this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2026
1290 points (99.0% liked)
Comic Strips
20863 readers
4339 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
- !memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Planes are not flying cars. They're flying buses.
You can get tiny planes that seat 1-5, like a car.
Sure. But you need to think lived experience, less technical specifications. Think of how these machines actually interact with everyday life. Car and bus are socially defined categories. We could just classify them all as automobiles, but we have separate classifications for cars and buses because people interact with them in fundamentally different ways.
Right and I'm saying that there is a class of small plane that people, particularly in remote areas, use as personal transportation. Commercial jets are flying buses, the Cessna 172 is not. Your "um actually" is a false generalization.
And some people use full sized buses as their personal vehicles. Weird edge cases aren't how we define words. Your exception proves the rule. This isn't "umm actually," this is you being deliberately obtuse.
We're talking about how 99% of people actually interact with these machines, not a handful of oddballs living in rural Alaskan homesteads. Those few rare edge cases are not how words are defined.
Planes, for 99% of the population, are more like buses than cars. When people say, "flying car," they specifically mean a flying vehicle that:
This is what a flying car is, and it's why planes are not flying cars.
Have you literally never seen any media depicting flying cars? Are you really that incapable of seeming the difference between this:
And this?:
For 99% of the population, the idea of using the latter for a personal vehicle is comical. You need to have a pilot's license, and you need to own a god-damn runway in order to use it as a personal vehicle! The vision of a flying car has always been something that you could park in an ordinary suburban garage, pull it out into the driveway, and vertically takeoff without requiring you to own a giant piece of land. This is why you only see two types of people use planes for personal transport - the incredibly wealthy, or folks who live in extremely rural areas where large amounts of land are comically cheap. And it has to be something you can keep on your own land. If you have to drive to an airport to use it, you're no longer fulfilling the point-to-point on-demand dream that the vision of flying cars represents.
Again, you need to focus on the social definition, not the technical one.