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Cars Kill Cities

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Re: Cars Kill Cities

#211

Post by mikeash »

robomartin wrote: post #210
mikeash wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tesla has a 60 or 85kWh battery. The h is important; it's capacity, not power output. The power output is actually much higher, up to 310kW. But of course that means that if you run it at full bore, you'll only get about 16 minutes out of it. In any case, that kind of power output is vast overkill. A typical house only needs a few hundred watts, and that's easily provided with an inverter on a normal car. So agai…

I know it's kWh. EE, so I get it. Don't know where you live but "a few hundred Watts" would only power my computers. I keep a couple of deep cycle 12V batteries fully charged in the garage. We typically use them as power sources for chargin LiPo's for electric model aircraft at the field or to power the glider launch winch. A nice side effect is that the are available for emergency power if ever needed. I still have…

The refrigerator seems like the only real substantial load. I looked that up, and while it'll draw over 1kW when starting, the continuous load is something like 200W for a modern one. Nothing else is in my house is going to approach that. I'm not going to be running desktop computers during an extended outage, and laptops will add a negligible impact. In colder weather I'd want enough power to run the gas furnace, which I imagine is not a ton. Lights can be kept to a reasonable minimum, and you'd want LED bulbs available for all the lights you'd use during an extended outage anyway, and so also won't be a whole lot. Thus: a few hundred watts.

But let's say you need 2kW. (That's not quite double what a normal car can put out, from my quick research. Typical car systems seem to top out around 1200W, give or take.) The Tesla would be able to provide that no problem, of course, but! It'll only do so for about 22 hours before you run the battery all the way down, at which point you have no electricity and no transportation and no way to remedy either until the power comes back on. If you really do need 4kW then your Tesla will last you half a day, which is just about useless. If your needs are low enough that the Tesla battery could last for a couple of days, then you can run off a regular car too.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#212

Post by jchrisa »

eru wrote: post #190
dionidium wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody knows this is true, of course. I live three miles from work. To get here this morning I could have walked 3 blocks to the light rail station near my apartment, then another 4 or so blocks from the destination station to my office. This is pretty convenient, especially in St. Louis, where the vast, vast majority of residents don't have options nearly that good. But I didn't do it. It was 16F degrees when I l…

Put on some proper clothing and take your bike?

I'm carfree in Portland Oregon and I LOVE biking in the icy mornings. What a great way to wake up.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#213

Post by ido »

hoers wrote: post #203
prawn wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were more users of public transport (e.g., less parking available, etc), it's likely that service and intervals would improve.

This. I live in Berlin, which invested heavily in public transportation over the decades, leading the majority of my friends to not even having a drivers license (me included). You can get anywhere pretty much anytime, often considerably faster than taking a car, especially on day time when you easily spend 30min just looking for a spot. Plus if you combine public transport with a decent bike - no car will ever beat…

Heh, as a new arrival to Berlin I wish it had the quality of transit that Vienna does! :)

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#214

Post by saraid216 »

lsc wrote: post #209
saraid216 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave&allowed_in_fr... Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant". The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice…

Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.

It's not really accurate to call it a racial slur. The concept of race was extremely weak before the 1800s, when eugenics took off, and slackened after WW2 (because Hitler). There were geographical prejudices (you come from a Slavic country) and "civilized" prejudices (you silly barbarians with your shaggy hair), but skin color was rarely, if ever, a factor.

Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white.

In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money, how women are emotional, etc. A germ of truth, but mainly the kind of overgeneralization we call "stereotype" today.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#215

Post by lsc »

saraid216 wrote: post #214
lsc wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.

It's not really accurate to call it a racial slur. The concept of race was extremely weak before the 1800s, when eugenics took off, and slackened after WW2 (because Hitler). There were geographical prejudices (you come from a Slavic country) and "civilized" prejudices (you silly barbarians with your shaggy hair), but skin color was rarely, if ever, a factor. Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white. I…

>In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money

Huh. I would have called those examples racism. Maybe "European racism" if I wanted to make a racist statement myself. The joke is that Europeans are just as racist as Americans; they are just more refined about it. The implication, if you tell the joke properly, is that the Americans aren't as educated or refined as the Europeans, and thus can only handle the five colors.

But certainly, from the time of the rise of nationalism onward there has certainly been discrimination and violence along ethnic lines. (and perhaps before? I'm actually really interested in racism before the advent of nationalism, and I don't have much any information.)

