A lot of formerly bad neighborhoods are turning, and I think that’s mostly due to gentrification, not because the idea behind the neighborhood (in this case Bijlmer) was somehow belatedly good…

The idea of the Bijlmer and how it was presented sounded great on paper, but neighborhoods that are exclusively these cheap stacked blocks still mostly attract people on the bottom of the economic ladder and thusly also a relatively large amount of people that will misbehave in various ways. I don´t think culture is relevant here.

This status quo changes now because apartments evidently go for 300 to 400k “because Amsterdam” and the people they originally built those blocks for can´t afford that in a million years.

The Netherlands more or less does this, so i’m not sure this take is that extremist.

But the Netherlands also doesn’t have nearly as much of a car culture, with infrastructure that favors alternatives like public transport, cycling and walking. And puts large emphasis on separating these different kinds of commuters from each other as much as possible.

This is also why it’s relatively safe cycle around routinely without any kind of protective gear. Something that most (especially overseas) tourists I meet think is wild.

Leveraging people’s property to trash their privacy and serve them ads is really a good way to get me to avoid an entire brand for everything.

Your not towing anything with the smaller transits.

Even the smaller vans can tow 1.5t. I’ll concede it’s a lot less then a pickup can tow but this is not “nothing” and plenty practical for lots of use cases you’d have in any city.

And they suck in winter.

This is the Netherlands, not the Yukon. We don’t have 5 foot deep snow on the roads in the Winter. In fact it’s been years since we had any kind of snow at all. We just have a mild chill and mostly just rain.

The off-road/awd capability’s of any vehicle are almost entirely irrelevant in the Netherlands for the overwhelming majority of people.

For some reason people expect things from Bluesky but people forget Bluesky is basicly just new Twitter. There’s really no reason to expect “better” from this new platform.

Even though mom and pop stores are mostly dead, Amazon’s market share is thankfully still relatively contained where I live. So it’s still simply a matter of just picking a different “big box store” to order your things from.

Teslas are notoriously expensive to repair after a collision, and insurance companies often salvage them because of this.

Yeah, if you have people replace whole battery packs over a broken coolant fitting, things blow up quick. Hooray for corporate greed.

A transit or sprinter makes much more sense for commercial use in the vast majority of professions as the cargo space to vehicle ratio is much higher and you can lock the whole thing up.

The only profession so far I’ve seen where they make some kind of sense is for landscapers, and even that’s debatable considering you can get sprinters with an open bed that is much larger then what’s on these pickups.

This looks like Ram 1500 to me, there’s also the 2500 and 3500. I don’t know how much bigger they are in terms of size or percentage but they do differentiate mainly with things like payload capacity, so it follows they fill the caps between this and a full size transport truck.

But i’m pretty sure you can’t have those on a normal drivers license in the NL as their weight + payload capacity exceeds 3500 kilo’s.

Edit: If you really want to see an Avengers level joke, search for “Ford F-650 pickup” with your search engine of choice.

Imagine thinking tariffs are why these warships don’t sell in Europe.