But what if one day five years from now you need to move 20 refrigerators at midnight and all the trains suddenly break down?
/s
Well, I would simply make 20 journeys with my Cybertruck. 10 would be pushing it. The weight of two fridges might snap the chassis.
Yeah, trains.
Tiny cars is the only solution
I would unironically drive something like this. I’ve often wondered if I could make a street legal go cart.
Mandalorian armor suit with jetpack and climate control for me.
Corporate wants you to find the difference between these pictures
Miles per gallon. Or, in the case of the latter, gallons per mile.
“between 1.5 to 3 gallons per mile”, for those wondering
I swear this sub is the same thing repeated in different variations over and over
[looks at sub name]
I checked the sub again and it’s only the front page posts I see that aren’t any good, they’re just text post rants like this one, kind of like the Lisa Simpson template, not even a meme
Lisa needs braces
To be fair, they are contributing something and it still brings awareness and discussion.
You’ve just described all of human culture.
During WWII they invented the concept of gross domestic product to quantify a country’s ability to wage war. The higher the GDP, the bigger the military it could support.
GDP is a measure of how much economic activity there is. If I pay you and then you pay someone else and then that person pays me the same amount we’ve increased the GDP without actually doing anything. So the US, knowing this was their key performance indicator, set about increasing GDP.
So they make everyone buy a car, then gas, then service, then insurance instead of building rail infrastructure. The same goes for child care: If you make it so both parents have to work and pay someone else to watch their kids that’s a much bigger boost to GDP than one or even both parents being able to stay home and raise their kids. Having everyone in a suburb have to buy their own lawnmower and trimmer and grill and stove and washer/dryer and dishwasher also boosts GDP way more than sharing things.
Plus there’s the fact that cars require a lot of the same technologies and factories as a lot of war materiel. If we were ever to be in another global conflict we’d need to build all the guns and trucks and uniforms at home, and without a strong car industry we’d have to start a lot of that from scratch.
But we’ve got the biggest GDP in the world so I guess that’s something.
Thank goodness the UN and the World Economic Forum have started talking about replacing GDP with a measure of economic activity that takes human well-being into account. That was one of the points at the Summit of the Future a could weeks ago. Better late than never.
You’re kind of right that GDP is strictly a measure of economic productivity, and a lot of people look at it to represent a lot of other things like the size of the economy, the health of the economy, how well citizens are doing, etc.
However, you are dead wrong on this point:
If I pay you and then you pay someone else and then that person pays me the same amount we’ve increased the GDP without actually doing anything.
It’s possible that, you’ve “increased the GDP without actually doing anything” if you’re each not doing anything actually useful (see the broken window fallacy). However, in most case, each of those steps resulted in a useful service or product.
However, in most case, each of those steps resulted in a useful service or product.
I dunno if I’d say that, really. “useful service or product” is inferring a lot about the context in which these transactions are done, it doesn’t really open up the box, there. Is gambling a useful service to have access to, for instance? What about, say, setting everyone about buying a big suburban house, a car, running out a ton of asphalt to these places, putting out utilities to them that are both financially insolvent in the abstract and also take up too many resources for what they are? Like, I dunno, if we’re considering the alternatives, there, which incur much less consumption, and thus, much less trade, the alternatives that cost a whole lot less, I would say that the idea that this is a useful measurement really at all begins to totally fall apart. I dunno. I maybe wonder if, say, free healthcare might be thought to decrease the GDP of a country simply because less money is being thrown around.
If I pay you and then you pay someone else and then that person pays me the same amount we’ve increased the GDP without actually doing anything.
Wrong. This transfer of funds would be taxed in some form or the other. GST if u r a registered business. If u aren’t, it would come under personal income tax. Therefore, it would not be profitable for you to do this money exchange without expecting something in return. If you say that you simply enjoy seeing cash change hands, then u r generating value. U r getting pleasure in return of doing this experiment. Soooo that does come under GDP.
Now of course, GDP shouldn’t be the only metric you judge a country by. It’s clearly very flawed in measuring stuff like quality of life per person, wealth inequality and so on. However, it doesn’t mean that you should completely ditch it either. It certainly has its use case when trying to understand the economy of a country.
Wrong. Most jurisdictions have Value-Added Taxes, including I’m pretty sure all places that call their sales tax GST (Goods and Services Tax). In the given scenario, as long as the businesses were making those purchases (as business expenses), they would take the taxes paid as ITCs (Input Tax Credits), and be left will a GST bill of NIL.
Source: Here’s Canada’s info on ITCs. It’s pretty similar in other jurisdictions.
Man I really wish all that conspiracy rambling was real. As misguided as it would be, it would show a ruling class with political direction and effectiveness. I’d be happier if that was the reality - even if everything you said was true - over the mindless chickens we have wandering around our collective political landscape.
A bunch of mindless chickens chasing GDP would have the same effect
Ah, I see that Moo Deng has infiltrated the fediverse, welcome queen
Two things can be true.
We should reduce our dependence on cars. Also, our vehicles should be Electric. Ine dos not preclude the other and so saying we shouldn’t do one because of the other is a fallacy.
we most certainly do not need both. if we did the latter successfully, we should be getting rid of most gas cars, and replacing only the remainder. having as many cars as we have now is bad for a multitude of reasons beyond that they’re mostly burning gas.
wow, i really didn’t expect ‘there should be less cars’ to be such a divisive stance on c/fuckcars
Hehe cute hippo
I can find the calculations again but even if you would drive 250km a day it would still have a 4x bigger CO2e impact to eat 200gr(typical serving size per meal) less meat per day than to switch to public transit. So if you’re not plant based, being anal about what car you drive is just ignoring the
elephantfarm animal in the room.Okay but eating less meat doesn’t reduce micro plastics from tire dust if I still drive a car.
One step at a time I guess
I’m just saying, buying beans and rice is cheaper than a 60 grand electric car
Look, I’m not about to take transportation advice from a river mammal that enjoys showering its neighbours with faeces using its helicopter tail.
That being said, he’s not wrong.
No thanks, I’d rather just skip to banning cars
Someone will counter with “but the US is really a big place …” and you’ll have a completely counterproductive argument.
Or you could focus on better alternatives to cars. When that works, focus on better alternatives to more car uses. When that works, focus on whatever people keep using cars the most for
Yeah, the Public Transit situation in the USA needs a total overhaul; cities are too hostile towards foot and bike traffic. By addressing the capacity needed to transport people to their destinations and altering city planning, cars will become an option instead of a necessity. I’d love for the US to get more into trains like Europe has; that would help bridge the distance for people needing to travel cross country. I’d be able to travel more as a car free person.
The entire society is designed and structured specifically so that you need a car, its a bug, not a feature.
The more cars you have, the more you require cars.
Those still rely on gasoline.
