Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd. • Hacker News Board

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#21

Post by eru » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:02 PM UTC

scythe wrote: post #19

Having eight feet of steel behind you makes a lot more sense when you get rear-ended by a drunk driver going 45 mph while you're sitting at a red light. >The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fa…

I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

There was also a major heat wave in Moscow last summer. See e.g. "Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow" (http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/08/17/us-russia-heat-deat...).

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#22

Post by PaulHoule » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:03 PM UTC

When my son was six we were walking around downtown and saw a Smart car and his first impression was that he could pick up the car and turn it over. He thought it was a "dumb."

The industrial food system can definitely be criticized in many ways: it produces so many calories that obesity is becoming a global problem, and fertilizer runoff has created a huge dead spot at the mouth of the Mississippi.

You certainly can't say it's stupid, though. People like Pimental will cherry pick numbers to make it look bad, but Vaclav Smil's energy analysis convincingly demonstrates the obvious: the industrial food system makes a huge amount of food at very low cost... In much of human history people have lived on the edge of famine and things are much better today than they've ever been.

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#23

Post by antidaily » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:08 PM UTC

unwind wrote: post #2

It took me a while to realize that the author meant Smart (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_%28automobile%29 ). Using the marketing typography made it seem generic, which I find amusing in some ironic way. Also, speaking of typography, what's the deal with the bar over the 'o' in TransLoc? Is it like röck döts ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_dots )?

I was always taught to capitalize names regardless of their branding. In other words, even though the logo is lowercase like Adidas, you don't spell it 'adidas' unless you're writing copy for the company and that's what it says to do in the branding guidelines. Similarly, you don't add an exclamation point to Yahoo when writing about the company.

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#24

Post by leviathant » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:12 PM UTC

quanticle wrote: post #14

>Actually, now the other cars on the road looked strange. Why were they so large? Why did cars stick out six feet in front of the driver? Why did they drag around another eight feet of metal behind? It was an epidemic of automotive obesity. Smarts aren't actually that efficient. The small body means that the car has to be very strong, and therefore very heavy in order to withstand collisions. I was looking at a Smart…

I bought an Elantra in 2001 for less than what a Smart car costs now, and I'll bet that I've spent less on maintenance over the 160,000 miles I've put on that car than I'd end up spending on a Smart.

My wife and I were curious about the Smart until we drove one - it seems to pause for about a second while the transmission changes gears. It was such an absurd lurch that I felt a little bit worried about being on the road, even within my own neighborhood. Given that, and the unimpressive mileage, the prime advantage to driving a Smart car is that you have many more parking options, which can be really nice when you're in a city.

Having said all that, I get what this guy's saying in a way. We recently bought a Dodge Magnum (For a roadtrip across the US next year). All my life I've driven compact cars. The Elantra always seemed like plenty of car to me. I could sit four comfortably (five less so), I can fit a drum kit, a guitar amp and cab, and still have someone in the passenger seat, and it was still larger on the inside than a Civic or a Jetta.

After driving the Magnum for a month or two, I had to switch it up and drive the Elantra, and I was struck by how claustrophobic the car felt. It never seemed like a compact car to me, but after driving around in a car whose title is Latin for "big", the Elantra definitely felt compact now. My idea of what 'normal' was very definitely shifted. (It's still a great car, ten years on.)

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#25

Post by eru » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:16 PM UTC

DanielStraight wrote: post #17

choko wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must live in a city with a public transportation system that doesn't take 2 hours to get you to a destination only 5 to 7 miles away and doesn't require huge taxpayer subsidaries to exist. I would gladly use public transportation if it didn't suck so hard in my city.

No, I live in a city with woefully inadequate public transportation, and I drive everywhere I go. But, I lived in Germany for 5 months and only rode in a car 2 or 3 times, and Germany doesn't even have the best public transportation in the world. Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot of tax money too.

Public transport plus a bike covers you pretty well there, if you live in a city.

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#26

Post by scythe » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:19 PM UTC

eru wrote: post #21

scythe wrote: post #19

Having eight feet of steel behind you makes a lot more sense when you get rear-ended by a drunk driver going 45 mph while you're sitting at a red light. >The industrial food system is another. Our food, which could be grown from local sunshine and local compost, is instead grown in distant places with pesticides and fertilizers made from petroleum and natural gas. Meanwhile the sun beats down on our cities only to fa…

I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'. There was also a major heat wave in Moscow last summer. See e.g. "Heat probably killed thousands in Moscow" ( http://in.reuters.com/article/2010/08/17/us-russia-heat-deat... ).

>I guess Americans look at distances in a different way than us Europeans, but Moscow isn't `just shy of the Arctic Circle'.

You're quite correct (these scaled-out world maps can be misleading), though it is not really situated on fertile ground either. A city where the weather has historically been a major force preventing invasion does not bode well for agriculture!

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#27

Post by gaius » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:19 PM UTC

DanielStraight wrote: post #17

choko wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must live in a city with a public transportation system that doesn't take 2 hours to get you to a destination only 5 to 7 miles away and doesn't require huge taxpayer subsidaries to exist. I would gladly use public transportation if it didn't suck so hard in my city.

No, I live in a city with woefully inadequate public transportation, and I drive everywhere I go. But, I lived in Germany for 5 months and only rode in a car 2 or 3 times, and Germany doesn't even have the best public transportation in the world. Public transportation will require a lot of tax money, but roads require a lot of tax money too.

On the other hand, cars raise a lot of tax revenue. There's a 400% tax on petrol in the UK. 80p out of every pound spent on petrol is pure revenue for the govt. And people hate the oil companies if the price of a gallon goes up by 1p...

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#28

Post by leviathant » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:20 PM UTC

winternett wrote: post #12

A "smart" car is just another icon of consumerism, like an iPhone, or a "snuggie". If you want to spend money on stuff that is marketed to a self proclaimed "smart" niche audience of people who think that buying cute stuff makes them better or "smarter" for their purchased possessions, fine, do so, but don't expect the public to be enthused about your overconfidence in how much better material things make you and you…

Your first two paragraphs are reactionary garbage, but the postscript is actually a good point - while the Smart tested well in gov't and insurance tests, those tests involve vehicles of similar size. According to the link below, when tested against a Benz C-Class, the Smart got wrecked something fierce.

http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/Smart_ForTw...

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#29

Post by ericmoritz » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:33 PM UTC

I was having a discussion with someone about how much of our transportation issues would be solved if we were content traveling at Think about it, how much of your everyday needs around within 5 miles of you? Unless you live in a rural area, I'd suspect 100% of your needs are within 5 miles of you. At that speed, you could get to anywhere in ~15 minutes inside of that 5 mile radius.

Re: Sometimes What's Normal is Pretty Absurd.

#30

Post by ktsmith » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 3:49 PM UTC

ericmoritz wrote: post #29

I was having a discussion with someone about how much of our transportation issues would be solved if we were content traveling at Think about it, how much of your everyday needs around within 5 miles of you? Unless you live in a rural area, I'd suspect 100% of your needs are within 5 miles of you. At that speed, you could get to anywhere in ~15 minutes inside of that 5 mile radius.

Lots of American cities are very spread out so you don't have to be in a rural area in order to have to travel more than five miles to satisfy your every day needs.