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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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The London system exempts almost every vehicle made after 2006. That’s hardly crippling, almost nobody will pay.

If almost nobody will pay, then why waste all the money putting up cameras and whatnot?

Obviously they think they stand to make a profit on the enterprise, or they wouldn't.

That is not necessarily my impression of how the British government works.

That's silly. A trespassing fine will virtually never cover the cost of prosecuting the offence - but the point is not to turn a profit, it's to deter trespassing. Governments don't need to worry about turning a profit from law enforcement, they can just reach into your pocket and take what they want even when you've done nothing wrong.

The point is to boil the frog. They can't impose their climate goals all at once, that would piss off too many people. So they just slice off the oldest cars. Then they come back for the next oldest. And it ratchets up and up until we're magically living in the electric car utopia.

The London system exempts almost every vehicle made after 2006

The average vehicle age is 9 years (making the average vehicle on the road there a 2014 model), so the people who are still driving cars made in 2006 and earlier are also obviously poorer than average, since the 200,000+ km cars that are 20 years old are currently the only thing they can even afford (not that the shutdowns over the last 2 weeks weren't hardest on the poor to begin with, through the combination of banning the businesses they work at and directly causing consumer good prices to inflate through various means).

So it's a highly regressive tax by design, levied specifically against the people who can't pay it, for the explicit purpose of taxing their private transport away (and heavily enshittifying what they even can afford in the first place).

After all, nobody needs a high-capacity assault vehicle that can travel over 500km and recharges in 5 minutes. God forbid anyone ever want to spend the extra cash not to have to wait the extra time it takes for transit to get them anywhere, that's a privilege only environmentalists and bureaucrats should be able to afford.

For now it does -- do you think that this will be a static thing?

Already a fair number of people feel strongly enough about it to go after the cameras -- so some people are expecting to pay I guess? Both of my vehicles are pre-2006, and I'm making 6 figures -- are there no working poors in the LMA?

It's supposed to incentivise you changing your vehicles, so that the air becomes less horrible. I can understand poorer people being annoyed about ULEZ, but you can obviously afford to change your cars, so what are you actually upset about? I mean, would you say it's that you're concerned for the livelihoods of poorer vehicle users? Or is it a principle of liberty thing?

I am concerned about the governments of the world feeling that it is right and/or necessary to micromanage the activities of their citizens based on whatever hobbyhorse of the day is picked up by their mobs of faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats. Is the air in central london particularly bad? Are older cars actually causing this? Will the system have rolling standards eventually ratcheted up to include ICE vehicles in general?

I can understand poorer people being annoyed about ULEZ, but you can obviously afford to change your cars, so what are you actually upset about? I mean, would you say it's that you're concerned for the livelihoods of poorer vehicle users? Or is it a principle of liberty thing?

All of the above?

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