nerb
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.science.org/content/article/genes-turned-wildcat...
http://www.jabg.org/view/JABG_202303_02.pdf
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.
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 :)
... so they are domesticated and not native... ???
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.
you realize that the justice system doesn't equally impact everyone, right? people with more wealth, more access are demonstrably treated better and have better outcomes with regard to the justice system, so no, all living people do not have the same risk of losing freedoms.
> ... which is why prison works
ah, there it is
i'm glad you agree with more access to public trash cans; however, i think it should be called out
> local businesses using them for free trash disposal
is already done in homeless encampments. i can find some, but there are many reports of businesses dumping in encampments because there's little risk of getting caught and no one bats an eye at trash-ridden encampments.
so let's continue to spend more on incarcerating them as a bandage rather than fixing the issues :)
> incidents of... pooping...
i'm sure they just do this outside for preference rather than utter lack of access to public facilities. why couldn't they be like me during my trip to SF where i could just patronize a business to use their bathroom when i needed to go?
> menace to public health and safety
love to see the intentional split between "public" and whatever group you'd put houseless people in (those "menaces"!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
this sounds like pearl clutching and not wanting to think more about an issue with tons of variables.
love the idea of people in the US admonishing ground of peoples for current and comparably minor transgressions and labeling them overall as violent. hn is in desperate need to break away from technobabble and read some books from different perspectives from their own from people that don't look like them and thus live in a much different world.
and to catch it before, yes violence is inexcusable. focusing on individualism and personal responsibly is myopic (and in this particular case, racist).