Elon Musk on Twitter: 'Trains Should Be On Surface, Cars Below' (sfgate.com) 221
An anonymous reader writes:
The SFGate site reports that Elon Musk engaged in a "bizarre Twitter fight" after someone suggested underground tunnels were better for trains than cars. "Opposite is true," Musk argued. "You can have 100's of layers of tunnels, but only one layer on surface (to first approximation), therefore trains should be on surface, cars below." Underground, he noted later, "you can have as many lanes as you want going in any direction."
San Francisco transit authorities then pointed out that their high-capacity BART trains carry 28,000 people every hour through a tube under the San Francisco Bay, adding "That's nearly twice as much as cars over the bay."
This being Twitter, BART "was attacked by a number of Musk fans and other BART critics, and was forced to defend everything from the odor on cars to the amount of public money the agency receives."
San Francisco transit authorities then pointed out that their high-capacity BART trains carry 28,000 people every hour through a tube under the San Francisco Bay, adding "That's nearly twice as much as cars over the bay."
This being Twitter, BART "was attacked by a number of Musk fans and other BART critics, and was forced to defend everything from the odor on cars to the amount of public money the agency receives."
Mostly a logical statement (Score:3, Insightful)
The benefit of underground is that it is out of view. For a train, having a view is a benefit. For a community in a visual context, an 8-lane road divides the community and wastes valuable space. Also, from a maintenance perspective, it is much easier to shut down one of many car tunnels rather than the only train tunnel.
The real problems with it is that you can’t have pedestrian/train crossings at grade, so you need to elevate the train... and then there is the noise issue.
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and then there is the noise issue.
Well, I suppose cars are worse than trains at that due to sheer numbers.
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Also horns. And idiots who think loud == fast.
Re:Mostly a logical statement (Score:5, Interesting)
The benefit of underground is that it is out of view
Then lets put all traffic, including trains, underground. Cities will be much nicer.
Re:Mostly a logical statement (Score:4, Informative)
The benefit of underground is that it is out of view
Then lets put all traffic, including trains, underground. Cities will be much nicer.
And what about construction costs? Maintenance against cave ins? Pumps to avoid floods and fans to bring in fresh air, evacuation routes in case of fire or terrorist attack.
Cities can't even afford to put train lines underground, you think we can afford to push the roads under?
Re: Mostly a logical statement (Score:3)
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terrorist attack ....
What is that? The red brigades in Germany where subdued around 1970
You still have terrorist attacks in the US? Sorry, it made never any news in Europe ...
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This was Walt Disney's vision with EPCOT.
Re: Mostly a logical statement (Score:2)
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For the rest we'll have to get used (again) to travel like it was before the invention of the car to prevent climate disaster
That's not going to happen.
This is a simple cost / benefit thing here people (Score:5, Insightful)
Trains are, overall for society, a very cost effective way to move people about so you get a lot of bang for your buck putting them under ground. Cars on the other hand do not get nearly as much value for society as a whole. Cars are only cost effective for the individual, not at all for the society. This then begs the question, why would we spend the massive amounts of money to build underground tunnels for a system that moves less people? It's because Elon's Boring company is failing, that's why.
I love a lot of the work that Elon's companies do but the more that guy talks, the less I like him.
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True. Then why do we clog the roads with traffic from office workers instead of letting the important stuff take precedence?
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"Cars on the other hand do not get nearly as much value for society as a whole. Cars are only cost effective for the individual, not at all for the society."
Can you feel the air whooshing past your head?
Re:This is a simple cost / benefit thing here peop (Score:4, Interesting)
You people in the US are insane sociopaths. In urban areas, private cars are not just more expensive and environmentally unfriendly, but are usually about as slow or slower, slower on average when you count the time you need to spend on parking, garages, filling the gas tank, cleaning etc. But they are also a huge waste of space - personally and collectively; they are noisy; the stink up the air; and on a wide scale require a lot more street area, parking lots etc. When people like me - from car-sparse cities or towns - arrive in the US it looks like the car companies have been holding a gun to everybody's head and have remade the entire country to serve their interests.
Trains, metro, trolleybuses, trams, buses (can be electric these days), micro-bus/taxis, and no less important - bicycles!
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"The only reason anybody favors public transit as anything more than a lifeline for people who can't afford cars is because of the environmental impact of gasoline-powered vehicles."
