Capitalism always wastes precious resources for the sake of profit.

Transcript: "We welcome global top music legend and entrepreneur Chris Brown to become the next FF 91 2.0 Futurist Alliance owner and Developer Co-Creation Officer. He will also take delivery of his vehicle at a future “Delivery Co-Creation Day” event.

Mr. Brown hosted FF Founder and Chief Product and User Ecosystem Officer YT Jia at his Los Angeles home where they discussed FF 91 2.0’s features and highlights and officially began the Co-Creation process. Mr. Brown is an American singer, songwriter, rapper, dancer, actor and businessman and one of the most iconic R&B singers of all time. His unique style has earned him prestigious recognitions, including a Grammy, as well as MTV Video Music, AMA, and BET Music Awards.

#FaradayFuture #FF91 #FFIE #DeliveryCoCreationDay"

But no that'd be turbo communism, wouldn't it? Each charging station enjoys the freedom of potentially having its own app clogging up your phone and if it's a fucking Tesla station you better have a trademarked BazingaMobile (with le epic fart noises and higher chance of being trapped in it during an accident) or you're shit out of luck and can't charge there.

Sudip Bhattacharya talks about his article at HardCrackers.com, "Socialism or Suburbia." Sudip is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Rutgers University. He is also a writer, organizer, and you can find his other work at outlets like Protean Magazine, CounterPunch and Reappropriate, and the Aerogram.

I've been wondering about that for decades.

I'm assuming the non Donald Duck'd side of this was seriously pitched as a way to make horny in a crude yet effective way so they buy in.

They are choosing to pay parents $300 each instead of just paying bus drivers better? Absolute nonsense

So I made a passing comment of "it's almost like private car ownership is a really inefficient use of space and resources" the other day, which I didn't really pay much mind to. But all the replies were either explaining the concept of public transportation as if I don't know that's the solution to private car dependence (not in a constructive way adding to my comment or anything, I got the sense that they were trying to explain the concept to me) and someone even basically said "well I'm sure you think urban sprawl is an efficient use of space then."

Are the "normies" this oblivious to how anti-car sentiments work? Do they think we're against the concept of a metal thing with four wheels and not its effects on urban development and society? Why the hell would I be against public transit or pro urban sprawl if I hate cars? Cities before cars were invented had public transit and were tightly packed and walkable. You don't think I support that?

cross-posted from: https://sullen.social/post/59233

Really great description of the american sprawl. These issues eat away my soul every single day, and this guy wrote about it in 1973.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

The invention of the personal automobile, and destruction of public transportation, was a triumph of capitalist drug-peddling; suddenly, all at once, everyone’s personal mobility became dependent on a single, new commodity, gasoline. Without it, we are unable to function, since urban sprawl and suburbanization now means we can’t even walk to work if we wanted to.

“The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.

These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1364150

Also, lemmy should raise the 1MB limit on pics

Many have the impression that China is a very car-polluted country with heavy traffic and wide streets occupying much of the cities. I think this impression mostly comes from the fact that much of the imagery one sees while hearing news about China is that of multi-lane streets going through cities. What you don't see in these shots however, are the enormous blocks that lie in between these streets. You can look at the map of any Chinese city, and you will see that the blocks are usually around 500x500 meters. In Soviet fashion, these blocks are big enough to have all of the services one would need during the day, as well as green space. At the same time, there are usually larger parks in the vicinity as well hosting various community activities. All of this is reflected in the fact that China has a very low motorization rate.

If you're wondering about why these wide streets exist in the first place, one has to understand that these cities are big, and these wide streets are kind of a rare sight when looking at the cities as a whole (although they are very much necessary for car traffic). I would much rather like to see wider streets at a lower cadence than frequently having to wait at shorter crossings. Here in Stockholm, crossings feel like such a headache since they're so frequent.

These green space developments are most obvious when you go just outside the city center. Here, you will usually find very high density tall housing as seen in the picture above. Having these tall buildings then leaves good amount of space for greenery.

This is a picture of Shijiazhuang, which is far from a tier-one city, and it is also far from being known as a city with greenery (it is stereotypically a polluted city). After looking around a bit in the city center, this was pretty much the most concrete-looking part I could find. You can still see, however, that each block has some amount of green space, and besides, there are big parks just outside of this frame. Shijiazhuang is the city which I will be living in during the coming year due to my upcoming exchange year.

