I once coded a machine that could make photo-books of your neighbour's living rooms.
It was inspired by Ed Ruscha's "34 Parking Lots in Los Angeles" artist booklet from 1967, and the output looked pretty similar, but with photos of domestic interiors instead of parking lots. So far so ordinary, but the difference was that you could tweet any UK postcode at the machine and a couple of minutes later it would spit out a custom-generated, printed-on-demand booklet of living rooms in that neighbourhood.
The way it worked was when it received a postcode, it went to Gumtree (popular UK second hand listings site) and looked for second hand sofas for sale within a radius of 1km. It then scraped the photos, imported them into a document, generated a PDF on the fly and sent it to a laser printer with a built-in binding machine. The results were insanely good. Always hoped I'd get to show it to Ed Ruscha one day.
The project was commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but still kind of pointless from a utilitarian point of view :)
The services in question are provided by the local municipality - and they don’t receive extra government funding for this. So unlike a regular citizen who registers on a real street, from whom the city typically collects taxes, a homeless citizen brings costs without bringing many “benefits” (from a purely economic perspective).
As for why they mandate the creation of these fictitious streets, it’s because Italy’s administrative system is obsessed with linking people to an address in a way that is absolutely alien to many foreigners. When you change address the police literally come round to check you
actually live there…
Do you have any reliable evidence to back up your assertion that the activity in question "wasn't a very common practice in earlier generations"? The fact that something isn't openly discussed rarely means it's not happening...
Just to make sure it's clear to everyone who's commenting about how great this is - in return for UAE paying to protect Liberia's forests, it gets to burn more fossil fuels while claiming to be reducing its carbon output. Not sure whether this is bad news from a climate perspective, but it certainly isn't good news.
Except that both Tesla and the law make it clear that in a Level 2 system the driver is responsible at all times, regardless of whether Autopilot is engaged or not.
The Multipla was also very successful, and also happens to be one of the few Fiats that hold their value. A utility vehicle doesn't necessarily need to be attractive to be successful...