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Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

The self indulgence of your comment is laughable (aside from the ugliness of a philosophy in which "you'll adapt" is a good reason for being subjected to restrictions, regardless of their deeper merit).

Because you live in one of the densest, oldest and most public transit-packed urban areas in Europe, you think that your easy shift to not having a car is worth a damn to hundreds of millions of people who don't live in London, or another big, dense, highly developed city like it? A Texas farmer or Louisiana fisherman isn't just being a selfish, green-hating ass when he or she says that they NEED their truck or car. They really do, to live, and almost every day. What kinds of mental bubbles do some of the privileged people who comment on this site live in?

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Thank you, your outraged reaction has entirely proved the point I was making about identification and its effects. Change is coming, whether you like it or not. The greatest obstacles are probably not technical, but psychological. It's coming for reasons of ecological fact, not because anyone wants to subject others to meritless restrictions. (As if one guy on the internet had that power.)

And people will adapt to it, because that's what we've been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. That's not ugly, it's beautiful. It's beautiful that humans are adaptable, resilient and inventive.

Well most of us anyway.

No, not outraged, just derisive. Change is indeed innate to the human experience and to the course of civilization, but the kind of bubble mentality you display with your comment is if anything especially brittle against practical realities. In a genuine catastrophic climate change context, do you really think your privileged urban lifestyle will be better suited for adaptation? Maybe, I can't be sure, but maybe circumstances cause you to rethink your current idea of change being beautiful.

That aside, it really is absurd to dismiss the needs and complaints of hundreds of millions of diverse vehicle-owning non-urban dwellers based on how smugly easy you think it was to not own a car in London of all places. There's nothing psychologically obtuse about pointing out the closed mindedness of your notion. Yet you speak of identification and its effects.

> just derisive

Well, you've said it yourself. There's nothing a reasonable person can add to that, or hope to gain by doing so. So, have a lovely day. :)

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