// Lots of people have a sort of consumer attitude towards their communities, where they take everything for granted. I saw things this way when I was young. A social scene is an automatic feature of the world that appears on its own, like a wild blueberry bush. It starts sprouting parties and dinners and conferences and reading groups as naturally as the bush sprouts berries
True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you.
As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile.
I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.
There is a point where the things you took for granted start decaying. Your body, your things, your communities, your relationships. It's only when you start repairing or replacing them that you really value maintenance and the people doing it. As you point out, it's usually done by surprisingly few, surprisingly motivated people, and their work is often underappreciated until they stop doing it.
Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.
What you’re describing is essentially the concept of civic duty and, at least in America, it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon.
It also relies on people putting effort towards often intangible, uncapitalized, and unextractable shared value. So perhaps it makes sense that this is being diminished over time, as the grip of capitalism squeezes tighter and more efficiently. With more economic stress placed on individuals, people have less available time and resources to devote to things other than staying afloat.
Between polarization/politicization of literally everything and the relentless corporate desire to deconstruct society in the name of quarterly growth, I’m not optimistic this is making a comeback. If we want to teach the children anything, it is that The System has failed and is in dire need of replacement.
> it’s unfortunately become deconstructed and politicized to the point where it’s impossible to exist as a meaningful cultural phenomenon.
I think greed and corruption (cheating) by politicians and government employees has an outsized effect on this. Whenever you hear about it you lose trust and may even feel justified to cheat the system in turn. Basically they got there's, so I'll get mine.
IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. I'm talking prison time. Also transparency at all levels and at all times. Public service should have really really good reasons to keep anything private and the default should be open to the public. There shouldn't be a need for FOI requests unless there's a good reason to keep something from being completely public.
> IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society.
Tough to do when those who write the laws are a part of the problem. What do you suggest to make this so?
Grassroots campaigning and hardline support for candidates running on rule of law and overturning Citizens United. Overturning any status quo is possible in a functioning democracy - it just takes a lot of unskippable effort.
If you talk to people about the things that get you fired up then you might meet other people who also get fired up about these things, and before you know it, one of you is running for office and / or you are all getting involved locally. Or, you just keep talking about it I guess, but I think it at least improves the odds for change.
Passion can be just as contagious as defeatism.
[dead]
Part of it has to do with having children. If you have kids, you have a stake in the future. The birth rate has been falling, so naturally civic duty has also fallen.
> politicization of literally everything
The status quo is in favour of the owning class. Things in a macro sense can't be not political.
And, when things are viewed as not political, that in itself is a political view, and usually a very bad one.
It isn't only the decay. People change. Who you were online at age 23 and 30 and almost definitely 39 is bound to be vastly different as your priorities and real life relationships change (like marriages, etc).
And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.
In the late 80s I was working at Rabbit Software in Malvern PA (they made IBM 3270 terminal emulator software). I used to car pool to work from Phila. with a brilliant woman who was a lot older than me, and had a solid lifetime of IBM mainframe experience. I was a Unix hacker with just a few years under my belt.
We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.
Back in 1984 George Lewis apparently did a stint at IRCAM, culminating in an electro-acoustic performance with three Apple IIe's connected by MIDI to three DX7s. I'd bet his conversations with the IRCAM directors were similarly limited!
Speaking of IRCAM, does anybody know Joseph "jojo" Francis -- francis@ircam.fr?
Scenes don't sprout like blueberry bushes -- or baobab trees with their roots in the sky. Someone does the legwork -- or the scene quietly dies while everyone assumes it was a natural feature of the landscape.
Maintenance is fragile and underappreciated until it stops; you do it for the love of the game even when reciprocity is uneven; the process of putting the thing on is often where the real community forms, not the event flyer. Someone spent fifteen years building a local scene and still says it was worth it after Facebook ate the users. Someone else noted that recreational typing on HN rarely becomes meeting people. Sometimes it does, if you treat the thread as a place to organize a hunt instead of only consume takes.
