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Comment by natesm | Hacker News Reader

I associate cars with constant paranoia. Will I run out of gas, will my tire explode because I forgot to put enough air in it (or put too much), will I lose focus for a second and kill a family of four? If I leave my car somewhere, will it still be there when I come back? If it isn't, was it stolen? Was it towed? How will I find out, and what will I do if I'm able to find out? Will it disappear when I am sleeping, or will parts of it disappear along with a broken window?

Or... I could put a card in my wallet. I could tap my wallet on a turnstile[1], a gate slides open, a train arrives every 5 minutes or so, and I ride anywhere in the city for a flat rate. This seems a lot "cooler" than dealing with maintaining my own personal transport pod.

[1] in Boston, in New York you still have to take it out and swipe.

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I associate cars with constant paranoia

Now you know how many people feel about their computers...

Is this really the case? Most non-technical people I talk to don't seem to care about security or maintenance, unless it prevents them from performing their daily computer-activities.

haha, this is interesting because I feel like I'm much more paranoid now that I'm pretty deep into security. I run a ton of Firefox privacy extensions and it still freaks me out.

For the curious: - AdBlock+, because public Wi-Fi is slow and I don't like using more bandwidth than necessary - NoScript in "allow global" mode (still catches some XSS and other nastiness) - RequestPolicy (like noscript but for cross-site requests; also great for only looking at text as most big sites now host CSS/JS/images on a CDN) - Priv3 (blocks most opt-in social media integration while still letting it function if you want) - Ghostery (blocks tracking cookies/pixels/other methods) - Certificate Patrol (alerts you to any changes to SSL certs on sites -- it's surprising how often many sites change SSL up. Protects you from spoofing if you pay attention) - HTTPS Everywhere - MAFIAAFire (Gee! No Evil! to un-filter Google autocomplete, Pirate Bay Dancing, and Redirector to circumvent Department of Homeland Security DNS hijacking) - Header Spy because I do lots of debugging web apps and it lets me quickly robtex a server. - Wappalyzer to see what CMS or common software the site is running on

I'm pretty tinfoil'd up and still paranoid.

That makes us two. I run with the first three and a couple more of those you mentioned (although NoScript isn't in global mode, if you can bother with RequestPolicy, why not NoScript as well?). I know about most of the others you mentioned but don't feel the need for them (yet), however I'll look into Certificate Patrol.

You may want to check out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/betterprivacy - BetterPrivacy, if you haven't taken care of it's features in other ways.

To provide a counterpoint, I've lived my entire life in smaller cities with little to no public transit, so all the things you've mentioned are just second nature to me. Never run out of gas because there's always a gas station nearby (and I don't let it get that low anyways). I check my tires about 4 times a year, and I pay attention while driving.

On the other hand, when I visit a city with public transit it usually makes me very uncomfortable. Is the station open when I need to go? Do I need tokens or a card? Will the vending machine take credit cards? Will I just miss barely the train and be late to my meeting? Will the train be late because some dude got stuck in the door (this happened to me in London)? Is that shady looking fellow at the other end of the car going to mug or knife me? What if the engineer is texting, misses a crucial signal and plows into the back of a stopped train?

Each mode of transit has its plusses and minuses. Public transit is great if it's convenient, quick and safe. Cars also have a cost as well as the article illustrates.

For me, I like the flexibility and feeling of control I have from having a car. And, frankly, I like driving. :)

The big difference between the two forms of paranoia are that the parent's paranoia is an exaggerated response to a real threat. Getting your car broken into in a major city is a relatively common experience. Car accidents are one of the leading causes of death.

Your paranoia can be lumped into two categories -- minor inconveniences to you or threats with a very very low probability of happening.

I'm not trying to dismiss your paranoia. I completely sympathize that the shady looking fellow can make anyone afraid, and the only "cure" is habituation and rationalization. And you can't habituate if you're not a regular transit user.

On the other hand, one of the major problems with driving is habituation. If you're not paying attention, it's quite easy to kill a family of four. But people do it so often without having a problem that they let themselves get distracted. That's when accidents happen.

Driver training really needs to be more like the firearms training I received as a kid. Loaded firearms can be easily handled safely, but you always have to remember that they are deadly weapons and treat them with care and attention. A multi-ton vehicle moving at velocities well in excess of those evolution trained us to deal with is also a deadly weapon. Safe when used properly by yourself and everyone else on the roads, but always a deadly weapon.

I totally agree with you about the need for better drivers' training, especially in the United States. Quite frankly, my "driving exam" was a joke - a 5 minute drive around the courthouse square (again, I lived in a small town - cows outnumbered people where I grew up). Fortunately, my parents spent a lot of time teaching me how to handle the responsibility of driving a car.

Driving is a responsibility, just like owning a firearm or having root on all your company's servers. With great power comes great responsibility.

However, many of the items the parent mentioned, short of having an accident, are not even concerns for me and I would classify as minor inconveniences. Running out of gas is a minor inconvenience. A flat tire is a minor inconvenience (assuming you know how to change a flat, and even more minor if you don't). The others, again short of an accident, are things that are not likely to happen assuming you are aware of your surroundings. Don't park where you aren't supposed to. Don't leave valuables in plain sight - pretty much the same precautions you would take on public transit to avoid becoming a victim of crime.

I don't want to seem as though I'm opposed to public transit. I think it's great where it works and, if it were an option where I lived, I would probably use it when it made sense to. I was thinking about this last night and I've noticed I tend to use it more on the west coast than on the east coast. I actually like TriMet in Portland, and I've used Caltrain, VTA and BART when I'm in the Bay Area with little to no issues. But I would probably avoid the subway in NYC again and MARTA in Atlanta was one of the more terrifying experiences I've ever had as far as feeling unsafe.

The thing is, a large percentage of the population of the US lives in areas that have no public transit at all. Articles heralding the death of the car (like the link) tend to focus on cities, and suburban areas near them, that have adequate public transit while completely ignoring the remaining segments of the population that live in areas where public transit is not, and probably never will be, a viable option. For these areas there are simply no other options other than cars.

I took my driver's examination in a rural Saskatchewan. The hardest part was you sort of had to pretend you were driving in the city. You had to pretend that wide streets had two lanes in each direction even though really they were only single lanes in each direction but wide enough for farm equipment. We also had to parallel park using proper technique even though everybody left lots of room to just drive into the spot.

But now I'm a city boy, and glad to live in an area with viable public transit. Let someone else do the driving -- I'll read or entertain my kids.

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