It seems that many BART supporters are suffering from a fatal fallacy which I also believed until recently.
What is the purpose of public transit? Do you believe that public transit is designed so that poor people can commute to jobs?
Wrong. Public transit is designed so that people can go shopping. Buses and trains move people around to shopping centers and stores and malls.
It is only by accident that poor people can commute to some jobs with public transit. There are far, far more jobs that are more-or-less unreachable by bus or train, and poor people end up walking, cycling, or moving closer to those jobs.
When I was a young child, Grandma didn't drive, and so our weekends were consumed by walking around the neighborhood, shopping and eating in restaurants. We'd hang out at the 7-Eleven playing Centipede, Missile Command, and Asteroids. We'd pick up some sodas and Cracked magazine and go home.
Then later in life, we started going to malls. None of the malls were walking-distance from Grandma's house, so we rode the bus. And I fell in love with public transit; we'd ride the bus to any one of 3-4 malls nearby, walk around to our heart's content, and ride the bus back home carrying our spoils for the day. It was always a treat to do this.
What I definitely noticed was that a lot of poor people rode the bus. What I didn't realize is that mostly, they didn't have anywhere else to go. It wasn't a matter of commuting to their jobs, but just hanging out for the day.
Here in Phoenix, most bus stations are in shopping malls, or they become de facto shopping centers, and the light rail corridor is basically a commerce incubator by the way stores and shopping centers are popping up now that the track is permanently laid down.
On the weekends it may be common to see working-class Hispanic moms take their children to church on the free buses, but the free buses are intended to get tourists and residents into the shopping areas and/or connect them to the full-fare routes so that they can really do some hardcore "shop 'til you drop" activity.
In fact, the public transit sectors that are designed for commuting are the Express buses, which have a higher base fare and serve 9-5 white-collar office workers. It's transparently upper-crust. None of those Express routes can possibly help poor people get to poor-people jobs. Express buses get people into the city center so they don't need cars there: attorneys, civil servants, accountants, clerks. That's the Express system only. The rest of transit: shopping, shopping and more shopping.
Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular.
Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
When I was a child, our suburban home was at the mouth of a dead-end but very straight street. It was 100% residential, 25mph, single lane each way, but many motorists abused it. We could often tell when someone was lost, looking for the freeway, looking for a through lane that would put them somewhere else.
When there was a high-speed crash into the barrier at the end, the car would often plummet into a ravine into the valley below. My mother tended to call this "taking the shortcut to Benihana" as that was the restaurant to be found at the bottom of the ravine (not an actual shortcut, but just a macabre sense of humor.)
Now we had some neighbors with a very picturesque home a few blocks down. They were from Switzerland, and Dad owned a Volkswagen repair shop a few blocks in the other direction. Since they worked frequently on German-engineered Volkswagens, they also worked on Porsches. And so it worked out that Dad would often bring home a Porsche to work on or to play with, or something in-between. Dad had 2 or 3 sons who all loved cars, and so by the time they were driving age, there were quite a few Porsches in circulation there.
And we always knew it, because those 911s are not quiet. And the sons would not be quiet either as they gunned their engines to show off their nice Porsches, in various states of souped-up or in-progress repair. It became a more or less nonstop parade of motors for a few years.
My parents never miss an opportunity to complain, and so there is plenty of traffic still to give them a chance. There is at least one resident down the way with an obnoxiously loud motorcycle, so Mom and Dad always cluck and chide and complain as that vehicle takes its turn on the street.
I used to edit Wikipedia and I was heavily involved in many, many disputes. And in fact, I would seek out disputes, even ones outside my topic area; it's not difficult to do on Wikipedia because there are entire notice boards where people go to have public disputes. We called them "dramaboards", especially the admins' disciplinary ones.
And I would have these disputes, of course, over utterly trivial things, like how to spell something or where to place the apostrophe, or some manual-of-style nitpick in an infobox. And the disputes would drag on for weeks and we could utterly stall the editing process by disputing on talk pages. And yet we could edit-war over it, usually in slow-motion. And often the dispute would be couched in quite polite language but I would hate the guys' guts.
And the tipping point came when I began to have dreams about Wikipedia, and I would wake up angry. I would wake up fighting. I would wake up and immediately tear into the web browser and catch-up on the discussion, or not, just to post my next riposte, because I'd composed it in my sleep, in my dreamless dreams.
And I woke up angry more often than waking up in any other mood. And I was telling my psychiatrist this, and she said I should probably stop looking at blue light before bedtime. And I was incredulous that she would think if I turned my arguments red-hued that they would anger me less, or cause me to wake up happy and agreeable or something?
And I know I wasn't taking enough medication to make anyone happy, but these guys on Wikipedia really knew how to piss me off, and if you've ever heard of "brinkers" it's a certain type of troll who will play by the rules, and basically trigger anyone with a hot temper, and that triggered person would forget their ethics and commit a fatal error, and get banned, and the brinker would go on to live another day and cause others to fall into similar traps. And many of us do that, if we have the volatile temperament. I lasted about 17 years on Wikipedia without a single block and with some low-grade warnings, but generally a clean discipline record, but finally it got to me.
And a lot of time on Wikipedia I had spent fighting trolls and vandals and very disruptive editors. And I made sure a lot of them were banned. I filed a lot of reports. I was a petty bureaucrat there, filing reports and compiling evidence and arguing cases. There was no shortage of "wikilawyering". From the very beginning I was finding disputes and diving into them. Especially when they didn't concern me, didn't concern any topic I cared about. Just to have the disputes.
And I kept waking up angry. And finally I got control of that. Nowadays I wake up frightened. I wake up traumatized. I wake up scared of something I dreamed about. It's spiritual torment, and it's attributable to nothing I did the night before. Perhaps the F.U.D. of Hacker News gets to me. But not on that level. At least I don't go on crusades or jihads against Wikipedia editors anymore.
17. Responsible men can ... first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. ... [A] man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
Seriously though, “we didn’t have to apply for permits” holds true until you blog about it and HN publishes it on Page 1 and someone contacts Public Health about your dumb electric griddle, or someone tries to monetize something and nearly succeeds.
Furthermore, you would be surprised at how dysregulated one's breathing can become when using a computer all day, especially for gaming, or communicating using the keyboard, rather than having human conversations.
I have found that my breathing has become quite undisciplined and irregular. Also inadequate support, in terms of coming from the diaphragm and all. I sang in choirs for over 20 years. Well-regulated breathing is essential to our health in all respects.