But is that proper? calling it racism even when it's not based on Blumenbach's white/black/red/yellow/brown categories? I mean, dividing people into the aryans/poles/slavs and treating them differently based on that classification looks like the same thing to me, save for the fact that the classification takes more effort than Blumenbach's method does.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#216

Post by StaceyEC »

api wrote: post #29

I have lived in both car-dependent and transit-based places, and can see advantages to both. Given that the advantages of transit are commonly discussed these days, I thought I'd give some of the advantages of cars. (1) Cars don't have schedules. You can just jump in your car and go any time of day or night. Cars also don't stop running at 2am, while most transit systems do. (2) Cars permit sprawl. Sprawl has been ba…

Great insight.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#217

Post by saraid216 »

lsc wrote: post #215
saraid216 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really accurate to call it a racial slur. The concept of race was extremely weak before the 1800s, when eugenics took off, and slackened after WW2 (because Hitler). There were geographical prejudices (you come from a Slavic country) and "civilized" prejudices (you silly barbarians with your shaggy hair), but skin color was rarely, if ever, a factor. Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white. I…

>In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money Huh. I would have called those examples racism. Maybe "European racism" if I wanted to make a racist statement myself. The joke is that Europeans are just as racist as Americans; they are just more refined about it…

> I would have called those examples racism.

Yeah, but this breed of joke is basically timeless and global. Read old folklore of any culture and it's full of these backhanded compliments and unsubtle digs at neighboring villages and provinces. Tribalistic derogation (yeah, I just made that term up) basically happens anytime you have two sets of people who can be distinguished at all. Here in Seattle, it's Huskies and Cougars because football teams.

A lot of people can't tell the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant, for instance, but they've cheerfully gone to war over the distinction quite a few times. Is that a race war? It seems less than useful to do so.

Actually, it now occurs to me to look up the etymology of "race": http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=race&allowed_in_fra... I'm not sure what the Arabic ra's has to do with anything, but the earliest attestation there is 1520s. Interesting that the root similarity with other meanings is due to the way a river branches; that would never have occurred to me.

Nationalism, as I countenance it, is a 20th century phenomenon, which leaves a period of 1.5 to 4 centuries for your interest if you agree. I group nationalism, racism, sexism, etc. under the larger umbrella of tribalism, though, which may or may not be academically sane. Nationalism doesn't seem to become a thing until nation-building became a thing as a retrospective reaction to colonialism; you could call some ancient prejudices nationalism but... that doesn't feel right to me.

...I am rambling now.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#218

Post by lsc »

saraid216 wrote: post #217
lsc wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money Huh. I would have called those examples racism. Maybe "European racism" if I wanted to make a racist statement myself. The joke is that Europeans are just as racist as Americans; they are just more refined about it…

> I would have called those examples racism. Yeah, but this breed of joke is basically timeless and global. Read old folklore of any culture and it's full of these backhanded compliments and unsubtle digs at neighboring villages and provinces. Tribalistic derogation (yeah, I just made that term up) basically happens anytime you have two sets of people who can be distinguished at all. Here in Seattle, it's Huskies and…

I think that "nationalism" is generally thought to have really gained traction in the 18th century; Napoleon's France is often described as a nationalist state, and Herder (the dude credited with naming nationalism) was alive around that time. Germany started thinking about becoming Germany not that long afterwards, and did so, incidentally in France, in the 19th century.

Some people suggest that one of the reasons Napoleon was able to do so well militarily in the earlier years was this "Levée en masse" - most other countries at the time being a little hesitant to arm and train the peasantry, for fear they might demand rights. Civilization says that it's the Republic, not Nationalism that is the prerequisite for conscription, but eh.

On racism, yeah, what you are calling Tribalistic derogation - when it is based on inherited characteristics and actually ends in discrimination, functionally sounds a lot like racism, even if it happened before the term was coined.

How did that work in, say, the 16th century? I mean I'm sure that an Italian in France would face some discrimination, but would that be true of his kids? or would his kids or grand-kids be considered French even though they looked a little different?

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#219

Post by jowiar »

chriswarren wrote: post #33
jowiar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxis are a reasonable "turking" of this concept.

Taxis in general don't fully turk the concept, at least not in areas without reliable taxi volume. It's reasonable as long as you can rely on the taxi to show up within a decent amount of time of requesting it or expect to see one in passing in a short amount of time. Uber et al. have done a lot to help with this in my experience, but I've had many times where I'm in a location that taxis aren't typically in the imme…

Agreed on all parts - for me, I live in DC, in a neighborhood with good cab density, and Uber is in the cab business as well as the swanky car business. I'll launch the app, hail a cab, and by the time I ride down the elevator of my building, there's a cab parked out front waiting for me. It's a reasonable approximation of the future.

Re: Cars Kill Cities

#220

Post by jowiar »

samolang wrote: post #31
jowiar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxis are a reasonable "turking" of this concept.

And zipcar.

Zipcar is great - I love it. But as far as a "self-driving car network" goes, one of the big advantages is that you don't need to worry about parking on either end. A higher percentage of cars are in the process of getting someone from point A to point B rather than taking up space somewhere.
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