It's like the hover tank in Sargent Bilko. Not about being practical, just about if you can get the contract. Human nature is the same everywhere.

It's weird because I watched a Youtube video the other day where some guy who has a long-established UK car channel had collected all the registration data from DVLC for EV sales in the UK and showed that they'd dropped significantly in 2025.

Is this a case of classifying hybrids as EVs or something?

Not really. Plastics require hydrocarbons that can be sourced from anything, including coal or wood. Oil is just the most convenient source, but it's certainly not the only one.

And anyway, only 6% of oil is used for plastic production. Even increasing the demand for plastics won't materially affect oil consumption. Fossil hydrocarbons are also used as a feedstock for other industrial processes (fertilizer production mainly), but adding up all these uses accounts for just about 15% of global production.

You think Democrats are going to run on an open "Send all your jobs to China!" platform?

That really only works for cars at least maybe 10-15 years old. Newer cars are packed so full of electronics and other complex hardware that can't be repaired that they're simply not going to last very long; once the manufacturer stops selling those parts, the car will be scrap once one of them breaks.

Tariffs are a bad thing from a pure economic perspective. They introduce inefficiencies, and make things more expensive. This is a basic concept of macroeconomics.

However, some things are more important than making the most money. Among them, national defense. In America, both parties have decided they don't want to work with China anymore, for varying reasons of ideology, ethics, and self defense. And they have decided that is more important to them than economic efficiencies.

Would you rather pay a tariff's cost or pay more for products produced domestically? We will see how every company deals with this.

Tariffs are often presented as a shield for domestic industries, but economically they are counterintuitive: by limiting foreign competition, they reduce the pressure on local companies to innovate, improve efficiency, or lower costs. Without that competitive drive, businesses can stagnate, producing inferior goods and services while charging higher prices. The irony is that the domestic consumers tariffs are meant to protect end up paying more for worse products, while the broader economy loses out on the dynamism and progress that open competition usually sparks.

Suddenly reshaping supply chains to respond to tariffs carries significant risks that ripple across the economy. Companies may be forced to abandon established, efficient networks in favor of hastily arranged alternatives, which often means higher costs, logistical bottlenecks, and reduced reliability. These abrupt shifts can disrupt production schedules, strain relationships with long-term suppliers, and erode quality control. Worse, the uncertainty discourages investment in long-term innovation, as firms divert resources to short-term survival.

When unemployment is already low, suddenly finding enough workers to reconfigure supply chains in response to tariffs becomes nearly impossible without driving up labor costs. Firms must compete for scarce talent, often retraining or relocating employees, which adds further expense and delays. At the same time, the abrupt shift discards sunk costs. Prior investments in established supplier relationships, infrastructure, and logistics are thrown out before they would have been depreciated. These wasted resources are replaced by new costs for recruitment, training, and building fresh networks, all of which inevitably flow into higher prices for consumers. In effect, tariffs don’t just disrupt trade; they force companies to burn past investments while layering on new inefficiencies that must show up in the prices of goods.

It's likely intended for military purposes (or more precisely, an attempt to get funding to build them for military purposes).

Bruh needs to stop promoting nazism and get off his delusional billionaire high horse.

It's illegal to promote fascism or host content that does in France. They should have gone after him for that, since there's only three groups on Telegram, 1) Gay furries, 2) American nazis, and 3) Russian nazis. The latter two groups are enough to hang the man, and they should.

I would say under-regulation, or more to the point, mal-regulation. Unregulated markets inevitably settle into a worst case scenario given time.

In the case of residential property (which is what your link refers to), I agree that some of the regulations there are bad and need to be revised or eliminated. But they have nothing to do with the commercial space falling into squalor.

My observation has been that any streaming package that includes ESPN is automatically well more than 4 times as expensive as any package without it. Perhaps the cable companies should find a way to dump ESPN and pass along the savings to remain viable.

Yup, and now the Brits seem to be flirting with the same asshole, Farange, who inflicted this on them in the first place. And their NHS is short of staff they used to get from immigrants. I suppose the Brits need to go entirely down the Dumb Ass Well, like the U.S., before they get it out of their system.

If it does become endemic, then no one has any salary to piss off on companies' offerings.

"Trump seems to like crypto - he's opened up the crypto market in the US, and so people are inevitably coming to make some money out of it."

The reason el Bunko did that was so that he could cash in. He doesn't give a flying rat's ass about anyone else. It also has foreign policy implications. Pakistan wanted tariff relief and turned to funding crypto-lobbyists because the knew el Bunko would "appreciate" their support of his scam.