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Darwin
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Post by Darwin »

Terralthra wrote: Again, this does not actually rebut my point. Yes, the current mass transit and sustainable transit system does not meet the desires of the car culture. That in no way changes that the car culture is unsustainable.

Expecting a sustainable system to provide similar transit times, costs, and traveling conditions as an obviously unsustainable system is unrealistic to the point of being silly.
Then what do you propose to do? Without a viable alternative to car-culture, you can't expect people to flock to a broken mass transit system. It has to be fixed before it can be viewed as a useful alternative to driving, and this can't happen without a lot of money. Of course they can't get the money without the ridership, so it's kind of self-defeating.

I love Seattle's mass transit, they got it to work there, and I wouldn't even consider taking a car into the metro area, it's that good. And we are getting so far off topic. Maybe this can be spun off into the other forum or something.
Terralthra wrote: I fully expect light rail, both MUNI, BART, and SC VTA, to be extended significantly as pressures from rising oil prices increase.
I fully expect bay area drivers to keep paying higher gas prices and just bitch more, as each believes the roadway is their own god-given right, and everyone ELSE should take mass transit, which won't expand because California's economy is boned and nobody has the money to do it.
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Ritterin Sophia
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Post by Ritterin Sophia »

Terralthra wrote:Are you under the impression that this actually refutes my point?
Well since you've yet to explain how twenty miles is unreasonable, yeah, I do, dipshit. You think I can find decent housing that close to my work? Newsflash dipshit, Elkins is full of drug-addled criminals, which means that at the moment I either have to put up with their shit or go fucking homeless, because the only housing where I'd feel comfortable would cost too fucking much. I don't see why expecting not to have to deal with violent drunks or meth-fiends and expecting for a public transportation system to accomodate for that is such a fucking problem. :roll:

Also, to pre-empt the inevitable screeching of the word 'move', people in West Virginia don't typically get paid enough to be able to afford moving. There's a good reason I'm attempting to join the Army, because outside of the Armed Forces I'm out of options when it comes to getting the fuck out of this redneck hellhole.
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Terralthra
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Post by Terralthra »

Darwin wrote:
Terralthra wrote: Again, this does not actually rebut my point. Yes, the current mass transit and sustainable transit system does not meet the desires of the car culture. That in no way changes that the car culture is unsustainable.

Expecting a sustainable system to provide similar transit times, costs, and traveling conditions as an obviously unsustainable system is unrealistic to the point of being silly.
Then what do you propose to do? Without a viable alternative to car-culture, you can't expect people to flock to a broken mass transit system. It has to be fixed before it can be viewed as a useful alternative to driving, and this can't happen without a lot of money. Of course they can't get the money without the ridership, so it's kind of self-defeating.
I didn't say it wasn't viable. I said it doesn't meet the desires of the car culture. This goes back to my original point: No one wants to tell the entire population of the United States the simple truth that the car culture's expectations are completely out of line with any long-term sustainable system.

I have the feeling it's going to take a lot more pain before people start to accept that. We're still in the denial phase, where we pretend that if we all just switch to a car that gets ten more miles per gallon, everything will be alright. It won't. People are going to have to change the very fundamentals of the way they live.
Darwin wrote: I love Seattle's mass transit, they got it to work there, and I wouldn't even consider taking a car into the metro area, it's that good. And we are getting so far off topic. Maybe this can be spun off into the other forum or something.
I figure that'll be dealt with the next time Ghost Rider happens along.
Darwin wrote:
Terralthra wrote: I fully expect light rail, both MUNI, BART, and SC VTA, to be extended significantly as pressures from rising oil prices increase.
I fully expect bay area drivers to keep paying higher gas prices and just bitch more, as each believes the roadway is their own god-given right, and everyone ELSE should take mass transit, which won't expand because California's economy is boned and nobody has the money to do it.
*shrug* We'll see.

General Schatten wrote:Well since you've yet to explain how twenty miles is unreasonable, yeah, I do, dipshit. You think I can find decent housing that close to my work? Newsflash dipshit, Elkins is full of drug-addled criminals, which means that at the moment I either have to put up with their shit or go fucking homeless, because the only housing where I'd feel comfortable would cost too fucking much. I don't see why expecting not to have to deal with violent drunks or meth-fiends and expecting for a public transportation system to accomodate for that is such a fucking problem. :roll:

Also, to pre-empt the inevitable screeching of the word 'move', people in West Virginia don't typically get paid enough to be able to afford moving. There's a good reason I'm attempting to join the Army, because outside of the Armed Forces I'm out of options when it comes to getting the fuck out of this redneck hellhole.
Well, I said twenty-five miles is way too far, I'm pretty sure it follows that twenty miles is still too far. Are there enough people living near you and working where you work to make a bus route or a light rail track any more energy-efficient than a car? IE, would you be the only person riding that bus/light rail? I'm not saying that there is no room for cars in the world at all, by any means. I'm saying that the cultural expectation that everyone needs a car, so it's ok to plan your life around having a car, so it's ok to plan our cities around everyone driving everywhere, is totally unsustainable.
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Post by Illuminatus Primus »

