Fascinating and stuff, but holy noise pollution!

I have a friend who is from Basra, Iraq, and when I saw those pictures I imagined him being tortured. It was terrible to think that his countrymen are being treated in such a way. And I don't care if they're guilty or not. I wouldn't want to see Osama bin Laden treated that way, because America is not supposed to sink to that level. That is the key point in this argument; the American Dream does not involve despicable practices such as waterboarding, forced masturbation, standing for hours on end, attacks by dogs, sleep deprivation, unending noise pollution, or any other catastrophic treatment of detainees.

If we treated our prison inmates this way, they would sue the government and win, because they have rights as American citizens. So what kind of rights do non-citizens, even supposed "enemy combatants" have? Sure, they're not U.S. citizens, but aren't they humans, nonetheless? Isn't it a round world we live on? Didn't we make up these invisible borders long ago?

Nothing gives anybody the right to torture anybody. Not even the guise of democracy in action. If they hate us for our freedom, for our differences, then why are we starting to look like them?

OK, I've been thinking about this a little more, and here you go: The title isn't totally wrong- it only got it half right. It would be more correct to say, cars suck, cars rule, it's not quite so obvious as you think.

It is difficult to overstate the transforming effect of motorised transportation on humanity as a species. It's not for nothing that Douglas Adams joked in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that Ford Prefect thought that cars were the dominant species on the planet and nearly got run over when he first tried to make contact.

Cars affect how and where we live, how and where we work, play, raise our families, design our cities, get our food- the effect has been so enormous that it would not be an exaggeration to say that they have transformed us as a species. I've been trying to imagine what it would be like to live in the country before automobiles, and it is very difficult to do. When a trip in to town suddenly takes several days rather than a half hour, this represents a very different sort of living. Forget about a commute to work.

Urban centres are bigger and bigger as cars allow for sprawl to take place. Produce has to travel further, and is able to travel further- pretty much anything you can point to exists because humanity is motorised.

ANY technology that is so universally transforming will have its downsides. We have paid an ENORMOUS price in blood, tears, and geopolitical enmity. Traffic Deaths, Globalism, Middle East Conflict, Urban Sprawl, Road Rage, Greenhouse Emissions, Noise Pollution, the list of what's WRONG with cars is almost as long as the benifits that they have brought.

Arguing about that is completly moot however, and I think that's the problem in this thread, and, by extension, with this video.

I think that many of the people in those cars may very well have been douchebags. Dudes, that bus totally just PWNED all of you. Figure it out.

But I bet more than one of them was headed somewhere the bus doesn't go. Halifax has one of the worst transit systems EVAR, but they do have one feature that i think is, in principle at least, very clever. They call it park&ride. Don't take your car from the rural community where you live all the way to downtown halifax, where parking is 1.50 an hour at a meter, or more in a parkade.

Instead, just drive to a parking lot maybe a 15 or 20 minute drive away from the city centre, then grab a bus in. It reduces traffic in the crowded downtown, you never have to search for a parking spot, and you pay less for gas.

Brilliant idea, but I suspect that not many people take advantage of it. Because they love their cars. Heck, I probably would too, had I a car. I grew up downtown, and hope to live downtown my entire life. I want a car for going on trips, hauling gear to a gig, and getting groceries.

Not for going to work. That's what my sneakers are for.

/endrant

the answer is public transport, but rich middle aged guys are never going to go for that.

here in vilnius i can get a trolleybus to anywhere, and i only have to wait 5 minutes... except that the banks went crazy giving out car loans to everybody, and now private cars with one driver and no passengers are clogging up the city and slowing down the trolleybus.

private cars in a modern city are 90% vanity. the only reason they are everywhere is that people are prepared to pay thousands of dollars so they don't have to sit next to somebody on a bus. Even if global warming doesn't exist, the exhaust fumes, parking space and noise pollution are outrageous.... but there's that vanity thing keeping it all going.