Tesla is sitting on 800 million worth of unsold cybertrucks. The current plan is to sell them off to SpaceX and xai.

Spacex's contracts are almost entirely government. The private organizations that launch satellites do so on the back of the government funded launches.

So yeah it's government funded. Like all of Elon musk's businesses it wouldn't exist without heavy government subsidies.

It is slightly less obvious because here in America we like to obfuscate the subsidies so we can pretend the free market is doing everything. It goes back to the Cold war and Ronald Reagan types constantly going on about how government is the problem while using the power vacuum created by the average person ignoring government to make it do what they want and to steal your taxpayer dollars

But we are absolutely excellent at selective law enforcement.

We're not perfect. Every now and then a pretty white woman will get caught up in our laws attacking women's reproductive healthcare for example. And sometimes the cops will harass someone that is clearly not of the appropriate economic class for harassment.

But for the most part we are very good at building systems that punish the innocent and reward the evil. I mean we had slavery longer than anyone on the planet and segregation and Jim Crow after that. The daughters of the Confederacy is some terrifying ass shit.

I'm just saying that yeah we can ban vpns. And will teach the United Kingdom how to do it because we've basically made them into Little America.

And if I may take a moment I would like to apologize to the entirety of Europe and the United Kingdom for doing that.

I mean it was kind of hard to notice anything else what was all the organized doxing and campaigns to get quick people to commit suicide. Those kind of overwhelm any other content on the site.

It's the old Nazi bar problem. Once you start letting a few Nazis in congratulations your bar is a Nazi bar.

You report them and away they go. Yeah they will crop up again but they don't get as big as kiwi farms. Kiwi farms centralized the practice of online harassment particularly online harassment for the purposes of encouraging suicide.

Centralization can bring a lot of power to evil. It's why dictators exist.

It means the website goes away in the UK.

People who want to access it will use a VPN and eventually the people who passed these laws will use that to get vpns criminalized.

You need to pay close attention to who is pushing these laws. I promise you every time you look you are going to find a right winger.

The left wing is too busy trying to stop fascism and maintain human civilization to be bothered with bullshit like this. You might find the occasional centrist that gets roped into it too. Centrists can be frustrating because they will basically do whatever the fuck they think the voters want even if the voters want something incredibly stupid.

Here in America we had a anti-crime bill in the 90s specifically written to Target black people that was extremely popular with the black community because they wanted a crackdown on the crime in their neighborhoods that the police were ignoring because, well black neighborhoods.

It's not just bad or even harmful speech it's a website that specializes in doxing especially of trans and queer people and then arranging for harassment campaigns with the goal of getting the target to commit suicide. The website's users have been successful more than once.

If you have ever used the bsnes emulator the author of it killed herself and kiwi farms was involved.

Not that the UK law would help any of that. Someone was successful in taking kiwi farms off the internet for a Time by going around to all the hosts and just explaining what kiwi farms was. But it looks like they are back. At one point even the hosting provider that specializes in white supremacist websites wouldn't touch them. It makes me wonder who would host the website given the potential liability risks.

There are limits after all to free speech. Then again section 230 of the CDA should protect the hosting provider from anything except boycotts and I'm not going to give up section 230 and basically the entire internet with it just to get to kiwi farms.

If we had a functioning Department of Justice though the website would just be filled with cops arresting people for harassment. Sort of like how they hang around websites used by sex workers to do the same thing.

I mean from a lawyer's standpoint it's a different thing but from a practical standpoint the lawsuit goes away.

You're absolutely correct as far as the procedure but I'm speaking colloquially.

What I remember is Microsoft holding out until Bush Jr got in charge and shut down the investigation and any punishment. Hell forget punishment they got rewarded. Technically they had to give a bunch of free software to schools, schools that they had been trying to force software on for decades but who had been turning it down because Microsoft software is shit.

So Microsoft literally got to violate the law and destroy competitors illegally and in exchange for that they were rewarded with access to the public school system. In hindsight that was probably the sign of the end

I just saw a story about the 4xe where a guy is suing because he's had his vehicle stuck in the dealer's repair shop for months while he pays the auto loan on it and insurance but doesn't have a car. Naturally it's going to be an uphill battle for the lawsuit because he has a automatic arbitration agreement that he was roped into when he bought the car.

