US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5389

On December 18 2025 02:27 oBlade wrote:

You are coupling things that need to be decoupled.

What you want is radical car size standards and that's not the job of emissions standards.

Thinking trucks are too big because their grills are too big, they're too high, and they don't fit well on city streets, can be dealt with in a Vehicle Sizing Act. It's definitely not the job of Ford to randomly want to make people in the US want Fiestas more than F-150s because it's some progressive urban planning and road safety policy.

Using emissions standards to, say, make certain pickups de facto unmanufacturable would be sidestepping the law and legislating via regulation. The point of emissions standards is make emissions better, which they have. Unfortunately, because they were designed by people who are not as smart as you think, the gains perhaps aren't as good, paradoxically, as if smaller vehicles were allowed to have more emissions than they are.

Someone wants to determine how big cars than be, it's different than how much CO2 cars should emit per size. Some people might draw the line at pickups. Some at SUVs. Some at full-size sedans. Some at mid-size. Some at compacts. Some people's idea of greener transportation could be we should all be driving golf carts. Which is legitimately less CO2 than now. You could also tax by size. Tax by emissions.

If companies' cars aren't getting smaller, or their cars aren't getting smaller enough, that doesn't mean they are gaming the system. It's just that was never the point. They don't need backdoors and loopholes to find ways to sell big cars. The entire system of tying emissions to footprint alone, inherently results in that. Perhaps readers outside the world of cars are getting confused by the many hats the word "footprint" wears? This doesn't mean CO2 footprint. It's the area of the shadow of the car at noon. The 2D size of the car. That's the base of regulation.

There are other ways to regulate poorly that could also have unintended consequences. But blaming car manufacturers for making bigger cars in a regulatory framework that favors bigger cars in certain cases.. It's like blaming a coconut for falling on your head. The rational approach would've been don't stand under a palm tree.

Only other emissions comment is I think catalytic converter harvesting should be a death penalty terrorism offense.


You have no idea what you're talking about at this point.

Individual vehicle models are not regulated in the US.

There is no reason F-350s from 2024 couldn't emit more CO2 than F-350s from 2016 even with the exact same footprint and engine displacement as long as Ford on balance meets emission standards among all their pickups.

You would have been exposed to that information by having read my earlier post rather than just clicking post.

You said companies made huge expensive vehicles instead of figuring out how to make theirs better. You can't simultaneously keep shitting on these companies and then not have a single demonstrable case of them getting away with something bad. Literally name the model or lines that aren't getting better. I asked because I was interested. And interested in an actual tangible case not theorycrafting about pizza analogies that people don't understand either. While I've tracked some data I haven't perused thousands of vehicle stats myself. So otherwise if it turns out the huge-ass death trucks that Europe doesn't need are also just improving emissions across the board, I'm going to put my pitchfork away and take a nap after another false alarm.

On December 18 2025 06:34 LightSpectra wrote:
The only way Trump wins a third term at this trajectory is if there's a pandemic of brain worms that is exclusively fatal for people with above-room-temperature IQs.

On December 18 2025 17:10 Acrofales wrote:

I find it amusing that you think Trump would care about a fair election. His team will have much better preparation than in 2020. He has shown that you can go full brown shirt on Congress and he'll just pardon you for it. And he has shown he is more brazen in everything in his second term. If he wants a third term, he won't rely on fair elections to get it.

And it'll be up to individual states, or popular revolt, to stop him. The Republicans have been systematically removing the guardrails, and most of all people, that stopped Georgia from ignoring the popular vote in 2020, so I have little hope for the states. And Trump is already practicing and preparing the national guard for dealing with a popular revolt... and Americans have reacted with a shrug.

On December 18 2025 23:39 LightSpectra wrote:


I was told the 2025 elections would definitely be canceled, and before that, we'd be under martial law already, and before that, all of the Democrats would have already been shipped to Guantanamo. When are we going to stop with the brainless dooming and accept that Trump isn't omnipotent, he's a scared, fragile old man who knows everyone else knows he's a pedophile?

On December 19 2025 00:25 LightSpectra wrote:
For which case? Other than the fraud charges, he outlasted all of his indictments by getting re-elected before they went to jury. If the implication is that the trials should've been expedited, I would say that judges refusing to do that because they're obsessively trying to appear nonpartisan was vastly over-estimating the consequences of not doing so, rather than under-estimating Trump as an individual.

On December 18 2025 23:59 LightSpectra wrote:
Yes, and he tried to cheat and overturn the 2020 election as well, and it didn't work. Now he's even more decrepit and his underlings are even more stupid. They literally can't even get a valid indictment against their political enemies because they have no idea what they're doing.

I'm not saying there's no legitimate threat and not to take it seriously, I'm saying half the power that authoritarians have come from people overestimating them. Trump is a living Potemkin village and should be treated as such. His own supporters are calling him TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) behind his back.