How do you expect their material conditions to improve if nobody attempts to get more stuff to them?
I doubt the "HN crowd" was about to do anything, but it'd be better if someone saw some sort of market opportunity here. It sounds pretty miserable not being able to get to a well paid job. I personally appreciate all the people who lent me money and sold me cars. It enabled a lot of income for me, over a lifetime.
Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale.
US automakers have chosen to abandon anything not a $40k-$100k SUV or pickup truck, and purposely minimize production to optimize for profits over volume. You can either leave the country, pay the captive market tax, or import a cheap car when allowed to.
Chinese automakers cannot find enough marine capacity for exports at the moment (currently at a ~12M unit/year export run rate). Imports are allowed eventually imho, it’s just a matter of when (elections and representation turnover rate). Until then, the poor are held hostage for profits (as is tradition in the US).
In the long term, yes, but infrastructure projects are famously drawn out in the US due to meddling from NIMBYs, companies puppeting sham environmental groups, and third parties forcing their way in and holding projects hostage unless they get a slice of the pie among other things.
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
The advantage of busses and bikes are that they can use the same roads we already built for cars. We don't need to build new infrastructure to make busses and bikes much better, we just need to limit car access. That can be done by significantly lowering speed limits for private vehicles, tolling a lot more roads and streets, and in cases where we can (especially in cities) ban personal vehicles entirely.
Trains need infrastructure, but a lot of the train infrastructure is already there, it just needs to be repaired and modernized. The USA freight network is one of the most comprehensive train networks in the world. The problem is that is has gone through decades of neglect, and trains are required to crawl through a large portion of the network so as to not derail. Urgent modernization of the rail network could happen in years instead of decades.
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where they want to live, then take their 2-3 kids to school and themselves to work 10-15 miles away without having to plan their lives around a public transit schedule.
I'm American, and I don't normally drive, because I use busses, bikes, and trains to get to my destinations. I sold my last (hopefully ever) car over a year ago.
I'm sorry to shatter the dreams of most Americans, but the world has finite resources. Buying a car when you're poor is hard, because cars are expensive, because they are extremely resource demanding. Even with all the subsidies drivers receive, they still usually struggle with the cost.
By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
> By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, many people take regional rail or (gasp!) busses, and those don't run every 5 minutes.
A majority of American households (58.4%) are childless and ~80% of Americans live in urban areas per the US Census Bureau. I think you might be misreading the desires of most Americans, based on the data.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
The census definition of “urban area” means nothing. I technically live in an “urban area” according to the census definition, but there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me.
The same is true for the definition of “childless” people. It counts my parents, who don’t have children living at home, but have my kids coming over to their house multiple times per week. Only 15% of women never have children. Most people arrange their living circumstances with the goal of eventually having kids. And once the kids grow up and leave, most people want to stay in the same area.
>Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small
percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. And realized fertility is trending lower globally, as shown by my numerous citations. I’m willing to bet on this if you want, as a demographic scholar.
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility.
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
People are having less kids because women didn’t want them before, they just have the power to not have them now. This is covered extensively in the citations I provided in the comment you replied to. Housing might be a component, but it is not the root cause. Children are a luxury good now, not an extra hand on the farm.
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
> It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1 is those in Israel, and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so due to political winds changing.
Good luck to those desiring "children confering high social status" as inflation continues to increase and the cost of everything increases long into the future due to climate change and structural demographics shrinking working age populations globally. Being poor sucks, everyone figures this out eventually, and the future will not be as nice as the recent past was. Kids have a cost, can those who want them for status afford them? We'll find out soon enough.
Muslim Americans are among the most highly educated demographics in the U.S., and Mormons are around the average. So it’s definitely possible without turning the clock back before women had education and choices.
> and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so…
Hard to take you seriously as a “researcher” when you apply antisemitic tropes to math. Israel’s GDP is about $700 billion, and growing at 3% (that’s $20 billion) a year. US aid is about $3 billion a year.
It’s one thing to mime the meme for shits and giggles, but you’re now trying to use that in a rational argument.
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
I hear this a lot, but it’s not an excuse for never starting. Amsterdam started taking their non-car infrastructure seriously in the 1970s and now it’s seen as an example for the rest of the world.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Asking to see a realistic roadmap and timeline is being a realist, not a defeatist. If Amsterdam started in the 1970s, that’s fifty years ago. Maybe we can make progress by the 2060s-2070s? Or we can just wait for China to manufacture all the EVs the world needs. Which is more likely to occur first?
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
It doesn’t have to be a massive nationwide project on par with the national highway project. It can start with local communities.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
The US lost that global argument when it decided financialization mattered more than manufacturing. A majority of Americans cannot afford their basic needs to be met on their income, it’s not “a bit more expensive,” and it’s for legacy auto profits, not to maintain domestic production capacity.
