Many automakers already dropped their prices after the credit. Hyundai especially, has dropped their prices across their product line, by up to $5000, proving they were keeping prices high to soak up the credit (I don't blame them; that's what subsidies do).

I hope I'm not the only one who remembers Ford increasing the price of the lightning by exactly $7500 after the tax credit went into effect. They didn't even try to hide it by using some other slightly different number.

EVs will be just fine without subsidies; what they need is not outright dis-incentives in the form of tariffs and arresting factory workers.

There are already dutch companies that make electric tractors, and yes, part of the reason is that famers already have solar systems and want to use their solar to run their equipment instead of buying diesel. Diesel is a huge cost for farmers, even here in the US.

The interesting thing is they went with 48V, so farmers can work on them without having to use any high-voltage techniques, and the batteries are swappable because you don't want to have a tractor sitting to charge. The batteries hang on the front and sides where they usually hang huge iron weights anyway, and they just lift them off with a forklift to change them out.

The Aztek was actually ahead of its time. Here 25 years later, the market is flooded with "compact SUVs" essentially the same as the Aztek, and just as ugly.

A possible difference is that the drift toward SUV dominance is a result of malignant regulation that unfairly penalized small cars, regular cars, big cars, and basically everything but SUVs. So I think people still hate compact SUVs just as much as they did when the Aztek was launched, it's just that now, there are no viable alternatives left like there were then.

I also think people don't like or care about thin phones, but they don't have a choice anymore. They also liked their headphone jacks, removable batteries, and removable media just fine, but they don't have a choice anymore.

There was never a phase in America where most people lived remotely on farms. People always live in communities, and always have. Even primitive peoples.

The first settlements in America were things like the Dutch colony that eventually became NYC. Or Jamestown Virginia. Or if you want to go further back, St. Augustine Florida. Or going even further back, the pueblos or Mayans. Even the nomadic plains indians and inuit live in settlements together. Out West, they built forts and the forts eventually became cities like San Francisco.

If you look at any 19th century American community, EVEN IN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMIES, people still lived in towns. You can see these small towns with their dilapidated main streets all over the Midwestern US, which used to be thriving communities before the train stations shut down and all the public investment went into the interstates and Walmarts that leech off of them. My grandpa lived in an incredibly small BFE town in Ohio that you could walk completely across in 30 minutes. When I was a kid he would always tell me about how he used to walk down to the train station and take the train to Wheeling WV (the "big city", which was also walkable) on the weekends. Which seemed so incredible to me as a kid I thought it was the ravings of an old man, but it's true. You can still find the timetables of the drains from back then. He could have gone to Florida if he wanted.

If you read early American biographies or history, people ALWAYS lived in some kind of colony or town. Laura Ingalls' life is a great example. You might read her books and think that they lived out in the "frontier wilderness". Then you read a little further and learn they were able to walk to school. So in actual fact, they lived within a child's walking distance of a town big enough to have a schoolhouse. Compared to modern American children, most of whom who couldn't hope to walk to school, that's unthinkable urban density.

When you read the chronicles of Narnia, a fictional book, it starts out by the children being moved out of London to the countryside. The "countryside" was 10 miles from the nearest railway station, which was considered incredibly rural.

Not even cities. Walkable towns. Walkable villages. Even the smallest, tiniest, BFE towns in America had a walkable main street. You can see these old walkable towns all over the East and Midwest, usually with cars blasting through the widened main street and all the businesses boarded up because they closed down the train station 50 years ago and invested trillions of dollars of public money on the Walmart out by the interstate.

It's not a situation where mega-cities don't need cars, or where cities don't need cars once they get to a certain size. No size of civilization needs cars. There is no scale or transition period where cars are needed. You don't need them when it's a tiny village or settlement, you don't need them when it's a fort or a small town, you don't need them when it's a midsize city, and you don't need them when it's a mega-city. All those things existed before cars and cars don't improve them.

Cars are great for intercity travel and logistics. Just not for driving around where people actually live.

This is why the solution is and will always be Georgism.

When your culture, legal system and tax structure makes it easier to make money on rent-seeking than it is to make money by useful production, don't be surprised when your whole economy arranges itself around extracting rent instead of generating production. Only suckers will pay 25% marginal rates on their labor, when they could pay 15% "capital" gains tax on a rent-generating asset (or more commonly, nothing at all by taking a $1 salary or creative accounting).

The script should be flipped; we should be taxing unearned gains at higher rates than labor and capital.

When BMI comes up, everyone turns into a bodybuilder.

Do people who care about an extra 200 per year buy Porsches?

