“It really ramped up when Reagan” is an acceptable comment about most of our current problems.

All of them made serious money by exploiting workers. That’s how it works. So in my estimation, if you’ve managed to hoard an ungodly sum of money, you’re an asshole. Agree to disagree I suppose.

Overworked, underpaid, constantly scrambling to get ahead, always on the precipice of disaster, riddled with untreated mental illnesses and substance addiction, subjected to a never-ending torrent of propaganda, alienated from our fellow man and regularly told the problems in our lives are all OUR fault while we get…

There’s a solution to letting the mentally disabled / substance addicted wallow on the street. Harder to solve the meathead with a quick trigger issue.

Your first paragraph is true, the rest is needless bootlicking. Charity is bullshit. It’s what the most exploitative gangsters on the planet do for PR and tax write-offs. Charity wouldn’t be needed if we took those ill-gotten gains and allocated them democratically to things that benefit society.

I can simplify this: Ford was an asshole, Vanderbilt was an asshole. The through-line on a lot of these rich assholes is that they made their fortunes by exploiting workers (and. sometimes working with Nazis). That makes them assholes. Brilliant assholes, but still assholes.

2nd Gear:

When the majority of your force is commuting in from Long Island by car, yeah, they require a lot of parking.

I mean, I’m a huge critic of “autonomous” vehicles, but I see this as a good thing. Your average human would plow through despite conditions that make driving unsafe at pretty much any speed. Hence why we see massive pile-ups multiple times a year.

Recently drove a Model 3 as a rental. Largely awful car with an interior that would make a poverty-spec Mitsubishi blush. Yes, it accelerated quickly. The steering/handling were bizarre. Rough ride, noisy, twitchy overly-boosted steering.

A hybrid Telluride would have been much more compelling. 

Make transit free and tax the hell out of personal/commercial vehicles. Also, you spend $11 BILLION on cops per year. My guess is you could carve a billion out of that and nobody would notice except for maybe the cops looking on their phones at the subway station who would get slightly less bullshit overtime.

The history of personal transportation is also spiteful and racist, i.e. building highways through predominantly black neighborhoods and thus saddling them with lower property values and higher rates of cancer and asthma.

Chicken or the egg problem. The die-hard motorists will piss and moan about their property taxes going to expanded public transit and then will piss and moan about how “nobody uses it” because the built environment still favors cars. That said, “moving the car problem elsewhere” is actually an improvement. Fewer cars…

Yeah, there’s research showing foot and bike traffic spends significantly more money than car traffic. 

Walkable cities are now utopian?! 

The solution to that is better public transit, not more cars, which would further strain a lower-income family’s finances.

You buy a jacket and boots.

Sounds like you live in a small town with spread out suburbs. Of course you can’t imagine living car free. The place wasn’t designed with that in mind. That said, all of the things you mentioned are mostly issues of convenience. You could live closer to work. You could find a doctor closer to home for your daughter.…

It’s a lot of money, but California brings in $250 billion in taxes every year. We need to push this through and do an honest appraisal of what went wrong (and what went right) when it’s done. Doing new things is hard and many mistakes will be made, but we have to start somewhere and presumably we’ll get better at it…