Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like
Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.
The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.
In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.
That is the problem.
Oh and the road infrastructure project is buying up resources other people could have used for literally anything else. With money they promise they'll be making from Wide Car sales any day now.
Okay so what I'm getting from the notes is that when you try to transplant some techbro nonsense into an offline equivalent, you have to be careful to avoid simply inventing something the Americans are already doing in real life
i've stood next to one, 5'3", its sheer presence genuinely fucking intimidates me. that thing should not be on the road.
This is also a problem in the US because
These cars don't fit into parking spaces and make pulling out in parking lots impossible
The weight of big cars is causing additional stress on roads and bridges
The number of big cars and trucks is directly linked to the number of children struck by cars because the drivers can't see over the hood!
These cars should be banned. They're not even useful for hauling because the truck bed space keeps shrinking.
...please don't be telling me there are Even Wider Cars that we aren't seeing in Europe? Because the humongousness of some of the cars people are trying and failing to cram into our parking garages here in Sweden already causes disasters, frankly.
Doomy, I am so sorry to tell you this, but Ford put this thing on the market last year.
And this is its even worse sibling from this year.
...well shit.
When I was a little girl growing up on a farm, my father had two trucks. The one with all of the tools in it was really easy for me to get in as a child. The larger one was much newer (at the time), and I had to climb into it, but I had to get something from it like last month and it was pretty easy to get into as an adult.
I am a very tall woman, like taller than most men. Several years ago, I was helping a relative move. I had difficulty getting into his truck because of how high off the ground it was. The floor of it was above my knees, I'm pretty sure.
My uncle replaced his truck a few years ago. The old one came up to my shoulder. The new one is high enough I can look straight through its windows.
I would say the growth has leveled out, but somebody earlier mentioned Ford's releasing even bigger trucks now, so I guess not.
These are unmodified trucks. There's an entire culture around making trucks even taller by, for the sake of simplicity, making the body higher compared to the tires, and usually also adding bigger tires but that's a much smaller change. This can go anywhere from moderately noticeable to obvious attempts to have street-legal monster trucks.
And yes, I said "street-legal". There's no law at the national level, so it varies from state-to-state what's allowed. In basically the entire southeastern quarter of America, this kind of thing is allowed. This shit actively kills people. Cars involved in wrecks with these have the bottom of trucks ramming through their windshields. They also are way more likely to flip because of how high their center of mass is while only being slightly wider than a regular car to compensate.
It's illegal to have LEDs on the underside of your car because those are associated with criminals and street racing and people with dark skin wait pretend we didn't say that last part aloud.
Lifted pickup trucks are legal because that's just good ol' boys having fun.
