My gadfly challenge to humanity is this: Change to wisdom as a base or decline into near insignificance. As is the nature of reality, wisdom is universally reviled as a set of impossible ideals. — Chet Hawkins

Well, Mr. Gadfly, what is the wisdom to which we should switch over? The dictionary says...

"Wisdom: the soundness of an action or decision with regard to the application of experience, knowledge, and good judgment."

but this doesn't get us any closer to what exactly we should do. I agree that we ought to change. I have a list of changes we could / should make. Lots of people have these lists, and many of the items are excellent recommendations. "The List" isn't the problem. The problem is motivation -- the compulsion individuals must feel that leads them to act, to change (for the better or for the worse, depending).

My guess is that individuals attempt change their behavior when their material circumstances present enough motivation to change. A farmer gives up his land when persistent drought and heat ruins the farm. Parents migrate long distances when there are no longer opportunities for themselves or their children to survive. People make serious efforts to lose weight when the doctor tells them "diet or die".

I live a much less stressful, happier, simpler life now than I did 20 years ago. Wisdom didn't motivate the change: circumstances that were beyond my control forced new circumstances into my life.

If wisdom has an effect, it comes in when we have to decide what to do next, usually under difficult circumstances. ("Life is what we do while we make other plans.") I don't happen to know what to tell someone who has a family, a mortgage, student loans, and car payments what they should do if their means of earning a living is pulled out from under them. Simplify? Get rid of the cars? Sell the house? Put everyone in the house to work? Go live in a tent? Get a new career? Shoot yourself? What?

My options as a single man were/are not the same as a man who has a family. What is wisdom for me might be folly for them.

I'm 77. I don't know how a 27 year old should respond to the challenges he or she is facing in the years ahead.

The Buddha misquote site is quite a rich vein. For instance, “Chaos is inherent in all compounded things. Strive on with diligence.”

I thought it was DECAY is inherent in all compounded beings.

I know that it comes from French. The statement that an English word comes from Latin is in most cases comedic, as English has nothing to do with Latin. How could it? — Lionino

There is nothing Latin about English, French was the language of culture in England for 300 years, not Latin.

English did not exist during Roman times. — Lionino

There is nothing persuasive about your argument.

I agree that English has nothing to do with Latin. It's a Germanic, not a Roman[tic] language. The French contributions to English vocabulary didn't change English grammar.

You have made this objection before. I don't understand why you think a word that entered English from Old French doesn't itself have roots in Latin. There would be no Old French without Latin.

Many fights are lost before they begin. — Tom Storm

This accords with my experience of tilting at windmills. It never turned out well. And, I've never read your pithy sentence before, as far as I can recall.

Hallmark sentiments are positive sounding non-inferential statements which are quite harmless as long as we don't take them seriously. I suppose graduation speakers and teachers trying to inspire their students do well to invoke platitudes. It would be bad form for the speaker to say to the 2024 graduating class that "you are lucky to be graduating at all!" or "You people are going to need every bit of underserved good luck you can get!"

The children leaving posh academies and graduating from elite institutions don't really need commencement platitudes. They, privileged bastards born with golden spoons in their mouths, know things will turn out well for them under almost all circumstances.

Which brings me to agreeing how nice is Balzac's "Behind every great fortune, there is a great crime". Only I think it much more true than not. I also like Pierre-Joseph Proudon's formulation, "All property is theft." Is my 100 year old 800 square ft. house on a narrow lot theft? I rented apartments until I was over 50, so I had many years to enjoy the Proudhon without feeling guilty. Was Pierre-Joseph talking about "capital property" or personal property? I don't know. Personal property which greatly exceeds need qualifies as theft, IMHO. A small family does not need a vast McMansion on 5 acres of farm land planted in high maintenance Kentucky blue grass (popular lawn grass) and other landscaping cliches. Don't forget the 4 car garage.

How about "Workers of the world Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" Is that true? I used to think it was unquestionably and obviously true, but I am less certain that we have nothing to lose but our chains, however chains are defined. And workers of all lands uniting seems quite far-fetched indeed, these days.

A watched pot never boils.

Not true. I have personally watched a pot of cold water put over a fire come to a boil.

What is true is that watching a pot of cold water heat up and boil is not very interesting.

I cannot be a nuclear power plant, for instance. — Tom Storm

This is true.

But I maintain that even a rich and smart person can not not be anything he wants to be. He may be rich; he may be smart. But he can't be the world's greatest lover if he is as sexy as a cold wet dish rag. He might be able to become a saint if he gave up all his wealth. Brains would be helpful, as would not being too sexy for his sandals and shabby clothes. Saint Augustine had to pray to God Almighty for chastity, "just not yet!"

