And... There is the "problem" skipping over to the new technologies... The old technologies don't want change, they loose out, the economy looses out, the country looses out, a TOTAL propaganda BS from the old guard...


IMO, there shouldn't be a house built, from now on that ISN'T TOTALY self sufficient in power needs... A car/vehicle that can't be driven from solar power charging, and so on... The old guard is protecting itself but not looking out for the long term, switching over, would actually be a huge boon to every working person/country that adopts newer technologies ...;) But, I probably had 1 too many beers... :beer:

And this last part is different from living in a non air conditioned home with little or no outside power in what way? The way man used to cope with changing seasons before they gave up hunter gathering was to move north or south, higher or lower as the seasons changed. Like I said I have lived the life you indicted was poverty, and by the way those people felt almost middle class, and have been friends with some that left that life and moved here.

If I were to accept the definition that modest living was simply living below your expenses, just a paraphrase here, then a persons income would dictate what a modest life was. An executive I know has a pretty good high six figure income. He has a condo close to his work place for during the week and a very nice big house near the beach in South Orange county. All his kids have had their college paid for and he has paid for all of his vehicles. To him a modest life was buying a 40 foot sail boat rather than a 60 foot sail boat.

For me a modest life in one where I was able to pay off my house by the time I retired. I had no bills and all of my vehicles were paid for. I budgeted my vacations so I could afford to stay at places on the way and I didn't begrudge the hotel, motel, B&B or camp site for the charge getting to or from my destination. Very different from my executive friend and I bet different from the highlighted section of the part of the post I am responding to.

Like, never eat a fish you don't catch yourself? You obviously are describing a situation where using gas here to power a car is an evil to be avoided but powering up an electric car with solar cells made over there--e.g., in China of rare earth, under different labor laws than California requires (for example) and obviously will probably make use of energy from power plants that are powered by coal and probably dirtier than standards here consider permissible...

In that you'd be doing it voluntarily, and maximizing efficiency using both nature and science to facilitate it with techniques like shade sails, vegetation, maybe water features, high tech cooling or warming clothes, and other new and old technology, rather than simply living indoors in an energy dependent, constantly regulated artificial climate. That's still true for a lot of people. I'm confused because I thought you were repeatedly bringing up the Africa example as something bad to be put behind us, and now you seem to be saying it had its positives. Was there anything you liked about the way they lived? What made it seem "middle class"? Yes it is a relative term. I don't get your point. Presumably td's version of living modestly is more austere than yours, but I was trying to make the point that he is not advocating for primitive, squalid living conditions, as you (it seemed to me) and a few others here seem to repeatedly suggest.

California should get its act together and manufacture its own solar cells and find a way to do it without needing rare materials. Where's that famous American ingenuity?

They were middle class because they have at least their own home. They aspire for more and maybe even some day a life like we find middle class. A different unit of measure.
But no he can't live in a high tech society with shade sails, trees on apartment building rooftops with roots running down the water lines, it doesn't exist to any practical degree, and I haven't seen an example of the high tech warming and cooling clothes you speak of. If we are to accept modest living as described today the living would be a home with no heating or no cooling just as the ones in Kenya were. So voluntary or involuntary it is the same life style.

Everyone has a right to live as they choose even if that means rejecting the norm. LCF can be the same, you can live it because you want to or you can live it because you have to the results are the same. X amount of energy expended and x amount of results achieved. I see no evidence that society would be a better place if we lived a life without air conditioning or central heating. I have seen evidence that people that have a choice will choose living comfortably rather than modestly if it benefits their family and budget. I don't see that as a bad thing do you?

You can't have only the good stuff. The economy fueled in significant part by the post war auto boom led to a world where we can discuss this on our laptops. Without economic growth, there are few significant technological advances. On a personal level, I lead a fairly modest life, but I recognize that my standard of living is improved because I live in a society that promotes greed and excess to further growth. Are there downsides to this? Certainly. And there's a lot of "excess" that I don't need or want. But over the years I've enjoyed some of it a great deal. And I know it comes as a package deal.

