• EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      5 days ago

      Powered running boards.

      I think these should be illegal. If you need running boards to enter or exit your vehicle at all, the vehicle is too large to be on the roadways.

      In my area of Canada, these things are on most lifted or fat wheel pickups and SUVs which maybe make up 1 in 8 vehicles on the road.

      • Well omg.

        I mean it’s so ridiculously big. We used to have a farm truck when I was a kid, like one for hauling bales and stuff, and it didn’t require any special equipment to get into. It was still big as it was some old chevy and sort of ridiculous by local standards, also expensive to drive.

        These things are just insane, how can anyone afford to drive them at all. Why would anyone want to deal with parking that? How do you even use it for any hauling, because looks like the truckbed is just as high?

        I don’t get the usaian mindset at all. That thing would fit in 0 parking spaces where I am.

        • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          5 days ago

          So, a big part of this is that lots of Americans who have these fucking things get to deduct up to 100% of the cost of a heavy truck on their taxes, so long as the vehicle weighs over 6000 lbs. This is often called the G-Wagon Loophole.

          Also common near agricultural areas are farm plate trucks which are exempted from things like taxes and registration, and are allowed to use inexpensive/untaxed dyed Red Fuel on the road.

          They’re completely useless for any truck type tasks other than maybe towing, but statistics show that almost none of these vehicles ever tow anything between the date of manufacture and the date it eventually gets totalled out or crushed.

          It’s a way for business owners to get a free luxury vehicle, and almost every Hummer ever sold used this method.

            • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              5 days ago

              They’re also allowed to do this every single year, so tons of farmers just get a new truck yearly and you’ll see tons of kids driving to school in a 3 year old Sierra 3500 clad in like whale cock leather or some bullshit.

              These are the farmers that complain about being sooooo poor and how impossible it is to be a farmer. They’re almost universally sitting on like $5,000,000 in tractors and combines and luxury pickups, getting a free phone plan, and getting 250% subsidies on corn.

              “Ooooh but I’m a job creator and I grow your food!” Bro you farm ethanol corn and American Wagyu that’s $30/lb and exploit undocumented laborers while denying them a work visa, shut the fuck up.

              • GalaxyBrain [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                5 days ago

                Literally no one seems to understand that a business owner has fucking business assets that they can sell for a shitload of money should their smol business fail. They’d still be in a better position than the rest of us

                • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  4 days ago

                  The other thing is that farmers who are even remotely close to anything nice (mountains, lakes, small metropols, etc.) can just sell their land to developers, or develop it themselves.

                  Out where I’m at you constantly see old farmland being turned into tract homes with a 15 acre cutout in the middle where the retired farmer builds a $10M mansion.

              • That part is completely similar to Finland then.

                There is a smol bean poor farmer in my extended family and they have been exploiting eastern european labor since the 90s, drive new teslas and basically own the entire town around them at this point, complaining every single day about the hardship. Saw the bank balance of one of them once as a kid, that was one of the moments of my early radicalization.

                • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                  5 days ago

                  It’s an unbelievably privileged lifestyle on the back of unbelievable exploitation, and in North America the barrier to entry is also “did your family steal native land or own slaves?”

                  Not that I think people should try to become one of these landowner ghouls, but it’s just impossible to do any sort of farming that would be less exploitative.

      • I was going to ironically disagree and post counterpoint: image of a patent for dogs riding on car sideboards because their old timey owners don’t want to let them in their cars which is kinda cruel but also the dogs probably loved it at the speeds they were going back then but now search is so enshittified that I can’t find it.

        Please enjoy this unrelated image I found of a dog powered car: