[Photo credits: Not Just Bikes and 新星]

Location -> West End Cincinnati. Both photos from same location and angle.

94 is built through a former prominent African American neighborhood.

After seeing similar pics, it is incredible how nasty white supremacy can be if you look at how cities in the USA where changed after the 60s.

Also, the Cathedral of St Paul is outlined as a reference.

YouTube user Drew Gooden made a great video and rant about regressions in modern car design from his perspective as a driver, with a large portion of the time dedicated to our favorite abomination: the Cybertruck. He also touches on those fucking brighter-than-daylight headlights that have been proliferating for several years now which anyone here, forced to own and drive a car to maintain the most basic existence, likely has seen in person.

Alternate Invidious link

Context -> This is in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. The family turned down an offer of $50 million from property developers.

Also, not a single shop, daycare, school, mall, community center, public park or hospital in a 10 km radius.

It is awful.

Capitalism always wastes precious resources for the sake of profit.

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/226775

After living in a region that was (foolishly¹) designed exclusively for cars, I moved to a proper city: a city with public transport and a cycling infrastructure. Started using public transport and felt liberated. No more insurance burden, no maintenance burden, no vehicle registration, no traffic fines, parking fees & fines, no more financing unethical right-wing oil companies that are burning up the planet, etc. It was a weight off my shoulders to live cheaper and more ethical.

public transport also unethical

Then a colleague convinced me that using public transport needlessly is also unethical.. that the huge amount of energy required to power that infrastructure is still harmful & wasteful. Public transport needs to exist for various reasons like serving disabled people, but when able-bodied people flood onto it, more vehicles must be dispatched more frequently and I was adding to that burden.

the winner: cycling

So after years on public transport I switched to a bicycle. It’s even cheaper than public transport. And it came with another upgrade to liberties:

• privacy— my realtime whereabouts is no longer surveilled & tracked (no license plate readers, no public transport card readers w/DBs, no insurance records which can then intermingle with other insurance & credit records & cause harm in other ways).

• independence— it’s easy to maintain one’s own bicycle. So I’m free of dependency on mechanics & free of dependency on public transport schedules (which can be unreliable). Dirt cheap and you only need to depend on yourself.

After evolving into a cyclist, I cannot stomach the thought of living again in a non-cyclable region. Those regions are encumbered by stupidity and addicts: people addicted to their perception of convenience (despite sitting in traffic that bicycles are immune to and despite looking for parking)… and people addicted to energy (from oil or power plants) because they think peddling their bike will be a notable effort.

Intelligence of car drivers

It’s been said jokingly (by Douglas Adams IIRC) that dolphins are smarter than humans because they’ve figured out how to get their needs met without investing crazy amounts of cost and labor to create things that work against them to some extent. Cyclists are like dolphins in this regard, as they see people work their asses off to be able to afford the car that takes them to work, where they earn the money to finance their car ownership so they can work more. At the same time they work to finance the oil politicians who work against them.

2023 research suggests cycling makes you smarter and apparently 2014 research suggests cyclists are more intelligent² (I suspect there’s the factor that people with naturally higher IQs favor cycling anecdotally. E.g. many profs cycle to universities).

self imprisonment

We all live in a prison of some kind. My new prison is being self-excluded from a big chunk of the car-dependent world and living in all those regions. But I prefer my new prison better than that of car dependency and being forced to finance companies that finance politicians who work against humanity.

footnotes

¹: it would be unfair to fault pre-climate aware municipal designs as foolish, but foolish that decades thereafter these shitty designs are still being maintained (unlike Utrecht who were wise enough to realize their mistake & fix it) while people continue rewarding the shit designs with their residency and tax.

²: I’ve not read the 2014 study myself. Some articles claim the research shows cyclists are perceived as more intelligent while other reports claim cyclists are more intelligent.

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