There doesn't seem to be a big trend for rich smart people opting for the sorts of lifestyles that lead to eventual sainthood.

Are there any that are never true? — Tom Storm

Like, "The check is in the mail"?

No, that doesn't work because sometimes the check actually is in the mail.

How about "the United States is a democracy"? We have and have had a one-party state controlled by an oligarchy since the get-go. That the Republicans and Democrats are different parties is true every now and then, but mostly it's not true.

"Any American can be President." I would say this is obviously not true, but then there is Trump.

"Peace-loving nation"? Obviously a false platitude no matter which nation one is describing.

"You can be whatever you want to be." False, in ever so many ways.

they gave up horizontal social organization for a vertical one — Vera Mont

We weren't around, so what you and I say about them is a guess. My guess is that they didn't EXCHANGE horizontal organization for a vertical one. Verticality was imposed upon them. We can go one step back, as some writers have, like James C. Scott in "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" and suggest that grain was the bait and exploitation of the farmers by the 'elite' was the trap.

Even so, people have maintained horizontal organization at various levels, because it is just plain necessary for the survival of th species.

Sure, so did lots of reformers in lots of countries since then.
But it takes years to make the improvements, and when the other kind of administration comes to power, which it always does, it takes them hardly any time at all to tear it all down again. Ultimately, the wealth and power never stays with the people. — Vera Mont

I can't decide whether you are profoundly pessimistic or deeply realistic.

Perhaps we can say that wealth and power doesn't begin with "the people" in the first place. (and who do we count as "the people" and who are the evil "them"?) What "the people" -- the peasants, the laborers achieve is "enough" plus a little extra. Wealth and power are the province of the accumulators, the far-sighted exploiters, the "creative class" who figure out how to wring that "little extra from "the people" and keep it for themselves.

The peasants aren't free of the stain of cupidity. They too desire to accumulate, and as reported in the Medieval magazine Successful Peasant, some became quite comfortable and moved up quite a few notches in the social order. Most peasants don't end up in the pages of Successful Peasant because making minimal ends meet takes all the time, energy, and heart they have.

Exploitation (to create capital) is probably a necessary step to material progress. Yes, material progress doesn't benefit everyone -- at least, often, not for a long time.

Hello everyone!
This is my first post on this forum and I would like to debate about the hypothetical end of humanity and what would be possible scenarios that could happen. — Ege

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Putting our present in the widest possible context...

All life will be extinguished on this planet when the sun becomes a white dwarf billions of years from now.

Even IF there were no future threats to our species, we would still evolve and cease to exist as we now do. Into what we might evolve is beyond guessing

In the billions of years since life began on earth there have been five catastrophic extinctions that human beings had nothing to do with. A sixth extinction is in progress, and there will be more in the future, whether we cause them or not.

Hamlet calls humans "the paragon of animals". Shakespeare was as aware as we are how flawed our species is, but sure: in some ways we are paragons, but we are also deeply flawed in our inability to regularly and effectively act in the present to avoid somewhat distant or uncertain harms. What might be clear vision is clouded by emotions, misinformation, missing information, aspirations, hopes, greed, fear, wishful thinking, etc. Even love clouds our vision.

Actually, we are doing fairly well with global warming. Billions of flawed people recognize it and worry about it. Every day millions of individual minute actions are directed toward reducing waste. It is our misfortune that the problem of methane and CO2 in the atmosphere has reached high enough levels that we can't undo the damage by small actions. 99.9% of the world's population are not in a position to enact very big changes, and the 1/10th of 1% that could are greedy bastards, for the most part, that can't let go of opportunities to get even richer.

Will something happen that will persuade even the oil magnates around the globe--the auto manufacturers; the developers and builders; the big food companies, the manufacturers and retailers, etc. to stop driving us ever deeper into crisis? And what would that "something" be?

In any event, this species (us) will in all likelihood survive, barring some added disaster (like nuclear war, a big rock from space...) happening. We might be significantly reduced, we might be living a primitive life style, but we'd still be around.

but now a lot like that is restricted — Mark Nyquist

Perhaps 'the authorities' have no choice but to restrict access to places that used to be open to the public. Or perhaps they did have options, and chose restriction, just because. The U of Minnesota used to be wide open--libraries, classroom buildings, clinics, etc. Now there are guards and locks at many entrances. I suppose a higher level of social disorder since the pandemic might be a factor; so more thievery, assaults, OD's in the restrooms...

