Renewables work, you just have to build batteries to store it, which California has been doing and is part of the reason energy is cheaper there. There is more hydro too, but solar into batteries has been overtaking it at peak recently.
It’s not the capitalist auto companies who are going to get hurt though. The price advantage of the Chinese companies comes from low labor costs and government subsidies, so the auto companies will just move there production to whatever country offers the most subsidies and least labor costs because in our current globalized world capital can move freely.
The real losers will be the unionized auto workers who’ll be abandoned while capitalists maintain or even increase there profits in the third world. These sorts of race to the bottom always harm workers, whether it be with clothes and shein , or EVs.
Zionism and white nationalist anti-Semitism go quite well together actually. Even Hitler thought Zionism was a good idea for a while, get all the Jews out of Europe and the u.s. and onto the one barren patch of land in the Middle East without any oil so they can fight with the brown people they also hate is a pretty good “solution to the Jewish question” if you buy into all of that shit.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that across all political and social groups in the United States, there is a strong preference against living near AR-15 rifle owners and neighbors who store guns outside of locked safes. This surprising consensus suggests that when it comes...
A poll was just released saying a majority of Democrats characterize what’s happening as a genocide, and 30% said it was a top issue. 40% of likely voters in general call it a genocide and 70% want a permanent ceasefire. Where are you getting your idea of the American electorate from? Cause poll after poll has shown a majority of Americans and a large majority of Democrats, even if they won’t call it a genocide, disapprove of what’s happening in Palestine.
Even so if it was a fringe issue this election is looking to be incredibly close and may be decided by 10,000 of those “fringe” voters in Dearborn Michigan deciding not to vote for Biden.
Hamas values Palestinians way more than israel, at least they signed a ceasefire deal to try and stop raffah from being bombed, while Israel ignored it and started bombing any way.
Both sides all you want, but one side has been pushing for a ceasefire for months, returning the hostages for a permanent stop to the slaughter, and one side has been ignoring those calls to continue there genocide.
If I want to be blissed out until my body falls apart, I can do that now by turning my retirement account into a stockpile of fentanyl. I don’t think its presumed that intelligent civilizations all just do this, for the same reason I don’t believe modern human civilization will collapse on itself simply because we’ve discovered opium.
The key difference is that we still live in a society where, at least most people, have to work to live. If you spend your retirement on fentanyl the fentanyl isn’t going to be the thing to make your body fall apart, assuming you get pure shit and are able to dose properly and not od your body can handle that for decades. What’s going to tear your body apart is the poverty and deprivation of living on the streets after you lose your job. If you’re in a fully automated post scarcity society and you’re able to hook yourself up to one of these machines and live a long life I could see a majority of people doing that. Sure some people would object to it being meaningless, but in a post scarcity reality where God is dead, a robot can do anything better than you, and there’s no conflict or competition for resources there isn’t much meaning to be had anyway.
Doesn’t seem like they’re making better cars, the most innovative things he points out is a funky gear shifter… But that they’re making them more cheaply. That doesn’t seem to be because of any production innovation or finding some hidden efficiency that western companies overlooked, moreso heavy subsidies and state support combined with a cheap labor market. Hopefully this competition makes the west adopt the former and not the latter, but considering the current political environment we’ll probably end up with the reverse.
In what ways are they ahead though besides price. A new iPhone has more battery, a camera with more MP, a faster chip etc. These cars have the same or shorter range then they’re competitors, same or slower acceleration, same cargo space, charging speed etc. just cheaper because of the reasons mentioned above.
When Japanese cars started taking off in the 70s it was because they had way better fuel economy and build quality then anything Detroit was putting out at the time, they were better at those fields. I don’t see any field where these cars are better at besides price.
Would you say the same if the argument was about the inherent danger of black men? If a bunch of white women were online saying black men are dangerous we wouldn’t say that black men calling it out were “magically claiming false victimhood” we’d say those women’s fears, even if they are truly felt, are a product of prejudice and unfair and they’re spreading of these ideas is damaging.
… But no one is being thrown into the woods with a random stranger or a bear. Like the original question this is a hypothetical meant to prove a point. The original point seems to be “the average man is dangerous” , this is meant to show that point can be prejudiced/sexist. It’s meant to show that the argument that some people are saying they’re afraid of a group therefore we must validate that fear can lead to some bad places and shouldn’t be used. This argument is at the core of what the comment I replied to.
I live alone and I’m just wasting away my time here. It’s actually making me very depressed to be honest. I do live in the city which makes think there ought to be at least something to do out here. Though I can’t really afford to spent money on it every day....
Id recommend disc golfing. You can start if with just a mid range disc and that’ll cost ~$15 then your good to go. Most major cities will have at least one course that’s free at a park so you don’t need to spend more after that. It has a pretty low skill floor so you can pick it up pretty easily but a very high ceiling so there is a lot to learn and grow which can help with depression. Also gets you walking outside in nature which can help with depression too. It can be as social as you want it to be, you can invite friends, or just go solo, and even if your solo you can strike up conversation with the people in front of you and sometimes they’ll even let you throw with them.
