XCOM A-Team in theory: They're the best, they can solve any problem.

XCOM A-Team in practice: It's March and we just spotted a Snakeman on this terror mission so our soldiers will spend their remaining time units running back to the Skyranger while screaming like little girls.

Mind you, to apply for a minimum wage job at my company the applicant has to fill out several forms and then submit the exact same information as a PDF file along with a cover letter that will be run through an LLM detector (data mismatches or possibly LLM-written cover letters will be an instant fail) followed by an LLM that determines whether the applicant is worth my HR department's time. If they pass they will have three video interviews, the first of which will be with my company's AI avatar.

If they pass those and do well on a little take-home test that just happens to be identical to the work they'll be doing for me, they're invited to an unpaid six-month full-time WorkPrenticeship™ where they get the opportunity to prove they can consistently perform well beyond the limits of their job description. They don't even have to pay for that privilege, which goes to show that my company likes to go that extra mile for our employees. If they do that and we don't happen to have a silent hiring freeze they get to sign the hiring contract, an industry-wide non-compete agreement, and a contract stating that they will never join a union and will actively report any instance of union building to management.

From then on they get to enjoy all the perks my company has to offer to non-executive workers such as coming to a beautiful office building every day, a salary competitive with other entry-level jobs like the hospitality industry, up to five (5) vacation or sick days, and the chance to work with exciting new artificial intelligence tools that may soon render entry-level drudge work obsolete.

"Complex" doesn't mean "balanced". Israel has always pulled underhanded shit like extending its de facto borders by means of "settlements". The Hamas/PLO fight also didn't happen without its involvement. But there have also been factors like the involvement of foreign powers, German guilt, the similarity between Zionism and early Nazi deportation plans, and so on.

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has been a mess from the very beginning and it's understandable that people were reluctant to get involved. Of course these days most of that complexity doesn't matter and not taking a stand is a luxury we shouldn't be able to afford.

(I'm saying "shouldn't be able to" because honestly we routinely ignore genocides; this one just happens to be particularly hard to ignore because Israel is a spotlight hog with huge diplomatic influence.)

A couple years ago it was complex. The complexity just stopped mattering once Israel turned the conflict into a war of annihilation.

Admittedly, those are already handled by something else where I live: A regular class B license only lets you drive vehicles with a max weight of up to 3.5 metric tons; everything beyond that requires some kind of appeal l special license and those cost a couple thousand bucks a pop and have additional strings attached. Not something you get casually.

So I would handle commercial vehicles like freight trucks, buses, tractors etc. differently from regular cars. The use case there is usually that someone has a specific professional need for such a heavy vehicle and not that they want to drive their kids to soccer practice in an Actros.

If your country doesn't have truck licenses and random jackasses do drive around in semi trucks for fun you can just go with a tiered approach. I'll use the European definitions of vehicle classes here; adapt as necessary.

Commercial vehicles get taxed by maximum weight. That includes everything designed to pull a semi-trailer, tractors, self-driving farming equipment, everything capable of seating more than eight people, and everything with a max load above 3.5 tons.

Personal vehicles (ie. everything that don't match the above criteria) get taxed by empty weight.

So if someone decides they want to drive around in a Peterbilt with no trailer attached they still get taxed as if they were hauling heavy loads all day because that's what semi trucks usually do. But someone in a regular car gets taxed as if their car was mostly empty because that's usually the case there.

Kann nicht einfach Toyota mit einem Monitorhersteller fusionieren und dann Modellnamen wie "bZ4X3261UHSCP-W" machen? Nicht zu verwechseln mit dem bZ4X3261UISCP-W, der das äquivalente Modell ein Jahr später ist, aber völlig andere Komponenten verbaut hat, und dem bZ4X3261UHSCN-W, den es exklusiv bei einem spezifischen Elektrohändler in den USA zu kaufen gibt.

Perhaps this supposed pizza is penance for that.

For the record, as a German I do remember the lessons we learned from our grisly past: That genocide is evil and that it's very easy for a country to sink into utter barbarism. I wish we could take the principled stand we owe to our past victims and condemn Israel for its actions.

Unfortunately, that's just what the German people learned. German politicians apparently learned from our past that our mistake was to genocide the wrong people and to lose the war.

That assumes uniform marked parking spots. A lot of cities make heavy use of roadside parking where your car takes up as much space as it's long plus what's needed to be able to pull out. With roadside parking there's a big difference between a 3 meter ultracompact and a 5 meter SUV. Likewise, wider cars might take up space on the road and/or the sidewalk.

Even with marked parking spots long cars may exceed the length of a parking spot that was perfectly adequate when it was designed. I have something like that near me. There are parking spots perpendicular to a road and long cars routinely obstruct the sidewalk because otherwise they'd be obstructing the road.

I'm all in favor of having way fewer cars around in general but I also want the cars that are there to coexist better with everyone else.

I think vehicle taxes should be proportional to vehicle footprint and empty weight.

Footprint because larger cars need more parking space, which is generally at a premium in cities. I get that many people need a car but we really don't need people to fight over where to cram their giant SUVs when they usually need to move one or two people and very little cargo.

Empty weight because most cars are nowhere near fully loaded most of the time. And if you spend 99% of your time driving around with one or two people plus maybe a half dozen kilos of cargo there's a big difference in road wear between a car that weighs one ton versus one that weighs two.

Wanna pay less car tax? Get yourself a kei car. Wanna drive around in a battleship with wheels? Pay up for the road wear and space you take up.

If you think that's too onerous for people in rural areas who actually do move stuff regularly you can introduce a truck rebate for vehicles registered in rural areas. (Note: This assumes a system where the car has to be registered where the owner lives.)

You don't need that many people to have cafés with outside seating. Basically speaking, if your town is big enough to have a pedestrian zone it's big enough to have those. Heck, my hometown lacks a café or a pedestrian zone but does have a bakery with outside seating and it's rural enough that you can smell the pig stables from any point in town.

It's more a question of whether you're willing to dedicate space for people to be outside (rather than just traveling from A to B) and whether people actually want to be outside. Culture matters a lot here. Where I'm from people will happily use outside seating right next to a busy arterial road because sitting outside when the weather is nice is seen as desirable.

As for urban vs. rural, a six-lane road practically screams "urban sprawl"; that's the kind of road generally associated with major population centers in Europe. I know that many municipalities in the States like to overbuild their car infrastructure to the point where you can walk nowhere and then wonder why there's so much traffic. But from a European perspective that very much looks like a commercial zone on the outskirts of a big city.

One factor is that your brain absolutely doesn't care about long-term consequences when it believes it's fighting for your immediate survival (or that of someone sufficiently important to you like your child) so it completely ignores all the warning signs that normally keep you from overtaxing yourself. You need 100% performance right now, no matter if you end up tearing a muscle or breaking your own bones.