Well there's one reason but certainly not the only. For instance, the brilliance of any kind of rail mass transit is that when demand exceeds supply, typically all you have to do is ad more rail cars to the existing line. Not a major expense. When demand exceeds supply for major road ways the only solution is massively expensive
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That's simply not true. If a road is underutilized, you can just add more cars onto the road to add capacity there, too. Similarly, if your train track is already running at capacity, you can't just add more cars. You're comparing apples and oranges, and as a result,
Re:This is a simple cost / benefit thing here peop (Score:5, Interesting)
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Americans think mass transit is bad because their country was designed around them, and corporations have deliberately sabotauged the transit system to sell cars.
Mass transit lines in the states (streetcar and interurban rail) were in deep financial trouble before World War I. The Model T Ford was cheaper and more versatile. Family of four + dog and cargo. Portal to portal on your own schedule. The geek has a postcard view of mass transit in that era. Riding the cars wasn't half as pleasant.
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lost time spent shopping
I can't shop online when driving, but I can on a bus. I can order groceries for delivery. So I am not sure, as things progress, there is necessarily much loss of shopping opportunity due to public transport.
People outside the United States think mass transit is the only efficient answer because their cities require mass transit as a workaround for the fact that those cities were built back when horse-drawn carriages were the norm, and thus can't handle automobile traffic in the quantities required to support a properly functioning society.
I take it you don't live in New York, LA, Austin, Raleigh-Durham, etc?
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For online shopping, that's true, but it's also true of self-driving cars, which any car in the tunnels Musk is proposing almost certainly would have to be, so that difference is largely moot in the future we're talking about. By contrast, you can't typically grab dinner at a restaurant while you're sit
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You know what? What you're saying doesn't smell right, but at first I couldn't figure out why. At first I thought you were overestimating road damage, so I looked it up for myself, it's the 4th power of "axle weight divided by 10 tons", even so, here in London where double decker busses are heavy, that works out worse than your estimate - about 6500 times as damaging (fully laden bus approaching the legal limit of 18,000kg versus a 2,000kg laden vehicle). You've ridiculously underestimated capacity - it's u
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Because it's not the cattle that decide the size of the barn?
Re:This is a simple cost / benefit thing here peop (Score:4, Informative)
public transit cannot even remotely approach the speed of point-to-point transit
If I want to go from London to Edinburgh it's much, much faster to go by train. If I just want to travel across London the Underground is faster than driving except from some stations at rush hour.
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GP would agree with you on that. The problem, however, is that public transit is not an option for Americans not because public transit is bad, but because the American realization of public transit is shit. Part of that is legacy tech and a lack of investment in infrastructure. Another part is low-density cities, where there's not enough people near any given stop to make it worth using, and meaning you have to catch 3+ conn
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Except that at least in the U.S., Rail travel is within a factor of 2 compared with cars [wikipedia.org]. And that means if the self-driving pundits are right, driving will be safer than trains pretty soon.
Turns out that having a giant tin can that takes more than a mile to stop isn't a very good idea when it comes to safety.
Actually, not that logical. (Score:2)
A more logical solution would put local roads on the top surface. By local I am referring to the "last mile" roads. When you travel 2 miles to get some milk sort of roads. The long distance routes, both trains and automotive, can go underground.
The big advantage of underground routes is that you can build them without intersections. This benefits the underground routes directly but also the above ground routes. Put those high speed, long distance routes underground and you can do away with the outra
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You want car roads underground using automated cars that drop you off at the nearest stair or escalator going up to your destination, or offramps going up to short access roads outside the city. Surface roads and rail-roads are a huge waste of space and are bad for the enviornment.
Individual vehicles traveling through tunnels are extremely space inefficient and having so many vehicles stop at exit points or exit on to public roads could easily cause the entire tunnel network to become gridlocked. If you're traveling to fixed exit points then why not have large shared vehicles that take you set entrance/exit points on the network, then a fleet of individual shared ground vehicles above ground that can take you the last mile if that exit point is too far to walk.
We could call the under
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So... a train. Except far fewer people on board for the amount of "platform" required. And that would only work for foot passengers in the special pod vehicles, not for cars going through the tunnel.
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Modern trains don't make noise ... ... go figure.
But then again I live in two or three first world countries
Re:Other side of the tracks (Score:2)
an 8-lane road divides the community
As does a train track. Thus the saying, the "other side of the tracks."
Insightful. (Score:2)
Just like the interwebs!
