I think it was doomed from the start being essentially the biggest thing in the Baja->Maverick-Ridgeling market segment.

I think they crossed a size threshold where they lost most of the upsides of that "not a traditional truck" market segment and gained a lot of the inconvenient downsides of the traditional half ton and larger truck market segment.

Then again, it's not like the Ford/Chevy/Rivian equivalents are flying off the shelves...

>You can get a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where all the industry was destroyed for imports

By the people your parents voted in to do just that no less.

Prices are set at the margin.

The entire internet from that era is still built on it.

I worked at a major CDN with roots in the dot com era. PHP errywhere. You wanna log on and see your bill you're invoking like 40 different (modern containerized) lamp stacks.

>(after a short research your LLM usage is currently used to build your profile)

I'm hoping and praying that not buying a subscription makes attribution 1% harder (because let's be real here everything is fingerprinted to the moo and back) puts me at the bottom of list of doors to knock on because (like everything else) they'll prioritize easier stuff and political will will be the bottleneck so they'll never get to the bottom of the list.

This is somewhere between ignorant and a bold faced lie. We all know that the permitting people and the finning people have no qualms about using publicly available data to confirm a hunch/tip if the public stuff is more recent than whatever aerial survey is in their "official" GIS system.

Now of course they won't use public imagery to grant permission for anything, but that's a different story.

>and local governments couldn't provide a whole range of basic services that depend on commercial imagery services.

I understand the efficiency argument but efficiently applying a level of micromanagement that probably shouldn't be happening in the first place exist isn't exactly a win.

I'd be fine with it if crimes with no identifiable victim below $1k went un-punished.

I pay because fuggit it's cheap but I'm gonna think twice now that I know I can make "those people" think I'm some sort of hardened criminal.

Yeah, they should be like those nonprofit hospitals.....

Which is to say if the solution was that simple and the fruit that low hanging it'd be done already.

At the end of the day whether profit or not the problem is that there's no consequences for sucking and no reward for not sucking. Government agencies tend toward fiefdom expansion, amassing power and graft. For profit entities tend to try and create situations where they can extract rents on the flimsiest of pretexts. They both seem to suck for energy though perhaps government sucks a tiny bit less. Neither "solves" the problem because neither seems inclined to steadily march toward cheaper/better/faster/whatever-er energy. They both seem to try and increase the suck if left to their own devices.