Yes, I do see it as a bad thing, because right now we are doing it in a destructive way, and everybody trying to "live as they choose" leads to the tragedy of the commons. However, fortunately I think things could be readily improved with little loss of comfort, and little or no impact on freedom of choice (or even greater choice) by a few tweaks - for example by properly pricing non-renewable energy expenditure or pollution generation so that people will be financially better off the less they do it. That would "fuel" (ha ha) a lot of innovation.

Up till this century, economic growth was closely tied to resource depletion and especially in the 20th century to fossil fuel depletion and carbon release. Those can't go on indefinitely, but fortunately I think we are starting to see a decoupling of the economy from non-renewable resource expenditure. For example, to relate this to the thread, Oslo hopes to see an economic boom coincident with reducing motor traffic, and in fact due to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_building
Earthship Biotecture - Radically Sustainable Buildings (one of your favorites)
Solar shading - All architecture and design manufacturers - Videos
Stanford engineers develop a plastic clothing material that cools the skin | Stanford News
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-07/first-shirt-lower-body-temperature
Home ? Information on Green Roofs ? IGRA
Arizona Commercial Shade Sails, Structures | Phoenix Shade Sails | Patio, Pool, Fabric Shade Structures Florida | UrbanShadow.com

it's called, ethanol...

I'm smart enough to know that no matter how smart you think you are you are not as smart as the market.

Interesting. I have vacation time is there somewhere I can see a city that has adapted to this technology? I haven't found the clothes because I would order some I believe if I could find some. I already have half a closet of wicking shirts and shorts. No tree on the roof I see but then I wouldn't need a tree covered roof once this comes to market.
And it would be LCF as well I believe. :innocent:

Yes it's all in use in various places.LOL

Infrastructure, like the redesign of Oslo to be less auto-dependent, or the roads you drive on to get to where you bike, is usually not created by the market, but it is expected to have economic benefits. Do you have any thoughts on infrastructure improvements in your area, that might lead to economic benefits while reducing car use?

Probably not, because it's still just a bike and it's hard to see the differences from the air. 3 or 4 gears were available in the 20's and that's enough for most cities. Hammers have benefitted from technology and developped too, but when it comes to hammering in a nail there's really not much difference between 100 year old one and a new one. The bike was already fully up to the current task, the car only got there decades later.

Still it requires a re-think and people need to be triggered for that.

Amsterdam is only half as dense as NYC, but Amsterdam is part of the 'randstad', that's where the four major Dutch cities meet through villages and towns. There live about 7 million people and it's more than twice as dense as the NY metropolitan area, while it's not even really a metropolitan area, with farmland, forests, dunes and lakes in it. So the density comes from the number of towns and villages in a certain area, with little distances between them, and the compact setup of any town, village or neighbourhoud. Even in small villages most houses young or old have a backyard and/or front yard, not a garden surroundig the house, the houses stand right next to eachother, and they have 3 storeys and not that much floor space. In the suburbs of the bigger towns it might be no front garden and one more floor. And what Americans might call a suburb is what we might call a neighbouring village, it functions as a suburb now but it started out as a seperate village, but the space in between has been filled with houses and other buildings. Also some newer suburbs are designed quite spatious and quite seperate from the city to give it a rural calmness, and they are also in cycling distance different from the traditional suburbs that were build a close to the inner city as possible.

I guess all those smaller sizes of houses and no space between them, and narrower roads add up to shorter distances, but if you work for example in the city of Groningen and you live the suburban lifestyle in the connected village of Haren, it's still half an hour's commute by bike. And people commute by bike from village further away too. In general the time saving by going by bike is limited to the people living inside the city, including a lot of suburbs but excluding the neighbouring villages and some of the suburbs. There's more to it than just distances. Having an occasional alternative in public transport for example, or combining them.

Not if it's cycling city's contribution to prosperity. I don't want to go into a discussion whether there should be growth or not. I like growth and prosperity, and cycling is good for that. I just don't believe that GDP is telling the whole story and growth of GDP doesn't necessarily mean that the economy is doing well.

