5 karma · joined February 7, 2024
In NL, for example, I see plenty of large EU cars driving around with only a very occasional US "monstrosity" like a pickup truck, and I don't even live in the city.
Oh I love cycling. I know it's hard to find even remotely comparable cycling-friendly locations in the States, even if growing up (also in a large family) we were fortunate enough to live walking distance to schools in a suburban area.
But for education and health, health care isn't "free" in the Netherlands. We pay hundreds per month for the whole family for health insurance on top of the high taxes that support the "system". Public education is also tax-supported in the USA for K-12, although indeed higher education is more expensive.
I'm more referencing policy that is intentionally "squeezing" everything to make it all smaller and more frugal in a way that makes a <5 family size far more practical. It is not the same in the States.
Agreed that this feels like click/rage bait mostly against US pickup trucks, which many people in the States express frustration with too!
VW Caddy we looked at and almost bought, but we had many bad encounters with dealers and instead bought from the private market.
Here, owning a car is extremely expensive - perhaps one of the most expensive in Europe. This price goes up considerably when you get a larger vehicle, both because fuel costs are very high but also because you are taxed quarterly for CO2/weight of the vehicle.
With a larger family, you are squeezed into an uncomfortable position since you are outside of the <= 2 child norm. Many 7+ seater vehicles (French cars, etc) are extremely impractical to the point of me thinking that they are not actually designed for more than 5 seats in use, as there is comically low cargo room and the 3rd row is extremely cramped (try fitting a stroller or anything besides people...ha!).
I ended up picking up a Chrysler Town & Country import from the USA for my family, because it was the only vehicle that I could find for a reasonable price that checked all of the boxes, and am paying dearly for it (400+ euros every quarter just to have the privilege of registering it!).
Before you say anything about us having a "kindercrusher" we also have 2 bakfiets cargo bikes and use them regularly, but public transit and bikes don't scale well to large families for anything more than a short distance ride (school, groceries, etc).
Large families are being squeezed out of existence here.
Sure you can accept some template project or CLI tool to kickstart things if just starting out, but at some point you will need to tweak the configuration and there is an enormous realm of options.
I'm surprised no one mentioned this already, but a runtime like Deno goes to great lengths to solve alot of these pain points. You get testing, linting, bundling, and Typescript out-of-the-box with sane settings. If Deno worked better with GRPC I'd probably be using it right now in my work projects!