I'm a fan of Google Maps and I'm not an American.
For fun, I will often plunk myself down into an American city in street view and outside of the major metropolitan areas on the coast, there is one very very evident aspect of America - they love asphalt.
It is the most virulently anti-walking society on earth. I could not survive in America because I don't drive.
Huge developments often have no sidewalks at all and if that's not a sign of hating a walking human being I dont know what is.
I realized a long long time ago that America is a giant shithole of planning.
Give it a rest.
When's the last time a Canadian government agency reported a breach of the size that we typically hear about on a near-weekly basis from the private sector?
Might be worth your while to look into things before your mouth makes the leap for you.
You clearly haven't got the first clue about how Americans live.
In 90% of America, you need a car. It's not debatable.
This is a country that has spent the last 70 years spreading out on cheap land. Any place outside densely populated, carefully planned coastal areas doesn't have the density to make transit either affordable or reliable. Look at the city centres of places like St Louis or Atlanta; they're essentially glossy towers surrounded by highways - NOBODY lives where they work. Nobody. And they can't because American planners have ever heard the term 'mixed use' when it comes to zoning. It's a disgusting hellhole of urban planning; just a stinking, rotten cesspool of stupid.
Me too. At the very least you'd expect them to be given huge severance packages of a few hundred million dollars, as per American incompetence/fraud in the financial and tech sectors.
" if we stop ascribing human qualities to gigantic corporations. "
I guess we'll stop ascribing those qualities when they stop claiming them - as an effort at branding themselves.
Once upon a time, the curator of each projected 'self' was biologically centralized and understood that each version of who we were had to be carefully parsed. There was 'out with the gang at the softball game' Joe, 'straight shooter at the office' Joe, and 'devil may care boyfriend' Joe, and each version understood their self expression within very specific contexts. Now, we have devices in which each version sits alongside the others. So deeply Personal Joe sees no harm in texting naughty messages to his girlfriend one moment, reaming out a coworker for their sloppy reports in an email and then instagramming April's great diving grab at the weekend game a few minutes later. So here we sit, curating the real self, for our new and mysterious friend, "third party".
How ya'll liking it?
> We really shouldn't use anthropomorphization of a company to justify inhumanity in us
And yet... what is the purpose of branding, but to 'humanize' a service or product produced group of people who are gathered for the purpose of profit?
The most interesting part of this is how indifferent people are to it. I live in Canada. We've had Food Banks for 35 years. When they started, there were a few "Oh that's too bad" editorials, then averybody just 'normalized' it. We started to see a homelessness problem back in the 90's, until it too became "normal", so that the citizenry simply assumed 'those people' had it coming to 'em.
Now we've got a serious problem because middle-aged professionals can't afford housing and the accompanying news articles assigning blame to municipal governments, provinces and the federal government are everywhere you look - a classic case of hot-potato politics.
But no one blames an electorate that did nothing, voted no differently, acted indifferently or simply sat around and let it happen because all the bad things were happening to people who, you know, 'probably brought it on themselves'.
And that's the problem. In the developed world, it's become habit forming for the electorate to watch as people at the edges of society and those on lower socio-economic rungs crumble away into 'irrelevance'. Or, as some would call them - the 'deplorable' class.
I suspect it will take a another 2 decades before it become crystal clear that the winners are being winnowed down and the losers are looming larger and larger. We're seeing the first edge now, but it's only going to get bigger. And angrier.
THere's a reason you require a license to drive. It has something to do with accountability. I have zero problems with making car drivers more accountable and responsible for the 38,000 deaths a year caused by driving an automobile. Considering how ridiculously lenient penalties are when drivers kill people while driving drunk or being inattentive to their surroundings, this is long overdue.