Which brings me to a digression that already started elsewhere in this thread (IRCAM, Apple IIes, DX7s) and to the kind of legwork I actually enjoy: preserving a weird primary source, then trying to find the human who wrote it.
Does anyone know how to contact the legendary Jojo -- Joseph Francis, once francis@ircam.fr?
I asked FJ!!!; he thought Jojo was last seen in LA. Brewster -- if you're reading this -- any breadcrumbs? I'm wandering the stacks the way the Archive wanders the Web: save the strange pages, then go looking for the people. That is producing social fabric, just with a longer half-life. If you knew him from Paris / Usenet / soc.motss, please point him here or forward this.
Jojo, if you see this: please email don@donhopkins.com. I'd love to catch up, reminisce, and talk about applying those brilliant (and ridiculous) UI ideas now. I'd rather you tell your own story than have me invent one.
His classic Usenet riff, glorious typos intact:
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/jojo-o...
Jojo built it with words decades ago, and boy did he make me come! He invented a whole product line of design-free GUI kits (POSEUR, XYmorph, Quagmire, boraX -- all open, scalable, and extensible, of course), then drops the mask for one paragraph he titles XBorges:
>One longs for the day when the responsibility of programming computers falls squarely on the shoulders of the users, where it belongs; they are provided with a set of infinitely configurable instruction codes, on an open, extensible, and scalable n-bit bus, and their task before setting upon work, is the naming of all the operations they want, and encoding them into words, sentences, phrases and storing them for instant retrieval while they use ideas communicated to them from all the users before to choose most wisely within the infinities of possibility. They have at their hands all books written, all interfaces, they merely traverse endless treelike chains of possibility, of choice, of alternate (open, scalable, and extensible) universes; baobob-like roots in the sky and leaves delving gnomishly in circular connections leading to closed-form solutions.
>Visual design: patterns on the screen, snow in hell.
Thirty years ago that read like absurdist satire about Motif-era configurability. Today it reads like someone accidentally describing prompting, tool use, and semantic navigation -- naming the operations in words, then retrieving them -- while standing in Borges' Library of Babel.
David MacKay said writing is navigating in the library of all possible books. Dasher made that literal: you don't type, you steer through probability space toward the text that already exists as possibility. The Internet Archive is busy saving the books that were written. LLMs collapsed a fuzzy corner of the ones that could be. The hard problem Jojo named is still the hard problem: not generating the infinity, but traversing it wisely -- which is also, annoyingly, the hard problem of community. Infinite possible hangouts. Someone still has to pick a time and open the door.
Dasher: information-efficient text entry - David MacKay, April 19 2007, Google Tech Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie9Se7FneXE
Speech Dasher: An Efficient Correction Interface for Speech Recognition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCF6a00Bcoo
LLMs accidentally built a wing of the Library of Babel. XBorges was always about the card catalog. Dasher was always about steering. The Archive is why any of the cards still exist. And if you build the catalog (or the search party), sometimes they will come.
I ordered a cursed monkey's paw from the ACME catalog, thoughtfully wished for the rest of the monkey, gave him an infinite number of typewriters, told him about Dasher and Bruce Tognazzini Apple ][ Integer BASIC program, and he came up with this:
One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me. A Personal Account of Incarnation, Navigation, and the Beautiful Machinery of Existence, By Palm:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...
David MacKay's Dasher, Palm On Being Palm, and Tog's "The Infinite Numer of Monkeys":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL2sw2oYU98
>Le Jojo: Fresh 'n' Clean, speaking out to the way you want to live today; American - All American; doing, a bit so, and even more so.
Please Jojo -- write me. Everyone else: if you know him, please be the person who does the little bit of legwork and taps him on the shoulder.
Tim Pozar and Brewster Kahle CHM Interview by Marc Weber October 29 1996
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2h2LHRFbNA
Brewster said:
But also the early stuff has got people's dreams. The early people that sort of say -- you know, the early people on the web, like you, doing your dinosaur exhibit. You've got this ability to be able to do something new and different. But at some point, people will just say, "oh, well, you know, you can't do that", and they'll just sort of focus in on all it can do. But in the beginning, you have just amazing things. So I always kept the early logs of WAIS. I thought those would be the most valuable things. Is one of the questions, that people ask of the net. And so I kept all of those logs.
