Depends, If the car has a longitudinal engine layout it can be very easy to change an alternator belt, which is usually a single serpentine belt that runs all the engine accessories these days. If it's a lateral engine layout and there's barely enough room between the pulleys and the side of the engine bay to slip the belt through, it can be a lot more difficult but I wouldn't say impossible as a roadside repair.

Powertrain internals are where you get closer to roadside repairs being categorically impossible due to the need for specialized tools, fluid handling equipment (and fresh fluids) and a clean work environment. I'm sure someone's going to pipe in about giving an air-cooled VW Beetle a full engine rebuild on the roadside now :-)

AI is pretty useless so I don't have a use for it no matter how private it is.

Granting legal personhood to inanimate objects and imaginary concepts is a minefield of trouble and has already gone too far. We should remove legal personhood from corporations.

The VC system actually appears to be worse. China's trying supercritical CO2 as a working fluid and flying wind turbines while the West is in its second round within a decade of "make a small handful of people stupendously rich chasing a plainly stupid idea that makes most people's lives worse" (Currently AI, previously blockchain nonsense). And that's aside from the undercurrents of SaaS and uber-ization among other aspects of enshittification. We can only look on at China's gambles with envy.

Oooh interesting theory, we should make sure managers everywhere hear it :-)

Their fear isn't perfectly rational, they just look for a vehicle with lots of material to put distance between the cabin and the edges of the vehicle and ground.

I've never before this thread heard a person say that driving a large vehicle is fun. In my experience it's inoffensive at best when cruising the highway with lots of space, and a stressful annoyance when there isn't a lot of space and you have to deal with the awful visibility near the vehicle and huge turning radius. Dealership lots tend to be cramped spaces.

To me fast and agile cars are fun, and large vehicles tend to be the opposite of that.

Good points. This has been a productive discussion.

Sounds like a job for a wealth tax!

No that's not what I'm trying to do, I did mention shareholder dividends earlier. Much of the corporate profit has been routed through different income sources including investment-related ones, but this shouldn't be allowed to obscure the upward redistribution of pay that needs to be reversed no matter how complicated in might appear.

It's all there and my numbers are actually very conservative, this study found that there should be enough to double present-day incomes: https://time.com/5888024/50-tr...

s/expenditure and be/expenditure can be/g

Increasing wages only increases costs to employers if it increases their total expenditure. If they reallocate the money from elsewhere, like shareholder dividends and upper management pay, expenditure and be held steady.

Hello ownership class supervillain! FYI, normal people only fly "cattle class" and thus would be unaffected by this. As long as our societies are democratic, we will do our best to keep you from destroying our planet for your personal pleasure including whatever jollies you get from waterboarding volcanoes with gasoline.

See also, congestion charges. Reduce traffic by making it too expensive for the poors to drive where the traffic is!

The solution to flight emissions isn't to make flying an exclusive privilege for the rich again, it's to pressure businesses to pay workers more of the fruits of their own labor so they can afford carbon capture to offset the emissions produced during their flight. Workers should be making at least 40% more money right now for starters.

I know what fun is, and the inconvenience and ill handling of a huge ungainly vehicle isn't it.

Americans mostly want huge vehicles because they're afraid - of the consequences of a wreck. They want to be some distance from, and ideally "upstairs from" where the wreck happens, which is what drives the ridiculous safety arms race we've been trapped in since the '90s.