I can't remember how one transfers from the blue to the red line. It's been many years since I was in Boston. Did you, by any chance, drive through the route of "the big dig" or across the stay bridge?

In the original trolley car problem context, it was fetus vs mother. By some definitions (not mine) a fetus is a 'person', so abortion for some people IS this life for that life.

In disaster triage, decisions are made about letting some die (who, under the specific circumstances can't be helped) so that other people who probably can benefit will be treated.

It is probably more productive to discuss actual moral dilemmas. One problem with the 'trolley problem' is that actor on the bridge doesn't have a stake in the outcome. A pregnant woman does have a stake in the outcome--her body will experience the abortion; her fetus will be destroyed; her partner may or may not approve. Further, the 5 and the 1 on the track are as good as stick figures.

What-if the subject to be shoved off the bridge wasn't the disposable fat man, for whom nobody has all that much sympathy anyway, but a gorgeous woman? BTW, there was no 'fat man' in the original 1967 problem posed by Philippa Foot in the context of abortion ethics.

In 2017, a group led by Michael Stevens performed the first realistic trolley-problem experiment, where subjects were placed alone in what they thought was a train-switching station, and shown footage that they thought was real (but was actually prerecorded) of a train going down a track, with five workers on the main track, and one on the secondary track; the participants had the option to pull the lever to divert the train toward the secondary track. Most of the participants did not pull the lever

The subjects must have been very naive indeed to think the "train switching station" or the pre-recorded footage was real.

Take away: just stay away from mass transit.

Are we sure this is a real story?

I still feel my life is being squandered — hypericin

As William Wordsworth said in his poem, The World Is Too Much With Us, "getting and spending, we lay waste our powers..." in so many ways.

45" to an hour each way on transit from house to office is par for the course, and for carless people with young children, it gets much more complicated.

It makes total sense to me that workers who were told to work from home don't want to go back to their former offices. It isn't the office -- it's the commute.

Many Americans could drive less. I don't really expect people to walk 2 miles to a supermarket and then carry 30 pounds of groceries back home. They could bike, but biking requires a reasonably safe street, and there are a lot of places in the suburbs which are hard to get to while remaining safe on the street.

Many people do, however, live reasonably close to drugstores and supermarkets, and could get there on foot or bike with little risk. It is more work, sure. But the labor of shopping and schlepping one's stuff home saves a trip to the gym.

Internal Combustion Engine. I didn't get it either.

Lots of transit riders have stood or sat for several lifetimes waiting for a bus to arrive. The traffic whizzes by, 1 person per car mostly, maybe 2. Maybe a dog rides along. Time after time. We begin to wonder, "Why does the community in which I live and contribute value my time so little?" It has spent millions of dollars making sure drivers have a good road. A little money, a million here, a million there -- it never seems to add up to real money -- is spent on buses.

Here am I, on a Sunday afternoon, traveling 10 miles to downtown and my favorite gay bar. It took me 10 minutes to get to the bus stop, and the bus I was aiming for zoomed past when I was 1/2 block away. It will be 30 minutes before the next bus arrives -- and this won't get me downtown, It will get me to a transfer point where I will have to wait for another bus to finish the trip. Between 60 and 90 minutes later, I arrive.

The trip back is going to take just as long, because evening buses are less frequent and the whole service ends about the same time the bars close.

On Monday morning, there are more buses, certainly, but it still takes 10 minutes to get to the bus stop. The bus will probably be crowded and many people will be standing as the bus lurches this way and that. Still a transfer to be made. Another crowded bus, moving slowly down the street -- average speed is about what a bicycle can do, or less.

I also have always had poor vision and have never been a driver. Yes. this is outside the 'normal' American experience where car ownership and the 'freedom of the road' has been an essential -- obligatory -- part of experience. In much of this very large country, not driving is a decided disadvantage.

It's amazing how often people will drive to store that is 1/2 mile away to get a small bag of groceries--this is the city where there are wide sidewalks everywhere, no prowling wolf packs, only 1.3 gun-toting criminals per mile, and nice wether during much of the year.

I'm not sure how long studded bike tires have been around--probably not too long. You can get them with more or fewer studs; more is decidedly better. I've used them when the streets had a lot of packed snow/ice, and felt pretty secure from having the bike slide sideways out from under me.

One drawback is that they are fairly expensive, but they're good for at least several seasons.

