Yeah but isn't that because you're bringing in a ton of cheap Chinese EVs? America isn't going to do that for a variety of reasons.

Also isn't a Volkswagen t-roc or t-ceoss around 30,000 euros versus 43,000 for an equivalent Tesla?

Again though I think you've got more choices because Europe is allowing those cheap Chinese electric cars into their markets.

Because society benefits me. Electric cars aren't benefiting me.

So yeah you have a right to demand that I chip in for things that benefit me but you have no right to demand I subsidize your personal choices.

That's the argument you're going to get. And honestly if we're talking about cars it's right. We shouldn't have a car based transportation system to begin with it's ludicrously inefficient and only exists because we externalize the costs from it.

So you're going to have a tough time convincing me or anyone else that I should pay more of those externalized costs so that you can putz around in your electric car which is probably a luxury vehicle anyway because the high cost of the batteries means that nobody is going to sell a cheap electric car to a broke ass loser like me.

And that's the answer from a very politically aware standpoint. Your average voter is going to hear what you just said and react violently and get even more dug in against electric cars. There are certainly not going to question the car based transportation system in the first place or the trillions and subsidies we give automotive companies. So all they're going to really question is why the fuck they have to pay for an electric charging station they're never going to use.

It's especially galling because for a lot of them the reason they'll never use it is because they couldn't possibly afford an electric car. If you become aware that you are subsidizing somebody who's better off than you financially then that is extremely infuriating. It's why the billionaires spend so much time and effort making sure you don't realize how much of your taxpayer money let alone how many months out of the year you spend working to make them rich

There's only 11 million electric cars on the road. That includes plug-in hybrids. That's out of 300 million vehicles. So yeah it's a drop in the bucket.

Honestly if we're going to get mad at oil companies we should get mad at car companies too. Go watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

A automobile based transportation system is horrible for everyone except car companies and people who like cars because they grew up with them. But those same feelings of love for your car could just as easily be redirected to trains. The Japanese do it just fine. Look at all the train toys including some cool transformers.

But love of cars is so deeply ingrained in us that even suggesting that they are bad news gets you in all kinds of trouble especially with nerds.

It was on the older cars but on the newer ones they do seem to Outlast the rest of the vehicle.

The real problem is that everything else on the vehicle ends up being very expensive to fix so it ends up being like a BMW where it ends up in the junkyard and rotting there because it needs $20,000 worth of repairs. Also you typically need specialized tools and computer systems to do those repairs. So besides the occasional hobbyist that resurrects one most of the electric cars on the market today are destined to be turned into scrap as soon as the first owner runs them down. Maybe the second.

The problem is I used to drive a 20 year old Honda Accord. You're not going to have those kind of vehicles available for poor losers like me. Because just about everything being sold is a expensive luxury car.

I guess just added to the pile of crises that our economy is facing along with the fact that baby boomers represent 80% of consumer spending and they're going to die without leaving much if any inheritance, climate change, the collapse of democracy, the automation a job apocalypse and 100 other things I wish I had died before living to see...

We have had birth rates below sustainability since the late 1990s. Old people are always going to look to yesterday because when you are old your best years are passed you and you're starting to hurt all the goddamn time. Not that old people will admit it. But I think the amount of opioids being sold speaks for itself.

It is very difficult to have a country that looks forward when you have so many old farts. America is especially bad about that because we have largely disconnected anyone over 50 from the economy by giving them the benefits of the new deal and the Great society and then letting them take those benefits away from their children and grandchildren...

So politically you have a shitload of old people who are prone to nostalgia that can be easily exploited by corrupt politicians combined with a social welfare system that continues to benefit them but doesn't benefit anyone else.

It's not a surprise that the American capitalist system is rapidly breaking down. But those old people aren't going to let us do socialism. There is way too much resentment associated with socialism and wealth redistribution.

We need a third way but damned if I can think of one. I think we're gradually going to sink into a rather nasty techno feudal dystopia and eventually world war III is going to take off and a bunch of religious lunatics are going to get their hands on the nuclear launch codes...

I would love to be proven wrong and I would love someone to give me that third option I was talking about but honestly when I bring all this up people get so angry and depressed they just either yell at me or mod me down. Occasionally a lefty will tell me we're going to do socialism but they have no answer for that resentment

If I'm driving a gas car then why should I have to subsidize anyone in my apartment let's driving an electric car? The electricity still has to be paid for and the privately owned electric companies aren't going to give it away for free. Also who is going to pay to install those electric vehicle charging stations?

