SkepticalButOpenMinded

Of course I don’t mean that literally not a single small car is for sale. 🙄 Anyone who has done even the most cursory search knows that the market for small cars is extremely different in other parts of the world. When you’re misinterpreting my comments in such an uncharitable way, I don’t really see a point in continuing this discussion.

You want to reduce the size and impact of vehicles on roads you don’t do it by doubling the cost of all vehicles, period.

When did I ever say we should “double the cost of all vehicles”? What an insane way to argue with someone! You can’t just invent stupid positions and attribute them to your interlocutor.

I agree with your proposal. A road tax based on weight internalizes the externalities. It sounds like you think we disagree because you don’t know what an economic externality is. Instead of your glib reply, you could… look it up before replying.

How do you think people don’t already buy the cars they need with the money they have?

Because they don’t sell smaller cheaper cars here due to bad regulation. Most European/Asian cars look nothing like the big stupid SUVs here.

And that’s just not how economic externalities work. When you ignore them, these costs don’t just go away and make things “more affordable”. We all pay for it. In fact, costs falls especially on the poor, who disproportionally tend to use public transit instead of buying big shiny new trucks.

How do smaller and fewer cars raise the cost of living? And why is the thing that’s successful everywhere else in the world not a solution? Your comment makes no sense.

Car insurance only covers a small number of externalities. It does not cover tire particle pollution (tires are the number one source of microplastics in the world), air exhaust pollution, noise pollution, etc etc. Even if they never got into accidents, cars would remain one of the most hazardous things to our health. Cars are also the number one killer of children, by far, and insurance doesn’t bring them back to life.

Agreed that a road tax is a good start. But a road tax wouldn’t cover the fact that bigger cars cause MUCH more of all these harms than smaller cars, so externalities remain.

You might be right, but it would be a good motivator to have people pay the true cost of big heavy cars — including the negative externalities to health, safety, road wear, parking, and pollution. Drivers don't currently pay those costs, which means we essentially subsidize big heavy cars now. If we stopped doing that, Canadians would act more like consumers in the rest of the world.

Also, strong agree on fewer cars being the ideal solution. In fact, fewer cars is a mathematical necessity. We can't electrify ourselves out of terrible land use, e.g. the oceans of parking lots, crumbling roads, and inefficient highways that contribute to carbon emissions and environmental degradation.

That’s a good point. I think one solution is smaller cars. For the past two decades, we’ve bought way more car than we need—everyone has huge SUVs and pick up trucks, despite the fact that families are smaller than ever and fewer people carpool than in the past. That’s because big cars are subsidized with relaxed regulations.

The other solution is fewer cars. We’ll always need cars, but there’s lots of low hanging fruit to improve our mediocre public transportation and lack of mixed zoning.

Big oof, I had no idea that critics liked that. 91% on RT! OK, that might be the first major exception I’ve come across.

The critic rating is better than the audience rating. I’ve never seen a film with a high critic rating that didn’t have something worthwhile about it. But I’ve seen a lot of audience hits that were garbage.

For the average person, there is less inequality (Gini coefficient has gone down), high employment, and historic wage increases. Not saying there aren’t still lots of problems, but the economy is hands down better under Biden.

Having lived there for a few years, I don’t think this describes Japanese child raising culture at all. I’m not sure how you can infer so much about the culture based on a single visit to Japan without any ability to speak the language. You may have just had culture shock.

I think saying “good” about the death of so many Russian soldiers has a hint of “fuck Russians” in it. That loss of life is senseless and tragic, not good.

Why do you say that media bias fact check is baseless propaganda?

edit: One of the most left leaning but highly factual news sites I go to is Fair.org. This site is almost always against the major mainstream media consensus, but backs up its claims with lots of high quality reasoning and evidence. MBFC rate it left-center and high factual reporting.

It gives Jacobin, probably one of the biggest left leaning news sites in the US, a left leaning and high factual reporting score. Jacobin calls themselves left leaning, of course. For anyone who knows history, it's right in their name. So what's the problem there?

Meanwhile, it gives all the major right wing news sites poor ratings. Fox News, Breitbart, Epoch times, etc. get an extreme right and Mixed factual reporting score.

So I understand why you would besmirch MBFC if you're some rightwinger. But, from the left, I don't understand. Reality has a left leaning bias.