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Hundreds? I don't think so. The problem is, you have to get people back to the surface when they complete their journey. Most car trips are not that far, say, to the grocery store or a restaurant. So, part of your journey takes you to a tunnel 100 layers down. You're not going to be able to hop on an elevator to the surface. Instead, you'll have to wind your way around to the surface. There would have to be lots of tunnels doing nothing but taking cars up and down from one layer to the next.
So, how about 5?
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And kind of impressive in a creepy giant underground tunnel kind of way.
Large cities already have this kind of 'creepy' giant underground. Not just subways and pipes, but every high-rise tower has an underground infrastructure to match.
Both (Score:2)
Put the trains underground as well, and convert all the old tracks to bike trails.
Of course, if tunneling becomes cheap enough, architects will design "houses" that consist of rooms in a length of tunnel, or perhaps several side-by-side tunnels. Instead of high-rise apartments, you could have it all underground.
I think there have been some science fiction books where that's exactly what they did--move literally all human infrastructure underground and leave the entire surface as a park and wilderness prese
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Yes. In the short term, the tunnels that The Boring Company is making are too small for trains, but once they perfect their drilling technology, it could be scaled up a bit.
That is completely backwards... (Score:2)
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Cars are variable-end-point transportation, they can go anywhere, with few people, and are ideal for non-fixed routes. Trains require tracks and are for massive numbers of people commuting in the same general direction, between a restricted number of stops (due to the tracks and large stations required). Put trains underground, cars on top. This is like saying pedestrians must be on the freeway, and buses can be on the sidewalks. Completely backwards.
Not at all. The surface should be pedestrian traffic only (and, perhaps, trains and delivery trucks). By putting roads underground, you have grade separation from the pedestrians, and you can put parking in layers, too, allowing far more parking (and far closer parking) than would be feasible on the surface.
Yeah, like... everything's tubular man (Score:4, Funny)
You see, like.... cough... the cars belong in tubes, man. Like, I was thinking about how much inspiration comes through tubes. How my vision comes through tubes, and the more people are in tubes and breathing in through tubes the better.
Seriously, dude. Put the hash tube down.
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people should be on surface, (Score:2)
graves below.
Access points. (Score:2)
It's getting difficult... (Score:2)
With Elon it's getting difficult to determine if he's just being an ass to someone or if he really believes in one of his stupid ideas. Honestly, scale up the number of tunnels in an area for the amount of traffic? So every tunnel has entry and exit points for every "intersection". So if you have four tunnels coming into downtown and you want to connect to a tunnel going perpendicular you have to merge four off "ramps" to become one on "ramp" to the other tunnel. Imagine if you have multiple lanes of traffi
Elevators. (Score:2)
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Right, then you're going to need a heck of a lot of elevators to keep up with traffic. Imagine the number of cars leaving a highway by using an off ramp during rush hour and then think of them having to use an elevator. It's going to carry more than one car but it will quickly reach a weight limit. You can save elevators by having each one carry vehicles up and down but that slows down the time the elevator can return.
What he really needs are escalators! /s
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So a tunnel is about 130 times the cost of a road, but Musk says they're better idea? And never mind where I live the water table is a few feet down, because Musk didn't mind that either.
What a fucking moron, no wonder all his companies are actually losing money.
Sure, and ICE vehicles should get the carpool lane (Score:2)
...because electric vehicles can idle in the regular lanes without creating pollution.
Time to ... (Score:2)
Cars AND Trains in Tunnels (Score:2)
Why not put all motorized transportation underground? Trains go the deepest, then cars so they can access the first level of buildings and out-of-the-city roads. Bicycles and pedestrians on the surface.
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Shows that very smart people can be wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
Elon is a very sharp guy, elite educational pedigree, extremely successful businessman, and visionary even. A billionaire. He's also flat wrong about the cars above versus below.
* Virtually all the destinations are on the surface. They are the ends of the capillaries.
* Tunnels are complex, require a lot of energy and engineering to create.
* Trains are like arteries. Carrying lots of people going in one direction. But it requires the capillary routes to get each of the 1000 individuals to a thousand different destinations.
* Roads are classified as being interstate, arterial or local ("capillary"). [dot.gov]
It makes sense to put the big arteries underground, to get a large volume of "blood" (commuters/red blood cells) from one common location to another; but for that "last mile" question, for which building rail line to each business, for which a train would need to make a thousand stops to let each of the commuters off at their final destination, would not be feasible. A thousand stops would take hundreds of hours. What makes trains take a long time are all the stops in the middle.
