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.

Maybe originally, but now the demand for gasoline far outstrips the amount naturally found in crude oil. That's why they invented cracking.

If one day there ever were an excess of light components in oil, they could simply transform it into higher-weight molecules. Along those lines, one of the biggest uses for natural gas is for building polymer chains.

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.

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...

Right wing politics doesn't work. It's a combination of trickle down and the divine right of Kings and if you have literally any knowledge you know those don't work.

So the only solution is total media control. Like they do in Russia or China. Otherwise we all see the emperor has no cloths and do away with our ruling class.

So right now in America 90% of media is owned by billionaires, but that's not enough. There's still truth and reality available. And that has to stop.

What are the odds that the daughter of Bill Gates could secure funding for a start up. Didn't have that on my bingo card for 2025.

Somebody once asked, "If Jeff Bezos can start Amazon in his garage what's stopping you?"

Answer: I don't have a garage.

Billionaires and ruling elites are dismantling capitalism. They have never liked capitalism they have just taken advantage of it when it was available. But they spend every waking moment trying to undermine the mechanics of capitalism.

On the other hand voters simply will not tolerate socialism. If you've ever had a co-worker that won't pull their own weight and felt resentment that's why. The idea of somebody who isn't working being allowed to have anything is really upsetting to a lot of people.

We need some sort of third way and I have no idea what it is. I know Joe Biden was trying to buy time with some antitrust law enforcement and with unions but that wasn't a solution that would it Best buy some time before the total collapse of capitalism.

And that is way too complex for voters to understand so we get another term of trump and capitalism is getting dismantled faster now...

We definitely have to come up with a third option but I have no idea what it could be

I know you probably want to go back to Gold but our economy is too big for that and it would be silly. You need a money supply and you need a currency that isn't pegged to any physical asset. Otherwise you artificially constrain your economy to that asset .

The problem is we keep printing money and then giving it all to about 3,000 billionaires and then they use it to buy up competitors and jack up prices on you and me.

The issue is that we have a ruling class and a lot of us seem to want it that way because they want to believe that there is order and structure to the universe instead of the frightening chaos that we actually live in. So they turn right wing and support a hierarchical structure that makes them feel like that order exists even if in reality it doesn't.

For the older ones a lot of them will drop dead before reality comes calling but if you're under 50 you can't pretend the real world isn't real anymore. The protections from the New deal and the Great society or your local equivalent have completely broken down.

The way they got so big wasn't that they were super efficient they just went around buying up their competitors and they happened to have some venture capital because bezos had some connections through his parents.

If we had proper antitrust law enforcement someone would have noticed ages ago that Amazon was going around buying up competitors and shut that down but well, we don't.

So now we've got a handful of retailers and they are all basically owned by the same handful of major shareholders so they all have the same prices and those prices keep going up because good luck starting a competing retailer.