[jseliger]

A car is freedom. Do you really want to be completely dependent and beholden to some public transport system?

Per the link, I view a car as slavery, and, per The High Cost of Free Parking, car infrastructure is much more expensive than is commonly realized. Owning a car is being a slave to car payments, to saving for the car, to the insurance company, to the repair shop, to the driveway or parking lot, to paying around $10,000 a year in TCO.

Lots of people don't want to live in a city.

Which is good! They shouldn't. The challenges come from the way we've structured an entire society to subsidize parking.

To some extent that's changing, with people like Glaeser, Shoup, and Yglesias in the intellectual vanguard. The issue is also getting more prominent in part because the startling cost of living in many cities and inner-ring suburbs is causing intellectually curious people to ask both why this is happening and how it can be alleviated. Both questions go back to politics.

[lsc]

People throw around the world 'slavery' way too lightly, considering it's historical connotations.

[dllthomas]

"Freedom", too, for that matter.

[lsc]

meh, 'freedom' has never had a good, solid meaning. Kings have been using that word for centuries.

Slavery, until fairly recently has meant 'owning another human' - I mean, hell, I'll buy the use of slavery to mean 'having a choice between doing what another human wants and dying'

My problem here is expanding it to mean 'having to pay a small fee or suffer discomfort'

[saraid216]

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=slave&allowed_in_fr...

Slavery was turned into "owning another human" by abolitionists who wanted to play up its squick factor. It was previously just a state of submission and would be interchangeable with "servant".

The sense jseliger is using it is in the sense attested from the 1550s: that a car owner has lost resistance to a habit or vice; in this case, the "habit or vice" is the acceptance of car infrastructure in city design and the habit of looking at the world through the needs of one's car, namely to find parking, to calculate finances based on a car's needs.

[lsc]

Thanks. I was not aware of that etymology resource. Interesting that it started out as a racial slur, then became something much less serious, then again became something more serious.

[saraid216]

It's not really accurate to call it a racial slur. The concept of race was extremely weak before the 1800s, when eugenics took off, and slackened after WW2 (because Hitler). There were geographical prejudices (you come from a Slavic country) and "civilized" prejudices (you silly barbarians with your shaggy hair), but skin color was rarely, if ever, a factor.

Because, keep in mind: Slavic peoples were and are white.

In this sense, it's more accurate to compare it to jokes about how Polish people are stupid, how the British are always stuffy, how the French don't know how to shower, how Americans only care about money, how women are emotional, etc. A germ of truth, but mainly the kind of overgeneralization we call "stereotype" today.

[sibartlett]

Some words have multiple definitions. Here's one of the definitions of the word "slave"... someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; "a slave to fashion"; "a slave to cocaine"; "his mother was his abject slave"