I don’t think you’ve spent much time here if you think that “fuck cars” is being said without empathy. None of us think that nobody should be allowed to own a car and that there aren’t legitimate use cases. Just that the vast majority of cases are Not That and for how dangerous and inefficient they are, along with infrastructure that only considers the experience of people in cars, the extent that cars have taken over and define our lives (again, as non-single-mothers-of-seven) is ridiculous.

Also, station wagons used to exist. Mini vans still exist. You could transport this many kids and not have to drive a massive truck that’s likely to mow one of them down in the driveway before you even notice they’re unaccounted for. There are other “real solutions” for this person. In fact, that single mother would have a far more peaceful time transporting her family if the cars around her were both smaller in size and fewer in number. Our interests are aligned, you see.

Have you tried having some empathy for those that are strained by the financial burden of owning a car? Society should consider people that don’t want and shouldn’t need to own a car just as much as it considers people who do need to own a car. Go project your lack of “real empathy” somewhere else cause it’s definitely misplaced here.

Yeah but straight up I’m not getting out of bed in the morning in those temperatures

Sounds like you’re just as comfortable being a member of this passive society as anyone else you named, even if you took the long way around to the same conclusion.

cool. What are you doing to introduce it to others?

Does the amount really matter if the effect is the same?

If you had all the levers of wealth and power in the world, or if you as an individual had access to just one of them, wouldn’t you do your part to build this kind of passive society too? Otherwise you might have to worry about your access to these levers and therefore your power being usurped. There are many ways to manipulate a person to work against their own interests, which are almost entirely concentrated into the hands of the wealthy owning class.

This is a problem of class antagonism, not the complicity and/or ignorance of the individually powerless. As a class we have to rise beyond these antagonisms; their manipulation of us into a class that passively allows them to profit from our labor and pays no mind to their corruption; by teaching class consciousness to the other members of our class. That is just as much on you and I as it is on anyone else.

I mean. Empty promises for things to be paid for by somebody else are kind of his Thing. Walls, Tariffs. It makes perfect sense.

Don’t forget the heritage foundation wonks and oligarch-adjacent folks that debrief him and write all the orders for him to sign. I see the people directly in his administration having much more influential power than any foreign diplomat.

We already had bribery in politics, the media just doesn’t talk about it like they do with Trump and other particularly egregious ‘fall guys’ like Clarence Thomas.

There’s always the option that they believe he’s the antichrist and are just rapture accelerationists

tbh I think that’s kinda the point, it’s corporate doublespeak.

I tend to think society should be organized in a way that people don’t need therapy to cope with.

Yeah lol why would anybody pay inflated prices for a house if government housing was just as good. It’s not the government that’s your problem, it’s the owning class that makes the rules with a vested interest in making sure a) public resources don’t compete with private profit and b) workers have to keep working to survive (which also generates private profit)

Look at the public housing in singapore. Shit’s awesome. You’re telling me the wealthiest nation on the planet can’t pull that off? I call bullshit.

you really just work so you can pay your mortgage.

Of course. Why would we work so hard to keep jobs that most of us hate if we didn’t have mortgages and rent to pay? This is how the machine keeps itself turning. If only there was a motor that wasn’t so exploitative in nature…

Housing should not be a speculative asset in the first place. Houses are for living in- and before you tell me about how they are a valuable store of wealth, you shouldn’t need to do that either to get by. Your net worth and therefore your class standing should not be a factor in whether you can have access to the basics of life. That’s why it’s called capital-ism, because everything revolves around capital. It’s designed to self-perpetuate by exploiting the inequalities it produces. There are other ways of life, and they aren’t as pie-in-the-sky as they would seem. You just have to get out of the capitalist frame of mind to understand how they work and what exactly is holding us back from achieving them.

Where is your horse in the race? Is it really “yours” if all you do is collect a premium for having a piece of paper that says so while someone else does all the care, training, and maintenance for it? What a raw deal for that person…

Lmfao. We’re not talking about foreign manufacturers in the US, we’re talking about US manufacturers in foreign markets.

Well the larger trucks are exempt from the safety regulations is the reason it plays out that way. The spirit of the law I think is that they have a special use case and aren’t supposed to be the default vehicle someone would be driving. But it’s a loophole probably written in by the manufacturers themselves and that’s just how it was billed to whatever legislator that signed it.

I don’t know what physical reality you live in that the snub nose and lifted style vehicles on the roads today, not just limited to trucks, is going to “deflect” a pedestrian anywhere but directly into the pavement.

“built to sell in both markets” my ass!! American brands are virtually non-existent over there and better yet have completely discontinued any remotely normal sized vehicle that would “sell in both markets”!! If they were “built to sell in both markets” Trump wouldn’t be flirting with trade war just to somehow force our shitty inflated cars to sell in Europe. Beyond EU regulations, Europeans are harder to sell to at american prices because far more of them have the option not to own a car. Americans do not have that option!

Jesus christ you’re fucking delusional. Hey dumbass!! Capitalists don’t give a fuck about what you or any market or regulation wants, they care about making money!! If by some ‘supply and demand’ miracle that ends up being what you wanted in the first place, then it’s a happy accident. But most of the time, at a certain level of market saturation; they will just use their vast amounts of wealth to convince you, by hook or by crook, that “what you want” is actually “what will make us the most money”. They are not the same thing, learn the fucking difference!!!

They’re “light” trucks under CAFE standards as opposed to real trucks like semis and utility trucks. If they were smaller I think they would be lumped in with all the other normal passenger vehicles.