Go UAW, fight for higher wages and better working conditions
Also Lemmy:
I demand the cheapest car possible, I don’t care if its built by slave labor in xinjiang. If western companies can’t compete with third world labor costs then they’re obviously inefficient and don’t deserve to exist.
The average purchase price has gone up because people are buying more expensive cars, eg. Large trucks, SUVs, luxury sedans, high end trims etc. not because cars are getting more expensive.
If you look at lower end sedans there price hasn’t changed much. For example if you look at the Chevy Malibu the current base price is $25,100 , in 2014 the base price was $22,340 or $29,400 adjusted for inflation, in 2004 it was $18,700 or $31,067
None of those are close to the $10,000 cars coming out of China because you just can’t make a car for that cheap in a country with high labor costs like the u.s., or even Japan or Germany.
the financial parasites that have gotten used to getting free money from the government for so long.
Actually the government is giving out free money now as opposed to 0 interest rates where it wasn’t. The fed rate is the overnight rate you get for depositing money into the fed, not borrowing money from it. If I’m a bank and I have $1,000 at the end of the day and didn’t find anything to invest it in then I’ll deposit it at the fed and get say 5% apy as interest from the fed. If you did that every night for a year you’d get $50 from the fed while taking almost no risk, about as close to free as a capital gain can be called free. This has the effect of pushing up interest rates across the board because why would I invest in some risky business venture for 5% when I can get 5% with no risk from the government. The government is basically paying capital owners to not invest in riskier loans and bonds, cooling the market.
If you want to see financial parasites there are plenty of people right now with millions in Treasury bonds collecting even more interest from the government while doing nothing.
Don’t get me wrong their are plenty of parasites and con men that show up in the highly speculative world of 0% interest rates, *cough crypto *cough, but it’s not a matter of low interest rates good for capitalists and high interest rates bad.
This may be true if your working with two assumptions. One society is a meritocracy, which isnt true in most cases success is determined by birth and luck rather than merit, other comments have mentioned this so I won’t get too deep into it.
The other is that politics and government are just about getting the smartest most credentialed people in the room and then they will solve all the issues. While we do want smart capable people in office this view ignores the other qualification a representative needs, to identify with and understand the people they’re representing. If Congress is just a bunch of lawyers from Harvard they don’t understand what it’s like to be a single mom working on minimum wage and are unlikely to increase that wage. If there only talking to people in the successful upper middle class that they inhabit they’re less likely to see the struggles of the common worker. This is why we need working class representatives to give a voice to those struggles.
On the meritocracy argument if you think of it like economic success = merit = hard work and determination, I think that’s wrong because there are two things required, that are matters of luck, to turn that hard work into economic success.
One you have to be talented, or have some innate ability that others may not have. Just like some people will never be a top basketball player no matter how hard they work because they just don’t have the body for it many people just dont have the brain to understand medicine or law or business at high levels. There’s nothing wrong with not being able to do that though and people shouldn’t be punished by having a lower standard of living because of it. Hard work !=merit
The second is you have to be talented in a field that the market values. The classic example of this is the starving artist but even if you’re talented at child care you may not be payed well unless you “advance” to becoming a manager which you may not be good at. This also goes into how we value work as a society since that childcare worker is doing more good for society then a Google engineer figuring out ways to click ads, but the latter is payed far more and is deemed worthy of merit. Merit != Economic success
If you’d like to know more about this perspective I’d recommend reading “the tyranny of merit” by Michael sandel. It’s written by a Harvard philosophy professor on the reality and the moral and political implications of the “meritocracy” as it exists in the U.S. today.
Also in the Caribbean it was seen as more economical to work the slaves to death and then import new ones. The conditions on those plantations made south Carolina look like Disney land and the average life expectancy was only a couple years.
In the American south there was more emphasis on keeping the slaves alive and “breeding” them to get more slaves instead of importing more.
This is also why the African diaspora population is a bit less in the Caribbean then in America even though way more Africans were brought into the Caribbean, most of them died before they could have children.
Is it good or do they just have a massive network and data advantage. If tik tok left and everyone switched over to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and they had the same amount of data tik tok has I think the experience would converge to whatever was on tik tok in a month or so.
There’s no secret sauce to tik tok, they’re throwing massive amounts of data at a recommendation AI and telling it to optimize for watch time, any sufficiently scaled company can do that nowadays. It’s more a matter of getting and maintaining an audience to create that data and content creators, both of which due to the network effect, and without federation, are drawn to the biggest service, not necessarily to the best.
It’s not about the data, it’s about the algorithm. Unlike other social media which has followers, subscribers etc. that dictate what you see tik tok is a pure black box recommendation algorithm. Tons of people’s world views are shaped by tik tok and a slight tweak to this algorithm can have huge political consequences. I’m far from a china hawk but even I can recognize the dangers of allowing that sort of machine to be in the hands of a foreign rival. Ideally we’d take it out of the hands of the corporate interests running the ones here in the u.s. as well and force them to be open sour e, but that doesn’t seem possible right now and at least those companies are more beholden to the American people then byte dance, there are American employees in those companies that can raise a red flag if management is telling them to push the algorithm in a direction.