One of the things that dissuades me that light rail is the all-purpose cure is the cost / benefit. The Green Line extension into western Hennepin County from downtown Minneapolis (a 10 +/- mile line) has risen to $3 billion and it has taken years to not being finished yet. Its stations can not be close to nearly enough people to produce decent ridership levels.

Mass transit in suburban areas is up against the low density that those cities were predicated on. True, fixed rail systems could be built out like so many branching arteries and capillaries. Better, it seems to me, IF we were going to force suburbanites to use transit (possibly by pointing a gun at their heads and ordering them to ride) would be many small electric buses that could use the already installed concrete and asphalt roads. These could be both on-demand or on-schedule.

As practical as a light rail network to every cul de sac in America would be to compress the suburbs into denser communities. Expropriate the properties, recycle the McMansions, tear up the excessive mileage of roads, and replace it with dense housing closer to the core. Return the once fertile suburban land to trees or turnip fields.

This draconian solution might be beyond even the Chinese Communist Party's enforcement apparatus, however.

I did bike a few times in freezing weather and wouldn't recommend it. Ice patches and it's very hard to regulate your body temperature so if you stop biking you will be wet and freeze — Mark Nyquist

The cure for ice is studded tires. I bought a pair several years ago and they really help. BUT studded tires do nothing for snow that is more than a couple inches deep. This has been a good year for winter bike riding. Not a normal winter.

I used to run all year round and liked running in the cold. But true enough, if you are sweating, you have to keep moving. The trick for winter riding or running (say, for an hour) is to not dress too warmly and suck up a certain amount of discomfort. You'll feel so virtuous!

I haven't ridden the Grand Rounds since... the 1980s? For a while in 92 I was training for 2 century rides (100 miles) and did maybe 50 or 60 miles 3 times a week, riding east into Washington County. The first century was Minneapolis, down highway 52 to Fountain. Rest break for a couple of days. Then Fountain to LaCrosse and up the trail to Trempeleau, about another 100. Next day, Trempeleau to Red Wing, maybe 80. Next day, a very hard ride from Red Wing to St. Paul, 60 miles, by which time every turn of the wheel got harder and harder. The August weather was great. I wouldn't think of riding out of town on 52 now; it'd feel too suicidal, with the heavier traffic.

Minneapolis is a pretty good place to bike around, as long as one stays off heavy traffic streets, with dedicated bicycle lanes or not. 28th St. has a well marked bike lane, but there is just too much traffic on the one way, and the Greenway runs parallel with it 1 block away.

I'm getting too old (77) for long rides, so mostly I just bike to the store and back.

So that's at least two of us in MN. I live in the Longfellow neighborhood of Minneapolis.

You mentioned Boston's transit. I've seen a number of Youtube videos critical of the MBTA -- primarily long-deferred maintenance. Design is itself a problem -- the oldest parts of the system were built about 124 years ago. Corners are tighter than would now be designed, less space was allocated. Old and newer elements within the MBTA are sometimes not quite compatible.

I lived in Boston in 1968/9, and I thought the subway, elevated trains, and buses were just wonderful.

Here's a pretty good Youtube video about the problems of the MBTA.

Based on my experience of growing up in a rural county, I'd say there is no practical way of providing regular transit service. On-demand rides could certainly be done -- I think are done in some rural areas on a limited basis. There is a real need, though. Many people in rural areas are elderly and would prefer to have a practical option to driving themselves everywhere.

Example of rural transit: The Mayo Clinic is located in Rochester, MN - a town of 121,000 people. It employs a large number of people from at least 3 surrounding counties. In order to cut down on traffic and parking costs, and to keep from annoying citizens more than they already do, Mayo organized a transit system for its employees, collecting 1 or two bus loads of people each in small towns up to 50 miles out, and dropping them off at the buildings in which they work. In the evening the routes are traveled in the opposite direction. Several thousand workers get to work this way.

There used to be intercity or interstate bus service in some of these towns, but that died out decades ago.

I don't - never did - drive, so P and R services are outside my ken. I don't know what level of utilization they have / had or whether they fulfilled their purpose. The commuter rail systems are a sort of park and ride -- in the AM you drive to the station, park (or are dropped off), and get on a heavy rail train into town, and do the reverse in the PM.

@Schopenhauer1 During the pandemic (now running into its 4th year) offices were closed and employees in offices were given the means to work from / at home, The numbers of people not needing transit or a car trip downtown was big enough to produce a crisis in the office real estate market. Many billions of dollars worth of office space across the country are empty. This reveals two things:

First, technology makes it possible for many people to work at home. Good? Bad? It depends. It depends. In a cartoon from 2020, two cats ask, "When are they going to leave?" and "Why don't they just go outside and die." Initially many people didn't like it; now, as their employers are dithering over office rent, most don't want to go back to the daily commute.