Oh, you have those? Oh yeah. What do people look for? What are people dreaming that the technology can finally answer? And right now already, the web has sort of stagnated, people's idea of it has really focused down to the stuff the technicians have given. But it's the early dreams that we should trying to live up to. So I'm trying to keep some of that alive.
Been thinking a lot about concept and word hijacking/cancellation, lately. Dasher is a good example. Ever notice how this happens? It is one of my concerns about agentic AI.
I haven't thought about Motif in ages, either, incidentally. Another tricky word, of course.
> > And right now already, the web has sort of stagnated, people's idea of it has really focused down to the stuff the technicians have given
This comment has not aged well at all.
Not as unwell aged as the Dumbold Voting Machine's P. Diddy "Vote or Die" disaster that either electrocuts you or sets you on fire if you choose "Die".
https://donhopkins.medium.com/dumbold-voting-machine-for-the...
A transit system has a different cost and is actually paid for by majority of users: the fact that few abuse it is not going to break it (as long as we keep it immoral to do so — note that there may be valid reasons to do it, when someone is in some sort of urgency and eg. ticketing machine is overcrowded or broken: it's not on us to judge even if we might be right 99% of the time).
Here, we are talking about things where it takes volunteer work to keep a thing you want going — I do not even want to imagine a world where a board game night is organized by a paid pro instead of the enthusiast, even if a status quo means that there is always an assymetry between hosts doing most work and guests never hosting themselves (maybe they do not have a big enough space though — they can still volunteer to help though).
I've realized this in high school and uni and started making conscious effort to sometimes do the social fabric things even when I did not feel like it, in order to continue benefiting from the social engagement.
This is, to some extent, precisely what happened to most of the internet. Things run for passion withered away; things run for profit remained. New people grew up surrounded by only for-profit things, and believed that was just the way things were supposed to work. They've never seen a personal website.
When I was 5 or 6 my dad helped me make a web page about the Star Wars movie I just saw and didn't really understand but I thought the pod racers were cool. Apparently our ISP came with a little bit of web space. That doesn't happen any more. You don't even get Usenet.
the turnstile thing is more complex than you perceive because almost every transit system relies on public funding. here (Seattle) those fares only fund about 10% of the _operating cost_ of the transit per Sound Transit's own reports. not to derail the point, but please do go read your transit system's quarterly reports instead of taking the conclusion of fare dodging for granted. just about every city has public budget reports for their transit system precisely because they are the product of public funding.
Not quite sure what you mean. Is it that fare dodging is fine because the taxpayers at large already pick up most of the tab? Or that fare dodging is worse than you’d think because it makes an already quite expensive thing for the public budget, even more expensive?
I’m thinking about BART right now, which really might simply go away altogether due in part to the collapse in fare revenue that remote work triggered. BART didn’t have nearly as bad as Seattle’s fare ratio though - pre-COVID, fares and parking covered 66% of the operating costs. (Source https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/BART%20FY23-32... ) This was apparently the best or one of the best of its peers. It was 28% last year, just due to the fare revenue basically halving.
i hadn't considered that Seattle might be an outlier; the numbers vary by city more than i knew.
https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2...
page 11 has the $ figures. "link" is the commuter rail system: $408M operating expenses but only $51M revenue from fares, i.e. fares cover 12% of op ex.
the "average fare per boarding" is $1.34 (page 3; this is ticket price multiplied by the proportion of trips where the rider pays that ticket). throw that together: even with 100% payment compliance the average ticket price would be $11 per boarding for that to be a complete funding source. $11 would force more riders onto the subsidized fare programs, plus other knock-on effects from raising fares (e.g. reduced ridership in general) means the sticker price would have to be higher yet.
the commuter rail here was never designed for ridership fares to cover its operating costs. it just wasn't. the recent focus on fares in the face of all this is misinformed, that's the kindest way i can phrase that.