Trains are serial; cars are parallel. A thousand commuters can reach their different (surface) destinations in parallel in cars, from the common drop-off point. A train would have to stop a thousand times.
And also, rescue in a tunnel is more complex than a surface rescue.
A good idea (Score:2)
If only this were half the story (Score:3)
Unlike trains, cars want to go in all directions so how many tunnels do you need to bore? In addition cars have to get up and down from the surface so you're going to have elevators all over the place to facilitate this. And do elevators serve one tunnel or many tunnels? And where do cars stop while they're waiting for the elevator down to a particular tunnel? Are cities going to have to dedicate massive amounts of surface space for cars queuing up to enter tunnels, and feeder lanes for those emerging from tunnels? And what kinds of cars are we even talking about here - Teslas or random vehicles, and what does that mean for any city's willingness to support this?
I honestly don't believe that what Musk has demonstrated with tunnel boring comes anywhere close to solving these issues. Superficially it sounds great, in detail it sounds like a lot of problems need to be worked out before anyone should take the idea seriously.
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Unless those things are factored into any speed comparison then it's not a proper comparison at all. It also doesn't account for scaling either - what's fast for 1 car might choke on 10, 50, 100.
And then there's earthquakes (Score:2)
California may be loaded with jackass politicians, but the views while driving are beautiful. Of course bury car roadways below ground. Sounds about right for legislation from there.
Right... (Score:2)
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You're still going to need to remove methane, CO2, ozone, radon, etc.
1. Methane is not heavier than air. The only source will be from farts.
2. People exhale CO2, but only a small amount of ventilation is needed to keep it at safe levels.
3. Brushless motors don't produce ozone, and there is no other source of generation.
4. Radon can be kept out by sealing the tunnel from the surrounding rock and soil, which you need to do anyway to avoid groundwater intrusion.
Tunnels have been built before. We know how to deal with these issues.
Re: Exhaust (Score:2)
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Like... well, that's one thing.
The other is "taking serious". I live in a country that has lots of underground road (we call them tunnels through the various mountains here). Did he ever witness an accident in one of those things (let alone one where a car goes up in flames)? Or trying to get someone who is badly injured out of it? Hint: Airlifting him out from the traffic jam isn't exactly an option.
Elon doesn't seem to have any concept of water. (Score:3, Insightful)
Musk argued, "You can have 100's of layers of tunnels"
No, you can't. Let's say each tunnel is 10ft tall. 100 x 10ft = 1000ft underground. The water table is very often much shallower than 1000ft in most areas. Even in the high desert of Arizona we have water down about 800 ft below the surface. Try putting an underground tunnel under the water table and it's just going to be perpetually flooded with water.
Elon Musk is a car salesman through and through. He'll say anything to get you to buy his product.
Come to think of it, wasn't Musk trying to sell mini-submar
60 story elevators every two blocks? (Score:3)
I take a train to work. Trains are effective when you have stops about every ten miles or more. A train that stops every half mile would take forever to get anywhere. There's no way I would take the train to work if it made 30 stops on the way, that would take far too long.
Because trains don't work so well if they are stopped or stopping most of the time, there isn't a train station at my front door. I take the car a couple miles to the nearest train station, then hop on the train for the longer part of th
A stop every 10 miles or so? (Score:4, Insightful)
Different places need different solutions.
True, different distance scales (Score:2)
That's true that different solutions make sense in different places. In this instance, I think the point remains at the smaller distances involved in Manhattan. You wouldn't want to go very far on a train that stops every block.
Whatever transportation does stop every block, it makes sense to have on the surface. Kinda a pain to build underground stations every block.
Of course, I haven't been to Manhattan since I was a little kid. It appears that the amount of land we in Texas call a "yard" is called a "nei
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Thereâ(TM)s no reason you canâ(TM)t make tunnels below the water table.
You can, but it makes it much more expensive.
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I'm not seeing it either... Elon has such vision, according to himself, which is, by and large, detached from what we all experience, henceforth called reality.
Have you ever been in a pileup in a tunnel?
I'm guessing that Elon has never been in a tunnel crash waiting for hours to get out... choking on fumes... I think, he sees his Tesla cars driving the perfect route, bumper-to-bumper, and it's all hunky-dorey. In reality, a train would be better suited for a tunnel... or an elevated track. Cars should rem
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I'm guessing that Elon has never been in a tunnel crash waiting for hours to get out... choking on fumes...
