cooker

In reality, eh? Outside the forum I do look for ways to reduce my car reliance or eco-footprint and I support or belong to a few advocacy or political organizations that I think have an impact in that regard. However this forum is part of reality and I discuss and debate these issues her because that's what forums are for.
Cultural changes occur over a generation or two but in the grand timeline of human existence that's surprisingly fast. Attitudes about things like gay marriage or slavery or child sacrifice can turn almost overnight in local populations once the momentum gets going, even though it takes a bit longer to spread globally, and the same could be true of environmental concerns or transportation preferences. I hope so, anyway, and see some positive glimmerings.

cooker

Happiness is correlated with access to food and shelter and security until you have ample supply, and then it becomes disconnected, Once you get into the affluent range, happiness is correlated with how well your life meets your expectations, and being super-rich does not make you happier than being middle class. The Finns are less rich than Americans but happier. It's partly because there is less economic discrepancy there, so everybody feels they are getting a fair share, whereas in the US there is a huge range of wealth/poverty so everybody thinks somebody else is much better off than them, and thus they may feel disappointed in their own situation, even though they may be as well off as most Finns.

Maelochs

So ,,, you plan to transform society by riding your bike?

We do basically the same thing for the same reason ... but you look at it wrong.

More seriously ... Some cultural change can happen quickly .... but let's recall, the real public push for the acceptance of *****exuality started with the Stonewall riots in the late '60s.

Blacks have been second-class citizens in this nation since before this nation was formed ... and still are.

most people still think America is a Christian nation ... and should be by law.

I was part fo the big second-wave environmentalism push, when Greenpeace got big in the late '70s/ early '8os. Peopel fought for .... reccycling.

Now recycling programs are shutting down all around the nation because they simply are not profitable up front .... which, yes indeed, does ignore the fact that the programs were put in place for their long-term benefits.

I was briefly involved with a "walkable town center" development ... it never got off the ground because no one wanted to walk of ride a bike, even when it actually took less time.

And in most regions, walking or cycling takes a Huge effort. You talk about the Netherlands ... if the average round trip were 20 and not two miles, and the roads were full of cars doing 45 mph ... we;'d see.

You know why you don't see a lot of igloos in Florida or Texas?

Cultures work in regions where those cultures work. And as anyone who cycles on the road regularly for transport or pleasure in the U.S. can tell you ... this is not a setting conducive to cycling culture.

Get to work.

cooker

Wow, super lucky for the Danes and Dutch then, that they just woke up one morning and saw all that practical, useful biking and walking infrastructure sitting outside their door just waiting to be chosen!

Maelochs

Nor does it make you less happy. And in fact, there are some people who can "live here and be happy with less."

However ... i was speaking of the divide between the "have to o littles" and the "have enoughs." How much more than "enough" you have is superfluous .... but if you don't have food, shelter, heating and cooling, water, sanitation, health care, opportunity for education, opportunity for your children .... and no chance of upward mobility ... you almost certainly won't be particularly happy ... based on the people i have met and everything I have read and heard which seemed credible to me and which correlated with my own experiences.
Imagine if what you wrote made snes. Too big a reach, you say?

The Finns are poorer than Which Americans ... oh the ones who have more. but they are richer than the ones who don't have enough.

Since I keep talking about having enough ... maybe you would get some hint that i was talking about having enough.

Also ... who says the Finns are happier?

WHO suicide rates rank Finland at 35th and the U.S. at 48th. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...y_suicide_rate) Pretty freaking jolly people, aren't they, those self--killing Finns?

tandempower

I think it really boils down to economic analyses. If people analyze that everyone spending money on driving and car ownership is boosting the economy, many favor that regardless of any other thoughts they might be ultimately capable of regarding other aspects of transportation. I think the Europeans who chose to favor bicycling and transit/walking had a sense that they could make things work economically without having to submit to the expansion of automotive culture that was going on post WWII.

Probably if enough fear of economic change and/or uncertainty had been perceived/expected as a result of resisting further growth in the automotive sector, there would have been more cultural resistance to bike infrastructure, transit, etc.

Worknomore

Riding/not riding the bus is simular to marginal cost in manufacturing. At some point a bus will have to be added/ subtracted based on demand.

