On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 01:01:55PM -0700, Chris Kantarjiev wrote: > > The car itself was a bad invention. > > Oh please. Methinks though dost generalize too much.
Yeah. Dropping the electrombile for stinky ICEs was a stupid move, though. > The car was a vast improvement over the horse, which it replaced, both > in terms of self-reliance and range, not to mention public sanitation. Just like the first (whale oil) crisis, our cities turning Augean stables didn't quite materialize. Whew. How lucky we are to have photonics. How unlucky are are to not have telepresence, yet. But the first terrorist nuke will change that, a lot. > The bad decisions along the way, especially in the US, involved > tearing down large scale "public" infrastructure in favor of > private vehicles and long-haul commercial trucking. Not understanding the scaling of average infrastructure cost in a volume versus dilute surface was a key point. > When making these arguments, one has to recall the vast scale of > the US compared to Europe. The ranchers in Nevada and Wyoming and Suburbia is scale-free. > Iowa who live 20 miles from the "main road" are never going to be > served by a Postbus or train. Their kids commute 50 miles to high > school. Why are urban areas surrounded with a halo of suburbia, and no commute infrastructure there, though. There are certainly no reasons by history/politics to go with it. > Don't get me wrong - I am by no means defending the widespread > infestation of the one-person car in the US. But it's very > important to keep in mind that "it's a scale thing". The last No, it's not. Cities are the same everywhere. Hickistan doesn't figure. > hundred years in the US have gone down a particular route such > that the country's economy has been built on the assumption of > subsidized oil for road-going vehicles, instead of, say, rail. > Recovering from that without an intervening disaster may be impossible. I question the whole idea of shipping primates around in a diurnal cycle. The whole idea is barbaric. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
