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- cross-posted to:
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Bus lanes and trams are a symbol of “communism” and car is a sign of “freedom” until you realize that the ultimate freedom is choosing to walk, bike, take transit, or drive to your destination.
his employer won’t reimburse him for mileage once he fully transitions into his new role next month
2018 Chevy Silverado, which he uses to carry equipment and supplies for the hotels, this year.
Well, that’s a fucking problem. Don’t take a job in which you are expected to use a personal vehicle for work purposes. Work provided vehicle and submit receipts for gasoline. Insurance company won’t like it. You won’t like how fast your car goes through tires and then dies. Etc.
I feel like the legality of not reimbursing him for using his personal vehicle for work purposes is fairly dubious though I’d be lying if I said I knew the specifics of the laws there.
Employer: taps head They’re a contractor and I don’t pay then enough to live.
I think in his case he’s salary as a regional manager. Contractor is a whole other thing.
I can only see so much of the article so I don’t know where he’s based, but I know in some places the reimbursement is mandatory. Per IRS mileage reimbursement is currently $0.725/mile. Working in hospice I drive to patients homes with my supplies full time, which cuts me a check for about $300-450 mo, which more than covers gas.
I actually just switched to a hybrid so since reimbursement stays the same, it’ll start paying for the car a well.
Bus lanes and trams are a symbol of “communism” and car is a sign of “freedom”
This is basically it.
I saw a post the other day that argued to the conservative mind there must be an underclass. There must be poor people whose lives suck. If you try to make things good for everyone, you’re going against nature and will just make things bad for everyone.
Thus good public transit is bad. If different classes of people all mingle then it’s like mixing your food up on the plate and that’s just wrong!
They really are like children
But but the oil and car companies DESERVE our income! Corporate rulers are just born better! /s
I still don’t get truck culture.
I grew up kinda out in the sticks, fair number of religious nuts and racists.
You know what they’d say about trucks, in the late 90s?
If you need a truck, like, really actually need a truck, you get it and use it only for actually hauling shit, or towing something.
Then you have a sedan or similar for everything else.
Like, … the yokels of 20/30 years ago would all be laughing at the yokels of today.
I don’t get how these people can be this aggresively stupid, its literally an insult to their ‘heritage’, fucked up as that heritage may or may not be.
They would! I remember my gear head uncles scoffing and laughing at the extended cab in the 90s.
They would absolutley laugh at these yuppies. Now some of them are the yuppies.
its wild.
Yep I remember that too, specifically
Extended cab? Ridiculous. Like ‘hwaaaak ptooie’ ridiculous.
Whatchu gonna do with that?
Take your wife down to the feed and seed, ask her for help liftin bags into the bed?
Ahhahahahah!
Swear to god I heard nearly exactly that at some point.
This implies your wife is so large she couldn’t just sit in the passenger seat to one’s right.
… correct.
Multi-stage / trap joke, they want you to walk into that one so they can start making fun of you and her from that angle too.
It’s masculine insecurity. Our culture doesn’t produce men who are secure in their gender identity so they have to constantly proofs it to themselves and others all the time. Once you see it, you realize it’s the root cause from everything from truck nuts to looksmaxxing
Right but like, I’m basically from them.
And I am a guy.
And I have been insecure.
I addressed this via self reflection, learning about myself and others, finding things I wanted to become good at and then becoming good at them.
Like I totally agree with you that trucknutz are literally gender affirming care, but I… I don’t get it.
I can’t relate to or understand such people beyond pathologizing them and basically treating them as an NPC sub type.
Your description of the 80s and 90s lines up with Charleston SC, but not with backcountry SC, or anywhere I went in Alabama or Texas.
The default is a pickup, sedans are for posh people.
EXACTLY. GIVE A CHOICE!!
I myself am a car person but still. Give us a choice. I would be ALL FOR banning cars in our downtown area and just having to bike walk or bus to get there from farther away. Cars ruin cities.
We need them in rural. But thats far fewer people.
It is going to be very funny (read: horrifying) watching the American economy entirely grind to a halt, due to our car centric design of everything just completely imploding as ICE vehicle commuting itself becomes a luxury.