Jim from Boston

Nonetheless,cycling has been beneficial to me (at least) because it has enhanced my reputation, FWIW.

I-Like-To-Bike

Just like all those practical cars that the Danes and Dutch own and use when and where they find it it their best choice. Have you been to either country? I have, and believe it or not there are lots of passenger cars in use in both countries. In fact most households own at least one passenger car (71% in NL, 60% in DK, 2015).Vehicles in Use Europe.

Riding bicycles does not preclude owning and driving cars, in NL, DK, US, CA or anywhere else except perhaps for LCF Philosophers™.

Maelochs

Mr. Cooker ... as far as I know, the places where cycling became popular did Not deliberately design their cities or towns to be bike friendly---they were designed back when horses were transport and horse-and-cart was a big deal. Narrow streets, compact cities because land was at a premium, traffic speeds were very low, and particularly in the lowlands ... dry land was hard to find.

Here's where we run into danger---when we start picking facts and interpreting facts to support a point of view ... we lose the meaning of the facts.

The problem there is that if we understand what really happened, and learn the right lessons, and apply them to the Real way people seem to behave ... we can make real and reasonable plans which have a much better chance of working out.

If not …..

I look at Communism as the perfect antithesis of smart planning. The idea, that people can be completely unselfish and work for the collective, sounds great ... but it just happens to be totally opposite human nature.

Even good people, unselfish and caring people who devote themselves to others (a Rare sort) still have a sense of self which overrides the "serve the collective" mentality. The fact is, humans are individuals, and that is the basis of operation.

Communism assumed that people could abandon all human nature. Unfortunately ... nope. Greedy, powerhungry people greedily took power and made rules which were self-serving and irrational.

A lot of people Really tried to work for the good of all, because it sounds so right ... but in fact, and both the Soviets and the Chinese found, when people had a personal connection to what they did, they worked harder and better, and when the focus was impersonal, people were shoddy and lazy.

They also learned that while fear seems like a great motivator, before long people become inured ... they grind along, working to beat back the capitalist tide which threatens to overwhelm ... but they know it is a lie, and they just want to avoid labor camps ... and nobody does anything well, and things collapse.

The bad people get really bad, the good people get blunted ... it just doesn't work as a national political philosophy.

And yet ... scholars and politicians both still praise the totally unrealistic, totally failed system. It is as crazy as a system of transport based on unaided human flight, but sophists and savants have made it Sound so good, people don't look at how it always fails, and why.

I don't want to do the same things. Better to offer no advice than destructive advice.

I don't want to extol the virtues of some specific system as a general rule if the reason that specific system works are so completely specific that it could not work generally (which is why some small communes might work but Communism doesn't. When the members self-select .... )

It is the same with a sports team, in a way. I can lay out the plays used by the winning NBA teams, but my sixth-grade intramural team cannot make them work, because they simply lack the strength, speed, size, and skill .... (“Dude, stuff that alley-oop pass. I laid it right on the rim. I know you are only four feet tall but Jump …”)

I can see that there are some communities where people seem to ride a lot ... but also drive, which cannot be ignored ... but they do tend to rise a lot more than Americans.

I can also think of all the "walkable" villages and towns designed and built here in America, where the people still choose to use their cars even when walking would seem, objectively, to be easier.

That is like the discussion above about the economics of it all ... people don't give a Shirt about the economics until their other needs are met.

Many people I worked with years ago bought cars on credit and drove to lunch at fast-food restaurants every day. I rode my bike and bagged a lunch.

I lived tremendously more cheaply than they did ... so I got to go on long, exciting vacations and such, because I actually had a lot of money saved, while they were paycheck-to-paycheck.

But to them, theirs was a Better Life.

I could show them the math ... the economics, the ecology, the health benefits ... it made no difference. They were Different People with Different Values.

My values were "better" for me ... but not "Better" in any overarching or universal sense, than theirs. They had different needs and desires, different strengths and weaknesses ... they were Different People. They could no more have lived my life than I could have lived theirs.

There is a passage in Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of motorcycle Maintenance" where the author talks about a pilgrimage he took to India. he and a bunch of elderly Indians were walking all across the subcontinent, visiting holy places, climbing mountains to meet wise men or whatever.

