I think if there was a misunderstanding, it was that my intent was to get that person to tell me that US commutes were universally too long for this car to viable because that argument is always given as though every single person lives rurally.

I’m fully aware that a lot of people are in a shitty situation but I also know that a LOT of people aren’t. I’ve lived in both those kinds of places and can comfortably say that most people massively overestimate their needs or don’t buy with their brains. People don’t need a “back-up” ICE car, that would be a lot of extra up-front, maintenance, and insurance cost when they could just rent something very easily. Lots of people use cars in Montréal, for example, but they use car-share services because it’s infinitely better and easier. I only keep my personal vehicle because it’s a sportscar so it doubles as hobby and I still don’t drive it because the metro is objectively better the overwhelming majority of my trips.

Anyway, I understand that I maybe wasn’t super clear in the intent of my original question, on purpose or otherwise, so I get why you responded as you did.

I sympathize, but a LOT of people don’t suffer from that in the US or Canada. How many cars in NYC alone could easily be replaced by these things? How many cars all over New England? And if they need to go super far there are options/charging stations exist and people have done EV road trips.

It gives me the energy of the people who spend $70k on a truck claiming that they need it to help someone move when they coulda spent $25k on a normal car and rented a U-haul for under $100. We don’t need to buy all these things for the worst case scenario unless we are actually going to regularly find ourselves there.

Even when I live in the suburban sprawl of Ottawa the only reason any trip would be more than 30km was because I’m actually from a village outside of it/right on the edge. Here in Montréal a commute someone would consider to be far would be 11km. Hell, when I go back home that’s only 170km so on a full charge I’d be fine even for that.

The only reason a commute would be more than 30km in North America is if you lived in a place with exceptionally poor planning(common, but not the only option). Inside most any city a car with a 200km range would get you around so easily, and while some guy in Montana might potentially struggle there’d still be a massive customer base on the continent for these vehicles.

Why? How long is a commute in the US? In Canada even a long commute that isn’t some special circumstance would be ~30km and this thing has lots of range for that.

What do you think laws are? Even in the best of societies they are based on that specific society’s idea of morality. They are still important and they definitely should apply universally, but when they cease to function they lose their worth. That website needed to be taken down, and not getting removed by the government left a citizen to need to bring that balance back.

You might not enjoy what it looks like, but if you truly seek balance then it’s what you’re asking for.

Look, I am aware of the dangers of vigilantism but I’m struggling to see why you’re so dead-set on this. There is basically no movement from those in power to actually curb these people and that’s where I start to care a whole lot less. Yes it’s still important to consider somewhere in there but hey, if the German government wasn’t doing anything about it then I guess that means they’ve passed on the opportunity.

At some point the scales will not balance well and you need to be ok with that. There is no paradox of intolerance, for example, because tolerance is itself part of a social contract that bigots broke all on their own and once that’s out the window they do not get to reap the benefits of it. Social contracts aren’t easy math but they do make sense.

This isn’t blowing up a furry website because someone thinks that’s weird. White supremacy is an incredibly dangerous ideology that has no place in whatever better society we claim to be aiming for. No one killed them for it, either. White supremacy built a website and a better person removed that website the same way one might paint over a swastika but leave the nice mural.

I call it self-defense, honestly.

It’s wild considering one the first things people did with LLMs was that lawyers had it do their work for them and they showed up to court with documents that were partially made up. Literally stuff within the law sphere and these guys still couldn’t learn from the mistakes of others.

AI is so fucking stupid.