We’re so fucking delusional about this.
Cars are unaffordable.
Gas is unaffordable.
Public transit basically doesn’t exist outside of some major cities, but not even close to all.
If it costs more to go to work and be able to go to work, than you are paid for working, it is imminently rational to not go to work.
Just most people in general will completely lose their minds as this gets worse.
What will win?
Just get an EV or Hybrid or Motorcycle or E Bike…
Or…
No, cuz that’s gay/stupid/‘unreasonable’… ?
Or just can’t afford to buy a new vehicle, ironically enough. I would love little more than to get rid of my car for an EV right now but I was barely staying afloat before gas prices started to surge, now it’s just even more precarious.
I guess you could put it like this:
How do we improve traffic?
Raise gas prices, dramatically.
Anybody who cannot just stop driving will tell you the many many ways why that’s a terrible idea without like 15 other things done first
Worry not, 15 year financing will save North America!
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Apparently motorcycles are selling really well. Ebikes are gonna be big winners in town too. Transit ridership appears to.be slightly up but lots of cuties are still below pre pandemic levels due to cuts
I would LOVE a motorcycle, but the reality is that if anything hits you, even a tiny car, you’re going to get smeared. Best case scenario, you just destroy one leg if you fall over.
I have literally had dreams about riding a motorcycle, but I just can’t balance the risk on that one. If the rider makes a small mistake, dead. If there is a foreign object in the road that you hit and go flying, dead. If a deer pops out in front of you, dead. If some crazy person in a tiny car gets mad at you, dead. If some crazy person in a big truck gets mad at you, dead.
There are so many ways to be dead and so little between you and a lot of big immovable objects. Our little meaty bodies are not meant to sustain the forces that happen in a motorcycle crash. Yeah, you should wear a good helmet and all the riding gear, but at most, it will just serve to contain the meat paste that your body will be transformed into if you get hit hard.
So depressing. It looks like so much fun.
I sold my bike after getting into a head on collision in my car when some guy playing with his phone decided to smooch his headlights with mine, had I been on two wheels I’d be dead. Get a dirtbike and go off road, just as fun to twist the throttle without the traffic and road rage.
But at the same time, using mopeds and motorcycles is extremely common in Central and South America, Asia, and Africa.
And many of those places have road infrastrucure as bad quality as ours.
Yeah, if 10% of US drivers just switched instantly from cars to motorcycles, that’d be quite dangerous, because most American car drivers are idiots who shouldn’t own cars or be able to drive them.
But… if 10 or 20 or 30% of US car drivers just… stop driving, full stop… and then more people switch to motorbikes…
Might be less of a blood bath?
I don’t want to justify the use of cars, but the reality is that it’s a big place here. Also, much of the place has winter. A motorcycle is more of a toy than transportation unlike other countries. A lot of people can’t afford a car and a motorcycle–hell, they can barely afford the car.
Now our obsession with big trucks is just stupid.
Yeah I lost a friend to one in college in a rather horrific crash and I’m not nearly as athletic or coordinated as he was, decided I’d always stay away from them after that happened.
San Diego is about to increase fares and reduce service. They seem to think they have a captive audience in the poors, the disabled, the old.
Yet there are so many deaths on motorcycles. This week alone there has been at least one death a day where I live. I used to want to buy a bike. Nope.
Won’t be as great for road death stats though.
There’s simple solutions for all of that:
- Fire anyone who’s not essential. Poor people don’t have any money to spend anyway, firing them will not have big impact on the economy
- With less workers you can transform free office space into dorms. Employees will be able to rent them for a small price.
- Unemployed people don’t have money to buy food so it doesn’t matter if they can drive to the store or not, another problem solved
- Put up military style camps with tents and bunk beds next to factories. Workers will be able to rent those beds and get basic food rations for a % of their salaries. No commute needed.
I mean yeah, neo/techno-feudalism is the timeline we’ve collectively chosen here in the US.
But that still runs into the problem of capitalism collapsing significantly when it destroys its own demand via destroying its consumer base.
