Are Some Haters Of Government Sensing The Looming Regeneracy?

[pbrower2a]

(03-18-2017, 11:01 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(03-17-2017, 04:43 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(03-17-2017, 04:34 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Rags....

You want Mass Transit?  Leave that to the states and to the cities.  Interstate rail and air transport can be left with the DOT.  

I'd include Fannie and Freddie.  There is more than enough fat to trim.

As to the DOD yeah, it has a lot of bullshit that has to be wrapped up too.  An aggressive withdrawal back to our Hemisphere will do much to aid in that.

Yes, I think the USA has an auto fetish. Autos belch out a lot of pollution. Also, in rural states like Oklahoma, I whistle stops along current rail lines would be nice. At present, if you want to fly, you have to drive more than 70 miles to hit the closest airport. I also like to pull any lever to get rid of the addiction to foreign oil.  I'd love to see what happens to  oil price once the externalities of defending oil imports gets tacked on.

Does anybody on board here really think that the days of our auto-centric culture are about numbered? This theory has been floated around from time to time even since the long gasoline lines of 1973-74. But not much has changed since, and if anything we have, with the exception of in a few large older cities, become even more auto dependent since then. I believe our love affair with the auto will have to end, but as I am now 72, I don't expect it to happen while I am still alive.

Yes. The automobile as an expression of the Self is practically dead -- in view of the bland vehicles that are now the norm for commuters. It's practically an appliance now in its appeal. Nobody gets excited about a stove or a refrigerator anymore, and the cars that we have are becoming about as charming as dishwashers. A tip-off is that we no longer see people trying to make the equivalent of hot rods anymore.  Try making a hot rod out of this:



It's a utilitarian, early Honda Accord. It's a nice car for traveling in, but it has no style.

Figure that thousands of Ford, Chevrolet, and Plymouth vehicles from the 1920s and 1930s that were effectively useless at freeway speeds, had a dead engine, or whose upholstery was ruined got new lives when some kids replaced the underpowered four-cylinder engines with bigger engines from otherwise-decrepit jalopies.



Of course that depended upon people having space for working on and keeping cars with little usefulness. Southern California was ideal for such until the 1960s when land was still cheap. (Simulated bodies like those of 1920's and 1930's vehicles are made, but they would not work on the busy chassis of a contemporary front-wheel-drive car).  This vehicle might be available in Michigan, but you might not enjoy it during a cold snap, blizzard, or heavy rainstorm.

...The more that people are crowded into tinier apartments, the more impractical automobiles become. In 1993 as I was on a drive in the Greater New York City region on the Tappan Zee Bridge on a Sunday afternoons, I noticed that almost all the cars on the bridge heading into NYC were expensive makes of car -- Cadillac, Lincoln, Mercedes, Lexus, Acura, Bentley -- just figure that the cost of renting garage space for a car in NYC is higher than the payments for the car. Automobiles might be cheap to keep in rural New Mexico, where poor people have cars, but they are very costly to keep in New York City, San Francisco, and Boston. Middle-class people generally might be priced out of private automobiles in NYC.