The way I've heard it from drivers, suvs gives you elevation to observe the traffic and the mass to make your bad behavior problem of the other side while you gain real numbers safety.
That's a pure negative sum game though. The elevation gives you only a relative improvement in visibility if other vehicles don't increase in elevation in response, at the cost of sightlines for other road users and especially pedestrians, unless they wear platform shoes.
The same of course goes with mass.
Usually this kind of negative-sum-prisoner's-dilemma incentive matrix is resolved by government intervention which changes the payoff structure.
Elevation doesn't have to be zero sum. My compact pickup (a class of vehicles that is barely manufactured anymore) is a little elevated and has an upright seating position, but it also provides good visibility for other street users. The space over the bed is clear (unless I'm carrying something big) and the rear and side windows are vertical and clear allowing vision through; the windshield is raked less than most other vehicles, so it's better for looking through.
Of course, as I mentioned, compact pickup trucks are basically dead in the US. You can get a four door car with a three food bed that is marketed as a small truck. If you want a single cab and a six foot bed, you have to buy a full size truck and those are usually taller and bigger and less efficient than a compact truck would be; it can do bigger truck things, but I only need little truck things.
Maybe the Bezos truck brings back small trucks to the US.
I was next to a GMC pickup on my bike the other day at a stoplight. When I stood up, the hood was roughly shoulder-height for me. They can easily make the hood at least a foot shorter (and probably more) and still fit everything under the hood, or even go with a cab-forward design.
The NGDV is dorky as hell. But I bet they're very effective for drivers.
I've got an old cabover passenger van, visibility for me is pretty good, but if you were next to it on a bike, you wouldn't be able to see over the hood cause there isn't one.
It's also pretty dorky, but it's got essentially a porsche engine, which makes it a rear engined mid-life crisis sports car. I have to run it at red line for 30+ seconds to get up to freeway speed...
Well, in the absence of government, it is pure profit for the suv driver and for the car manufacturer who sells higher margin product. And fuck the pedestrians and those in smaller cars.
In a couple years you won't have to bother with that. The device will connect to the ID chip embedded in your body when you're born. And this will be a one-time hard-wired coupling for that device when it is first turned on.
A bit of a tangent, but your worst case answer here is the culmination of all the secure boot and remote attestation concepts.
What would stop it is a combination of not being able to buy new hardware that will even boot the modified kernel, and not being able to get vintage hardware to connect to any public ISP etc. due to being unable to attest its validated boot chain information, signed by a required modern hardware OEM key.
So you would be stuck in some kind of underworld of vintage folks attempting mesh networking between themselves. Then, because of basic market forces/economics, there will be a dwindling amount of software that is able to run in such environments. It will become the esoteric realm of old-school hobbyists who don't need to run any commercial apps which require ABI/API features of the modern commercial OSs which require this boot chain of the modern commercial hardware, etc.
They might force the Linux kernel to add a value 'age' to the couple username/password. Although in Europe OSS is exempt from age verification obligation.
The same way it will affect the incoming mission to the center of the galaxy. The space cloud is much more related to the incoming SpaceX ipo than to any phenomena of the physical or computing universes. Thermodynamics says "no".
For a product that supposedly handles the most private bits of one's personal life, I would've expected much stronger wording in the privacy section. Instead, privacy and security are meshed up in one soup, there is no mention of internal access controls, and no promise that this info won't be shared under no shape or form or derivative beyond providing the functions necessary for the service. CCPA is mentioned but only for California residents. Generally, use at your own risk.
Unfortunately, useful idiot is a valid phenomena but much of what we observe in the US is disempowerment. The congress people believe that they don't have power outside the president's benevolence and hence does not assert their constitutional powers. The constitutional court is either partisan or outright corrupt and does not work as a corrective. The execution branch are ready to serve the president and not their assigned duties or the law. Many ordinary voters do not feel personal responsibility for acting, but prefer to rely on whoever promises them emotional validation instead of forming and empowering their communities. This is not a single thing, this is a combination of effects that influence and amplify each other.
Won't forget from one of the Pratchett's book, where the word "synergy" was called a whore. Don't have the english edition of Going Postal handy to find the exact quote, but it was a glorious rant against a CEO's interview in the newspaper.
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