The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.

It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.

We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).

> What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level.

They'll stop once the police (or ICE, more likely) start dishing out horrific punishments for it.

> That’s an insane conflict of interest.

Welcome to America.

This isn't even in the top 10 of corrupt activities our government officials undertaken in the past year.

It does a pretty good job, but I still don't completely trust it with keys to the kingdom.

I have replaced my standard ddg of, "git <the thing i need>" with asking Claude to give me the commands I need to run.

The Hilux isn't "banned" from the USA. Toyota can federalize it and sell it here at any time. Toyota doesn't bring it here because we have the Tacoma - a truck designed to be more inline with American consumer tastes.

If Toyota wanted to, they could readily start manufacturing Hiluxes in Mexico and importing them into the USA. Presumably, the reason they don't do this is because Americans hate small pickup trucks. Every single truck on sale in the USDM sells better in larger footprint spec.

There's maybe 20k American who are willing to buy a new truck with the wheelbase the size of a Mustang (smallest Hilux). Even small BoF SUVs have the same problem. Take the FJ Cruiser, despite being a cult classic, it sold terribly in the USA, likely due to being too small.

Plus, they are expensive. In Australia, the cheapest non-work-spec Hilux trim is ~$55k - which is like $38kUSD. A Tacoma starts cheaper than that and is much larger.