You can get all kinds of small EVs in the UK at least: Mini, Renault 5, Fiat Panda, among others, as well as the relatively shitty Vauxhall Corsa. Toyota made a bet on hydrogen engines instead of EVs, so that electric Yaris might take a while to materialize.

Forget about the housing. If the cost of personal-car commuting were to skyrocket, people would naturally gravitate to be near transit hubs.

Cyclists will be thankful that they’re being killed by electric SUVs, not petrol SUVs.

I’m also for a usage based tax, after x Liters of fuel you pay more taxes (on a yearly basis)

That’d require a tachygraph or intrusive surveillance of road use. Taxing vehicle dimensions and weight is much simple.

A large percentage of microplastics come from car tyres.

Not all EVs are bloated SUVs.

Road damage goes up proportionally to the 4th power of vehicle weight: double the weight, 16 times the damage. Vehicle tax should include that as a component. That also indicates that we massively subsidise the use of huge lorries to transport goods.

Vehicle tax should be doubled for any such monstrosity. They also block visibility on the roads and are a hazard to cyclists and pedestrians.

I love to wish it on my worst enemies.

That entirely depends on who deeply they’ve locked themselves into a single-vendor set of services. If they used an abstraction tool to hide vendor-specific implementation detail, and were moderately smart, it’d take little besides minor config changes, redeployment and some regression testing.

Source: I’ve done it.

Or, you know, do two things at once. It’s not uneard of for a huge governmental entity to be able to do that. And it’s stupid to repaint the ceiling when you have a leaky roof.

Most countries have prison labor.

Don’t take that out on chinese people, take it out on your owners and masters.

As if the Chinese people don’t have owners and masters.

Forcing you to use a service when you have bought an unrelated service is anticompetitive. For example, bundling a particular browser with an OS, or forcing you to use a vendor’s store because you’ve bought a vendor’s product.

some of them will hesitate to mistreat a Christian

I don’t believe that. They don’t regard non-fundies as being Christians.

I think the starting assumption in any accident investigation should be that it’s the driver’s fault. That’d encourage appropriate caution. But it’s undeniable that some cyclists (and pedestrians) are suicidally reckless.

To a significant extent, you can design away stupid. Look at the concept of poka-yoke (mistake-proofing) in manufacturing processes: arranging things in a way that minimizes the possibility of common errors. And note that its inventor originally called it baka-yoke (idiot-proofing) but that bluntness rocked the boat a bit too much.

Having separate paths for bikes and motor vehicles, and appropriately controlled intersections to take that into account, is a proven life-saver.

Or demand that all bike routes are separate from traffic, not just a line painted to force cyclists into the door zone.

Google is today’s IBM.

By that measure shouldn’t Disney be considered a Tech company too? Or I guess banks and insurance companies.

Yeah, in the same way that every company that uses a phone is a phone company.

The age of consent in many developed countries is 16.