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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Two facts:

    1. The average occupancy of a car in my North American city is 1.2 people per car. This does not vary much by city.
    2. Autonomous vehicles will almost certainly be worse for traffic than human driven cars. They will circle empty with no passengers and drive to pick up passengers empty (dead heading) even with a fully rideshare system. If there is widespread private ownership of autonomous vehicles (and you bet your butt that car companies will campaign for this aggressively to keep sales up), the dead heading problems only multiply. If you don’t believe me, look up any recent literature on the topic: by most accounts it will be worse, not better. Dead heading is only the tip of the iceberg of problems there.




  • As with most sci-fi the author gets loopier in the later books. That being said:

    • Dune: masterpiece of philosophy, one of the best books ever put to print
    • Dune Messiah: a worthy sequel and must read after the first book; completes Paul’s arc
    • Children of Dune: more plot driven than the first, but still thematically rich and entertaining.
    • God Emperor of Dune: the most divisive of the books: you love it or you hate it. I am in the love it camp, the book is unhinged and the themes are marvelous. This is where I’d stop a read of the series.
    • Chapterhouse and the other (Heretics?): forgettable in my opinion, simply because I’ve forgotten them. Later book fan opinions welcome.
    • anything Brian Herbert: not terrible but not awfully good either. Makes for decent light reading I guess, and there’s good lore building in some of the books despite some unforgivable retcons (Agemmemnon, sigh)














  • Hi and welcome! Our take is a little bit more nuanced than that, if I may be bold enough to speak on behalf of the community. We understand that most people don’t have a choice but to own and drive a car for most of your everyday needs: here we call that car dependence. The sane among us recognize that most people didn’t necessarily choose this way of living, and most acknowledge that those who enjoy it have that right.

    We do recognize that car dependence has a lot of negative impacts on society: from climate to economy to health to geopolitics and more (there’s whole books on the subject). And we’re a growing group of people who strive to build a better world than the one we inherited. What that means is taking action to reduce car dependence and instead promote alternatives like public transit, walkable towns, and cities built for people (not for cars). It’s a multifacted issue, far beyond the (incendiary) name implies. This discussion is about trains and how safe they are compared to cars, which kill over 50 thousand people a year in the United States, and injure millions more. It doesn’t have to be this way.

    Wouldn’t it be great to not have to drive 30 miles each day? That’s the kind of future we’re trying to build for the growing number of people who desire that. Accomplishing that is difficult and takes time and political action that many in this community are trying to build.