And it still means that a whole lot of people are basically just going to go literally insane, as the fabled promised bullshit of ‘work hard and follow the rules and you’ll be a billionaire too!’ is more and more obviously exposed as a fantastic lie.
The cognitive dissonance will get worse and worse.
Some will actually conclude that everything they know is wrong… many others will not be able to do this, or manage that realization well, and they will become psychotic.
There is another wrinkle to what you’re describing though.
Office space could have started to get transformed into residential space since covid made it obvious remote work is a viable paradigm, and thus commerical office space itself is significantly overvalued.
But they didn’t let that happen. Partly because managers and C Suite are narcissistic sociopaths who need to live a life where they get to neg their employees in person.
Partly because if you revalue downtown office space property values, well, a whole lot of rich people become significantly less rich.
So what I am trying to say is… they wont let those property values dive, to the greatest extent possible, and they can literally just do cartel style price fixing to do this.
So it’ll be they’ll all just keep acting like their inner downtown core properties are absurdly valuable, and you’ll be offered an indentured servitude contract where your downtown accommodations are fixed and rising, but your pay is variable and performance dependant.
No one who agrees to anything like that will ever get promoted to any substantially important position (barring an occasional selected token exception that proves the rule)… though they’ll create an entire internal and external ‘company culture’ that incredibly strongly implies that they will, reinforced with app kinds of propoganda, media, social media, etc.
… things like this will just keep occuring and get worse untill the proles basically kill these kinds of people. Otherwise, they’ll just keep churning through the proles.
The city is the plantation now.
First, they are already solving the demand problem:
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/09/17/top-10-of-earners-make-up-half-of-us-retail-spending
The very small group of people with “important” positions in corporations will still be allowed participate in the wealth and drive demand. Everyone else will be forced to buy basic products like food and water at crazy prices basically giving away all income back to the corporation. Some tariffs, couple of wars and annexations will make sure they are not losing money.
You’re right about the office space property values. They will most likely not convert it into apartments. Better solution is to just allow workers to sleep under their desks. You get to keep your office space and workers don’t have to drive. You wold obviously have to charge them some rent to cover the energy use during night but it wouldn’t be that high. At first.
Yes you bring up good points!
I think we’re both basically seeing the same kind of likely future, just from slightly different angles, or via slightly different extrapolated examples.
Yeah.
Yeah shit’s lookin pretty bleak right now.
For me this was always the future presented in many American SF movies and shows. Couple of nice office building in the center, elites living the American dream and slums full of wage slaves everywhere else. Running Man, Bladerunner, Robocop, In Time, Corporate, Altered Carbon … They all nailed it.
Basically same, I guess I was just a fool to think that people would interperet those as pointed warnings and criticisms, not fucking instruction manuals.
The problem in the US is that everything is to far from everything else thanks to low density, sprawling suburbs. Public transport works best in high density neighborhoods where they constantly have enough passengers that allows for a bus every 5 minutes. The other difference is that in my city you don’t get any free parking, because the land value is insane and parking garages charge something like $10/h or so. This means for me driving into the city would be expensive, inconvenient and slow because of the traffic lights on every corner, so bus or tram wins every time over the car.
I’m patiently waiting to see what else it takes for Americans to overthrow this government.
From his pedophile ring to unlawful executive orders, wars, tariffs… Trump keeps breaking the law and acts outside their beloved constitution. All with consent from the majority in both ruling parties, either by direct support ® or silence (D).
They won’t.
Despite what you hear on lemmy, the average american is not living in some kind of fascist hellscape. They are working a pretty decent job for a wage that pays their bills, and everything for them is more or less the same as it was under Biden. They are unhappy with the increased cost of things - but they aren’t even close to “riot in the streets”.
Instead, their strategy will be:
- ignore the federal government until the next election
- vote in opposition politicians in city and state elections in the meantime
Legally, the states can’t make laws that contradict federal law. But as the case of marijuana legalization has shown, the federal government is very hesitant to push back on laws passed by states with broad popular appeal. So in the meantime, we’ll likely see moves by the states to become more autonomous, and will see more anti-Trump politicians make names for themselves and get ready for the national stage.
