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Microplastics and nanoplastics in urban air originate mainly from tire abrasion, research reveals (phys.org)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/cars@hexbear.net
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[–] 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

how do you think construction works? especially in the united states? there are a lot of people living in the pits of suburban sprawl who cannot electively stop using cars tomorrow, and will not be able to electively stop using cars for years. they might as well be in electric vehicles rather than gas.

i love trains and bikes but the infrastructure doesn't exist and we're shitty at building it so I guess everybody in the lurch in the meantime is supposed to starve to death?

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    i love trains and bikes but the infrastructure doesn't exist and we're shitty at building it so I guess everybody in the lurch in the meantime is supposed to starve to death

    Obviously yes, unlimited genocide on all the KKKar DriverSS /s

    The point is why would you stop building / inhabitating suburban sprawl if the electric car gets you there and back just fine? Like what changes here for it to herald the 2 decades of bike and rail construction?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    because living in the suburbs is miserable even with electric cars? we need government intervention and central planning for any of this anyway, it'll take time and whatever you're imagining instead would be more expensive.

    optimizing for the end of suburbs as quickly as possible just because we hate suburbs isn't the actual objective.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    because living in the suburbs is miserable even with electric cars?

    I certainly think so, but somehow those houses keep getting bought

    we need government intervention and central planning for any of this anyway

    True, I don't blame people for buying EV cars. Either you save some money - which is good - or you pay more for the common good of reducing CO2 - also good!

    EDIT: Just to be sure; doing the better thing but paying for it is bad, but like good on an individual levle

    But like sticking to the US theme, the republicans aren't going to do it and the last democratic president hooned an 8 ton E-Hummer around and then called it the future of transportation (when he wasn't busy suggesting everybody not in a car would be required to carry a transponder so self driving cars could happen). So who enacts the change here? The suburbians sure won't, everything is the same except their car goes MMMMMM instead of vroom now.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I certainly think so, but somehow those houses keep getting bought

    a lot of that is equity firms, but we're not building comblocks either so the alternative is legacy housing that's unobtainably expensive or renting forever. Developers need to be prevented from building that shit, but people don't have a lot of agency in housing, see tiny homes and van shit getting way more popular over the last decade.

    there's like a hundred things that need to happen all at once, very few US politicians are interested in making any of them happen, and in the meantime we might as well have electric cars instead of SUVs.

    i'd love to ride my bike in the winter but the city doesn't clear snow promptly enough or on sidewalks so i'd just die if i tried.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    a lot of that is equity firms, but we're not building comblocks either so the alternative is legacy housing that's unobtainably expensive or renting forever. Developers need to be prevented from building that shit, but people don't have a lot of agency in housing,

    well, yes, again, but then also again: how do EVs change the equation here?

    there's like a hundred things that need to happen all at once, very few US politicians are interested in making any of them happen, and in the meantime we might as well have electric cars instead of SUVs.

    there's no in the meantime. All the needed changes I assume we agree on could be done in the now, but they won't be, and they also won't be once you exchange every ICE car for an EV because why would you? The system can keep on trucking fine with EVs instead of ICE cars, why change?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago*

    why the hell would electric cars have anything to do with blackrock buying all the housing and landlords extracting onerous rents? they're better cars while we have to have cars, that's it.

    the "meantime" is the time the process of reorganizing society so most people don't need cars will take.

    we don't live in a vacuum of ignoring politics to go ride bikes to work or the grocery store in january

    i don't know what you're arguing against. are you're some kind of Internal combustion engine accelerationist?

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    there are a lot of people living in the pits of suburban sprawl who cannot electively stop using cars tomorrow

    We have overproduced living space just like we've overproduced everything else. There are 32 million empty bedrooms and this is a conservative estimate of housing usage. There are plenty of smaller cities/towns, empty units, vacant lots, and oversize houses such that you could easily fit everyone within a short bicycle ride of their downtown. For someone who has a car, and either isn't trapped in debt or has reasonably okay job prospects, living in the suburbs is a choice.

    People choose to continue living in suburbs partly because they're constrained from imagining anything else, and partly because they swallow the propaganda that this is what a good life means.

    We could take 70% of the cars off the road within a year and still be just fine. (We proved this, pretty conclusively, in a dry run 6 years ago.)

    Anybody who has the ability to move further than a regular commute's length has the prospects of living without a car, where 90% of what you need from a city is within a 30 minute bike ride and the rest is a 3-hour bus trip away, and where baseline costs (rent, water, electricity, phone bill, staple foods, produce) amount to 70 hours of low-wage work a month or less.

    Most people (excepting those with chronic/acute illness) could live just fine on $30k USD per year. They don't do this because they're constantly chasing a bunch of optional things that you really don't need. Not everyone is eager to shed their car dependency, but for those that do, there's definitely a way.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    there's a ton of unexamined individualism and liberalism in this comment

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I was split between making a point of living a "third-world" lifestyle, versus verging towards inviting people to come live the materially simpler life that I have, where I live and organize in accordance with the ends I want to see.

    But sure, keep on saying "the poor, poor Americans are forced to live in their suburbs with 1000 square feet of building space and 0.2 acres of land per person". I'm sure they can't help it, if someone's burning up the Earth's resources at 1.5x the rate at which they're replenished, maybe they just might be the real victim. Nothing can be done until we overthrow the whole thing; forget about intermediary steps; try not to think about the rate at which the country's working class is moving toward revolution and how many lifetimes it will be until that happens.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    housing units aren't fungible. jobs aren't necessarily where the housing is. A program of displacing people is not something i want the US government doing again.

    none of the structure required to support what you want to do exists.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Most people in hyperexploited countries would have a lenin-palace reaction to how people in this country live.

    The transition is not going to happen overnight for all suburban dwellers*, but an organized group of people can go live in high density (sometimes with roommates, the greatest fear of an amerikkkan that is having to share living space with someone they don't have a chain of progenitors with) and orient around a new approach to settled places.

    Jobs are largely a function of need which is a function of population; this has been the case since the dawn of civilization. Good Jobs are scarce and will get more scarce no matter what. As communists we know this, and we should also recognize that a Job is a means to making a living, and there have always been other means.

    *At some point, though, we will run up against environmental or economic constraints that reveal living 10-40 miles away from all of your destinations to be futile and impractical, possibly by oil scarcity, possibly by supply chain shocks, or possibly by bankruptcy of municipalities.

    We can either get ahead of the curve and live well, or we can wait until it hits us, but the exurbs are an ephemeral peculiarity of parts of the 20th and 21st centuries. One way or another, they are headed to the dustbin of history.

    And I for one would love nothing more than to see the tears of the inheritance class and PMC ladder climbers when they no longer have the option to live in a McMansion.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    deep-nesting

    The transition is not going to happen overnight for all suburban dwellers

    so what you're saying is

    there are a lot of people living in the pits of suburban sprawl who cannot electively stop using cars tomorrow

    ?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Not as a whole all at once, but that's not a reason against beginning the desertion of the suburbs.

    I don't pretend that everybody can stop being in debt all at once either, but I help people reduce their debt anyway.

    If we only did things when we felt like we'd have a wave of acceptance powering us, we'd never make any progress.

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