1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
personally lose someone, no, but i've gotten the chance of being a citizen first responder to a lost of life one. i feel like your's and OP's response are because you've never seen or been impacted first hand what dying by car is like. it is usually horrific and violent that to be able to say those outweigh the time saved traversing the sprawled built environment created for the sake of those very same cars shows a lack of any lived experience. your argument fundamentally relies on the idea "all i know is cars, and there is nothing better". it's uncreative, unrealistic, and devoid of humanity. it's terrifying you and others with your mindset are on the road.
dude... where do the imports of petroleum and fixed nitrogen which are critical for Ag come from? hint: look at the US ports and see what surrounds them.
farming and suburbia are subsidized out the wazoo. and a lot of Ag doesn't go to feed people... you're bark is much, much worst than your bite.
> a few tens of thousands of deaths in car crashes a year, is vastly outweighed by the time saved by everyone else compared to even an excellent public transit system.
what in the absolute f** are you talking about? have you ever experienced the sudden death of a loved one? what about the network impact of someone dying? even if you want to look at it through a capitalistic lens, think of the reduction in capability people going through that trauma. the amount of resources it takes in the health care, and public service sectors. you're off loading the immense costs of a person dying onto folks at random like an inverse and more likely lottery.
since you're so confidently in having the empirical measures of what outweighs what, at what point would a public transit system start to be a "good cost tradeoff" in your framework? cause there's a logical end goal you could get to: individualized transport with an experienced driver; and then work backwards from there until you balance the cost of implementation with those tens of thousands of death. would it be $1,000/day/person? $500/day/person?
though more than likely you're speaking like this because you've lived your entire life transported by car, benefiting off of the externalized costs passed off to the less fortunate, and you fear having your subsidized conveniences justifiably going away.
You reference the laws of thermodynamics, but I'm not sure which laws you're applying to the human body? Is it the first which requires the measured system to be closed which a human body is not? Is it the second about entropy always increasing? Or is it the third defining perfect entropy at 0 Kelvin?
Bringing up thermodynamics as a generalization for biological systems is pseudo-intellectual. We aren't all equal machines that take in a fuel stock and output work. How do you account for differences in peoples' resting metabolic rates? How do you account for the difference in available energy in the foods you chose to eat, and in the differences in peoples' biological processes that extract that energy? Stress is a common hormonal modifier that impacts how the body stores fat; no where near a "rare" condition that many people experience nowadays, and yeah caused by things like sleep apnea. You betray your own argument anyway by adding an the "hormonal condition" exception (I don't see any exceptions referenced in the laws of thermodynamics, lol).
Biology has more dimensions than you are choosing to look at, and using thermodynamics as a "gotcha" when it comes to others' bodies reveals your lack of understanding and intuition.
> don't involve spending an appreciable fraction of your day shopping.
if you're concerned about how your time is spent, i think you're missing a fundamental piece of the puzzle: how much time you spend driving. you could end up saving an enormous amount of time while still going out to shop more if you cut out driving and reduce the scope of your trips.
This reeks of being an outside observer. WA has no income tax, but has a sales taxes which homeless people are subjected to. The only taxes are from property which renters also don't pay. When people complain about the rent seekers it's from a place of empathy, not envy. The extraction of wealth done by them always has and always will be more negatively impactful than homeless folks.
from the looks of it, you found an inkling of confirmation and rolled with it. you think you got a science backing for your ideas, but nah, wrong. remind yourself when you read all the articles claiming "near identical DNA!" that human DNA is ~1.6% different from gorilla DNA. geneticists are seeing larger differences between domestic and wild cat species.
> cats in small city apartments are especially cruel.
nah, you're just an uncreative person. you can be involved in your pets stimulation. seeing that you think having a pet inside is just confining, i feel pretty correct assuming you see pets as just an animal you hang out with and feed and not a responsibility to nourish. instead, have the outdoors do your work for you! and if they die, so be it. shows a lot of love and care :)
fair. projection on my part. i interpret seeing people say indoor cats lives are miserable (and using that idea uncritically to affirm their own choices) are doing so from a holier-than-thou position. to me, it's an uncreative and lazy view on pet ownership, but i getcha: flies, honey, and vinegar and all that.
dude, it isn't a giant SUV divers that are advocating for indoor cats. they are the same people that hold onto the whimsy that "cats a natural and belong outdoors! :)"
1. those collars don't work. birds didn't evolve alongside cat w/ flashy collars, so it doesn't always trigger flee instinct
2. if your cat wants to go outdoors, you can leash them like any dog-owner is required to do. the whole "cats need to be in nature" argument is rooted in the assumption that you as the owner aren't involved in that nourishment. if you can't be a responsible cat owner (keeping it from roaming on it's own; keeping it stimulated) then don't get a pet. is the cat really a critical unit of your family if you skirt responsibility and are okay w/ it dying violently outside?
3. the US is very much a fragile ecosystem. source on it not being? we, like many other place, have had a huge and trending decline in biodiversity.
4. cats haven't adapted to the human environment; we've developed technology and laws that have protected cats in our human environment. i'm not sure how they've had to adapt as they can interact with humans safely.
5. you don't see everything your cat kills. you may be able to placate yourself that your cat isn't one of the "rampant killers", but that thought isn't based solely on fact.
how are you going to be like "my anecdote is actually important" with an N of magnitude 100. long-term and wide-scale research and monitoring has tracked millions of birds and have used models to extrapolate to the billions. your comment means little more than nothing. have you considered you haven't seen the extent of what the roaming cat has killed? it won't always bring it back to you. and why is it that the non-bird animals aren't important? biodiversity reduction, not just birds. and you think that even if they are sick or injured catches that your cat isn't impacting the other animals? you realize other animals gotta eat? if they can't b/c your cat takes it, or worst infects it with a parasite by chomping on it, your local predators are gonna suffer.
wow, what a spiteful, judgemental message. people always beat their children to discipline, so should we keep that relic from the past even though we know better? a cat indoors is not miserable; rather you lack creativity to get it the stimulus it needs in a way that doesn't thrust the problems of an outdoor cat onto your local community. outdoor cats are for people who like the idea of having a pet, but don't want all the responsibility to take care of it and instead relies on the local environment to provide it with all of its needs. you force non-cat owners to subsidize outdoor cat ownership. y'all are a draw on our society holding onto this idea cats need to be outdoors b/c you have a naive view of what is "natural". you think your cat is being in nature, but it's more akin to a state-sponsored killer. you think wild animals get the benefit of having a guaranteed source of food, shelter, and disease prevention?
1. deaths directly by car are not the only deaths to account for. look at the history of lead poisoning from gasoline and the ramifications we're still reckoning with today from that. think of the rubber, heavy metal pollution we are just finding out today is driving critical ecosystems rapidly to extinction (in my neck of the woods: salmon). the death from the resource gathering required only for cars. there are so, so many externalized costs you don't consider even tho i'd argue that due to no experience with it yourself that the violence associated with a death by car is no easily written off as a statistic.
2. the environment built for cars is the only environment that can be. you've been duped by automobile manufactures, oil barons, and the affluent class that needs their chose mode of transportation adopted and subsidized by the masses. i see many more countries with better public transit and less folks living with cars all with better measures of comfort and convenience. you have exact measures to compare number of deaths, population, and road miles, but there's no way to measure whether those miles were worth it for anyone because of the baked in assumptions of no other choice. but what is always measurable is that deaths are directly caused by the existence of cars, and that death impacts people greatly.
rethink your assumptions and misanthropy.