My 60 year old dad straight up said “idk why people get so worked up, the president won’t affect your life that much anyway”. Even people who hate trump still have families, children, a life that while bad, is still worth holding onto for them. Better to keep their head down and try to scrape by with their loved ones than go off to die in a revolution. And who would lead them?
People like to talk about grand ideas of revolution and overthrowing government, but then reality sets in while trying to actually work out the nuts and bolts of it.
Yep it’s the classic “first they came for” dilemma. Your dad is probably a straight white guy with a decent job cruising to retirement. That’s great for him and his family. No need to do anything to push back on the trends now while it’s easy because it’s not affecting him.
It’s definitely been awful for a whole lot of people though. Immigrants and brown Americans are getting ICE’d (the detention centers are worse than most people want to know 🙈). Trans people are being harassed and pushed out of society, they can’t even renew their passport without having their gender forcibly changed or feel safe going to the bathroom.
There are real things that folks like him could do to show the GOP that they need to pull back, but the truth is they are going to wait until they come for them, once it is too late.
Your dad is probably a straight white guy with a decent job cruising to retirement.
If this were the actual cause, then where are all the gay Mexicans rioting in the streets. There should be, at minimum, millions, if protesting and rioting were popular ideas.
Null hypothesis: until their lives are significantly impacted, most people will ignore the administration and wait for it to blow over. Not because they are scared, but because they are busy and have lives that they care about living.
I have a number of coworkers that are immigrants, black, etc. It’s still been hard to get them intricately engaged in the subject of politics, and they’ve still trusted immigration/customs when traveling internationally.
To a lot of people in more stable communes of the USA, it’s not life/death. But I will grant, “invasions” like Minneapolis, or the abduction of Rumeysa Ozturk, do pull people into that fight.
(I will admit to being that second one. I only saw it as racism, until I read more into the oppression of Gaza. It was a subject I had been relatively ignorant on, or had a “both sides” attitude on until then)
There are street clashes happening in various cities periodically now. It’s just not full on storming the Bastille levels. Yet. The AI bubble is hanging over us, ready to implode any day now and the Iran war is gonna make that worse, nevermind any other unknown factors that might happen
some of us have seen the bs over the last decades though and did not have kids and may be willing to fight just to hold our heads up. Some kids to will see the bs and take a stance. Thing is it does not go right to violent revolution. Some of us will bartley the scrivner it up and it will wratchet in multiple ways.
I mean… what was the last significant action you took against the administration? Like, something you had to go out of your way to do, that cost you some amount of time, money, effort, or risk? How many other people were helping you?
I protest regularly and irregularly. It takes time and other people is kind of variable. During the last election I worked to get a person on the ballot. Helping is just something you do. Sometimes people have more complex things and need some help with setup or managment of it. I like to keep a pretty managable thing for myself that fits who I am but I will stow it to help someones more significant thing take shape. I have been involved in some planning and making of things.
Nice try Kash.
Your dad could be wrong. There is a turning point where a snowball effect will start where when the bottom part of the economy can’t make it to the end of the month, the rest of the country will feel the consequences.
If things continue as is, cities with expensive housing are gonna end up with shortages of janitors and baristas because they all left due to being priced out
Sadly you are probably right. The only decent ones speaking up are AOC and Bernie, and they have been yelling into the void for many years now.
But the large majority has nothing to hide, is white and is not affected until it’s too late. First they come for the…
Didn’t Bernie come close-ish to winning the Democratic national primary for president and push a great number more people to identify as socialist, to the point where Mamdani openly ran as a socialist and became mayor of NYC?
Also, iirc, the US is no longer majority white. And Trump had sizeable latino support in the last election. I think that people just don’t categorize themselves into identity groups as much as some would like to believe, and simply have a default state of hoping that bad times will blow over
You are right, no matter the colour of your skin or the minority group you belong to, most people prefer kicking down.
Let’s not tax billionaires, I’ll be one next week. Humans are terrible at self awareness and we have been stripped of solidarity by algorithms on top of that.
