bigschnitz

The guy who made it explicitly rejected a van for his purposes. Maybe we should let him decide how to do his job?

Your argument is the extreme minority who make this decision differently than everyone, exclusively limited to countries that have heavy government incentives to do so, being free to make an impractical choice somehow is rational because they are free to make a decision. Surely you can appreciate why I can't accept that as an argument for why that demonstrates it's a suitable vehicle for that purpose.

. . . very small niche of of tradesmen . . .How many niches does it take when, all together, they're no longer niche cases?

Most people would argue a majority. Even if we relax it to something more common like, at least a quarter of tradesmen in more than 2 developed countries, this example wouldn't qualify as more than niche. I mean, the actual hard to swallow fact is tradesmen almost definitely wouldn't prefer pickup trucks without the extreme tax advantages in the US/CAN biasing towards them, as is evidenced by countries where the government handouts aren't so generous.

That truck pictured would be better served with a van. Ladders and conduit on the roof, tools in the back. This is standard setup in the UK, UAE and Australia at least, I imagine for everywhere outside of North America.

Ah ok, I've only ever heard fifth wheeler be used to describe a camper. Hauling large trailers is something a pickup truck is better at than a van, but if that's the type of work you do surely the obvious 5T flatbed is the better option, no? I appreciate that you'll probably counter that the versatility for someone who only needs to do that occasionally and that is valid, but I hope you'll appreciate that we're now talking about a very small niche of of tradesmen in response to a comment I originally made making a generalization.

I felt it was obvious I was talking about tradesmen and workers doing work, with all the talk about toolboxes and having to walk into the tray (and given that what most truck owners like to pretend to be). For use as a work vehicle, doing work tasks for tradesmen, a van is far more practical.

Are you implying that construction workers who move around a lot need a gigantic camper when they move between jobs? Because I realize that yanks do tend to do that, though I'd argue that this is more a reflection of yankee culture than applicability for actual work.

they ride a bit lower while having a same or higher ceiling height

This is the line that gives away why they're unquestionably better if you actually need to use it for work.

These jackasses with a tray 1.5m off the ground clearly aren't regularly needing to get to their oversized toolbox at the back of the tray, because clambering in and out of that thing is an enormous pain in the ass.

This gets brought up so much because it clearly differentiates the people doing work from the people playing dress up.

This is the first result from Google. It's I guess ancient history now being it was the labor rights push to (probably) unintentionally discredit kevin07, but internal politics aside Conroy (famous for his opposition to adult rating for videogames) was for aong time a candidate for 'biggest piece of shit in Australian politics'. Stephen Conroy was the face of it, so search for him and firewall to your hearts content. The Alana and Madeline foundation were involved in some of the testing that damned the project, if I remember right (as if common sense hadn't already damned it with seconds of the sales pitch).

Theres a scale of influence, with a big difference between foolproof and entirely unenforceable.

In this case, it's effectively unenforceable, so what's the point in wasting time and effort drafting something that won't actually make any difference?

A few years ago the Australian government spent an enormous amount of money on a proposed firewall to protect the children. After years of development they were ready to pilot test their white elephant, and discovered that, on average, the Australian 12 year old could bypass it in ten minutes.

It's unlikely that the government could even enforce an obstacle as robust as the "are you 18+" checkbox that porn sites opt in to. This new law will not have any influence on under 16s online presence.

The first one where he was a drifter somewhere in the Pacific Northwest getting taunted by cops? I think you mean the 2nd or 3rd.

Part of the problem for the US is that such a huge amount of gdp is buried in the masses of beauracracy that makes up the US healthcare system, it's essentially acting (economically) as proxy government spending to prop up a failing economy. The average US citizen is so heavily propaganda'd into hating government run projects that the sensible economic stimulus (government infrastructure projects or public services) are well and truly off the table.

What this ultimately means is fixing healthcare isn't just breaking up the cartels, preventing price fixing and untangling the web of nonsense that makes up the US private system... unless you want to inspire a massive crash (which absolutely has real human cost), it also means redistributing government spending and implementing (unrelated) government run services and/or projects to keep all these people employed (which would also mean re-training and potentially relocating) - all of which needs to be done against the overwhelmingly loud voices screeching "government employee bad".

The court found him guilty, and then in a super sketchy, never before seen, closed door jury free appeal, a federal judge overturned it. Regardless, throughout Francis maintained support for Pell, including the period between his conviction and his incredibly sketchy appeal. There's no lense where I can accept anybody as moral, Catholic or otherwise, when they have publically supported a convicted abuser of children.

This is also only a a single example, there have been numerous cases of the vatican, under Francis, offering insultingly low settlements to silence victims based on their inability to afford to pursue what's fair (the average is $268,000). There's a clear pattern of the vatican, including during Francis' leadership, of shirking the victims of their organization. This suggests is what little progress they actually do (very publically) achieve is more about marketing than justice.

There are lots of ways the Pope behaves that make it seem like anything he's doing to address child rape by clergy is theatre.

Pope Francis stood by George Pell and even let him have his funeral at the vatican. Standing by someone who's been credibly accused of sexual assault of a child (and has definitely facilitated it by others) isn't, in my view, something that can be done in parallel with an honest and good faith attempt at fixing the problem. It looks even more shady if you look at the conditions of Pella conviction being overturned (definitely special treatment because of his connections).

Children should be raped, but not killed

-Pope Francis (probably)