I think this is a Corolla but as a smol autistic toddler I had a meltdown when my parents traded in their Tercel for a Mercury Villager. It was different, and different is bad!
reading an article about how immoral flight is has definitely contributed to my lead-footedness on getting to SBcon
Yeah, I’ve been meaning to research it more for years. Basically, from a manufacturing management perspective, Toyota are revered. They literally invented Kanban and Just-In-Time (sometimes called “Lean Manufacturing” now). Some quick wiki-ing shows that these are usually credited to a certain engineer.
They also have a concept called “Kaizen” (continuous improvement). They actively attempt to find defects or poorly designed parts by talking to workers at every level. Every day they have a stand up meeting with people from the line, and I believe people on the line can even stop the line to recommend that a piece be redesigned and machined–not only if it is defective, but if it is too difficult to work with. Multiple Toyota edicts are based around valuing every worker’s time.
They also rotate roles so that workers don’t get bored or low in morale. A lot of union shops would probably consider this cross-training, which raises other issues. But in general it sounds both logical and humane.
So yeah: they’re a deeply interesting company. Could be that in execution they’re total nightmare or that after decades of success there is a despotic regime at the helm. But structurally, they are very Japanese in their sense of inventive efficiency and very un-Japanese in their handling of hierarchy.
Anecdotally, here in Thailand, I’ve heard that everyone wants to work at Toyota, partly because it’s less boring and pressured (in contrast to Nissan and Mazda). Haven’t heard anything about the US factories.
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Nah, it’s a Camry. I want to say it’s the year my mother had (1992). I really liked the Camry, but then she traded it in and got some fucking piece of shit convertible Camaro that she couldn’t afford. I remember when the Camaro spun out, and I was like, you know, the Camry never spun out.
cars fucking suck. a constant grim reminder of how much ground humanity ceded before i even got here
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something that goes unmentioned a lot when it comes to cars is parking
here is the parking lot directly to the side of my work! look at how big it is! look at how. fucking. empty it is!
that building with the fence in the distance used to be an Orchard Supply Hardware that just closed when the chain went out of business (RIP) and now no one parks there except for like, big trucks waiting for things and cops pulling over minorities. there’s a whole other section of the parking lot that you’re not even seeing in that picture
all of it is going to stay a parking lot because that building is retail, and those parking spots are probably legally mandated by the city. this entire colossal waste of space, making it so that I have to walk way further to get food for lunch (which is fast food, 3 of 4 restaurants of which have a drive thru), is a legally required part of any development in foster city
I could post the donoteat video about parking but it’s just really viscerally disturbing to see this entire space go unused by like, literally every sense of the word - no one is even making any money off the space really!
and any time I hear things about how it’d be nice to use trains but the trains don’t stop in enough places that people need to get to because those places are really far apart, well, this is why! it’s not JUST the roads that carry these deathtraps, it’s the fact that we have to leave them somewhere when we’re not using them, which is like 90% of their existence
but just for the sake of being thorough here’s the donoteat video anyway:
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oh yeah the bay area is like a world historical tragedy of urban planning
in fairness it was motivated more by racism than an actual affection for cars
personally I think this should’ve been written into grace jones’ character motivation in a view to a kill
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I think you should worry about flight in systemic ways because like everything in this area it’s not a personal guilt problem, it’s a problem to be solved through political action.
And beyond that, flight has essential capabilities – it’s not like our vast inefficiencies in an auto-centric infrastructure or agricultural policy or energy fields. Personally, I think flight is some of the most justifiable 2-3% of the carbon emissions around.
Getting rid of my car was something that seemed a lot scarier until I did it. There are a ton of small things that gave me anxiety beforehand but, once I had to solve them, I did, easily. I recommend it if you can afford(!) it.
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I also think flying like, from Australia to the US is a better usage of planes than say, someone in the US. I actually looked into trains but I couldn’t figure out how to actually get there via train because American train infrastructure blows.
Corporations are working over time to convince everyone that individual people are at fault when we’re all trapped in systems we can’t escape without major political change.