On small scales (towns, communities) solidarity works. That’s why we should work on reconnecting. Meet your neighbours, join a club. Maybe this is what also helped Mamdani? I sure hope the US will figure this out, Bernie is too old now but AOC would make a wonderful leader.
It’s already happened, the coup is done.
I still see a small chance to reverse this, if only the rest of the world wouldn’t continue sucking up to this criminal government.
The funny thing is how you pretend that it wouldn’t be the same fucking thing in any other country. I don’t recall seeing this line of garbage about Hungarians “allowing” Orban to control the country for 16 years.
The article is about the US.
But since you mention him, Orbán was plenty bad, afaik he acted largely within the law. Like the gerrymandering in the US that disenfranchises minority voters. And as I said, Trump acts outside the law in addition to all the fucked up stuff they’re doing by the book.
hes saying that people were not suggesting hungarians allowing orban to do things. Honestly Im pretty sure I did see things blamine hungarians for the state hungry with voting and such though. So not sure I agree on him. Still I get that many people are nasty despite the many americans tha actually are fighting in the ways they can.
There was plenty critique for Orbán here, I really cannot stand the whataboutism this comment shows.
We have our problems in Europe as well that we need to takle quickly and decisively. If Trump gets away with shit there is someone else in the world taking note, it’s a preview of what may come for us soon.
My original comment is in part frustration but also a genuine question. People being driven into existential crises just sucking it up and taking on a 4th job? I would have beheaded Ronald McDonald long before.
If it makes you feel better I am unemployed and protesting. I will keep protesting even if I get a job (technically I substitute teach). Im more take a bullet than leave a bullet though. So we either get through it like south korea and hungary or I eventually fall one way or another. But yeah I don’t get people able to live day to day business as usual.
How I feel is irrelevant, but thank you for protesting. Getting out there regularly is important and may encourage others to join you.
I believe we will all get through this, the question is how much unjust suffering and death needs to happen first.
Ukraine did a thing iirc that lead to them being a massive resistance to Russia.
So now you’re telling me that investing in a culture that denies basic physical reality might result in a situation where reality is inconvenient?
Hi, I’m Trevor Moore. Did you know that it’s illegal to say “I want to kill the President of the United States of America”?
RIP Trevor Moore, one of the funniest (and whitest) kids u know.
He died like a Russian dissident except his death was actually an accident
No, not commuting. Commuting in cars.
They could take public transit and spend three hours one way commuting to their eight hour shift.
I do two hoursand it’s rough. My bus route is a good cannidate for bus lanes and high frequency, though they’re not gonna run more than once an hour in the early AM because I’m an edge case
I will be going back to the office soon. It is crap.
I could walk about seven blocks to a train, take it to central station, transfer to a different train which has a stop about two miles from my office in a non-walkable place (less so if it’s raining, snowing, etc). I would then have to take an uber those last two miles.
I mapped it out, it’s about a 1.5 hour adventure each way, three hours total if nothing goes wrong. Still going to get wet on the walk to work if it’s raining/snowing for that seven block walk.
Or I can drive 40 minutes one way. While I do not enjoy paying for gas or contributing to pollution, I would not held hostage to that commute. Also, when I need to pick up someone in my family, grab something at the grocery store, etc now I’d have to go home, get the car and head back out anyway vs just doing it on the way home.
I would love to be able to do the trip end to end in a reasonable time, but it just isn’t possible. Now had work not closed their downtown office and relocated to the fucking sticks, I would have had a train stop at the end of the block and a 20 min train ride on either end. Good thing the corp is saving lots of money by putting out in central bumfuck where the rent is cheaper. Thanks for that.
If the average American is working mostly to pay rent and commuting costs, they’re less likely to look for a new job, or to try to improve conditions at their current job.
But hey. At least you know you’re FREE.
But we’re not even free. I want a refund
The rich are loving it because they have more reason to fire people.
I mean, commuting was unaffordable for a lot of American workers beforehand, too. I knew a guy that worked at a grocery store, had his car destroyed by an uninsured driver, and when he had a night shift, there was no public transportation. He had to shell out more in Uber and taxi to get to and from work than he made on his shift.