As for public transport, I think we all have an idea of what the situation looks like.

Edit disclaimer: Obviously don't do protests such as these without proper consideration of the consequences. Some countries have facial recognition cameras and lots of them have laws against this. Even if I believe it's less risky than the usual headline grabbing stuff (XR gluing themselves) you are still in danger of both being tagged and arrested or being attacked by civilians. This should only be done as part of an organisation that supports this idea and can help you understand and deal with whatever consequences arise, and should not be taken as an endorsement of "lone wolf protesting". Change can only come through organised group effort.

A lot of the car people I've talked to in car cities usually cite cars being "individually convenient" as a reason why they use them. I randomly thought of a way to turn that around with very little effort.

Lots of car cities have these traffic sign buttons that operate on intervals of 30 to 60 seconds in their high traffic roads. It just so happens that some of those are where people are already waiting for the bus.

Just doing a minor experiment by triggering that button every time the sign went green for some 10 minutes it clearly caused some disturbance on a low traffic hour as an individual action. I bet even a very small group doing something like that during rush hour could cause traffic jams that XR could only dream of without having to glue yourself or risk arrests too much.

What do y'all think? It's very likely others have thought of this and I'm late to the party.

Alt text

No other country in the world is as dominated by the automobile as the USA. From the very beginnings of automobile travel in the early twentieth century, rates of automobile ownership and use in the USA have exceeded levels in other countries, and current rates of ownership and use are by far the highest in the world. Even countries with higher per capita incomes have fewer cars per capita than the USA. The automobile has not only dominated passenger transport in the USA; it has also become the most important determinant of the American lifestyle, urban form, and even the organization of the American economy. Virtually every aspect of life in the USA - work, social activities, recre- ation, education and culture - is crucially dependent on the automobile. For most Americans, every other mode of urban transport is practically irrelevant, and life without the automobile is unimaginable. Unlike other advanced industrialized countries, where car ownership only became widespread over the past two or three decades, almost all Americans living today grew up in an automobile dominated society, and most of them have never experienced anything else. The dominance of the car in the USA is especially striking in cities because its impact on urban land use patterns is highly visible and unmis- takable. It is also what most clearly distinguishes American cities from European cities. The term 'urban sprawl' first emerged in the USA to describe the extremely low density, unplanned, rather haphazard residen- tial and commercial development that increasingly surrounds every American city. Widespread suburbanization began earlier in the USA and has been more extensive and lower density than virtually anywhere else in the world. Low density urban sprawl would be impossible without the automobile. Just as the automobile encouraged suburbanization, so subur- banization has encouraged ever more automobile use, since low density development cannot be served effectively by public transport. The extremely high levels of car use in American cities have caused severe problems of congestion, air pollution, noise, loss of open space, traffic accidents and inadequate mobility for the poor, the elderly and the handicapped. Similar problems have arisen in other countries, but they generally arose earlier in the USA and have been more severe**___**#

When visiting cities in other countries, one is often struck by differences in their transportation systems. These differences are among the most visible indicators of variation in underlying social, political, and economic systems.

Take, for example, the Soviet Union and the countries of Europe and North America. Going from east to west, there is an unmistakable increase in the relative importance of the automobile and a corresponding decrease in the importance of public transport modes, such as bus, streetcar, subway, and commuter rail.

In the United States and Canada, the vast majority of urban travel is by auto. At the other end of the spectrum, in the Soviet Union public transport almost completely dominates, with extremely low levels of auto ownership and use. Europe lies along the middle of this spectrum, with Eastern European countries much closer to the level of public transport dominance in the Soviet Union, and with Western European countries somewhat closer to the level of auto dominance in the United States.

These differences in urban transportation have not arisen at random. To a significant extent, they result from decades of deliberate public policy. In the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, socialist governments have directly set the costs of auto ownership and operation extremely high through their system of regulated prices: in addition, they have sharply restricted auto production, thus keeping supply limited. At the same time they have offered extensive public transport services at extremely low fares.

By contrast, policies in the United States have strongly encouraged auto ownership and use. For many decades, large subsidies to highway construction, automobile use, and low-density suburban housing have made the automobile very appealing if not irresistible. Since the same policies have contributed to the decline of public transport, that alternative was eliminated for most Americans anyway.