To give you an idea of who is on the tesla board of directors, it includes Kimbal Musk, his brother, and James Murdoch, of the Murdoch family you’re probably thinking of. Musk himself owns something like 20% of the company, the board owns some, his cult members also have some share. The rest of the shareholders are either institutional or retail investors who are some combination of not willing to rock the boat, don’t have enough voting power, and/or just don’t care.
Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.
That’s been their mission ever since they bought and killed alien blue and released a pile of shit in its place. They can’t make a good app so have been slowly tying more and more exclusive features to it, and to new Reddit, hoping that this new shiny useless thing that no one asked for or wanted will get people to use it. I think with interest rates rising, their investors are looking for profits higher than t bills and so this trend that has been going on for the past few years is now kicked into overdrive.
The difference between this and 08 though is that in 08, way too many people were allowed to buy houses that were already built, taking on debt they could not handle, and speculating to an insane degree on the health of those mortgages. A structural issue with no structural cure except to bail out individual homeowners who took on way too much debt which was never gonna happen. For evergrande (as I understand it) it’s just the property developer running out of cash to pay for the construction. The homes were already paid for, so at most the house buyers will just be either SOL or directly bailed out by the government for which there is a strong case to do so, and evergrande shareholders losing their investment is not really a big deal since they’ll probably be paid out in the bankruptcy. I feel like this whole thing is a really big parallel to Silicon Valley bank, for which all the doomers were out there peddling the impending collapse of the financial system which never happened.
If anything is gonna bring down China it will be their demographic collapse, and that is impossible to fix and already manifesting. There is of course the usual argument of a huge tax base suddenly becoming a budget liability with a significantly smaller population of people to financially support them. But the big thing that will hit the private sector is the lower population causing rising labor costs which is driving away manufacturing, and the bulk of their entire industrial infrastructure is now set up for something they will no longer be very competitive in, and for a sector which young educated urban people don’t really want to work in.
I don’t know how anyone could ever stand going to Costco on the weekends. Just don’t. That’s like voluntarily driving during rush hour when you have the option not to. Unless you work the exact hours that Costco is open, going on a weekday evening is so much better of an experience all around. Weekday mornings aren’t bad either. I would have to be truly desperate for gas or groceries to go to Costco on the weekend vs just waiting until Monday.
Just the robot dogs for now, but I’m sure they’ll be first in line when the tech is available.
If they can get within artillery firing range of the train line that goes through Tokmak, they can disrupt all rail reinforcement going to anywhere west of tokmak, which then puts the only rail reinforcement to crimea and the Kherson oblast through the long way across the Crimean bridge. M777 maximum range is 24.7km, they are 29km away, and are making steady progress. Russia knows this and is reinforcing which is making the entire front line weaker, and if Ukraine can keep up the pressure then we hopefully might be able to see something like Kharkiv happen again.
They can. They just need to pay a little more. We’re talking 25 pence per liter at most compared to no sugar tax. Higher sugar intake is correlated with obesity which means more health problems which is more expense for the NHS. It’s like a train ticket or gas taxes or taxes in general, some percentage of usage that causes the problem needs to pay for the thing that deals with the consequences or expenses that solve it.
It’s the companies who have decided that they would rather sell shit soda, and consumers who are probably unwilling to pay anything except the cheapest price possible - wealth inequality and poverty problems aside because that’s a different social policy that should not be addressed through a sugar tax.
One of my best fried chicken experiences was a $5 fried chicken buffet somewhere in rural Kentucky near Lincoln’s birth home.
You’re right. The consumer tech consequences of the chip ban is more important than the military implications will ever be. Huawei’s lost tax revenue cost the Chinese government billions, which itself does more damage to the Chinese military budget than semiconductor bans for systems which aren’t actually critical in a conventional war. Cruise missiles can work effectively with tech from the 70s, and you don’t need 5nm chips to guide a rocket into an aircraft carrier. And this was about Huawei specifically - look at Huawei’s global smartphone market share. Pre trade war they were on par with apple and samsung volumes, with margins and a lineup closer to apple. Then the 5G bans and a PR campaign crippled their international sales, and semiconductor bans cratered their overall production.
Other Chinese brands like Lenovo, xiaomi, and the BBK brands (oppo, vivo, one plus, realme) are doing fine though, because inside them is all snapdragon, Qualcomm, intel, nvidia, and AMD. They’re basically final assembly plants for component manufacturers ultimately based in the US, whereas Huawei were using their own kirin chips, were taking market share from apple, and were creating their own operating system called HarmonyOS to replace android. Basically every major consumer tech hardware company in the US stood to gain from Huawei being taken out, including the US government when the trump admin used it as the poster child of the trade war. Huawei’s PLA connections were a nice bonus to sell to the public, but this was first and foremost a state backed corporate hit job.
