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Charles :trans: , fuck all GenAI (@celesteh@hachyderm.io)
hachyderm.io"Cars replaced horses"
This is what people say about LLMs, but it's based on a myth.
Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary.
In more rural areas, bicycles were extremely common. They were most associated with liberating women, who were more able to commute and meet with neighbours. Bicycles became a symbol of feminism - for sexists. When male students at Cambridge wanted to protest women's admission, the built an effigy of a woman student and burned it. The effigy was on a bicycle. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-45096690
This notion of women cyclists overstepping their place in society and being a menace to the social order appears in the 'Wizard of Oz'. In Kansas, a woman neighbour demands that the family give up Toto because he's been causing extremely minor mischief. Auntie Em tells the neighbour that she wishes to say what what she thinks of her, but can't as she is "a Christian woman". This places her in binary opposition with the neighbour who leaves on a bicycle. Toto escapes and as Dorothy goes to Oz, the woman transforms into a witch and the bicycle into a broomstick.
Bicycles fell out of fashion in the US until mountain bikes, which are loaded with male gender baggage and unsuitable to riding while wearing a dress or for commuting.
Households switched to cars which are expensive, so they tended to only have one, which men took to work and women were placed back in the home.
Cars are a malign presence. Their use was not the advance of technology, but deliberate concerted efforts to harm the public sphere and especially to disempower women. They only became practical because of massive subsidies for highways and roads. They are an inherently wasteful technology, ill-suited to a majority of their current use cases.
Horses were still used for many things still when those existed. They were fully replaced by the ICE
You are also arguing in bad faith, because cars are not the same as internal combustion engines. You might be able to argue correctly that tractors replaced farm animals for productive use, but tractors are not cars.
Tractors are a variety of car. I’m not arguing in bad faith I just think that’s nonsense.
And boats are a variety of car if they have an ICE, right? 🤡
boats are not a variety of car, but also boats didn’t replace horses? tractors are in no way meaningfully different from a car.
both four wheeled vehicles attached to an ICE. Cars.
You are making up arbitrary definitions to suit your silly argument. A boat is a form of personalized transport with an ICE engine, a steering wheel and seats, even a windshield etc. so it is clearly a “car” 🤡
A car, or an automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, seat 1–8 people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people rather than cargo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car
you’re calling me a clown when you don’t even know what a car is?? 🤡
By that definition a tractor isn’t a car.
You’re calling me a clown when you don’t even know what a car is?? 🤡
The only thing there that it doesn’t fit is “primarily on roads” the weakest part of the definition because there are plenty of off-road cars.
Have you read the article? It’s really not about horses at all, and it makes some good points that help put the horse comment into context.
Yes there are good points but the initial premise that it’s a myth is wrong, I did read the article.
Perhaps we’re getting hung up on the semantics of “replaced.” Where once there were horses, there were later internal combustion vehicles of many kinds. But the point the article makes is simply that that “replacement” wasn’t as direct as the typical claim, as urban workers were not commuting on horseback. People did not ride into the dealership in a personal carriage, trade in the horses, and drive off the lot in a Model T. At that time, communities were denser and people were walking and using transit. Some of the transit was pulled by horses, later replaced by individual cars as the auto industry systematically attacked transit and reshaped cities, but that’s not what the “replaced” claim implies. It has the sound of a 1:1 swap.