And not just as a refresher/competency test! It should also be a chance to educate on updates like legislation that get passed, safety information and tips as research improves, and new traffic controls like double diamonds or roundabouts that weren’t in use when people learned to drive in their youth.

But at a minimum you should have to re-validate that you are a competent and safe driver every decade or so, agreed.

This is the line that even at my most cynical, I never thought Trump would go for/be allied to cross - fuck with the money directly. Ruin the bag for the capital class. Tariffs were bad long term but presented an opportunity for huge wealth transfer during that manufactured chaos’s period of ‘creative destruction’:

“He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske

But then again, this loon is who he put forward in his first term, sooo yeah.

It’s okay, we’ve all been gotten by this too. It’s easy to look at an older piece of technology that has survived, and ascribe that to ‘things used to be better’ while ignoring the materials advances or better engineering that doesn’t require massive buttresses to stop building falling over, or why using MIM instead of forging is better for 95% of use cases, or how wastefully overbuilt things were in the past because they didn’t know how to build efficiently.

There is a flipside of planned obsolescence and value engineering something to death where the wrong material/spec is decided for profit reasons… but that is not a new phenomenon