Yes. But then their car will be towed, and they will have to go through the hassle of recovering it and pay a big fine. The point is to make owning a full size pickup truck extremely impractical to discourage people from making them popular here.
The weight limit in most of Europe is 44 tonnes. The weight limit for B class license holders is 3500 kg. A Ford F-150 weighs between 1800 kg for the smallest regular cab to 3127 kg for the heaviest electric one. This is no heavier than the larger European SUVs. (For example, the Mercedes G class weighs between 2485 and 3085 kg.) A regular cab F-150 is actually lighter than most European executive cars. And even if you spec it as a super crew with a V8, it’ll still be lighter than the heavier BMW 5 series cats.
I want to be clear that I think this is very unfortunate. And for ideological reasons, I wouldn’t buy an American car. But this is not a problem that is limited to American manufacturers.
They are not heavy enough for that. The B class license lets you drive cars that weigh up to 3500 kg. Normal American pickup trucks weigh 3000 kg at most. I think the EU is even planning to increase the weight allowance, so pensioners can drive around in RVs without getting a C1 license.
You could charge higher tolls for cars above 2000 or even 1500 kg, you could make parking spots that won’t fit almost six meter long pickup trucks, and you could implement higher registration costs for heavy vehicles. There’s a lot of things you can do. But the biggest issue is in my opinion cultural. Most people are size queens. They want everything to be as big as possible. Even their cars.
They aren’t illegal when they get type approval. Ford even sells the F-150 Lightning officially where I live.
This reminds me of that South Park episode, where Randy creates a formula for adjusted penis length, that shows that his dick is actually big. This formula just shows that Europeans live longer than Americans. You can weigh the variables differently and suddenly living standards are better in the US.
I can’t afford a house or a car, so I’d appreciate the higher wages and lower prices of the US.
The author claims that Norway is the only Nordic country that isn’t in the EU. This is false. Iceland might be small, but it’s still a country.
In the current economic climate an EU membership seems appealing, but I’m not sure it’s the right choice in the medium-term. Norway has a very different, natural-resource heavy economy than the rest of the EU, and monetary policy would not alway align. I also think it’s important to try to maintain control over fisheries to a larger degree than the EU allows, and I already think the country is making too many concessions in this area.
Like a lot of European countries, Norway is a member of NATO. Even though the US can’t be relied upon anymore, I would still consider it a more credible defensive alliance than the EU. That’s why Finland and Sweden joined last year.
The author says that “…the EU [is] the only organisation for collective European agency in world affairs, and there is safety in numbers.” But the EU does not agree on anything. A third of the European parliament consists of Eurosceptics, and because of internal disagreements between member states, any shared foreign policy ends up completely milquetoast.
No other Scandinavian country has a wealth tax. In the EU, Spain is the only country that officially has a wealth tax. In Spain it only kicks in if your assets are worth more than 3 million Euro (around 35 million NOK). In Norway, you start paying a yearly 1% wealth tax on all your assets, once your net worth reaches 140k Euro.
I am working class. I make basically an average wage here in Norway and I am strongly opposed to the wealth tax in its current form. The retirement age is raised constantly. (It’s been raised to 72 years starting next year for full benefits.) The publicly financed pension scheme is unsustainable, and already inadequate to live a decent life. If you’re lucky, your employer has a good pension scheme. If you don’t, you have to invest money yourself.
It is said that a sustainable withdrawal rate for retirement savings is around 3%. But if you live in Norway, capital gains are taxed at 40%. (The second highest rate in Europe.) Additionally you have to pay a wealth tax equivalent to 1% of all your assets every year. So you basically need to save twice as much as you would in most countries to achieve a sustainable withdrawal rate in retirement. This is not beneficial for the working class. It makes it more difficult to retire, and keeps the working class working.
They could increase the minimum deduction to 40 million NOK or something similar to what Spain does, and people could save for a decent retirement without incurring a wealth tax. Revenue wouldn’t even be affected that much, because most of the revenue from the wealth tax comes from the top anyway. Not to mention that our neighboring Scandinavian countries can deliver very similar public services without any wealth tax at all.
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French and UK nukes
You can’t rely on another country starting a nuclear war to protect your country’s territorial integrity. And would you really want to use nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack? It would in effect render the planet uninhabitable for humans for a long while.
…very little showed for absurd amount of spending
Spending inefficiencies are an issue that would need to be addressed, and spending and industrial capacity would need to be increased gradually.
Which countries specifically at which times?
I was wrong. Sweden was at 4% for a little while in the sixties.
If you think we should mimic Russia, whose resources should pay for our armies?
I don’t think we should mimic Russia. I think we should help the Ukraine defend itself, so that Russia’s way of doing things doesn’t pay off. I also think that we should have a credible conventional defense for when they’re done in the Ukraine and start invading the Baltic countries. In order to do this, spending has to increase.
To defend against a possible Russian threat requires more EU unity and integration, rather than more individual military spending.
Ideally, spending, R&D, and manufacturing should be coordinated across the EU. This is however not realistic. The EU can’t even agree on increasing sanctions. Euro sceptics are the largest party in Germany, France, and Italy. And they’re becoming more and more popular everywhere. A credible defense seems difficult without European integration, but I don’t think it’s something we can rely upon.
We live in a world where governments don’t care about human rights, the rules of war, or rules-based trade. Without a credible defence and a strong economy, you will all be at the mercy of the US, China, and Russia. If the war in Ukraine wasn’t enough to convince you, the Trump administration should be. It’s also not wasted money if you invest in the domestic defense industry. And we’ve spent at this level before without invading people. But if you think it always leads to invasions, you should be even more worried about increased military spending and military industrial capacity in Russia.
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In Sweden it’s also legal to sell heroin, but buying it is against the law. /s
Imagine having dual Swedish and German citizenship, and being stripped of both at the same time. Imagine how fucked you’d be in that situation. Can you still work and access banking services? Can you legally move about in the Schengen area? I know my country fast tracks citizenship for stateless persons, but I can’t find a lot of information about what to do in the meantime.
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I assume that you haven’t watched any American TV shows for the past couple of decades. Nudity and gratuitous sex scenes are a staple of the American entertainment industry.
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