(apologies to hijack much of this with what turns out to be more of a Seattle-specific issue).
There are probably some savings in externalities not accounted for as well.
Seems to me mass transit could reduce road maintenance costs, parking infrastructure, and such. Not to mention reduction in pollution and increase in desirability.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to “capture” those savings explicitly. So it ends up looking like a taxpayer funded charity program…
I can't remember what the paradox is called but it has a name - in any big city, public transit sets the speed of car traffic. Cars always go at the same speed as public transit, door-to-door. If you want to eliminate traffic jams, improve the metro.
[flagged]
The subway should be free, and continuous fare hikes when you're already double paying with your eyes because of all the advertising they shove in front of you is more incentive to turnstile jump. Overpaid do-nothing senior adminstrators and lawmakers who are in the pocket of privatization are the problem, not that 17 year old.
Enforcing fares massively decreases vandalism, and antisocial behavior on public transportation.
If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
That's an interesting point and I agree it makes some kind of sense, but is there a source for it?
I live in Montpellier France and all transit has become free 2 years ago. I didn't notice any change in people's behavior at all. Transit is also free in Talinn IIRC and I wonder if they saw something there?
Then they'll shift the goalpost: it's not free, someone is paying for it, which is every taxpayer.
Then you'll ask for receipts of what they pay to use the roads and they'll be out.
Regarding free transit, I think part of the reason it can fail is the socioeconomic situation. In places that rewards the rich and abandon the less fortunate, it's deemed to fail.
But also, I think that when people have to pay to use transit, they'll be less willing to act as a warden, so if they see someone doing something negative, they'll keep out, thinking that it's the responsibility of whoever is taking their money. Meanwhile, when we see public transit as a common good, we are more willing to act to keep it great.
https://growsf.org/news/2026-02-12-bart-fare-gates-10-millio...
The maintenance cost graph is very eye-opening.
It's attitudes like that let that stop any and every public transport being built.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0s86kEUxxak
They aren't enforced in Berlin and the worst vandalism is graffiti on the side of some trains (which, let's be real, who cares and it adds some variety).
You know what I think helps? Treating people like grown-ups
The impact in SF was absolutely incredible. A very small percentage of the writers was causing 90+ percent of the problems and vandalism.
Treating these people like adults would be best, but I’ll take getting them off of public transportation first.
https://x.com/SFBART/status/2020952977180328184
https://growsf.org/news/2026-02-12-bart-fare-gates-10-millio...
What was the vandalism?
Sometimes you see trains with graffiti on one side and a stern duct-taped paper notice offering a reward for turning in whoever drew the graffiti to the police. Which is retarded, it's just paint. They seem to have stopped doing those notices now.
If you think graffiti is vandalism I don't care. If they were smashing the windows then it actually matters.
Lol, no it was not just graffiti. I dont mind graffiti nearly as much as say:
- open drug use (literally smoking crack on the bus) - screaming threat of violence to everyone one around - purposefully urinating or defecating on the seats. - literally lighting things on fire - deliberately smashing glass at bus stops (somehow very endemic in SF)
I do think graffiti is a public notice of: “this is a place you can treat poorly and behave terribly in with no consequence”
Some graffiti I think is quite artistic and a sincere cultural contribution, but most on the sides of buses are more of the bathroom stall variety.
I don't think you need fare gates to stop those things. You need police to arrest them. On one visit to Berlin, someone insulted a bus driver and the bus waited 10 minutes for the police to come and arrest him.
Just as importantly, you need to stop arresting people who aren't doing those things. Otherwise there's no differential and no reason not to do them.
> I do think graffiti is a public notice of: “this is a place you can treat poorly and behave terribly in with no consequence”
I think that's only true in authoritarian regimes. The kind of place where all crimes are considered fatally bad, resulting in no differential. Otherwise, if there's graffiti but no feces on the sidewalk, it signals that you can paint graffiti, but you can't defecate on the sidewalk. You see the difference?
I don’t think you appreciate how hard it is to get arrested and how ineffective it is when a DA won’t prosecute crimes. Like yes in a more perfect and just society, this would not be a problem.
