Watch the Not Just Bikes video, if you have the time and interest. The short answer is: yes. The trucks are enormous because they carry all the equipment for any sort of emergency, so they send the big trucks to every call. Not every fire station has an ambulance unit, so the trucks can get to many locations more quickly.

It’s ridiculous.

Why would they want to be the target of a bukkake circlejerk?

Here in 'Murrica, they send something like in the second photo when grandma falls in the bathroom.

Yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. The truck in the first photo is smaller than the trucks my city fire department has. There’s a retirement community not far from where I live, and they send a ladder truck for medical emergencies there several times a week. I’m not really sure what use 4,000 liters of water would be when somebody is having a stroke.

Think of it like chemotherapy, when you have to invest poison in order to get better.

That last but is almost NMEA 2000, which standardizes exactly that kind of information, but in boats. It’s old enough that they based it on CANbus, but there are many repeater products to add IP devices (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) to the network.

ETA: By which I mean to say, plenty of designs already exist in the marine market which could be used to bridge a car’s CANbus to consumer devices, if they wanted to.

A lot of people do, it just got me in this case because the meaning of break lined up with the action of turning onto county roads, so I thought it was some special thing.

Oh, I was thinking of the definition of break, “a noticeable change in direction,” not brake, “to slow or stop by or as if by a brake.” Got it!

They break harder? I’m not familiar with this term, is it a regional thing?

That would explain my first experience driving in Massachusetts. We came down from New Hampshire to pick up a family member at Logan. At one point, I got onto the freeway from an entrance ramp on the right, into stop-and-go traffic, with about 1/4 mile to the left exit ramp I needed to take to the airport. I put on my signal; immediately somebody let me merge. Signal again; immediate merge into the middle lane. Signal and merge into the left lane, again right away. I’d heard about Massholes, so this was perplexing.

Now I understand: They were dazed and confused by the strange, blinking light!

And, eliminate Euclidean zoning in the U.S., so that people can live near where they work, or work near where they live. (Not all of us can do it, or like working from home.)

This is my plan to colonize Mars: Send a billionaire. As a self-made man, he won’t need a huge team of workers and costly infrastructure support to build a successful business.

The assessed value of a property is only indirectly related to the property tax that the owner pays. Municipalities multiply the assessed value of a property by the mill rate to calculate the taxes. They set the mill rate essentially by dividing their budgetary revenue needs by the total assessed value of all properties in the municipality. If my assessment goes way up (say, I put an addition on my house), then my taxes go up. But if everybody’s assessment goes up proportionally, then my taxes don’t change, because the mill rate will drop.

The latter is the situation in those ski-resort towns. It means that property owners suddenly have a much-higher net worth, but doesn’t necessarily mean they’re paying more in taxes. It only means that if the rich people moving in demand more and better municipal services, and raise spending.

On the other hand, look at the perverse incentive built into the current system: Landlords can reduce their taxes by letting their properties decay (lowering their assessed value); or at least, the system disincentivizes improvements which raise the assessed value. In a popular ski-resort town, or college town like mine, we get slumlords, because the vacancy rate is so low that they know that they can get tenants even in run-down units.

So they wouldn’t be able to afford their taxes with a LVT, but they can’t afford their taxes under the current property tax regime (in which land value is also a factor). I don’t see how this is an argument against LVT.

But, zooming out, is it beneficial to society to have empty-nesters, and elderly single people, living in 3- or 4-bedroom houses when there’s a critical housing shortage for young families? Is it even good for them to live in a big house, when a nearby, smaller dwelling that’s cheaper, and easier to clean and keep up? The problem in the United States is that those smaller dwelling units don’t exist at all in most neighborhoods, and about the only option is to move to an “independent living” facility on the edge of town, away from family an neighbors, for $3,000 a month.

It could be a win-win: Elderly owners of high-value land could realize the cash value that’s currently locked up in their houses, while the city could benefit by intensified development of that same land, increasing nearby land values even more. We need to change the zoning code to allow building that missing-middle housing in the same neighborhoods, but if we did that, a land-value tax would help incentivize its construction.

This comment neatly summarizes centrist Democrats to me. “We know that we need to do this to win, but don’t do it because we might not win.” Just like the arguments that LGBTQ groups shouldn’t have been pushing for equality 20 years ago, because it would alienate voters and harm Democrats.

Y’know, sometimes voters respect a principled stand, and the courage to push for what’s right.

You’ve just described all of human culture.

Thank goodness the UN and the World Economic Forum have started talking about replacing GDP with a measure of economic activity that takes human well-being into account. That was one of the points at the Summit of the Future a could weeks ago. Better late than never.

May I point out that this effect is killing small towns and living-wage jobs? Before the car, there had to be stores and groceries and doctors’ practices, et cetera, in small towns. Those provided local jobs for people, and community. Now, people drive into the city, or to the regional Walmart, and the small towns are decaying, mired in crippling poverty, isolation, and the diseases of despair that we see today. So the car might offer “freedom” to load up on a large selection of cheap consumer goods, but at the cost of dignity, connection, and meaning.

(Walmart, by the way, can be seen as predatory, killing small business with prices they can’t match, but also, it is successful largely because it is so well-adapted to a car-based lifestyle. It’s not the cause, it’s an effect.)

I hear this argument often, but it perplexes me. Yeah, the US has large areas with little population density, but surprisingly, comparatively nobody lives there. The places with high population density have lots of people living there. We could have trains in places where people live, but for the most part, we don’t. Not even a single high-speed line to connect the Northeast Corridor, just the Acela. The Great Lakes region has higher population density than, and about the same size as, Spain, but Spain has a well-developed rail system.

It’s not really about population density.

Love it!

Gotta point out that, though, that most primates don’t eat a lot of bananas. The species that really seems to love bananas is homo sapiens. I worked at a grocery store for several years, and saw the sales numbers. Bananas are the biggest seller, and it’s not even close. They outsell whole categories of other products.

The boat in the old photo (from 1928, apparently) is casting a pretty good wake, and the man aboard is holding a tiller attached to a rudder. It’s impossible to tell for certain with the low-res image, but entirely likely that one of those shapes in the boat ahead of him is an inboard engine.