It’s just a lot more, I guess. At least, EVs will start selling again, right?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unsustainable
not capable of being prolonged or continued : not sustainable
There’s now less traffic during rush hour. But you know, just like with the pandemic, those cars will come back doubled just as soon as fuel becomes cheap again regardless of who made it cheap again.
Stupid trump is literally the green party! LOL. He’s forcing people to think about commuting! He’s forcing people to get rid of their cars…flooding the used car market and affecting their price so others may afford a ride. He is also making food and foreign good expensive… So people are loosing weight and buying less junk! Shipping companies will be forced to use paper based packaging because it has less plastic… And lighter products so less fuel is used.
LOL… Not lol. The price to pay is this gigantic ball of hurt just slowly accumulating. I hope it dissipates in a slow leak rather than a big pop.
People already made several attempts at his life.
Takes just one angry marine…
And then an angry nightclub owner.
The new job entails thousands of miles of driving each month to properties in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois […] and his employer won’t reimburse him for mileage.
No fucking comment.
Thank god.
If you can avoid highway to get to work, a .50cc scooter sips gas and doesn’t need a motorcycle license to ride.
Bicycles have infinite mileage…
Or if you’re like the guy I saw the other day, you can intentionally take the highway during rush hour and split lanes the whole way.
That’s insane. 🤣
Splitting lanes is illegal in BC and is one thing cops will really fuck you over for. I have a motorcycle though. But those .50cc scooters are great. Vespas and Yamahas have plenty of storage too.
Bicycles are fine and all, but round these parts we have BIG hills. You’ll want an ebike or a scooter for that. And scooters are a lot cheaper to buy.
I like how everyone forgets EVs exist.
EVs mitigate one tiny slice of the problems caused by car culture.
Carbon emissions are only a tiny problem? What world do you live in?
- They still put crap in the environment from the tires
- much of the energy powering them isn’t green
- car culture still creates horrible spaces to live in
- crashes are still a common, ruinous, event
- doesn’t solve DUI
- still is expensive to own, maintain, insure
- car culture promotes isolated, sedentary life, which is bad for physical and mental health
Just off the top of my head. If you swapped all the gas cars for electric cars, you still have all those problems.
- The production emits a lot of greenhouse gasses, and requires a lot of ressources.
- Same goes for the infrastructure.
- EVs perpetuate car dependence, making it difficult to choose green modes transport.
- The space they take up, pushes everything further apart, making every other mode of travel less climate-friendly, because people have to travel further.
Better than ICE cars for the environment, in the same way that a commercial plane is better than a private one.
agree strongly on all points except:
- much of the energy powering them isn’t green
long debunked. even coal power to EV is better than gasoline emissions.
Not debunked at all: “Better than gasoline” is a low bar.
Coal is still not at all “green”/renewable/sustainable.
Tailpipe CO2 emissions are indeed only a fraction of the problem with ICE cars. EVs still cause CO2 emissions from production, maintenance, and especially infrastructure, in addition to being just as dangerous, noisy, and socially disruptive as an ICE car.
Further, if they are cheaper to operate, the Jevons Paradox means that we’ll end up using more total energy for EVs than we currently do for ICE vehicles, with all of the knock-on effects of pollution and environmental destruction wrought by automobile-oriented land use. That environmental destruction also drives climate change, and the Antheopocene mass extinction currently in progress.
It sure is. But we were talking about how regular people are currently affected by rising gas prices. Getting a used EV would be a helpful way to mitigate its effect on you.
You mean bicycles, right?
I do. I’ll just bike 30 miles to work on the highway… it’ll be fine.
You could put your bike on the front of a transit bus if those existed.
Ive done that before. Felt cool af
I used to do that in college. Would bike from school to work or take the bus when weather was bad or I was being lazy.
Unfortunately now I live in the suburbs away from any bus transit. :(
You done fucked up. Move.
Correct.
They aren’t cheap and that often means installing some at home charging station since ev charging stations arent great.
Here in the southwest, an EV is only cheap to charge at home. Many ordinary people live in apartments.
For now. I imagine gas prices will soon surpass the DC fast charge prices.
