Doesn’t Lyft work sorta like that?

I’ve only ever heard of lyft being a normal taxi service where people just use their own cars they already own. Also, I dunno where you’re getting your numbers for the calculation you’re doing, that would probably be something good to include. You could say the same for everything I write, I guess, but none of my criticisms much have to do with the numbers, except for this: I dunno what “smaller european cars” you’re using. Most cars nowadays are like, 2 tons or so at the least, probably more, and you could maybe get one ton of human body weight, at the most, if you had several 250 pound chucks riding around in one car, which I don’t really imagine to be the case normally at all.

There’s also an efficiency created by the “inefficient” route planning of the bus. By having something that travels in a loop, rather than having every individual travel to every individual point, we’re trading some amount of efficiency in terms of total time spent by everyone (theoretically, but this time is probably eaten up by increased amounts of car traffic in reality), and we’re trading that for a slight increase in the amount of foot traffic that people are collectively engaging in, which is probably a good thing. So that’s a total decrease in curb weight as a factor of total travel time, which is a decrease in road maintenance.

You’re also probably looking at a massive decrease in mechanical maintenance for buses compared to cars, using one big engine, set of brakes, A/C systems, etc, rather than like 15-20 smaller non-standardized sets, and maintenance costs for the specific roads you’re traveling on via bus means you can engineer in less maintenance over time compared to a more spread out system.

Density is also a pretty big consideration, because real estate downtown, i.e. the location most people are going to want to go, is at a high premium, both for people and for the city/state’s tax base. High density has the capacity to provide a sustainable tax base for the cost of providing utilities and maintenance by the city… Unless you park the series of autonomous cars all in some huge superstructure outside of town, and then basically just merge them straight into the highway, where you’d still have to overbuild and deal with a massive amount of car infrastructure (more than just the space you’d save on all this parking, since you could just have a couple pickup and dropoff spaces, if that, compared to all this other parking taken up downtown). I can’t really see it working out, and even at the normal densities we’d be looking at, I’d struggle to come up with a way by which it’s more efficient overall.

There’s also other types of buses, if we’re just talking about emissions efficiency, or energy efficiency. Obviously an overhead electrified bus is probably the most desirable, just behind a tram or a streetcar or whatever. Then you have the weird stupid hybrid battery overhead-electrified buses that I hate, and then probably all your natural gas buses and diesel buses and whatnot, and then your pure battery buses.

If we’re talking about autonomous vehicles, then we’re kind of also sidestepping all these questions about like, the scalability of the AI for this, and the computing power we’d have to use on that, constantly. We’d have to deal with the traveling mailman problem on a near constant basis, something which public transport can mostly sidestep by assuming passengers will come to it, and that public transit will be of a high enough density to create desirable locations simply by stopping there. We have all the pedestrian and cyclist traffic conflicts which we’d encounter, or else have to segregate from these cars entirely (something normal traffic already struggles to do adequately). And if we’re segregating the traffic entirely with a large amount of infrastructure, which definitely makes this much more achievable and easier, if still not easy, I think it makes more sense from a top down maintenance perspective to just go for trams or streetcars, or subways, or something like that.

I think the only real way in which I can cook up a reason this might be done, is because it’s outsourcing costs onto the public, and onto the state. Road maintenance can be done by the city, or state. Probably, this would mean that the autonomous vehicles would not be segregated, which means it’s less of a good idea, which I believe, is the primary reason it hasn’t been done. Then, the taxi service could basically make a bunch of money on their highly necessary transportation, which they have created a large need for, simply by existing and demanding a large amount of infrastructure by existing.

Use bicycles, e-bikes, and walking for individual pedestrian point to point travel. Fuck all the bullshit excuses people give about how, oh no it’s too hot out, too rainy, too hilly, what do I do with this cargo that’s not large or consistently arriving or departing enough to be loaded by a freight train, or by a professional truck, but isn’t so small that I can carry it, what do I do with all my kids, etc… Use cars sparingly enough to fill the very minor amount of gaps that can’t be bridged by bikes, cycling, and public transit, as a method of last resort. Mostly for people that would maybe need to live out in the boonies, like park rangers, maybe. Actual farms, not the stupid rich people playtime “ranches”, and industrial locations, they usually have a large enough cargo haul to justify a small freight train, or a large truck taking a small route to a freight yard.

