https://maxmautner.com/2026/10/11/how-fast-is-a-car.html
The median American worker earns $23.80/hour, or ~$19 after taxes. A used car driven the US average of ~10,900 miles a year costs ~$8,200, counting $1,700 a year for a parking space at home. That is ~430 hours of work before the car moves. A new car takes ~700 hours. A $999 e-bike ridden 3,000 miles a year takes ~25 hours.
It’s really not. Trash trucks are huge and expensive. Trash services are expensive. There aren’t that many people out here to spread the cost around to which makes them more expensive. It costs me nothing to take a small detour when going to get groceries and throw some bags in a big trash compactor myself. So why would I pay out the ass to have a trash service? Make it cheap and I’d consider it, but I really don’t think you can do that for an area where population density is so low. Garbage trucks are designed for suburbia and cities. Think of all the materials it takes to build and maintain that massive garbage truck and to keep it gassed up. And compare that to me taking a 5 minute detour on a grocery run in a truck I already need for other things anyway.
There’s smaller garbage trucks though, you don’t have to use the ones that I’d guess pop in your mind as the average suburbian one.
This is getting circular in logic, unless all reasons to own / use a truck stop at once there’s always something you could point to as to why you’d need it anyways and therefore does not justify paying for anything that makes the truck not needed on that particular front. The current model, even if you were to shift it all to EVs, is hugely unsustainable and very much subsidized to no end though, in substantial part somebody else is just picking up the bill here.
Yup. Totally agreed. What do you expect me to do about it? I live below the poverty line. I’m gonna save money anywhere I can and won’t apologize for it. You said it yourself that it’s subsidized. I’m not the one who chose to do that. I’m just making the best out of the hand dealt to me.
No, it’s not actually. It’s pretty simple. Individuals making lifestyle changes is never going to do anything about climate change. It requires systemic changes. For this specific scenario, if you want people to use a trash service, instead of dumping their trash themselves, make it cheaper to do it that way. This like “Oh this would be better because X” argumentation is not worthwhile. That is not how the real world works. People do things because they follow the path of least resistance financially and in their schedules, not because it’s the best way to do things. If we ever want to actually solve climate change we need to make doing things the greener way the easier way. Trying to get people to willingly spend more money on greener options is just as useless as the early 2000s recycling campaigns where they tried to have people seperate their own recycling. It’s never going to happen on any meaningful scale.
Also, I might drive a truck, but I can almost guarantee my carbon footprint is smaller than most people’s. Because China actually made solar panels cheap and I got some (I don’t use much power anyway so 600W is plenty for me). And I am just generally poor. So my truck’s about the only source of carbon coming directly from me outside my own respiration. I get a decent amount of my own food from fishing and gardening/foraging depending on the season. I’ve got a bunch of vining maypops I’ll be harvesting soon for example. Me and my 30 year old truck are not the thing destroying the planet.
All of which you are arguing against here
Not at all. Let’s go Romanov some billionaires and get to work. I’m down.
What’s the end goal here as per the problems and such you mentioned about rural life? All the billionaires get merc’d, socialism instituted - how’s that look like?
Well we’re not going to solve climate change under capitalism that’s for sure. Are you asking what my ultimate model of rural life would be? Like if I was a god just designing society from scratch? I don’t really operate that way. I don’t have some like “I want it to be this way” perfect utopia in mind. I think we’d have to do tons of experimenting and figure things out. While learning from existing socialist projects in the meantime to try and catch up to them. I’m also in favor of learning heavily from indigenous communities about how to do things. Food forests seem like a super viable option for farming for example. I also think people would generally speaking just need to use less resources.
But that’s not what I think about typically. I am more thinking about immediate results. And looking to historical examples for inspiration on how to get them. Lenin, Mao, etc. Taking things one step at a time. I see it as kind of impossible to figure out how to get from where we are to a utopia right now. We just don’t know that. So we have to figure it out over time. Through lots of trial and error.
No, I am asking you how you figure any of the problems that rural life brings could be solved. Like not by you as a person doing things, in a systematic way.
Nothing can change in the now and there’s 0 vision for how anything could change either under the current system or an optimal one doesn’t seem like a compelling argument for one particular reason; it doesn’t grapple with the today. You can be stuck in car-dependent-bullshit through little to no fault of your own - I’ll fully accept that’s your situation. Where does one go for here?
I buy the consumer goods made with child and our slave labour, hard not to do unless you go full hermit about it, this isn’t moral grandstanding by me. The car transportation I solved, don’t ask me who mined my phones rare earth minerals. My solution to make this better though would be state mandated laws that make phones repairable, better laws around software so they don’t brick your shit (either directly or indirectly) and you don’t buy them new every 2 years on a contract. I am as powerless or powerful to enact any of this directly, but I’d argue for it at every opportunity. What’s the exit scenario here?
I mean if it’s as broad as ANY of the problems there’s tons of solutions. I think people should go back to more subsitence farming instead of being entirely reliant on grocery stores. You can’t grow all your food at home, but if you’ve got land you can have a sizeable garden and prevent the need to import as much. Doing this properly takes time to develop. Letting fruiting trees and bushes mature for example. But it’s doable in the near term. Solar is a huge one. Everyone should have it. There’s no reason not to as it’s super cheap these days. Build smaller, better insulated, homes. But honestly? The biggest problem is just the economy. For a very long time rural communities would have their own internal economy with their own shops, and services, and it worked well. But then Walmart style stores came in and decimated it. Rural areas in some parts of the US are essentially the stereotypical “3rd world” conditions. Do you ever wonder why people out here can be so insanely reactionary? That’s why. Even decently wealthy rural areas have pockets of extreme poverty usually because the local economy is just gutted. All the wealth is extracted by massive companies and sent elsewhere. With very little being invested back into the community. The wealth that IS invested back here is to build massive private estates and mansions for the few really rich people.
You also mentioned right to repair for phones. Tractors are a big one for this. Idk how much most people know about that, but companies like John Deere will sell someone a tractor and then make it impossible to repair it with software locks and shit. So you have to get it serviced by them and it costs an arm and a leg. You start talking about that and watch the farmers start to decide socialism aint so bad after all.