Secondly, changing one thing (hundreds of thousands of office workers at home) can have adverse effects elsewhere in the economy. Work from home (wfh) was a boon to communication businesses. Think Zoom. At the same time wfh was a disaster for transit -- millions of fares foregone,

Central business district support businesses were devastated. Cafes, caterers, small stores, etc. tanked all over the place. The usual unlovely elements moved in to fill the vacuum created by absent office workers.

City planners aren't sure whether their downtowns will find ways to become even moderately interesting please to be. Convert the office to towers to apartments? This is only sometimes economically feasible. Buildings with narrow floor plates can convert offices to living spaces, though it is expensive to add plumbing for baths and kitchens and HVAC for individual units. Large square or wide rectangular office buildings (the most common kind) have too large a floor plate. Apartments arranged along the outside edge, where the windows are, leaves a large cavity in the center of each floor that just isn't usable for much. Air shaft? Atrium? Again, generally not economically feasible.

How many people living downtown add up to an interesting city? I don't know, but a lot more than who are presently living there. I'd say... let's say... could be... 25,000 residents downtown could make for an interesting city that didn't depend on office workers.

Minneapolis has about 50,000 people living in a very generously defined downtown. These 50,000 are not a dense enough concentration for the amount of area they live in. 400,000 people live in Minneapolis, and they don't make downtown an interesting place, because most of them never drive -- never drove -- downtown,

Why did they not drive downtown? Because there are scary unpleasant things downtown, like one way streets, parking meters, the dreaded cultural diversity, no enclosed shopping centers, parking lots charging money to enter, busses all over, too many stop lights... It's a nightmare!

I actually use park and ride in big cities to keep my car from being vandalized. — Mark Nyquist

That's a benefit, not the primary purpose -- one hopes. Park & Ride seems to be aimed at lessening congestion on inbound/outbound roads, and having to use expensive parking downtown. P & R is also a way of creating ridership.

At other times mass transit must be available for the small volume of people who want to use it, and it must still be frequent enough to meet people's needs — Agree-to-Disagree

why at any given day of the week and at any given time, there are so many people "not at the workplace", but going to shops, restaurants, the beach, and somewhere else. — L'éléphant

The fact of the matter is that a large share of "mass transit" is largely transit for the poor and the disabled who have little choice but to use "shabby transit". Because the constituency using transit tends to be poor people, students, or people who can't/don't drive, frequency, comfort, quality, convenience, etc. just isn't a priority.

IF the kind of anti-social, dysfunctional, disorderly, and disruptive behavior that swept over transit during the pandemic occurred in a wealthy suburb's shopping area, there would have been an immediate crackdown on riff raff. On many transit systems, this crap continued for 3 years before transit authorities got serious about bad behavior on their systems.

Did I miss the punchline to this lame joke?

Yes, Jesus blessed the cheesemakers. Had he lived two millennia longer, he would have had to pass final judgement on Velveeta. Would he bless it or blast it? My guess is he would say something along the lines of, "Woe unto you, deceitful fabricators of plasticized, extruded, and perpetually shelf-stable crap."

Cars are extremely inefficient when it comes to cost, pollution, physical, and psychological damage/outcomes if everything is considered in relation to it. — schopenhauer1

Absolutely. The tragedy is that practically our whole economy is built around this cost, pollution, physical and psychological damage, and negative outcomes.

As Jesus said, "It is much more difficult for an advanced economy to devolve dependence on the automobile than it is for a whale to live in a fish bowl." He said that. Really!

imagine if people built interconnected cable cars — schopenhauer1

VERY unfortunately, an interconnecting system of transit lines is, in most American metropolitan areas became an impossibility since WWII.

A core city like Boston, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, even Minneapolis can operate such systems, provided they run their buses and rail systems frequently enough, and sometimes they even do. But, as you know well, the bulk of the population is now distributed in concentric rings around core cities.

I don't think we can afford the costs of building out the light rail / bus rapid transit lines that it would take to serve the large share of the nation's population that live in these dispersed concentrically arranged areas, whose design was predicated on individual car ownership and concrete everywhere. Minneapolis and St. Paul together are roughly 20 miles long and 10 miles wide. The 2.5 million people in the Minneapolis St Paul Metropolitan metropolitan area are spread across 70 or 80 miles, reaching across 4 to 6 counties. Crazy, but that's what happened.