I am also mocking the idea that the choice has been made easier by Harris.

It’s also like, not a choice, just straight up, right? Like the offer between, shit sandwich and shit sandwich with, I dunno, ham, or some other ostensibly good thing, that’s not really a choice, both because on the surface it sucks or whatever, and also because I’m gonna choose the one with ham. If I’m, by default, guaranteed to choose the one with ham every time, then that’s not really a choice, I was predestined to choose that. It’s no wonder that with this constant framing, the focus is always put on these nonexistent undecided voters, because they’re the only ones which can actually be presumed to be making a real choice here, they’re the only ones who “need” any convincing.

I mean, a core component in fascism is massive overlap between control of the government and the control of private interest, in return for politically backing fascists. Lobbying accompanied by mass privatization, basically. I think Mussolini is most infamous for this, but it also happened with Hitler. So, I dunno if that’s really a limiting factor.

It’s fucking so obvious that it boggles my mind that people are still gunning for him and buttigieg and shapiro. They are all power-hungry neoliberal freaks, I don’t understand how this is really in contention at this point. Basically the only thing she can do on the campaign trail is talk, and appoint a rather meaningless VP slot to show her allegiance to some kind of politics that actually gets people out and voting. If she chooses some moderate scumbag because they’re in a swing state, that’s like the fastest way for her to piss away all the good will she’s built up so far. It’s crazy, I don’t understand it.

That’s kind of assuming they can’t just find any other freak to take command while doing everything the foundations and conservative PACs and corporate donors want. I don’t actually think trump really has all that much charisma beyond his slightly flamboyant mannerisms and his weird accent that I’ve never heard anywhere else. They could pretty easily replace him with some other brainworm candidate, probably get someone way younger and slightly more well-spoken, lose maybe like, 10% of the diehard trump supporters, and then gain back those numbers and more after running their candidate for like five months and trying to ride with slightly more centrist appeal.

Trump isn’t like, the end of this, he’s just a kind of canary in the coal mine for what’s to come, because the conditions which created him still exist and are actively worsening pretty much all the time. It’s not gonna end with him.

He’s also one of the only democrats that’s refused to sign the PRO act iirc, so I don’t think he’s, uhhh, pro labor either, which is a somewhat large issue I would say

Yeah, unfortunately people don’t understand that, of the IT guys and linux users and sysadmins that are gonna be most likely to want to migrate over here as a result of reddit going to shit, a lot of those are going to be furries and trans people, sure. But the other half of that demographic is gonna be the most incredible middle class financial anxiety liberal grifter white dudes you’ve ever seen, no question.

I mean I’m generally skeptical of like “this one weird 19th century ideology can solve all our problems” schtick, right, and I’m also skeptical of the mythical single tax systems, as a kind of simplified and idealistic compromise between your libertarians, your anarchists, and your more standard socialists and communists.

If you were to ask me in more detail, I would basically say that I think it’s a compromise solution for an extremely narrow set of problems that too often gets extrapolated into encompassing the entirety of a political system. I think that it functions well enough as an ideology within a specific set of constraints and goals, but if you seek to extrapolate it solve like, every political problem, as georgists generally tend to do, then it kind of falls apart, and doesn’t tend to be broad enough.

It’s basically just a less generalized version of marxism, to me, where land is equivalent in the system to capital, and rent-seeking behavior is only really banned from interference with whatever resources are seen as natural, which is primarily land. I dunno. I think as I slowly go more insane and become more cranky, I find myself increasingly wanting a horrible authoritarian state that just does exactly what I want, because everything I like is awesome, and everything everyone else thinks is bad and evil or whatever.

yeah georgism is crap though

but the government has to be pretty authoritarian in order to pull it off

I dunno if that’s a super necessary element, really. I think they could probably get off better, actually, if they had a more lenient prison system, and, say, didn’t execute people for minor weed possession or like, being gay. But then I also think their economy relies on a large portion of oppressed migrant labor, if I remember right? I dunno, somebody fact check me on that

I mean I would just get rid of the GOP if that were a viable option. and probably also the political system in which we live, as a whole.