General Schatten wrote:Do you expect me to bike forty miles everyday for work? Because the only train around runs from Elkins to Belington as a tourist attraction.
Because adverting extreme climate change and energy crisis should bend to everyone's convienence. Many should move, development patterns must change, and this will come at the hand of subsidy - just as preferential government behavior toward auto use and limited-access freeways did for decentralized and suburban development.
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Post by Illuminatus Primus »

General Schatten wrote:
Terralthra wrote:Are you under the impression that this actually refutes my point?
Well since you've yet to explain how twenty miles is unreasonable, yeah, I do, dipshit. You think I can find decent housing that close to my work? Newsflash dipshit, Elkins is full of drug-addled criminals, which means that at the moment I either have to put up with their shit or go fucking homeless, because the only housing where I'd feel comfortable would cost too fucking much. I don't see why expecting not to have to deal with violent drunks or meth-fiends and expecting for a public transportation system to accomodate for that is such a fucking problem. :roll:

Also, to pre-empt the inevitable screeching of the word 'move', people in West Virginia don't typically get paid enough to be able to afford moving. There's a good reason I'm attempting to join the Army, because outside of the Armed Forces I'm out of options when it comes to getting the fuck out of this redneck hellhole.
The inner cities are hell-holes because the government subsidized white flight and then voters used both their votes and now protected assets to ignore and piss on the inner cities. Once people are forced the move back - and we can do so with a grumble now or penniless and as refugees to tenements later - reinvestment and gentrification will improve the cities.
"You know what the problem with Hollywood is. They make shit. Unbelievable. Unremarkable. Shit." - Gabriel Shear, Swordfish

"This statement, in its utterly clueless hubristic stupidity, cannot be improved upon. I merely quote it in admiration of its perfection." - Garibaldi in reply to an incredibly stupid post.

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Post by Imperial Overlord »

I would like to see the evidence for the charge that Gore is some kind of environmental extremist. He's a fairly mainstream American politician that hasn't stuck his head down a hole where global warming is concerned. This is somehow extreme? And how is this possibly worse than incompetence, corruption, and illegalities of the Bush administration that has poured trillions of dollars into a futile war in Iraq?
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Post by Wyrm »

Anyway...

It occurs to me that the game mechanics wanking Mith is engaging in is a form of Fallacy of Accident, which in a nutshell is applying a rule outside the domain in which it applies.

What domain do the rules of D&D apply? Well, to D&D characters and parties of the same. That is, characters with order-of-magnitude human strength, wielding medieval-style weapons, and wearing medieval-style armor with optional quirk of magic, which only slightly enhances the strength of said weapons and armor (for enchantments) and do not outclass those weapons used as spells.

To apply these same rules to the troops of the Imperium of Man (to name one) definitely destroys the exception; the rules of D&D are not intended to apply to tank-crushing supermen with super-technology (or to whole armies of modern trained soldiers using modern tactics) — to handle cases where the official rules would give stupid results is one of the main jobs of the game master (or it's equivalent in a particular RPG).

Aratech, you might point this out when Mith engages full fanboy mode again. It might not actually help, but it would underline why his rule-wanking is stupid.
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Post by Junghalli »

Keep relying on oil or give up cars seems like a bit of a false dilemma to me. What about just switching to electric cars? Sure, they'd probably be lower performance and maybe more expensive than regular cars, but to me it looks like it'd be a lot easier to get the public to swallow than trying to massively reorganize our entire society to be carless.
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Post by lord Martiya »

Electric cars can have performance equal to normal cars. The problems are two:
1)recharging the batteries requires a few ours, refuel a normal car requires few minutes;
2)the electricity must be produced somewhere.
Unless these problems are solved, the most viable option is use the cars we have.
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Post by Junghalli »

Yeah, but we're talking about what happens when the cars we have aren't viable anymore because oil runs out. When that happens the long recharge time will look like a minor inconvenience compared to having to move because you live outside of walking/biking distance of your work and the bus doesn't stop by your house. The electricity can come from nuclear/hydro/solar/wind/coal/whatever oil-free source you care to think of.

Hydrogen fuel cells are another possibility. As are bio/synfuels, but I'd rather we switched to something that didn't add CO2 to the air.
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Post by Darth Hoth »

Illuminatus Primus wrote:Because adverting extreme climate change and energy crisis should bend to everyone's convienence. Many should move, development patterns must change, and this will come at the hand of subsidy - just as preferential government behavior toward auto use and limited-access freeways did for decentralized and suburban development.
This is once again me being uninformed, but I was under the impression that man-made climate change had not been conclusively proven. A gradually increasing lack of oil would, on the other hand, still be a factor, of course...

And as a general comment to everyone: I am sorry, I really did not wish to hijack the thread to this degree.
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Post by Ghost Rider »

Locking because at this point, it is a fucking bitch with the software the split a topic of this size and it has gotten off tangent with people going in and out.

If you want to make a new one on this or the variety of others, feel free.
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