BUILD TRANSIT
Let me give you an example: what if every one of the billion people in China wants a car? everyone in South America? everyone in India? It's not sustainable. Capitalism has no solutions.
:fidel-cool:
for a second I thought ABC had printed that quote and I was in disbelief
nah, sorry. it's a paraphrase from that clip @LoudMuffin and I keep sharing :)
- The US economy is dependent on a vast army of underpaid workers.
- These workers can no longer afford the cars they need to drive to go to work
- The US can't build transit for ideological reasons
- Even if the US could build transit undoing generations of car-exclusive city planning and infrastructure is a gargantuan task
I'm sure the free market will find a good solution to this :this-is-fine:
Less "buy here/pay here" used car places and more "lease a pre-owned vehicle HERE!"
When does Wile E. Coyote finally notice he's no longer running on solid ground?
Company car provided, but it's taken directly from your paycheck and if you quit or get fired before it's paid off the remainder becomes a high interest debt
I wasn't being funny, that's just an observation on how this will probably play out
Lots of jobs where you can't do that, especially underpaid jobs in the service sector.
Isn't it amazing how we managed to privatize the hell out of something that you need to participate in modern society
They also have free mass transit, lodgings, veterinary care and presumably health care, even in the Pokemon version of America where there's garbage and shit everywhere.
The settings for different generations are loosely based on different places. Japan originally, but one generation was US, and separately Hawaii, another France… most recently the br*tish isles
Unironically yes, several consequences of the falling rate of profit are cascading into each other right now and all of it is compounded and accelerated by COVID.
Car dealers aren't losing money due to the pandemic. They are recording record profit margins. If anyone says some shit like "Well the chip shortage", just slap them in the face as that isn't related to fucking dealerships insanely marking up both used and new cars.
It is eye opening to go near sprawling dealerships with ⅔ of their lots empty. So much wasted space devoted to storing things produced before their demand so they sit in lots until incentives help move inventory.
"the law, in its majestic equality, allows the poor as well as the rich to buy new cars, organic food, and at-home covid tests."
Americans will rather pay $30k for a lemon than ride a train.
Yea thats me. 20miles from nearest population center above 1k, 30~miles away from next similar sized city
American City Planners banked on the idea that people would always have cars, that no alternative was thought of. Lots of people scream “BUILD TRAINS” like the solution is as simple as that.
To fix this you have to restart the whole mess
You have to do what China did and massively build out urban infrastructure and subsidize urban housing to get people out of suburbs and rural towns.
Turn small family farms into centralized collectives with an urban district that has transportation out into the farms
We need major land reform and a lot more people shifted from bullshit jobs to farm work. We already rely on migrant farm workers to grow the majority of our food and it's one of the most obscenely exploitative and brutal jobs in the US.
But late on a lot of that, many family struggled over the last 100 years and couldnt maintain their farms, farmer nowadays lease their land, equipment, or both to what ever factory farm interests they could get, who under pay them for the most part to make their money back on rental fees and such.
The idea of the farmer who own their land and equipment is drifting further and further from reality. So cant say for sure they can collectivize with all that
I mean just seize the land and give it to the farmers in a better oriented collective agreement and that they don't have to worry about buffer crops or bad seasons leading to bankruptcy
That's actually ripe conditions for collectivization. The serfs didn't own land, the peasantry was mostly landless and operating under sharecropping leases. This is just the reintroduction of the old feudal property relations under capitalism. Relations that have shown again and again to serve as fertile ground for revolutionary movement.
If there’s a spark, yes, but the serfs, funny enough wouldnt dream of hurting their lords to set themselves free
The Chinese ones did. And when serfdom was abolished, the poor peasantry became revolutionary as their subsistence was no longer assured.
It’s nice to see what the Chinese did, but we’re talking about America specifically, camel through a needle, etc, etc
The American sharecroppers were revolutionary. As industrial farming kills off the moderately comfortable position that many farmers had and proletarianizes them, they too will slip into a more revolutionary position.
When you find yourself in a hole, the first step is to stop digging, but Biden just signed a highway expansion bill disguised as an infrastructure bill, soooo
Or Bus Rapid Transit, while not as good as trains is miles ahead of using cars and only needs some relatively small adjustments to existing infrastructure.
When I lived in Chicago I didn't need a car, that might be the only other American city where you can do that though.
mfers in my city would rather pay 60 dollars for parking than take transit that drops them directly off at the stadiums, it is actually fucking wild.
Parking for Giants games in SF would go for over $100 when they were good.
It's a 5 minute walk to the stadium from the 4th and King Caltrain station, which runs extra service on game days.
I had to buy a car earlier this year because my old mazda was finally starting to go. I swear nothing has put me closer to doing an adventurism than having to maneuver around and negotiate with car dealerships to buy a thing I don't want but need to live in this hell country.
Edit: Also yeah prices are fucking ridiculous right now I ended up paying like 30% more for a car compared to what it had been pre-pandemic.
"J.D. Power’s Paris says that if they can afford it, buyers should consider a new vehicle."
Oh word?
That doesn't even work because new cars have a "market adjustment" where they just tack on thousands of dollars to the price tag literally because of the high cost of used cars.
It is hilarious that chuds look at that happening and think free markets are an efficient and ethical system.
Whaaaat? No, I've been assured there's a Supply-Demand graph that all business owners obey when setting prices.
Oh fuck they've gone from too expensive for me to ever be able to afford one in my life to too expensive for me to ever be able to afford one in my life
Somebody stole a vital part of my car a few months ago and the insurance company said it would take five months to fix. My alternative was taking a payment to buy a replacement. I got less than five thousand and had to dip into student loan money to pay for something obtainable.
I wish I didn't live in a place where the closest services are a two mile walk, with several unprotected crosswalks in between.
And getting my new(er) car insured was so pricey. I didn't choose to have some asshole steal from my parked car, but here I am.
I would love to just have a bus pass and a train pass. I wouldn't even mind the commute if I could sit for two hours instead of driving for one.
damn...was it a catalytic converter? apparently that shits gotten HUGE since covid hit (wonder why), stealing them i mean. ive seen many articles about so much as catalytic converter theft rings, entire groups of people apparently just dead set on stealing these fuckers
sorry that happened 2 u though, comrade
That was it exactly. The guys that did it sawed through portions of the engine to get it.
I tried to be mad, but it's like, people are so desperate that it's only a symptom of deeper problems. I had to file a police report for insurance and felt gross the whole time.
I didn't expect them to get close to finding it or doing anything close to helpful, but it made me afraid of what the cops would do in my area if they had issues like mine as an excuse to harass people.
Thank you, comrade. I'm glad people here are like you and get situations like this.