I do think more realistically though the only point I’m making is that it’s a kind of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different outcome, without understanding why they’re able to poison pill anything and everything and roll back any advancements as soon as they feel that the public pressure has let up enough. There’s a deeper issue there beyond just the lack of public housing, an issue that causes that lack of public housing in the first place, and simply building massive amounts of public housing, even if we were able to do that, which would be quite a feat, and something I would be happy about, even that would be a temporary solution, as we’ve seen.

I mean yeah, but I’m not sure we won’t just poison pill them again as soon as the metronome swings back around and keeps us from having anything nice.

The problem is the rentier class has the most resources to throw against this and they still can find other ways to rescarcify housing unless forced building programs are big enough to over power them.

Yeah, we probably just need to get rid of the rentier class. I don’t like them very much, I think they might be bad.

So if we can elect like, any old fuck now, can’t we just go even older and elect the corpse of mao or something? cause that’s kinda the only way I see rent, and rent specifically, becoming a non-issue in the near future. This is like one of the main issues which is directly symptomatic of capitalism, and which keeps capitalism as a system directly propped up. I don’t really see any long term solution to it that doesn’t involve a lot of no longer having capitalism. Other capitalist countries still have this problem. It’s only like, china and the former soviet union and apparently barcelona with superblocks which are still gonna be subject to market demands and rates, it’s only those countries which are going to be constructing such an excess of housing that a good amount of it can remain empty, which is also the case here as well but with the caveat that we still have massive amounts of homelessness and the empty housing is basically just to increase demand on top of straight up not having enough housing even were we to construct mass housing projects.

I dunno, this is a pretty good encapsulation of why we are specifically incredibly fucked and how this incrementalism isn’t going to work at all to address our current issues. We’re cooked, lads. Get the titanic band to start playing the song or whatever.

So, people can make the whole like, oh, this is a different context, kyle is joking, whatever whatever, right, and that’s both true and a fine argument to make. But I also think when we make this like, freedom as a principle argument, right, free speech as a principle, argument, it isn’t necessarily hypocritical.

We’re just not prioritizing freedom, prioritizing free speech, as the highest possible value that trumps all other values. I think kind of by necessity, it can’t be. The idea of free speech is logically incoherent if you take it to the extreme, because you could just define speech as being anything. Harmful acts, smearing poop on the bathroom walls, whatever. So you have to put a limit on it, and then those external values are going to be what places the limit on it.

Those external values of “I agree with kyle gass” vs “I agree with dave chapelle”. Agreeing with either argument, beyond that, thinking either argument, had in the public sphere, is worthwhile, that’s what has to define the limits of speech and freedom and what has to drive the outlook on it. I might oppose the poop swastika in the rec center bathroom, but I might think the ACAB poop smear in the nazi bar bathroom is maybe okay, even if it’s a little misguided or kind of just stupid or whatever.

There has to be a core value there. It’s not necessarily hypocritical to believe that political violence can be called for, or justified against your foes necessarily, and then think that the same thing shouldn’t be done to you on the nature of your ideology strictly being better. If my foes are basically just evil, straight up, yeah, probably at the very least stop them from like, having undue economic influence, which depending on who you ask, is gonna be some form of economic violence by nature of stripping away their agency or property or whatever. That doesn’t necessarily strike me as hypocritical, or not believing in equal rights or anything, it just strikes me as pragmatic.

I do think people are becoming overly worried about this sort of thing having a negative effect, or a large amount of sway. I haven’t seen really anyone who doesn’t have a schizo political affiliation actually commit these sorts of things. The guy who killed shinzo abe killed him for affiliation with a cult, the guy who tried to kill reagan shot him because he was undiagnosed and thought a celebrity wanted him to do it.

I don’t think the right wing has enough support broadly, and the hardcore groyper trump types definitely don’t have enough support, in order to actually have some sort of large scale mass riot or protest like with BLM. Charlottesville is about the best they’re gonna be able to do. But despite their relatively lower numbers, and we’re talking like, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction here, we’ve seen that they are overwhelmingly ready to commit political violence over other political groups, as one might predict and as we saw during BLM. I agree with lots of people that are saying we might get retaliatory attacks from this, but I’m also agreeing that those might’ve happened anyways just as well, or might’ve happened for any other reason, it’s really hard to tell.

Your average trump supporter, though, I’d be incredibly surprised if they did anything, and I don’t think this is going to result in civil war despite how much people seem to want to manifest that as a reality. I’m more concerned with how this has probably just ensured that he’s gonna get back in the white house.