The youth also probably won’t care in a years time. Even if tik tok actually shuts down in the u.s. instead of selling, which I still doubt they will as that would effectively be burning 10s of billions of dollars to prove a point, the youth can just move onto another app like Instagram reels or YouTube shorts which offer the same experience but aren’t as good because of the mass network effect tik tok has. If everyone is forced out of tik tok and onto one of the other apps they’ll gain that same network effect and have the same experience after a bit of transition/ AI training time. The kids aren’t attached to byte dance or tik tok, they’re attached to the content and content creators who make it, and those can move to another app very easily.
If the choice is between the u.s. government and the Chinese government choosing what’s appropriate for me to watch then I’d choose the u.s government as it is still has some democratic levers which the American people can use to stop it from propagandizing too much. There is no such influence they can wield in the Chinese government. I’m not ok with it though and it’s more a matter of the lesser of two evils. Ideally there would be no centralized control over these services and the algorithms would be open source and the servers federated, to allow people to transparently evaluate the biases each service has and make their own decision free from the centralizing network effect present in current social media. If I am unable to inspect it then I want the person who is able to do so to have interests that are better aligned with mine, either an elected representative or at least a worker with similar national interests to me.
As for the book question it’s not a matter of a single book. Unless they’re advocating for atrocities I’m for any creator being allowed on the platform, the problem is how the platform is showing that content, it’s a matter of the book store instead of a single book. If the library has a copy of the three body problem, or even Maos little red book alongside a bunch of other books countering it then that’s fine. But if there’s no library and only one book store in town then the owner of that book store has a lot of political power and should be under a lot of scrutiny. If the owner of that store isn’t a part of the community and doesn’t have interests that align with it, or even run counter to it, then the people of that community are right to become skeptical and demand a more open system. This is why libraries are so important, they provide an information repository owned by the public instead of private interests.
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly...
The tech company life is great until they fire you and 10% of your colleagues in pursuit of even bigger profits. Then when your on the streets you’ll probably prefer the current liberal city government over whatever these fascists have planned for the homeless
Profits are gained often times at the expense of the workers, as seen in the recent push for profitability in the wake of interest rate hikes which has resulted in mass layoffs across the industry. These layoffs also have a double effect of flooding the job market depressing wages and allowing employers to further exploit their workers with the threat of casting them into the quagmire of unemployment. In this sense companies thrive off the economic insecurity of there workers as the more your afraid to lose your job, the less you’ll complain about ungodly hours or not getting a raise to keep up with inflation.
This threat is less scary for higher paid wealthier workers like yourself who may have the savings to sustain a bout of unemployment, but for lower paid, poorer or even higher paid people with higher obligations like a mortgage, child care, medical expenses etc. this threat is big.
This is why this techno-fascist ideology is so horrible, its stability relies on casting out the undesirables and unproductive and using the threat of being pushed out to enforce conformity. Like all fascism it sounds great if your part of the in group, but once the new bar is set and your cast out you’ll realize the tyranny that the system perpetuates.
Can’t tell if this is sarcastic but the intention was that Tupac was helping Kendrick get over his “writers block” for his next diss track by “gifting” him an idea to make fun of drake for liking young girls, drakes trying to beat him to the punch, while trying to discredit it as just gossip with the budden podcast line.
Summer power prices seen surging for Texas, falling in California | Reuters (www.reuters.com)
US to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs next week (www.arenaev.com)
Trump: Jews should be ‘ashamed’ if they vote for Biden (www.politico.com)
Study reveals "widespread, bipartisan aversion" to neighbors owning AR-15 rifles (www.psypost.org)
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that across all political and social groups in the United States, there is a strong preference against living near AR-15 rifle owners and neighbors who store guns outside of locked safes. This surprising consensus suggests that when it comes...
Biden hits Trump with major Microsoft announcement in Wisconsin (www.axios.com)
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The musician was seen wearing a keffiyeh on his arm, a symbol commonly used to show support for Palestine....
Shaming (lemmy.world)
I Drove A Bunch Of Chinese Cars And They Are Amazing: How China Learned To Build Better Cars While The West Was Sleeping - The Autopian (www.theautopian.com)
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What are some free interests/things/hobbies you can do in the city?
I live alone and I’m just wasting away my time here. It’s actually making me very depressed to be honest. I do live in the city which makes think there ought to be at least something to do out here. Though I can’t really afford to spent money on it every day....
Biden, speaking on campus protests, says both free speech and rule of law 'must be upheld' (abcnews.go.com)
Americans Are Open To Cheap Chinese Cars. That’s 'Scary' For The Rest Of The Auto Industry (insideevs.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/15089465...
Fed keeps interest rates at 23-year high (www.npr.org)
The Price We Pay for Having Upper-Class Legislators (www.nytimes.com)
Overview of the slave trade out of Africa (1500-1900) (i.imgur.com)
Source: slavevoyages.org/…/overview-slave-trade-out-afric…
ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US (www.androidauthority.com)
Exclusive: ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say (www.reuters.com)
The Tech Robber Baron who wants to take over San Francisco (newrepublic.com)
Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly...
Drake threatened with lawsuit over diss track featuring AI Tupac (www.theverge.com)