big agree. the only real reason to use planes is for rapid intercontinental flight. boats for slow intercontinental and trains for slow/fast intracontinental travel work perfectly fine, and smaller hours/work weeks would remove the time pressure.
at the very least banning all intracontinental flights and heavily investing in train infrastructure would significantly help. not feasible given, uh, how many nations have to agree and everything, but it’s a nice dream
you said something about allocating the global carbon budget to recreational travel? I guess we ignored that because it’s unworkable and naïve?? if you meant something else could you please restate your idea
freedom of movement is obviously important but the typical american overseas vacation is definitely a luxury and should probably go away. i agree with cuba that private flights are the worst though. extending the unsustainable and exploitative western lifestyle to as many people as possible is one of those american leftist goals that has never made any sense to me. its why the fully automated luxury communism guys are so fucking insufferable, because they have dumb colonizer lizard brain and just think they dont have to change how they live to make everyones lives better
people should be allowed to travel recreationally - domestic travel mostly bc as said before overseas shit is unsustainable - but the kind of high-speed rail and public transit infrastructure america needs to cut down on cars and domestic flights kind of requires the government to be something other than a racist ponzi scheme and uh, im not really sure thats on the agenda for “galt’s gulch for white settlers”
I think cuba’s point is compelling insofar as the idea of restricting travel isn’t great as a leftist approach and people being able to move freely is generally a good thing, although I do think that moving freely should probably be defined less around modes of transport and more around like, sovereignty or the lack of it
for me though I like the idea of improving the place you’re in so that it becomes worth traveling through and to, as opposed to making it easier to get to faraway places. there are all sorts of places just in san mateo that I’ve never even really noticed in a car that suddenly become really compelling on a bike or on foot! my wife walks to and from the train station every day and she’s basically become friends with every cat on the way and notices all sorts of things going on through the neighborhood and honestly, I wish I could get on that level
we recently had a friend over who doesn’t have a car and lives up in the city and we took her out to the water (we’re basically on the east side of the peninsula, so “the water” is the part of the bay that we have to build bridges over) and all the different park areas around there and she was really, really interested in all of it. she kept talking about how she didn’t even know any of this existed and like, for a while, I didn’t know either! but being able to have enough time to actually explore the place not having to use the Most Efficient Method to travel through it made me go from “this place is nice but I’m not that attached” to “I really love this area”. and this is the bay! I hate the bay!
so like, I agree that we should allow people to travel recreationally - I just think it’s really worth reconsidering what a recreational travel actually is. I could forgo the weeks-long vacation overseas if it meant I got an extra day a week to just chill in the park or ride my bike up to the city or down to san jose or even out to the east bay where my parents are. I love even having an extra half hour to add the loop around the outdoorsy park to my ride home! that’s all “recreational”, but because capitalism, any time we take outside of corporate-mandated vacation hours feels like cheating
i am absolutely one of these but we might strongly disagree on what we consider luxurious
desire and wanderlust should not be celebrated
i just want people to be taken care of and comfortable enough. a lot of american leftists do the huey long “every man a king” shit and its just not possible. i dont want anyone to have anything that requires exploiting other people or destroying the planet in stupid ways. to me i think the focus on making sure everyone has access to “luxuries” (shit the average american considers a luxury like uhh “food” and “shelter” and “healthcare” arent, btw) is bad because it still celebrates material wealth and doesnt reckon with the fact much of the wealth here is stolen. i know the yacht owners on here may be upset to learn that they cant own their million dollar boat anymore but we all have to learn to take one for the team
i will be running for office on the platform that all modes of transportation be replaced with varying sizes of kuribos shoe
Y’all are starting to lose it…
A 24 hour flight (about how long it takes to go around the world with one stop) would be something like 3 weeks by boat.
There are so many improvements we could make before it would be necessary to roll the clock back that much, and they are so much more likely to be enacted as policy than for all global shipping and international business travel to come to a standstill so we can spend a month on a boat.
i really dont think it taking 3 weeks to go around the entire world is a bad thing. a lot of shipping already uses boats and “international business travel” smacks of bourgeois bullshit to me. obviously if it was urgent you would let people fly, like natural disaster aid and shit. if you really wanna save the environment but hold onto your commercial international flights abolish the us military i guess
From Tokyo to Kyoto is about 460km. Current bullet train takes about 2 hours, 15 minutes to get there.
Los Angeles to New York City is about 4,500km. Assuming the same average speeds (maybe the tech is a bit better, but the route has to be more circuitous, whatever), we’re at something like 22-24 hours.
I consider that pretty viable, actually. The flight time from NYC to LA is about 5.5 hours, but the inefficiencies of flight mean you have to show up, like, 2-3 hours early. I think if a bullet train between LA and NYC were available today at half the cost of a flight, it would be popular as a competitor to flight, though I’m sure it would probably encourage more low-income people to make the trip than people who were gonna fly to do it slower.
So…it’s conceivable that such a route might expend more energy. Hard to really predict, though.
Anyway, the point is: bullet trains are unambiguously optimal and popular as a replacement for 1-3 hour flights. And 1-3 hour flights are comparatively quite wasteful, as is the equivalent car trip. I can even go to 5 hour flights, as above.
But beyond that, we’re doing more than imagining no-brainers that are only blocked by bad politics. You’re starting to prescribe a unified change to the entire global order, which…I think is a whole other realm of imagineering.
i’ve taken the ‘luxury’ bit of the slogan to be basically sarcastic and punchy, a way of saying ‘not fucked over constantly by scarcity and tragic distribution’
part of the actual full communist project will be necessarily dismantling a lot of the engines of desire and taste and revealing how much is completely maliciously fabricated to satisfy growth without consideration for whether the products and choices really make people happy and and
advertising must be destroyed in any case
i think its a dumb slogan cuz those things shouldnt be framed as luxuries, they are a right
yes…yes…a unified change to global order…you’re so close to getting it
Though we should also consider that if there were cross-country bullet trains in the US (like my LA-to-NYC scenario), a lot more people in the US would probably vacation to other US cities in the way that Europeans visit other countries.
Actually…I dunno: that’s already what most people do I think. So…honestly I have no idea if it would be more or less popular.
But it would sure be easier!
absolutely, but recall that the phrase has caught on specifically because it was trying to head off dread about revisiting bloc-era austerity, that might have been misguided it is important be utopian
Well, yeah: we’re hitting the point on the ride where you and I go separate ways, obviously.
I’m not in favor of preserving the “benefits” of some “status quo”. I just don’t think I can plan out the operations of the entire world.
This is how I see this conversation shaking out:
I say, “You’re not considering how the world relies on time-sensitive international movement.”
And then if I name any example that has anything to do with industry or supply chains, you say, “Well good. Maybe that should take three weeks. That all sounds pretty bougey to me.”
And if I say anything that has to do with human rights, such as supply chains pertaining to medicine, you say, “Well, there would be an exception for that.”
Scintillating.
have fun in branson everyone!!!
It is immoral for me to go to Branson, I’m afraid 
going to buttcon is praxis
Only if we become a roving band of hoodlums, trashing people’s cars.
Okay…I’ll take a ship for that.