It gets worse: one half of Minnesota's population lives in dispersed metropolitan areas while the other half, another 2.5 million, live within the roughly 60,000 square miles of rural territory (small towns, mostly). Many states have similar distributions. Northern Illinois is densely populated; the rest of the state, not so much. Mississippi, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, similarly.

Were we to make the truly Olympian decision to abandon individual transportation (whether gas driven or electric) it would require a Titanic change in the way 330,000,000 million people live--changes that are over the horizon and can only be guessed at.

All this is to say we are totally screwed. The unmarked pivotal events in our total screwing happened at least a century ago, and have been amplified again and again. The New Deal housing program that was a great blessing for millions of people was one of those amplifications. It created hundreds of suburban metropolitan zones, out of nothing, around the country and fed a tremendous amount of economic growth. Now we're stuck with it.

As much as I wish for great mass transit (especially as a transit dependent person), I don't see it as an economic or cultural possibility.

imagine if people built interconnected cable cars — schopenhauer1

Do you mean "cable cars" literally? Or do you mean trolley, bus, tram, street car, or light rail? I mean, cable-pulled trolleys are a charming but very anachronistic means of transport.

There is another angle to the question of how the invention of the automobile industry became evil.

Capitalism requires growth.

Suppose Ford sold stock and spent a few million dollars to build a car factory. He decided to make and sell just as many cars in a year as it would take to cover the cost of materials and labor, and then he would shut down -- maybe in September. In January of the next year, he'd start the factory up again and make / sell enough cars to pay off the cost of manufacture.

Everyone would get paid. What's the problem?

One major problem with this scheme is that it doesn't produce a significant profit. Another problem is that Ford's company would be static. There would be no growth. No one would invest another dime in Ford's factory if the business plan didn't call for greater production, more sales, and more profit on an on-going basis. There is a theoretical limit on how many cars could be produced and sold before the market was 100% saturated, but cars wear out, the population increases, and after over 100 years, automakers haven't yet totally saturated the market (which is the world).

At the opposite end of the economic continuum from car manufacturers are hunter-gatherers who spend no more effort on meeting their basic needs than is required. There is no accumulation of wealth, no growth in the standard of living. Tomorrow will be quite similarly to any day 5 years ago, maybe with slightly different weather.

Various peoples have lived much closer to the lifestyle of the hunter-gatherer than the way an automaker lives. Even in many sedentary agricultural societies, the goal was to raise enough food to eat, enough wood to cook with, and enough wool to stay warm with. After 100 years of settlement, the population and its lifestyles might be the same.

Once capitalism and industrialism joined forces in the 17th / 18th century, the assumption of growth was central. A firm needed to grow to attract on-going investments in order to reach new markets with new products and/or services, and to generate increased profits with which to reward investors.

If you are not trying to grow, then don't bother starting.

Capitalist industrialism didn't proceed to begin wrecking the world until the technology was capable of mass production for a large and growing population with enough resources to consume what was produced on an on-going upward-trending basis.

Continual growth is a mandate for everyone from Coco Cola to Apple computers.

Do people need more Coke? Do people need a new $1000+ phone every year? No -- clearly not, but the economy does. If Coke sales continually decline, that will be very bad news for its many investors -- plus many people require Coca Cola to function, apparently. People could eke out mediocre lives with a 3 year old phone, but that would mean catastrophe in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, and China, among other places.

So... buy a case of Coca Cola every week, and buy the latest fucking phone whether YOU want / need it or not. America is counting on you.

The U of M mechanical Engineer scheme I mentioned fits your idea of AI "trains" (maybe one small car on a rail rather than a string of them). His was an 'on demand' system. One would call for a ride; there wouldn't be a string of cars passing every few minutes.

His system wouldn't work by itself -- it would need too large a number of cars to handle peak traffic. For peak travel times, buses and trains would move large volumes of travelers.

Lyft serves my needs fairly well. Most of the places I need to get to quickly cost about $10 each. I use Lyft maybe 2 or 3 times a month. Today I used it three times within 4 hours because I had 3 places to be and no way to get to each by bus or bike. That was an unusual situation,

The bus system operates an on-demand ride share for some parts of the city that have been underserved and have a lot of bus riders. I don't know how well it works.

What makes Boston's system good, or even the Twin Cities' system good when it is good, is enough buses on a given route to offer frequent service, and then good interconnections with rail or other buses. Covid 19 fucked things up for transit systems across the country. Just now things are getting back to normal, but not quite up to 2019 levels.