He was young and strong and fit. They were elderly and decrepit. But he could not keep up.

For him, each step was a stop on a journey of exploration, looking for truths, looking for understanding, looking for whatever he could see. For them, each step was a submission to the will of the greatest holiness, a gift the both gave and received, and act of the most supreme devotion.

They didn't have to carry doubt, or wonder, or a desire to learn. They Knew, and they were living in that knowledge.

The upshot was that he had to abandon the trip, exhausted, while all the aging, doddering old Indians were able to keep going.

He could not follow their path, he could not live their life. He was stronger, but strength didn't matter. it just wasn't his path, and he couldn't do it.

They were borne up by the knowledge that they were living the right life and walking the right path, and that knowledge (whether delusion or not) enabled them to transcend their physical limitations.

So ... any plan which tries to Force people to live some other person's life Just Won't Work. It’s like trying to force straight people to be gay or gay people to be straight ... they can fake it, but you can't change it.

We live in a world where "scientists" and "social engineers" think they can maneuver people around like pieces on a chess board ... and no matter how often they fail, they refuse to see the truth.

When I see that kind of thinking crop up here ... yeah, i might call it out. Sorry ,... it's just me.

cooker

No, but it adds a little bit to my credibility when I try to transform it using other means.

cooker

Yes, both Americans and Danes often own both a bicycle and a car, and when they get up in the morning and choose their vehicle, more Danes than Americans choose bikes. I'm a big proponent of people choosing to use cars less, if you hadn't noticed.

ps. Copenhagen, November 2017

cooker

That Pirsig bit sounds like new age BS. I suspect the elderly Indians were super lean and had walked everywhere all their life and had grown up in that hot climate and were well adapted to it and properly dressed for it. He just couldn't accept that he wasn't in as good shape as he thought, and was embarrassed at being shown up by old people, and had to come up with some mystical explanation to save face

Maelochs

I will let you slide on that because you are so plainly willfully ignorant.

Ever heard of the author or the novel? Always good to know what you are talking about Before you start talking ... i keep forgetting to learn.

jon c. 

Good point.

jon c. 

The birth rate (per thousand) was 30.1 in 1910 and declined to 13.8 in 2009. So it is certainly true that the birth rate has declined substantially. Happiness is harder to quantify but will never be complete.

https://www.infoplease.com/us/births...rth-rates-year

Mobile 155

You have to remember some people will make an assumption and never read your link. You can post a like indicating that it takes a minimum of 2.1 births per family to replace the population a country has. Some will not look at that or research it. At the same time you can posts that developed countries, what we call first world are at Zero Population growth and some will still not look it up. https://www.newsday.com/opinion/comm...ids-1.16230654 You can point out if it is less that 2.1 per woman we cannot replace our population. Now it becomes clear where the population increase will be coming from, places that are developing and are the least likely to conserve till they reach the same level of consumption we now have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

But alas I feel you have wasted your post like I often do and have been chided by ILTB, maybe correctly.

Maelochs

Some posters might be confusing birth rate and population growth within the borders of a single nation .... population is growing in the U.S. through immigration as well as births/deaths ratio, and worldwide, as it has generally been, places where people have less, make more babies ....I have heard it suggested that this is a misplaced biological drive to create more young to increase the odds of some of them surviving, which worked fine in stress situations where over-population wasn't the main problem .... how often do you see that image of the starving African or Bangladeshi woman with three or four starving kids by her, each apparently about a year older than the next, while she tries to nurse a newborn but cannot produce milk ... and they all waste away ....

Also ... some people will read your links and only see the words which reinforce their own prejudices, even if the factual information provided in the linked document directly debunks those prejudices.

Until i came to BF I had no idea that traffic lights were the main cause of traffic jams. Nor did I know that the best way to speed up traffic flow was to remove all the lights and .... slow down traffic. (It's counterintuitive, so it must be true, right? 2+2=5.) Sort of return to the days of old ... when cars had collisions everywhere and took twice or three times as long to finish any journey because they were that much slower .....

All along I thought traffic jams were caused by traffic density, and not speed, and that preventing accidents by regulating traffic flow at intersections with traffic lights kept things moving better ....

