> When tech- and progress-focused people can't figure out why some cultures/countries have "anti-progress" laws (France's protection of book stores, for instance), well, this is often part of why they do that.

This is an enormously under-appreciated perspective here, thanks for pointing it out. What appears to be a foolish luddite is often someone with a thoughtful, long-term perspective based on hard-won experience.

> When tech- and progress-focused people can't figure out why some cultures/countries have "anti-progress" laws (France's protection of book stores, for instance), well, this is often part of why they do that.

Chesterton's Fence, yet again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...

Kind of, but a bit different. Both are cases of unintended consequences, but one involves something that was deliberately made or set up a certain way, and the other involves a state of affairs that existed essentially by accident. This is how people get away with arguing that changes to the status quo, under shifting technology or the demands of business, are "natural", so efforts to preserve the status quo are "unnatural"—because the prior state wasn't made that way deliberately, and absent coordinated action it may be demolished by changes, even if most people would prefer to retain some or all of the prior state, at some shared cost.

I heard someone make that defence of a river rerouting that let a bunch of sea water in to a lake and killed all the fish and shell fish.

Story seems to be more about people being jerks and not letting someone use a phone to make a quick call. Obviously there were tons of phones around but no one would let him use one.

It's rare but I have had someone ask to use my phone and I let them without any question

i lived without a cell phone due to poverty sometime in the not too distant past and it made me develop certain new perspectives on tech and society

Along the lines of an optional thing removing freedom, I have had tremendous trouble waving down a cab sometimes because all the cabs that were coming to the area have been hailed through apps.

I was literally listening to a podcast about this trade-off today by Andy Crouch, he’s the author of The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World

What was the podcast?

When it comes to automobiles and the US... are there any similar countries?

Most of Europe outside of large metros is the same as well.

There’s a difference between “it’s rural so things are spread out” and what we have in places like LA and Houston where major metro centers that could have been dense with good transit were purposely designed to be spread out and only able to be gotten around in in an automobile

There are plenty of non-US places which used to have transit and now do not. Britain's 1960s "Beeching Axe" comes to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts

It depends. For example there are many places that are too small to live without a car, but where you can do basic grocery shopping or kids can still go to school on foot or by bike. The spread is rarely comparable to the US.

Europe is not like the west coast of the US. Even urban areas are practically unnavigable by foot; everything is too spread out and only accessible by walking along heavily trafficked roads.

You'll want at least a bicycle in rural Europe, but you don't normally need a whole lot more.

Canada

Definitely the suburbs around the major cities. 40 minute walk to the nearest store does seem unreasonable.

2 hours to bus to work or 15 minutes to drive.

Depends on where.

I'm in Victoria and don't need a car (have one, though).

That may be the point of the comparison, as I understood it, with urban areas that don't require cars more of an exception than a norm. This is certainly the case in the US as well (NYC metro, DC metro, SF metro, university towns, etc.).

Perhaps, but I'd say urban areas are the norm here. 80% of Canada lives along the Windsor-Quebec City corridor.

I'm aware. As for the urbanization, that's about on par with the US (82% for Canada, 83% for the US according to this metric [1]).

More to the point, most of those areas outside of Toronto and Montreal have middling-to-no usable public transport. For example, I was recently passing by Kingston, ON, which has buses in some parts of the city but they reach a fraction of the population in the Kingston metro area. The same goes for much of the Windsor-London corridor. The qualification I stated was "urban areas that don't require cars," not any urban area.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...

I’ve been to Victoria.

Plenty of places in the US you don’t need a car either by that definition.