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yeah as @BustedAstromech and @AutomaticTiger said australia to the US is like, definitely not the problem when it comes to flight
the problem is stuff like the bay to LA/SD, which is like an hour twenty minutes flight at the very most and could very easily be solved by the high speed rail project except oops everyone is upset because it isn’t here right now and it’s a “waste of money”
cuz spending all that money on southwest flights is definitely not a waste yup investing in infrastructure that would very drastically change the way california is traversed as a whole is a huge waste don’t do it
(yes I know there are contractor boondoggles happening but still ugh)
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I’d say it goes back much further, to the rise of consumer-based left-activism in the '60s, with operations like Ralph Nader’s consumer safety movement and the '70s environmental movement, to our current day where union, group culture has been atrophied for decades and millions of people have a model of voting based on consumer choice – that they need a candidate who embodies them, rather than viewing it as pulling power towards their direction.
The atomization of political culture is a long time coming!
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Yeah, there are a handful of heavily-trafficked commuter routes that need to go. As you mention, those are infrastructure problems, not consumer choice problems – they need the sensible rail lines established where it’s suitable, and that needs sustained political pressure to establish (and not the stupid frickin’ cutouts and reroutes that the California line has fallen into. That’s so depressing, moreso for how predictable it was without clear guidelines on its goals).
its weird how america literally BURIED THEIR TRAINS to forget about them and embrace automobilies
i wish there was a middle ground in the states. its so fucking borderline personality disorder all or nothing here. like, a truck driver reading ‘i like trains’ on the internet gets all pisssed off “THEY’RE GONNA TAKE OUR TRUCKS” and goes and rolls coal in anyone who looks like a liberals face
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As a car enthusiast with agoraphobia, I have a love/hate relationship with cars.
But I can’t be mad at this happy boy:
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Ah, the Cleveland saga.
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Not just Cleveland! It was a big national trend to use the highway system as an excuse to destroy black communities.
Portland has less highways running through it than other cities partially because the state was pretty much run by white supremacists so there weren’t any neighborhoods to that were politically easy to bulldoze.
The history of urban planning is pretty horrible!
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Oh, I know. I just know and live with most of the specifics in Cleveland.
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People who don’t want a car have never seen American Graffiti or Initial D
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Cars are fine and have lots of legitimate uses, but I wish that the world were configured so that I would never have to use them for commuting to work or other essential functions.
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that’s an interesting point you make, and also one of the reasons that people do not love the daily commute to work - the drive to increase revenue literally caused this mess, since operators have been asked to provide a more efficient means of hauling more people into/out of cities, which means that you are urged to put as many paying customers into these boxes as you can - can you NOT listen to such a sweet siren’s song?
Thing is, new things are more expensive!
How do we offset that cost… let’s put more customers in these boxes!
Well, shit’s expensive.
Like, seriously expensive. In yuropistan, you want to put tracks where they already are, synergies! et al… but that doesn’t work anymore since there’s stuff around it, or it is below the surface, which poses an even bigger problem (or, literally, smaller) :
in the friggin’ year 2019 there’s still a major market for building carbodies that are literally backwards compatible to a design that’s 100+ years old.
Consider a carmaker building a car that would still fit into the same shape as the ford model T, and you are pretty close to how mind boggingly this market is. Granted, you can exit/enter a car anywhere, whereas the tube still needs to roughly fit the same dimensions (platforms, width etc.) while tech has made ridiculous jumps, so the comparison should be even morr bizarre, but roads/cars could improve in a much easier fashion than railways did, due to them being so essential to cities… just imagine what would happen if, say, tokyo would shut down all trains for a year to maintain all tracks/rolling stock. You just can’t, yepp.
anyway, trrrraiinnnns!
Trains aren’t necessarily run by the government/cities anymore, so as it is in any other domain, revenue is privatized, losses are nationalized. But even if we ignore that aspect, and assume government would have the dollars - what would they invest in atm, housing or buying space for a premium, tearing down that housing to building a new track that’ll be finished in several years down the road… or rather, what does you net the better press?
the very pessimistic answer is that in the current political and economical climate, you basically can only build trains and tracks like crazy in china, if you have lots of space you can claim… by force… like… china or russia, or if you are bezos.
in yurop, fwiw, we’re hedging our bets on retrofitting the ETCS where applicable, i.e. basically trying to squeeze even more trains into the same space by having more elaborate control over hoe many trains can run on the existing tracks without sacrificing safe operation.
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