed). If anything in an authoritarian regime, cars would be (and were) an instrument of control. The extra funny part is that all the car-brained ex-communist people that had to be good little comrades during the 20-year waiting list period they had to endure are now big on the 'cars = freedom' mindset... No my guy, if cars were freedom, you can be damn sure only the communist nomenclature would be allowed to have them. Instead you were humiliated with spending half your life on a waiting list, and then the only freedom you got was to continue being a subservient communist subject under the party boot. How else would you afford gasoline after all? Not that that was enough... For context, I live in a former communist country, parents and grandparents waited for 10+ years to be graced with the permission to buy a car. Then proceeded not be able to afford petrol until the early 2000s...
- queenkjuul 3mo agoIt's truly hilarious to me that people forget cars need roads, roads are owned by governments, and governments can block roads whenever they want. I bike most places but keep my car for the odd road trip or run to Ikea. But when ICE decides to shut down the interstates and round up all us commies, my car is not going to magically smuggle me 500 miles to Canada, and i can't believe people think it will
- phoronixrly 3mo agoYep - the most inconspicuous way to pass a border is with a car via the public road network, and through a border checkpoint! I call it 'The Handmaid's Tale' approach!
- happymellon 3mo agoThe fascists also requested papers please. It's an authoritarian requirements, not a communist or facist one.
- lan321 3mo agoWasn't meant in that way. I just have very detailed examples I can provide with the communist regime due to where I'm from. I can't argue about all authoritarian regimes since someone's bound to come with some exception or example I do not know enough about.
- queenkjuul 3mo agoGuess what? They can block roads and demand papers in your car, too. The car has nothing to do with what you're talking about.
- lan321 3mo agoThey can demand anything and suicide you in anything from a cell to a mass grave but that's not a reason to remove any freedoms you have. Oh no, they can demand I unlock my phone! Better remove encryption and give them permanent remote access! Oh no, they can close off all border-crossing roads via checkpoints and stop me from leaving the country by car! Better remove cars! Oh no, they can stop public transport! Better remove public transport! Oh no, they can suicide me! Better remove myself! In the case of shit hitting the fan you take what you can get and any options are welcome. I have family who died during the communist revolution and they literally went willingly to their death because if they'd run their entire families would have gotten killed, which then led to many immediate family members of the killed ones to be put in prison on bs charges out of fear of retaliation. My grandfather was literally found guilty of assisting in the murder of a national hero who died before he was born and causing one of the largest recent wars, which also happened before he was born, because his father was an intellectual that ended in a mass grave. When things get unstable all rules are out the window. Throwing your family in the car and booking it for the border would have been an option worth considering. There wasn't one though and you can't really escape by horse cart in winter with the borders of the time. Now it's all very open. Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial. Edit: Even without my schizo take, there's just a sort of freedom in that I can decide on the weekend that I wanna see castle, find one in a 400km radius and just beeline to it. With a bicycle that radius is 100km maybe. For me more like 70. With public transport there's a lot you can't reach and it's often more expensive.
- queenkjuul 3mo agoLol you're deliberately missing the point. Also, > Closing every single border crossing at the same time in a period of instability isn't going to be trivial. At least here in the US, literally every single border crossing is already guarded by armed men. They can already close them on a whim whenever they want.
- Mawr 3mo ago> During communism movement within countries required a written permission slip And what does driving your car require if not a written permission slip?
- cavoirom 3mo agoyou choose to limit your freedom on the public transportation, others don't. The freedom lies in the alternatives, people could choose different lifestyles, that's freedom.
- hparadiz 3mo agoI legit can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
- imp0cat 3mo agoThat's what so great about it, isn't it?
- bmacho 3mo agoWhy would you care what the guy was thinking writing that comment? Do you know him? He might as well just be a stochastic parrot. Just like with other media (movie, book, etc), the product is the end product, in this case a joke or a thought-provoking view. You shouldn't care about the creator's actual views or consider them while engaging with his comment.
- forgetfreeman 3mo agoIf your primary mode of transportation is a bicycle and you're cheering shit that annoys and (critically) distracts motorists you might have a death wish.
- strken 3mo agoI feel compelled to mention that the vast majority of cyclists are part of a household which owns a car, as well.
- moffkalast 3mo agoYeah, the occupants of the car won't be dying, I'm pretty sure every collision is survivable with seatbelts on with modern cars that have a meter of crumple zone in every direction and look like bloated whales. But pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists are gonna die on impact with them.
- compass_copium 3mo agoSolidarity. Cars belong in the rubbish bin of history. The Soviet Union had the right idea, as usual--make cars unbearable to drive to encourage public transportation.
- K0balt 3mo agoThat works for people in cities, if cities were made to by usable by cyclists and pedestrians. Not so much for people that live in rural areas.
- kybernetyk 3mo agoWhile not in the SU directly, I got to enjoy public transport in communist Poland for a few years and yeah, you don't want that.
- smackeyacky 3mo agoCommunist Sydney trains are awful too
- phoronixrly 3mo agoAnd here we come to the crux of the train issue - elitism. You both find it below your level to use public transport, and you don't want to mix with the 'unwashed masses' - again, doing so would be below your level.
- badpun 3mo agoPublic transport in communist Poland was horrible because it was severely underfunded. Remember that Poland bankrupted in the 1981 (when the West put sanctions on the country after the Jaruzelski's "coup", and sanctions kiled the economy) the whole decade was kind of surreal in terms of state's lack of funds and decrease of living standards.
- inigyou 3mo agoIf they were communist, why didn't they just print more money?
- kybernetyk 3mo agoLet me guess: You get your groceries delivered by some underpaid sucker? While I enjoy biking it's impractical many times (if you don't live a sheltered life with people doing all the annoying stuff for you). We have those inner city bike extremists here, too. There's proposals like banning all motorized traffic from the city because you "can walk to your bakery duh". But they never ask themselves how the baker gets all his materials to the bakery.
- nehal3m 3mo agoDepends on where they live. Groceries don’t have to be a weekly run to a far flung place to get a truck bed full of stuff. It can be a daily visit to a neighborhood supermarket on your way home. If zoning laws allow those can exist.
- kergonath 3mo agoThat’s nice in principle, but it really is not the same budget around here, even though the shops are here. Small neighbourhood supermarkets and corner shops are significantly more expensive than the big supermarket that’s a 10-minute drive away. We’re doing both: buying what we need in large quantities or with a long shelf life once a week from a supermarket and things like some meat, fruits and vegetables from the corner shop but that takes a bit of work and planning. Still, there’s money to be saved taking advantage of economies of scale.
- mcv 3mo agoHere the corner shop is a supermarket. I think I've got 5 supermarkets in a 2km radius.
- beej71 3mo agoIt won't work for everyone, but I have a bicycle trailer for food shopping. 20 minutes ride each way. I go about once a week.
- phoronixrly 3mo agoNo, I walk 200 meters to Billa or Lidl, or less to one of the plethora of small grocery stores.