And the worst part is, because of the opaqueness of it all and combined with propaganda from every direction, it’s hard to get a handle on how justified any part of it actually was. Because you basically have to choose to either trust the trump admin, US government, and corporate America, or Huawei and the Chinese communist party, and I don’t trust any of them. Personally I’m going with, there was probably something to be concerned about, but probably at a similar level to buying US hardware which the us government has clearly signaled that they have back doors into, but the corporate power struggle for market share is the actual reason behind it all.
The sad part is that I would hesitate to even call it a social program either - it’s the bare fucking minimum. It’s just taking the money that you paid into it and paying it back out to you later in life. It provides some financial structure and stability to those who otherwise would not have it, and that’s important, sure. But considering that this is height of our vital government social programs, then the bar is already so pathetically low. This is fighting to keep the scraps when private industry is already milking us for healthcare, education, public transit, utilities, etc, etc, etc, and it’s pitiful that we have to fight to even keep this.
The midwest has always been pretty centrist at least within living memory, usually split right down the middle. It only ever gave the impression of heavily republican leaning because they've been gerrymandered to shit. Wisconsin in particular has been ratfucked by redistricting - both a democratic governor in 2018 and Biden in 2020 won because those are state wide votes, but as of 2022 the state legislature is 66% republican while only having won 53% of the popular vote in that election.
BYD was selling ICE vehicles up until March of 2022, and their current split is somewhere around 50/50 BEV/hybrid so they’re still not a full EV company. Their lineup is still being supported by their existing infrastructure, subsidized by the already established supply chains for ICE that they can incrementally cannibalize while building up the EV part of the company. It’s a good blueprint for legacy auto, but not for an EV startup. That is even before mentioning the very generous subsidies and incentives for electrification provided by the national, provincial, and city governments to producers and consumers. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, because I believe the US also needs that level of investment into electrification, but my point is that it’s not the same business model.
Not to mention that everything Ukraine has been asking for from the US, Taiwan already bought in numbers and has had in the country years ago. Patriot, F16, ATACMS, and the list extends below to HIMARS and artillery and Abrahams, and above to apaches, black hawks, Phalanx, a wide range of torpedos and ground and air launched missiles, and even entire submarines.
China would also have to attack across the Taiwan straight, and amphibious landings are insanely difficult to pull off for anyone let alone for the PLA which hasn’t actually had meaningful combat experience since the Vietnam war - their Vietnam war in 1979. Any military buildup would also be obviously spotted months in advance, meaning anything from propositioned US carrier strike groups, all the way to enough time for Taiwan to build a dirty bomb or small nuke if they felt like they needed the ultimate deterrent.
Not the person you responded to and its been a while since I’ve done it, but I’m pretty sure you can just open the file with notepad (or TextEdit on Mac), scroll down to the timestamp, make the changes, and save the file.
Because heat pumps are popular now, and the government is helping people pay for them through inflation reduction act rebates. So they can jack up the price and price gouge the shit out of us, because they know they can and know that they will get away with it. And I bet they were never popular because the same people selling home AC units also sell gas powered furnaces for home heating. So they charge you for two appliances and two installations, with two maintenance calls every time something goes wrong and two upgrade cycles. But now that they come as one unit, they still have to find some way to return more money to shareholders than last quarter so the price goes up.
I just got whole home AC replaced with a heat pump with an integrated furnace backup because it can get very cold here, and also had all my baseboard heaters ripped out. Perfectly fine in the winter and it has freed up at least 1/4 of all my walls to have stuff right up against them if I so choose, but really annoyed that the whole thing costed $20k when it could and should have been built this way 60 years ago. Not to mention all the inefficiency of burning gas for heat when heat pumps move more energy than they consume, multiplied across decades for nearly every building on the planet.
The large profit margin SUVs are necessary for a company to achieve scale to then be able to produce the smaller cheaper stuff. Fixed costs like the factory, tooling, training, designing, that all takes a lot of money up front before even selling a single vehicle, and the smaller and cheaper the vehicle coming out of that production pipeline is, the longer the payback period will be. And when we’re talking about billions of dollars in cost, it’s hard to remain solvent when interest payments on the debt grow exponentially over time.
It’s why before tesla there had not been an American auto company startup for like 70 years, Tesla almost went bankrupt, and Rivian is just starting to head in the right direction. Lucid is probably fucked and they’re mostly Saudi owned these days anyways, and the rest of the US EV startup space ranges from a joke to a scam.
What legacy automakers already have in staff and part of the production line established is actually kind of useless when they have to wait to establish their electric motor, battery, and chassis production, which probably just means a new factory anyways. Give it a few years and the cheaper smaller stuff will come, because right now AFAIK only tesla actually has the free cash flow to fund an EV economy car at scale. Everyone else is still sinking billions establishing any EV production at all, and interest rates aren’t helping the speed of their progress either.
The peak of irony considering the porn age ID verification laws and abortion bans they impose on people living in the states they control.