Education / training always has such a dual function...either train people how to do the task, or block them from doing the task if they can't be taught. So it is for all certifications.

As you point out, this is a problem in the US because washing people out means they can't drive and therefore can't function in many ways. We don't exactly have a universal legal right to drive in the US, but because we absolutely ignore all other modes of transportation, we effectively do...we have made driving required in order to participate in society, yet we haven't guaranteed the right to do so either. I'm surprised the courts have never ruled that car-centric transportation planning a violation of the 14th amendment, ADA, or something else.

What's puzzling is how in modern times our pace of deploying technology seems so much slower. As you mentioned in your post, completely new technologies seemed to go from impossible to widespread deployment in society in only a few short years. After Edison made a lightbulb, it seems like lightbulbs were everywhere only a few years later, and whole cities wired for electric and switched from gas to electric light. Yeah, there was a format war between AC and DC, but they even speedran the format war.

After they invented the steam engine, it was only a few decades before the country was crisscrossed by railways, a technology that didn't even exist before, an entirely new way to do transportation. Just think how many existing business models were crushed by that, but it was progress, so it thankfully happened anyway.

After they figured out heavier-than-air flight, as you pointed out, we had commercial aviation nearly immediately and were on the moon 70 years later.

Now, it seems to make 20 years for anything truly new to be adopted. If you invented a modern equivalent of a "steam engine" today, it would just be stuck in a patent vault for 20 years and deemed impossible to commercialize. If you invented something as pioneering as an "airplane", it would take the FAA a decade of committee meetings to get around to figuring out how to regulate it. If you invented antibiotics nowadays, they would cost $1200 per pill and be rationed out slowly to milk the maximum corporate profits, and that's if they didn't outright get banned because they infringed on some existing patent, or the company bought up by big pharma and shut down.

I'm not talking about small incremental advances like a better smartphone camera, I mean NEW, society-changing technologies that require doing things differently, just seem to be nearly impossible compared to the 20th century. I guess because our industrial capacity and market capability, defined in ability to get things done in society rather than ability to maximize internal profits, just seem like it was so much greater then.

When the government seizes and dominates the private industry, it's communism. When private industry seizes and dominates the government, it's fascism. Either way it's authoritarian shitbirds running things; just a matter of which faction won out in the early stages.

Actual beer breweries test their beer with mass spectrometers and gas chromatographs. They systematically detect arsenic, because arsenic is a persistent component in barley, and it's a natural part of the plant, and there's nothing you can do about, and nothing you need to do about it...the levels are just insignificant to health, but are easy to detect with lab equipment. The ethanol component of the beer is far and away the most unhealthy part of it.

So you could just as easily write an article "aresenic found in 100 of of 100 beers tested". And it would be so much fake news. So when I see an article saying they "detected" some kind of PFAS chemicals in beer, with no information about how much they detected or what kind of PFAS molecules or what amount of those chemicals are dangerous acutely or chronically...it's just as much fake news.

I actually care about PFAS pollution, that's why we need the media to do better so we can assess it seriously. When they publish slop, everyone just learns to ignore the issue.

Productivity completely aside, during hype bubbles, companies attract venture capital by appearing to be growing, so they will have a mandate to show gradually increase headcount simply to appear strong and get capital investment. They will hire people with nothing for them to do, the idea is eventually they will have something for them to do or maybe the floor will fall out and they never will, but regardless, you can't stop hiring because it looks bad. They will specifically hire certain quotas of Ph.Ds and so on.

Brewers have been doing this forever. For brewing and winemaking purposes, any region's water can be duplicated by mixing the right salts with distilled water. You can easily find recipes to do it.

In the case of water which is to be drunk directly, it's the same, except there's an additional requirement to get the dissolved oxygen and CO2 correct. Dissolved CO2 contributes to the water's acidity and both that and oxygen can impact the taste of drinking water. But between the mineral mixture and dissolved gases, you can easily make any water you want. You could make the equivalent of a Coke Zero machine to duplicate water from anywhere in the world. In certain cases, it may actually be cheaper to ship the water, though.

This seems to be a common dynamic in polymers in particular. Another example is official brand-name plastics like DuPont Delrin(R) versus generic POM, or genuine Lexan(R) vs. generic polycarbonate sheeting. The brand-name stuff is genuine POM homopolymer, the generic stuff is a variety of POM copolymers that are just as good for most applications, but you're never sure. So if you want to be sure what you are getting, you have to pay a 3X multiple for the genuine thing, all the while knowing that the generic option is probably 90% or 100% as good but you just can't be sure.