From what I understand electric cars don't substantially reduce the demand for gasoline. I thought they did but someone had corrected me.

If the entire fleet of American cars changed to electric that might be the case but I think the oil companies would have something to say about that. So that's not going to happen. Never mind the fact that the increased cost of an EV puts it out of the price range of a lot of people especially now that the subsidies are gone.

That's Kind of the problem. At the end of the day has someone stuck driving old gas cars why should I be required to subsidize electric cars? Either with my tax dollars or with my rent.

Don't just mod me down give me an answer.

I don't think it's really any more expensive for the sort of person buying a Tesla since that person is probably going to buy a big honking SUV with a big honking gas tank.

But it does still mean that if you don't have your own house with a charging setup you don't get the savings.

I guess there are people who can charge for free at work.

For Tesla I think the real problem is going to be that losing 20% of their sales after paying their CEO $100 billion dollars in salary means they aren't really going to be functional as a company for much longer. But also explains why SpaceX is going public. It's time to cash out before the crash

Which is almost exactly the number of people who are buying them with the tax credits. This is a few months after the end of the tax credits though. There is still probably a bit of the drop tied up with people who already bought their car right before the credits went away but they are probably looking at a permanent drop of about 20%.

Other car companies are having a hard time too with their electrics. Tesla obviously takes the biggest hit cuz electric is all they do.

It probably also doesn't help that charging an electric without at home charging is very expensive and housing is prohibitively expensive right now. So a lot of people are stuck in apartments and not going to be considering an electric for savings.

By that standard not even renewables arw CO2 free, because materials for those panels and batteries also need to be mined.

The point is: the intrinsic method of energy generation is CO2 free. The rest is dependent on the "state of technology".

Nuclear is not "clean". It's merely CO2 free.

The price of electricity in Germany isn't the cost of production at face value, it's a complex political beast that's orienting itself by the price of the most expensive form of energy production: coal and nuclear.

It's literally illegal in Germany to sell renewable energy at its own cost (plus adequate profit).

This is a well-meant regulation from a while ago, initially intended to protect the then-fragile emerging renewable market. Now it has the opposite effect.

And Germany and coal - it's... complicated. The CDU/CSU government killed 120k jobs in the emerging renewable energy industry back in 2010, when Germany still was one of the world leaders in photovoltaics, in order to protect... wait for it... 40k jobs in the coal industry. Of course German electricity is as dirty as it gets, and of course it's expensive. It's by design.

I mean I can read news articles. And you can find the news articles the talk about the corporate commission overriding the locals.

I think the governor is a Democrat so there's some hope but usually you can steam roll locals especially smaller ones. Arizona has a lot of small towns and small cities that won't have the strength to push back against a combination of large corporations and corrupt state governments. It's a reddish state, I think without cheating and gerrymandering it would be a blue state because the statewide races keep going blue but the local races keep going red and that's usually a sign of voter suppression and gerrymandering...

Whatever the case though it's very difficult for Democrats and un corrupt politicians to win small races like the corporate commissioner because people do not realize just how much power those kind of local races have but you can bet your ass corporations and billionaires do

Of severe RAM and storage shortages. That's because openai has already bought 40% of ram capacity for the next 4 years.

It's possible that the whole thing will collapse before then but I don't think so because AI has the possibility to replace trillions and wages. Remember the problem AI is designed to solve is paying wages.

That's going to keep the 1% pumping all of their money into it and they have about 60 to 70% of the money in the country all to themselves.

While we were getting upset that we couldn't say Merry Christmas or that our kids might be gay they were busy consolidating power and taking all the money.

So she seems to have pretended to be a progressive long enough to get that senate seat and sell her constituency out. Because it's a senate seat it takes 6 years to get rid of her. The people of Arizona did so immediately afterwards. I think she was going to try to run as a independent in the hopes of spoiling the election for the Democrats and giving the seat to the Republican party but she was so intensely hated by democrats at that point she was only drawing Republican votes so she dropped out entirely and became a lobbyist.

Is planning on overriding it. They are all Republicans so they are bought and paid for.

Conservatives and the right wing are all about local government until it gets in their way.

The same model of using the state resources to override local government will be spread across the rest of the country out from Arizona.

Remember it's not small government, it's government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Small enough that you can control with violence...