Bus Rapid Transit lines run as frequently as every 8 minutes. which gives them good connectivity with other parts of the system. Some of the lines are 10 miles long or longer.

I have had a lot of negative experiences with buses over the last 50 years -- like long waits and slow travel times, or not knowing when in hell the bus was supposed to arrive. If you didn't have a printed schedule, you were sol. That has been solved by a text system for finding out when the next bus is scheduled to arrive.

Imagine if more money was put into mass transit. Bullet trains, underground subways. Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. Imagine a world where there were so many various train routes going from city hub to city hub, there wouldn't even be a need for highways. Imagine if one's personal or commercial goods were moved from various tram-like / light rails along with cable cars that could be connected right to a drive way to a residence. — schopenhauer1

Imagine all the unintended evils that would accompany such a thing — Leontiskos

Indeed!

Effortlessness requires a lot of infrastructure, especially if it involves retrofitting.

In the 1970s a mechanical engineering professor at the U of Minnesota proposed a network of 1 or 2 person small automated vehicles moving on very light rails throughout the city. It would pick you up at your door, or maybe the street corner, and deliver you anywhere else in the city. It was, in a number of ways, attractive. And in many ways highly impractical and expensive.

50 years later, it's much more likely that an AI supervised self-driving car will deliver door to door service for much less. Get rid of the Uber or Lyft driver and you're almost there. All we need is a self-driving system that is up to the task. So far, not so good.

You can have door to door transportation in a skyscraper IF you install elevators while you are building the tower. If you have to add elevators after the tall building is finished, elevator shafts and elevator systems become prohibitively expensive. Same thing for a city, to a large extent. One of the difficulties the met council's light rail system had was digging up all the infrastructure that was under the streets on which the light rail would run. It had to be either moved or upgraded so that it excavation wouldn't be needed in the intermediate future. Neither elevated rails nor burrowed tunnels get around all problems.

Our best bet for getting beyond the personal car and highways is global warming and an economic crash. The highways are always crumbling (at least in cold parts of the country) so without maintenance they'll be gone PDQ, what with a nastier climate.

The truth is, we missed the boat a century ago. We dismissed trains and we staked our future on autos, trucks and highways. Yes, it was a bad idea.

Suburbanization started before Henry Ford. In Boston, horse-power (and horse-oriented roads) and steam trains extended the distance that well-off people could travel between home and job in the 1880s. In time, this extension accelerated and included. Boston's first subway opened in 1901. Some of the "subway" was elevated -- and stayed that way for 80 years. Chicago started building EL trains in 1892. New York opened its first subway in 1904.

Outward-directed growth of cities at a relative low density was underway by the time cars became a feature. The US had room; a LOT of acreage and long distances. The compact manner of growth practiced in Emgland wasn't necessary here, and wasn't obviously beneficial. By the time the downsides of highly dispersed growth became manifest, it was too late to do much about it.

Another factor here is racial policy. The US practiced segregation early on. After the Civil War, it was practically mandated, if not legislatively ordained. A series of events -- WWI, the Great Depression, and WWII resulted in the American urban scene being crowded and at least some what dilapidated. New Deal Legislation, which played out in full during the Post-WWII Boom, built large swaths of new suburban communities for (more or less) middle class white people. Large tracts of urban land (neighborhoods) were written off as black slums. Downtown cores gradually emptied out -- so that by the 1990s, say, there was not as much "there" there as there used to be. Covid nailed the coffin lid shut.

Highways were built to, within, and between suburbs; highways were built between urban hubs; highways were rammed through cities; highways were built coast to coast. "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The kernel of Ford's and GM's drive to create new markets where no market had previously existed, reached its fulfillment during the completion of the Interstate Highway system in the 1970s.

It took time for "the automobile market" to fully transform the American society, the American economy, the American landscape, American demographics--about 60 years, 1914 to 1974, to pick a year. Did Ford and GM plan all that out? No. In general, capitalists are short-sighted. They want to see yesterday's investment pay off tomorrow. That may take a year, 5 years, 10 years, or maybe 20 at the extreme. As goals are met, as the market reaches its goals, new goals are set -- ever towards growth, new markets, new products, new transformations--whether The People jolly well like it or not. But plenty of money will be spent on getting them to like it.

It took more than Fordism to get the automobile mega ball rolling. There had to be oil, grease, and gasoline; iron ore, coal / coke, and steel producers; rubber plantations, rubber shipping, and rubber manufacture; limestone, coal, cement, and concrete--all in huge abundance. The stock market and government ran in tandem, investing and spending.

