Yeah, I think we are certainly learning it, albeit slowly. When we set up our suburbia world, it was fine, because there were just fewer people, and we had the room to do it. It's now chaos, you take your life in your hands driving to work, it costs an arm and a leg. Unfortunately, we designed ourselves into a corner, and (at least where I live) trying to fix it feels insurmountable. And I live in a place with some of the best trains outside of Manhattan. And they're terrible.

No solutions here. Just observations.

You know whats also an offense? Your lack of punctuations.

RIP Trevor Moore, one of the funniest (and whitest) kids u know.

The problem is that everything is to far from everything else thanks to low density, sprawling suburbs. Public transport works best in high density neighborhoods where they constantly have enough passengers that allows for a bus every 5 minutes. The other difference is that in my city you don't get any free parking, because the land value is insane and parking garages charge something like $10/h or so. This means for me driving into the city would be expensive, inconvenient and slow because of the traffic lights on every corner, so bus or tram wins every time over the car.

Worry not, 15 year financing will save North America!

Or just can't afford to buy a new vehicle, ironically enough. I would love little more than to get rid of my car for an EV right now but I was barely staying afloat before gas prices started to surge, now it's just even more precarious.

They won't.

Despite what you hear on lemmy, the average american is not living in some kind of fascist hellscape. They are working a pretty decent job for a wage that pays their bills, and everything for them is more or less the same as it was under Biden. They are unhappy with the increased cost of things - but they aren't even close to "riot in the streets".

Instead, their strategy will be:

• ignore the federal government until the next election
• vote in opposition politicians in city and state elections in the meantime

Legally, the states can't make laws that contradict federal law. But as the case of marijuana legalization has shown, the federal government is very hesitant to push back on laws passed by states with broad popular appeal. So in the meantime, we'll likely see moves by the states to become more autonomous, and will see more anti-Trump politicians make names for themselves and get ready for the national stage.

I still don't get truck culture.

I grew up kinda out in the sticks, fair number of religious nuts and racists.

You know what they'd say about trucks, in the late 90s?

If you need a truck, like, really actually need a truck, you get it and use it only for actually hauling shit, or towing something.

Then you have a sedan or similar for everything else.

Like, ... the yokels of 20/30 years ago would all be laughing at the yokels of today.

I don't get how these people can be this aggresively stupid, its literally an insult to their 'heritage', fucked up as that heritage may or may not be.

I feel like the legality of not reimbursing him for using his personal vehicle for work purposes is fairly dubious though I'd be lying if I said I knew the specifics of the laws there.

They could take public transit and spend three hours one way commuting to their eight hour shift.