I was riffing on the original and translated titles of foucault’s most well known work. whether it was sarcasm or not; 🤷‍♀️

okay but consider that you don’t have as much surveilance of your employees, and without that, how are you supposed to discipline them?

…cluttered? the fuck?

has this fucker seen a cubicle? why did she allow it?

what the fuck is wrong with boats on principle? I’m not anti-civ. I would suggest that we should switch to sails or solar though, for slow container ships.

but for land transportation: switch to fucking trains and (e)bikes/scooters

yeah, you can whine about “MUH FREEDUMS” but a modern commercial car can’t go off road for a substantial length of time. if you’ve ever DONE off-roading, it is not the same as traveling over asphalt. you cannot go long distance like that; not as a consumer. it’s a fucking expedition, and even vehicles capable of it (most modern 4wd vehicles are not) you need to be willing to put that extreme wear+tear on your vehicle, and go through that ordeal. you fucking aren’t. no, shut the fuck up, you aren’t. not as a regular thing to get somewhere. maybe once or twice a year as a cool adventure.

so your car needs well maintained infrastructure to get there just like a train does. except the train’s infrastructure is safer, easier to build, easier to maintain, massively higher capacity, and substantially cheaper to use.

plus, you can use overhead wire/third rail, which means you don’t have to carry any power (petrol, batteries, whatever. weight is weight) on board. think of it like the speed boost things you drive over in a racing game. it’s really that good.

plus, you can just, like, sit on a train and chill. last train I was on? I took a NAP. can’t do that shit in your car. don’t talk about self driving-that’s not real without infrastructure investment, which locks you more into expensive infrastructure, and why even bother when you could have cheaper more efficient infrastructure with literal centuries of testing and iteration? other things I’ve done on a train: run a D&D game, watched a movie, written a paper, had sex without it being a safety hazard (we splurged on a sleeper car), paced, ordered lunch, gotten completely shit faced (amtrak’s coctail selection is pretty sub-par and their wines aren’t great, but nobody in california cares if you’re on edibles, and it’s not really ‘allowed’ but you can absolutely trip on acid on a train relatively safely), physical therapy, pooped (yeah not my finest hour, but the paper is better than average) read a god damn book, attended a remote conference while traveling to an in-person conference. in india, where the trains mostly work; they have trains that offer massages and five star meals.

okay, so, some nitty gritty. sorry about where I started that, I probably didn’t intend a pun. gravel rails and ties to keep them the right distance apart. pot hole? add more gravel and bang it back into shape. there are (barely) functional rail lines from before automobiles existed. meanwhile, in cold climates where they need road salt, asphalt roads don’t last a year before becoming unusable. even the basic physics of it favor trains-steel wheels on steel rails are just more efficient-you’re not bouncing around and steering side to side constantly, plus you’re carrying less weight of machine for the same amount of humans/cargo. there are places that currently have asphalt roads where you couldn’t take a heavy freight train, that is true, but those places also have weight limits for trailers going over them, for exactly the same reason. if you can take a car there, in any practical terms, you could build equivalent quality rail (or bike path) and run cars of similar weight/function over it.

we are running out of sand. we are not running out of gravel. road salt is an ecological disaster ruining our precious fresh water. tire dust is visible in the air where I live; that’s what the famous smog of los angeles is mostly made of, and if you have testicles, it is in there (that’s most of the microplastics that are in everything). trains have none of these problems. little bit of steel dust, too heavy to end up in the air, easy to clean up, even hypothetically possible to recycle it.

trains may depart on a regular schedule, but where the system actually functions and isn’t subservient to cars, which mostly make themselves look good by ruining the fuck out of everything else-don’t even get me started on induced demand, look it the fuck up- you usually get there faster with less frustration and more shit done in the meantime.

I really don’t want to hear your counter-argument. if you can’t imagine how this is better, you’re not engaging in good faith. if your excuse is that the people you let have your power are pieces of shit who would never do anything that wasn’t shitty, that sounds like it’s not really a problem with trains (or bikes or whatever), and you need a guillotine ASAP, but you probably knew that because of all the genocides or whatever they did/endorsed and the fact you don’t have healthcare.

oh, and high speed rail can go MUCH faster than 75 MPH with relative safety. look up the original shinkansen, then look up the modern ones.

this feels like you think car roads just appear magically from nowhere, and are an elemental feature of the world, not a ridiculously bloated maintenance expenditure of literally every municipality in the country.

places a trolley or train can’t get you

okay.

highway system

so um… I feel like if a car without 4wd can get there, a train can get there, with the same or less amount of effort+maintenance+ecological-fallout.

this shit is unsustainable, and if we want a future, we cannot wait for it to die on its own.

which it eventually will, because that’s what “unsustainable” means, but holy shit. the amount of resources and ecological damage that goes into maintaining it, the amount of LABOR than goes into maintaining it, fuck.

it’s not like they learned how to write reports; russian education has been shit for a few years now, hasn’t it?

1. asphalt roads in your climate are not practical. the maintenance is CONSTANT. rails would be much lower maintenance. trains work. they have worked. I’ve told you where to look for examples, for actual history of this working. you are not more remote than a rural village in fucking siberia. you’re not more spread out than pre-industrial mexico. I have told you where to look for examples of better, to correct your idea of history without having to believe me, and you’re just here arguing your anachronistic propaganized historical fiction at me.

2. why are you even here, on fuckcars, if you’re just so comitted to them and not willing to imagine better?

3. yeah living rural is fucking inconvenient sometimes. that’s part of the point. honestly, it’s part of the charm. so you can’t go to walmart on the spur of the moment every second of every day. boofuckinghoo. I survived living rural by having a garden, solar, micro-wind, and bicycle backup. I’d have had a battery instead of a shed of janky capacitors, but it was a while ago and I was poor. what the fuck are you even doing out there without that?

4. cars are unsustainable. not “difficult to sustain”, UNfuckingsustainable. cannot be sustained. every second we try to hold onto this shit costs us, ruins what we get next, robs the next generation by another tiny fraction, steals hours from their lives. even if you were right, which you were not, I’d say you’re shit out of luck and your way of life needs to end. it doesn’t, because you’re wrong, but, like, if you weren’t.

edit: oh, and there’s an indigenous group running their own railroad somewhere in the ass end of nowhere WAY north of you. i forget if its just one tribe or a little bigger, but this is a rural community who decided to service themselves with trains, and they seem happy with it.

okay so why the shit were they using it perfectly fine a century ago? with overhead wire?

why are there all these abandoned towns and grain elevators and farmland scattered over rural america that no longer works now that the trains can’t get there anymore? why the shit did it work for the deepest most remote ass end of nowhere villages in rural mexico during the diaz administration? why did it work for the USSR-of all their fuckups; they did make trains to rural areas work pretty damn well.

you’re repeating bullshit auto industry propaganda. trains may service rural areas differently, but they can be served, and they can be served well. we know this because it’s been done before on I think three continents. do better.

people with drastically more information data and money than me decided to tear up the whole country’s rail networks and start using this shit.

so I’m sure you’ll forgive me for assuming they’re fucking morons when they do something that looks stupid as shit.

a lot of 20th century construction was absolute dog shit, though.

then why build the fucking road!?

okay but people could, like, live there and have lives and stuff. or they could have before, at least.

not that we would propose any locals be forced to cycle. convict cyclists will be imported.

well, let em suffer then.

well, yeah; cars gotta live somewhere.