No one is banning electronics in cars, and US legacy auto will never catch up. They made their choice to prioritize profits over investment.
> While the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—accounted for 92 percent of domestic auto share in 1965, this share would fall by half, to 46 percent, by 2015, and to 38 percent by 2024.
> From 1995 to 2022, China’s share of global automotive vehicle output skyrocketed eightfold, from 3 to 25 percent, while the U.S. share slid from 23 to 14 percent.
> In 2007, cars sold in the United States contained 38 percent U.S.- or Canadian-made content on average; that portion declined to 18 percent by 2023.
(BYD sells more EVs internationally than Ford does in total, and they intend to be the largest global automaker in the next five years)
No sane poor person would buy a used Mercedes. Parts and repair would cost more than the car. The only people that would think a $1000 Mercedes is worth it would be rich.
Depends on the Mercedes. There was a time where Mercedes made cars that had a reputation for reliability similar to Toyota's today, and those cars are still fairly reasonable to keep running. The problem is that they're now becoming collectors items. Anything from the last 25 years though? Best to look elsewhere.
A W123 mercedes (late 1970s-early 1980s) is an exceptionally well built car. Reliable, easy to work on yourself if you're handy, parts not expensive. At this point they're getting hard to find and prices for decent ones are climbing but for a long time they were a great car and easy to find for low thousands.
You could say similar things about older BMWs. People leave notes on my 2004 Honda CR-V asking if I want to sell. A Honda civic I put on Craigslist took less than hour to sell. Repairability of any used car is becoming increasing problematic. Nursing an old automobile past its prime is becoming a lost art:)
I've owned two Hondas and I would not touch another one. Both had transmission failures at under 200K miles. They actually are designed so that you can't change the filter without removing the transmision from the vehicle and splitting the case. I will say that the engines seem good.
What about selling busses and trains, and buildings bike lanes and train tracks? Loans and cars aren't the solution to loans and cars, but there are solutions.
I lived in a place for a few years that had a free public transportation network. I can’t tell you how liberating that was, because it meant that I could get to lots of places without owning a vehicle. They even had bike racks on the busses, which meant that you could easily cover the last mile.
That place decided that free public transportation was a good investment. I think many people here would see it as a waste of their tax money. But those people are not low income. They can afford to buy cars. I occasionally hear my coworkers remark about how they would never ride one of those city busses—YUCK. It kind of grinds my gears.
Living in that place made me feel like the community actually cared about me. It made a big impact on how I think about what is worth spending my taxes on. We already subsidize the middle class (roads ain’t free!) and we subsidize the heck out of corporate America. A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
Plus, money isn’t always the reason people can’t or don’t drive. People may have disabilities that prevent them from driving. Heck, some people just don’t like driving. Improving public transit, biking, and pedestrian infrastructure solves most of these issues, and it’s frustrating how car-centric the US is in most places.
Is this sarcasm? Serious question. At least half of HN is autistic. Anywhere there’s friction there’s a market opportunity. Everyone knows that. So this must be sarcasm.
And, this is just for us girls, notice that Anthropic just believing that they are making a machine god is sufficient for their public announcements to not jUsT bE mArKeTiNg.
For some use cases, reliance on a phone is sub-optimal. Multi-day wilderness bikepacking, ultra distance racing, etc -- phones just use too much power when you can't get a few hours of charging every day or two.
I find colour useful for a navigation map, mostly. I think the 4-colour eInk displays would be plenty for that, although they have refresh constraints iirc.
A good UI design would mostly avoid the need for colour.
For me, it matters only when I'm futzing with the map: dragging around or zooming. For the rest of the info on the display, anything more than 500ms interval seems like a waste of power.
ANT+ is basically dead because of an EU legal requirement to ensure that personal information is encrypted. So no new devices will be supporting it, and everything has to move to BLE.
It was quite a rich ecosystem of sensor devices, especially for cycling, including speed and cadence sensors, heart rate monitors, power meters, lights, radar, etc.
It has been extremely popular over the last 20 years.
what is insane, is that ble is largely unsecured in modern implementations. when testing, i kept picking up everyones whoops/assorted ble devices spamming out heart rate data to whomever wanted to connect.
It seems so weird that the M series are really SOCs and not just CPUs. I also don't really want a home computer to have coprocessors just for machine learning...
At least they always allow installing your own arbitrary OS.
> The format is very simple: it adds some accounting info at the start of the file, and then appends all the ELF binaries after it, adding padding for alignment. The end of the file isn't touched, so you can still do things like self-extracting .zip files for multiple architectures with FatELF.
But I would indeed call it very-not-alive; their demo image is Ubuntu 9.04
reply