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Comment by FriedrichN | Hacker News Reader

Walking with groceries in the rain won't kill you, I promise. It's a small inconvenience but in my opinion you get a lot back for it, everything just becomes more village like and friendly. Being in a car does not tend to make people more friendly.

And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.

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Yeah but why do you want to turn back time to a village and make things less efficient, what's the point of pretending to be poor. Americans are the friendliest people in the world and they drive the most, the more people cycle and walk in the cold rain, the more depressed and unfriendly they become

This may be a controversial opinion, but not everything is about efficiency, especially when it comes to social interactions. But even if your life's aim is to impose rigorous efficiency on every aspect of your life, I doubt you'll be more time efficient if you do your groceries by car compared to living in walking distance of a supermarket.

Society is about efficiency. Social interactions are voluntarily and can be organised around any random activity such as games, sports, hobbies etc. It's really inflexible and incredibly limiting to force inefficiency of transport, because that increases social interactions.

People had the same argument when banks went online, all the retired people want to still go and pay their bills at the bank, because they get to go outside, meet people etc.

I can tell that we're very different people. Society to me is not about efficiency at all. I like a bit of randomness to my life and not live an absolutely regimented and organised existence. But I guess that's not for everyone.

I also like a bit of randomness and don't live an absolutely regimented existence, my point is just that people should be free to choose this randomness in their own space and time, and we should not force a particular way of randomness on everyone, and we also should not put it in the way of getting our work done.

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