Indeed, you would need escape routes to other tunnels, with fire doors, to allow people to escape such a situation. For example, the channel tunnel is actually three tunnels.
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Any accident in a tunnel is still a nightmare. First, they happen far easier than over ground and since the car can't simply fly off the track and land somewhere in the countryside, it's a near certain traffic jam in the making. You also can't easily shove the wrecks off the road to keep the traffic moving, so it will invariably lead to a congestation. It's far harder for aid to come to the place of the accident because alternative routes usually don't exist (escape tunnels don't work because they are suppo
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On a separate note, there was this cab driver in the news...he decided to go Dukes of Hazzard one night. The cops said he got at least a hundred feet linear of air on about 10-15' vertical so he was going about 120, at least.
I'm not sure I understand the relevance, but I entirely understand the sentiment.
Who hasn't looked at the humpback bridge with a mile long straight run-up and thought, "I need to buy something cheap, second hand and indestructible"
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It's not politically correct to call people from former Yugoslavia that.
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The amount of space required for mass transit means, we should probably build over road and rail links and have the building lots as parkland's. This distributes habitation over transport links improving efficiency.
In metropolitan areas I would tunnel under every road or at least the ones radiating from economic and employment focal points, with individual cars on tracks coming to pick up points when called, a system in constant motion, all fully automated, no cars no trains, technically the individuals ca
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That sounds great in a sci-fi world full of tech we don't have and infinitive resources. Here in the now and a world of finite resources I strongly think that if we're going to spend the massive resources it takes to build underground transportation it should be done for the form of transportation most efficient at moving people.
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It's like the flying car fantasy (of driving above a traffic jam) except digging down instead of up. Worth noting that we already have stacked freeways, but Elon thinks stacking them downward is better. [alamy.com]
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Both over and underground stacking have lots of issues. They both take up space on the surface, for pillars or for HVAC. Accidents on both can be pretty nasty. And they are both expensive and have knock-on consequences for nearby buildings.
Generally speaking electric trains are better for both. As well as not having any emissions to deal with, they are more efficient and safer, less prone to accidents.
The main issue with trains is that they only serve certain routes, but that can be mitigated by making the
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Wouldn't it take a considerable amount of energy to vent exhaust fumes from underground
The tunnels are for electric cars only. No ICEs.
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That's going to be interesting the first time a battery runs out.
It is no different than an ICE running out of gas.
Just dispatch a truck to either tow it out, or give it a quick charge with enough juice to clear the tunnel.
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Just speculating but I imagine these tunnels won't allow in EVs that can't communicate their charge/range to the tunnel network. A car without a enough charge to reach its destination simply won't be allowed into the tunnel.
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That is why the Boring Co plan is for electric cars only.
And that's supposed to be better [hearstapps.com]?
Use the tunnels for cargo. Let the people ride up top.
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You don't think they've thought about how to handle battery fires? They want to put tunnels in LA, which is in California, the one state whose motto should be "We got a regulation for that." There is no way LA/Cali will let people use these tunnels unless TBC can adequately show how they'll handle fires [of any kind] in these tunnels.
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The problem with cars is it has given generations of people unprecedented liberty that they haven't seen before
I don't know what your definition is for 'problem,' but it sure doesn't match any definition I've ever heard.
Re: Feeling secure is better then being secure. (Score:2, Troll)
Settle yourself dude. His claim is accurate. It seems like you're the one pushing some agenda.
http://vpc.org/regulating-the-... [vpc.org]
The number of auto vs gun deaths is right around 35k for each. Facts are not an agenda.
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Also for the USA in 2016, the National Safety Council has 14,415 'homicide' (assuming this includes accidents?) deaths, and 22,938 suicides with firearms.
So if you just take 'dead by x' per year, they do seem on par (and can insert into whatever stat abuse you want)
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Dogs should meow! Day is night and down is up! Buy my flamethrower!
Q: How do you make a dog go meow?
A: Dip it in liquid nitrogen and put it through a band saw. Meeeooooow!!
Q: How do you make a cat go woof?
A: Douse it in gasoline and light a match. Woof!!!
For the humor impaired I am not advocating harming animals, nor have I ever intentionally harmed animals.
Re: Cats should bark! (Score:2)
nor have I ever intentionally harmed animals.
So you're either a vegetarian or they're no worse-for-wear after you've eaten 'em and shat 'em out.
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When you eat roadkill, you don't harm it at all.