Now i find that birth rates and education and wealth are not linked and that immigration doesn't increase national population ... BF is so full of .... "Wisdom."

Japan is so poor and its citizens are so poorly educated, they are having to build robots to care for the elderly because they ran out of young people.

true story ... i read it on BF.

tandempower

Automotive society doesn't work for numerous reasons and it amazes me how so many people can continue to whitewash it in so many ways.

prj71

Apparently automotive society is working rather well. That's why you are amazed.

cooker

Okay, I looked it up. It's a fictionalized anecdote, kind of like a parable, that may or may not have happened, and is intended to teach a valuable life lesson about purpose and meaning. However, if it did happen, I stand by my point. He probably had a higher BMI, wasn't used to the climate or the altitude, wasn't dressed in weather-appropriate garb, and didn't care enough to keep pushing himself.
https://books.google.ca/books?id=DPh...page&q&f=false

Maelochs

Dude ... that is pathetic.

He is a fictional character, first off. The whole story is designed to explain how Will and Focus and other mental Intangibles can move a person physically beyond what muscle can ... and in fact, mind moves muscle ... but to keep moving that muscle takes a stronger mind.

Ask any athlete.

Are you so completely unable to admit you didn't know what you were talking about?

You are inventing physical characteristics about a fictional character to "prove" that your complete misunderstanding was actually complete understanding.

No one is fooled.

I can equally imagine, he had just got out of the Army and was in incredible shape. I can imagine that he was Special Forces Mountain Division and climbed mountains carrying a heavy pack every day.

You can imagine that he had gained 400 lbs since leaving the Army, and besides that had parasites in his intestines.

At what point can you simply say, "Oops," and walk onward?

My Original Point was that a person cannot do what is unnatural to him or her as well as a person to whom that thing is completely natural. One person is nurtured by the activity, the other is drained.

As smart as you seem to think you are, and as smart as I thought you were, I'd have thought you'd have learned that.

Particularly if you had actually made any of those tough choices you prattle on about.

Now, given this last exchange ... I have to wonder if this is all just sophomoric musing to you, and whether you have actually lived any of this. It would be a pretty enormous misjudgment of you on my part, but I have been wrong before.

Maybe ... just let this one go, admit (if only to yourself---(the rest of us already know)) that you got it wrong ... and let's move forward.

cooker

I find I have to respond to you sporadically and sometime after the fact as your posts are so long – where do some of you guys find the time?If you look at Mobile 155’s example in another thread, of the California town of Corona, although a planned community,it was originally designed to emulate a traditional small town,contained within a one mile diameter circle with a central business district and I assume a central rail station connecting it to LA. It was completely walkable. However it has since been de-densified and retrofitted as a car dependent suburb, with a freeway slashing through part of the historic circle and a hollowed out core where a few malls are surrounded by large parking lots.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Maelochs

I look at Communism as the perfect antithesis of smart planning. The idea, that people can be completely unselfish and work for the collective, sounds great ... but it just happens to be totally opposite human nature.

Neither communism nor capitalism work in pure form, and what we always get, and what works best, is a hybrid model. Roads are a good example of a well-established, state run and enforced commun(al/ist) benefit – does (or could) your community operate on a network of privately owned toll roads, or do you and your comrades collectively own them, through resources seized from you by the state through threat of force? Yeah, I thought so - totally communist.
Yet somehow the Dutch act differently. Let’s figure out why.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Maelochs

We live in a world where "scientists" and "social engineers" think they can maneuver people around like pieces on a chess board ... and no matter how often they fail, they refuse to see the truth.

When I see that kind of thinking crop up here ... yeah, i might call it out. Sorry ,... it's just me.

Somebody’s not seeing the truth, that’s for sure.We’re manipulated by “social scientists” (often working for private interests) all the time and what’s amazing is how people are blind to it, like the Robert Shaw character in The Sting who doesn’t know he’s been had. (Hopefully that's not a spoiler, as the characters discuss early in the movie that this is their plan)

cooker

Right, so if it is fiction, then it proves nothing about the real world.

Maelochs

Procves ... what is "proof" anyway. Aska Flat-Earther.

When I read something in fiction which mirrors my own personal experiences ... but whatever.

Pretty freaking sick of the silly bickering.

YOU WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now you are the hero.