Imagine if more money was put into mass transit. Bullet trains, underground subways. Imagine if every city had worked out a way to transport people where anyone living in a metro area was never more than five minutes away from a stop for mass transit. Imagine a world where there were so many various train routes going from city hub to city hub, there wouldn't even be a need for highways. Imagine if one's personal or commercial goods were moved from various tram-like / light rails along with cable cars that could be connected right to a drive way to a residence. Or, if we had anything interesting, we could use robotic pickups and dropoff of large materials to the locations of our choice. Imagine a world where automobiles were rare, and mainly used in rural areas that were extremely remote or for emergency purposes only. — schopenhauer1

It has nothing to do with virtue that at 77 I have not driven a car. Poor vision has kept me out of the driver's seat and kept everyone else safer. I have always depended on either someone with a car or public transit, and I can testify to the truth that it is more or less difficult to live without a car in the United States. Less difficult IF you live along transit corridors in dense urban settings. More, and much more difficult if you live in a transit starved suburb, exurb, or rural area.

Just for example, I live 3 miles from the University of Minnesota where I have worked and where I get medical and dental care. It takes me about 50 minutes to travel that distance on a bus (with good connections). It takes about an hour to walk. It takes about 20 minutes to bike. 50 minutes is too long for the distance, but there are no direct busses to the U from where I live. If a bus is missed, automatically add 12 to 30 minutes to the time.

Minneapolis supposedly has good transit -- maybe, but compared to whom? Certainly not New York, Chicago, or Boston. Better than Boise? Better than Biloxi? Better than Baton Rouge? Almost certainly.

The Metropolitan Council (an authority created by the State of MN) runs Transit, Water, and Waste Water Treatment systems, among other things, They have also built two light rail lines of about 20 miles total. Just as good (If not better) and cheaper are the Bus Rapid Transit lines the Met Council built. A third leg of light rail running out to a western suburb has cost 2.75 BILLION so far, and they have been working on it for years.

Light Rail is about as cheap as rail systems in an urban setting can get. Tunneling is extremely high cost. Maybe elevated trains, like Chicago uses, would be cheaper than tunnels, but people hate the idea. But then a lot of people also hate buses.

Interurban trains, running from urban hub to urban hub, used to cover much of the United States. I think we have a very romantic notion of what much of that train service was like. Long distance trains in the 1950s and early 1960s reached a high standard, then they went broke. Most train service was just not splendid. Schedules could be inconvenient, waiting rooms could be dreary, train cars could be too hot, too cold, not very clean, and uncomfortable in several different ways. Riding first class was certainly better, but it might not have been quite as fine as Hollywood made it seem.

Interurban trains were not especially fast -- certainly nothing resembling bullet trains. They chugged along, maybe 70 or 80 mph. But one could get almost anywhere, and one could ship a load of coal or sofas almost anywhere. Many small towns, like <2000, had at least freight train service. Lumber, coal, and oil was delivered to towns that way -- not by truck. Back in the day (say, up to the 1960s).

IF, and it is a VERY BIG IF, we had spent as much money on rail transit and urban transit as we did on highways, we would have a gold-plated system that would be the envy of the solar system.

Let's not blame everything on Ford. There was also Cadillac, Fiat, Renault, Land Rover, Skoda, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, Tatra, and Peugeot. In 1908 William C. Durant founded General Motors as a holding company for the Buick Car Company. Within two years, Durant brought together Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Pontiac, and the predecessors of GMC Truck

There are now 1.2 BILLION cars on the world's road with 2 BILLION expected by 2035. Most of these cars are now internal combustion powered. In 2035 a larger share will be electric -- but not all of them by any means.

1919 was the first time auto loan was available to the general public. — L'éléphant

Thanks for that. I didn't know when car loans began.

How to sell those cars if not enough people are wealthy enough to buy all the cars produced. — L'éléphant

Ford started paying his workers 62¢ an hour ($5 a day) in 1914. At the time the average factory pay was around 22¢ per hour. This solved two problems. It reduced turnover in the workforce, and it enabled workers to buy a Model T, which in 1914 sold for around $500. Ten years later, the price had dropped to around $260.

I am not sure whether workers saved up for a car, bought it on time, or borrowed the money, My guess is more the former and less the latter.

I'll begin my response to this highly relevant topic with a film made at the time of transition from hooves and hay to tires and gasoline: This short film was made 4 days before the San Francisco Earthquake in 1906. It consists of a cable car ride down Market Street; a camera was mounted on the front of the car. I know you are all media-sophisticated people, but bear in mind the film was silent.