In fact, most cities can operate just fine without barrier-esque fare gates. However, when you are trying to pull a city out of a societal doom loop, you need to do what you can when you can.
I think it would blow your mind if you knew the types of crimes a criminal can commit and be released.
The USA has 25% of the world's prisoners. I don't think it has a problem with not enough policing.
This still feels like a good faith discussion so I’ll engage.
The US does over incarcerate on average. There is clearly a problem there! The solution is not abdicating prosecution and the rule of law to make up for it in “progressive” cities.
Taking the Iryna Zarutska case as an extreme example, I don’t think anyone would argue that the killer should have been on that train. He should have been imprisoned/involuntarily committed a long time ago.
It is not progressive or empathetic to allow predators to with severe mental or drug issues with long histories of violence to repeatedly prey on a specific community regardless of the national incarceration rate.
Having people who come across as crazy or violent on public transportation makes the average citizen vote for the very policies that produce over incarceration (or defund public transportation) because they look around and their lived experience is that there are not enough police or bad people in jail and that the taxpayer dollars are wasted on public transportation because it becomes a cesspool of crime and drug use.
If you want to lower incarceration and you want people to use public transportation, it must be clean and orderly and socially sustainable.
Right maybe we can make them free and safe? Not sure why that is not possible. Walking on the street is free. In many places it is safe too.
Safe is a tougher problem, and especially when you consider that in most American cities with subways, the exact cities we're talking about right now, generally NO, there are many areas where it is not safe to walk! While I agree public transportation safety and public safety in general are incredibly important, they're also (clearly, given how we're failing at them) also difficult endeavors.
I also think this is relatively orthogonal to cost; cost is nice because it helps keep the people you don't want in the train (crazy people with knives, people smoking weed in the train, people who yell at everyone on the train and make them feel unsafe, etc.), but it's also important to create at least a small barrier so that people don't 'waste' the transit system! In general, when things are completely free, they will be taken advantage of; even a very small tax / friction helps stop this. If the subway is completely free, there's no reason to not just sit on it all day (taking up space and making it worse for everyone). I think subsidizing the subway is net beneficial given that we subsidize cars and things already with road upkeep and such, but free is not what you want.
There are other things to consider. Free public transit would make it more desirable to not use cars as much reducing congestion, accidents, pollution, energy usage. The need to build less high traffic roads may be a money saver to offset. Also it will get more people to exercise by walking to bus stops. You'd need disencentive for abuse but you can personally only add 16 person hours of usage per day so it is not like say free unlimited money or electricity where a single user can add a lot of strain. And spending all that time on transit is a cost. For homeless people yeah you may need to solve that problem! Build more housing for sale and rent driving down prices and reducing the number of homeless yet productive people (with jobs but can't afford rent). Build shelter for homeless with problems they can't hold down a job.
Why do you need free public transit for this? Why not just cheap public transit? Cars certainly aren't free, but people drive them because cars are just far better in most ways; you get to listen to your own music, they can be fun to drive, are incredibly flexible (can go anywhere), don't have the last mile problem, take like half the time unless it's rush hour, etc. Cost just isn't the reason people aren't using public transit. People buy cars because you NEED cars for many other reasons (most of them mentioned), and then once you have a car and pay for insurance and everything it's simply nicer and faster than public transit (rarely cheaper, even only factoring in gas and per mile depreciation, although the BART is so expensive it comes close). (FTR: I'm not sure where I stand on public transit subsidization; I think some is definitely good, but not sure how much I think is optimal).
You need cars because you live in the country where cities are built around the assumption of car ownership. Go to any place with an adequate public transit and you'll see a lot less cars. Go to Tokyo and you'll be shocked, it's the largest city in the world and their highways are practically empty. It just doesn't make any sense to drive when your public transit is that good.