Still... it's a pretty good metric-- much like the Big Mac index. Citizens in different countries may compare equally as far as access to various goods and services but if a Big Mac is $11 there will be less of them and everything else you can afford compared to someone who can buy a Big Mac for $2.

That's actually not how the Big Mac index works or is used. It is assumed it should cost the same everywhere, after adjusting for the currency exchange rate, and if it doesn't, that supposedly indicates the exchange rate is messed up. If the Big Mac itself is overpriced in some region, then the Big Mac index ceases to be meaningful. Regarding ethanol, it's pretty well understood that it is heavily subsidized both monetarily and by energy inputs, and is not a viable commercial product or source of energy - it costs more money and energy than it's worth.

Anyway, enough of the distractions. Any thoughts on your own prospects for living car-free or light, or opportunities for your community to support it?

Thinking outside box oftentimes means resisting a temptation by those who wish to boil everything down to ideologically inspired choices between two bad options. For many communities, the benefit of becoming more accessible augurs against taking proactive measures to limit car use by others. For example, the Danish-inspired town of Solvang in California's Santa Inez Valley is wholly dependent on day trips by car as a destination point or on travelers of the 101 corridor who will purposefully go out of their way to pay a visit. If you want to increase the use of a public park that has been set aside and maintained for use by off road cyclists, the surest way to increase use of the facility is to provide a big parking lot.

And craters on the moon range in size from millimeters to 2500 km across. And like your comments above, they aren't relevant to this forum. Do you have anything to say on topic?

...that LCF like Living Job Free is possible and for some perhaps desirable while for others it is less a choice than a circumstance.

Do you have any interest in it (LCF, that is)? After all this is by a huge margin, your favorite bikeforums subforum, so one would think so.

I would encourage more people to have a bike and enjoy cycling while recognizing that having a car can help make that possible, much like having surf racks enables those who don't live on the beach to participate in a new sport.

So no interest, in other words, in the actual topic of the forum where you spend so much time.
Weird. I don't think I would hang out for hours a week in some place that didn't interest me.

Lol, I didn't mean it as literally as this. I just meant that the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics, so they would probably be very interested in things like brushless dynamos for LED headlamps, sealed bottom bracket cartridges, lightweight plastic fenders, etc. as much as they would be interested in lightweight synthetic fabrics used for modern hang-gliders.

But rear-wheel gear clusters that freewheel and screw on an off are easier to service, plus you can just shift the rear or front gears when one or the other breaks for some reason. I do think, however, that enclosed gears, like cartridge bearings, are better in terms of keeping things protected from dirt and the elements.

[quote]Amsterdam is only half as dense as NYC, but Amsterdam is part of the 'randstad', that's where the four major Dutch cities meet through villages and towns. There live about 7 million people and it's more than twice as dense as the NY metropolitan area, while it's not even really a metropolitan area, with farmland, forests, dunes and lakes in it. So the density comes from the number of towns and villages in a certain area, with little distances between them, and the compact setup of any town, village or neighbourhoud. Even in small villages most houses young or old have a backyard and/or front yard, not a garden surroundig the house, the houses stand right next to eachother, and they have 3 storeys and not that much floor space. In the suburbs of the bigger towns it might be no front garden and one more floor. And what Americans might call a suburb is what we might call a neighbouring village, it functions as a suburb now but it started out as a seperate village, but the space in between has been filled with houses and other buildings. Also some newer suburbs are designed quite spatious and quite seperate from the city to give it a rural calmness, and they are also in cycling distance different from the traditional suburbs that were build a close to the inner city as possible. [quote]
Yes, this confirms what I was saying about many Dutch areas being more suburban than urban/dense, and distances are bikeable or traversable by transit, so people don't need to depend on driving just because they live outside the city.

I think most of these satellite villages have little train stations and bus stops to connect them with the city and other areas where they could seek jobs. So living car-free doesn't limit their access to economic and educational opportunities, or shopping or recreation.

Ok, we won't have that discussion here then, but I'll just say that growth and prosperity don't always work in tandem, and certainly not for all people and all lifestyle choices and objectives.