I have been to Tokyo, and I agree with you; perhaps I should have been clearer, but my point was that in American cities you DO need cars (this is a given, however unfortunate it is), and so you are going to already have a car and the costs that go along with it, and as such you are not going to use public transit even when you could because you already have a car. If I had had a car when I was in Tokyo I certainly would have used it! Public transit takes half an hour to go a couple miles, and cost wise gas is cheaper! In the scenario where you already have a car, it doesn't make sense to use public transit 90% of the time. Does that make sense?
The only point I was trying to make here was that cost isn't the reason public transit doesn't work in American cities, and making public transit free will in fact make it worse rather than better. I want good public transit too, don't worry!
Why not make it so there are better free places to sit than the subway? Like a park or something?
When I became homeless (again) about 26 years ago, the buses were a place of refuge and relaxation for me. I could easily pay the fare and stay on a long haul line. I'd be assured of safety and quietness for about 2 hours or so.
The area clinics were participating in this, because they could procure "Reduced Fare" passes that they would distribute to mentally ill patients, and we could get unlimited transit rides all month long, as long as we were still checking in, on the regular, with our case managers. Our providers would ensure that they qualified us for the "Reduced Fare" program.
After a while, the bus stops became camping grounds for street people who didn't ride. And the trains became camping grounds for people who needed to sleep. Literally, early in the morning, I would board the train and see people zonked out, with pillows, blankets, the whole bit.
Then a campaign began to clean up behavior aboard the transit system. Riders would need a destination, and fares were checked, and people were booted if they hadn't paid fares. So the vehicles themselves became quite sparse, and safer, and smelled better. But oh, the bus stops again. Everyone camped with impunity at the bus stops, and for paying passengers, it was intimidating just to beg for one place to sit down.
The transit system is undeniably safe. I am sure that 10-year-olds can ride unaccompanied. Any violence or fights, those seem to be between gangstas or people who know one another already, not just random outbursts.
Thankfully, too, they open up centers where people can chill, and get drinks of water and use the bathroom, which is honestly preferable to riding buses on false pretenses.
That's not really anything to do with fare evasion. That's a global systemic problem. That's the entire system being completely retarded, for political reasons ("look, we're solving homelessness")
Fare evasion on the trains here is child’s play. It’s on the honor system and so if a fare inspector pops you, worst case you’re disembarking at the next station.
In 18 years, I’ve literally never ever seen an inspector giving a stiffer penalty than that!
Genuinely curious here: is this born out across all geographies? Japan's fare enforcement for instance vs western Europe and resultant behavior?
some culture as just better than others
Why?
You must be privileged since you never experience it in real life
I feel the question was about transit fare observance relative to anti-social behavior. Not about culture overall. At least not substantially
social is a complex topic and could not be wathered down into 1 aspect
Can you say why?
I would be downvoted and reported if I speak
Maybe that's a sign you're wrong?
so pointing the truth is wrong ?????
> If you don’t have public transportation that I feel safe having a 10-year-old ride on unaccompanied by an adult then you do not have public transportation. You have a very expensive drug addict shelter on wheels/rails.
What an escalation. If I don’t feel safe having a 10 year old drive a car is that just a drug addict shelter on wheels?
Public transit should be worth the (inexpensive) cost of a ticket. The money used to make fares free should instead be spent on improving the quality of service. Better service attracts more riders, bringing in more ticket revenue, enabling further service improvements, and so on. It produces a positive flywheel effect that benefits current passengers, new passengers, and even drivers!
Free transit is a downward cycle, where increased ridership just increases costs, creating a negative flywheel.
Counterexample: Public transport throughout Luxembourg (the entire country, not just the capital city) is free. As in beer. Clean, safe, and reliable, too.
The positive "flywheel effect" where transport connectivity enables network effects does exist, but it does not follow that free public transport leads to negative effects.
Fares cover 40 per cent of the subway operating budget. It seems necessary revenue.
The 17 year old dodging fares becomes the 34 year old doing the same.
The percentage of fare dodgers who aren't pieces of shit in other parts of their life is zero.
The percentage of people who aren't pieces of shit in at least one part of their life is zero.
Private Jet rides should be free
They are. You just gotta obtain the jet, the fuel and the pilot.