It seems like Jeep made a lemon even by their standards. Honestly I'm surprised anyone still buys the things. I guess they are coasting on the old reputation but they seem pretty well known at this point for failure rates that would make Cadillac blush.

Lot rot will destroy the parts you're trying to stockpile. It helps if you can keep it in a garage but can you really keep a whole ass car or a shitload of parts even in your garage? If you can't the weather will quickly destroy the parts and even if you can it'll get to them eventually.

This assumes you can do all the part changing yourself and maintenance and your willing to spend about one weekend a month replacing parts.

It's going to be that often because you're either using very very old parts or you are using cheap aftermarket stuff that's going to fail within a year or two. Even a 20 year old car has a lot of parts and systems you have to keep in order to keep it running.

I found this out the hard way trying to keep an old 94 Honda Accord running. It was especially bad because I'm no mechanic so I generally have to pay to have anything done on it. I would replace a radiator only to have to do it again in 2 years because you simply could not buy a high quality radiator for it.

After about 15 years you start having part problems with a car and after 20 it's basically over.

Let's not forget the cancer villages. Besides one very specific black City here in America (we all know the one) we have not for the most part allowed our citizens to have the groundwater poisoned. Okay there's a few more asterises on that in the form of rural communities getting their groundwater fucked up by fracking... But it's not a widespread practice over here.

We also don't have a lot of slave labor outside of the use of h2b visas. Admittedly we have started using h2b visas to do the kind of slave labor that the United Arab Emirates does where they steal your passport... But that's something it didn't get started until the Trump administration. Look up the YouTuber Farm to Taber and she describes it and how it works.

China on the other hand has a ton of minorities they are currently housing in re-education camps for the purposes of slave labor. You can't compete with slave labor nor should you try.

These people are heavily involved in lots and lots of the production line especially mining and steel production. Among other things. So there's no way in hell Europe can possibly compete nor can America.

I mean not unless we install a dictator and start making heavy use of slave labor while poisoning groundwater.

I don't understand why we all have the race to the bottom just because that's how we were told life has to be when we were 12 and we didn't know any better.

Certainly it's true that we can't just let China blow up the world with pollutants and poison. The same goes for our own countries and our own backyards too. Pollution and climate change don't give a rat's ass about borders. And drought is drought and it's global because we are fucking up the water supply.

But besides stuff that carries over across borders and the obvious military risks of a super powerful Nation that is a dictatorship I don't need to compete with China nor do I want to.

The only reason we're talking about competing with China is our billionaires want to compete with China to see who gets to be the biggest and baddest billionaire.

But how in the name of fuck does that help me or you?

See your entire premise is wrong. You're trapped in a race to the bottom.

You need cops walking the White collar beat in order to get those cretins under control.

The trick is those cops are what we call bureaucrats. A bureaucrat is a white collar cop.

Think about every context where you've heard the phrase bureaucrat and your entire life. There is a reason why you have been taught regularly to demonize bureaucrats but not the kind of cops did punish crimes ordinary people like you and me are likely to do.

Imagine if you're running a mafia and you can convince the public to shut down the police. That's what we did. Or rather what the billionaires and multi multi-millionaires who violate laws and forced by bureaucrats did. We just got tricked into letting them do it.

Frankly I'm surprised the United Kingdom has enough of a law enforcement arm left in place. If this was America the lawsuit would already have been dismissed by the Department of Justice.

We here on the left wing point out a problem and get a little tiny itty bitty bit of action on that problem just enough to make the worst of the disaster put off for a few decades.

So after all that work we get a few more decades of time to actually solve the problem but during that time the disaster doesn't come.

And then outcome you numb skulls saying that it's okay we don't need to do anything and we can burn it all down because the disaster didn't come. Even though the reason the disaster didn't arrive is because we were actively doing shit to stop the disaster...

It's like with the ozone layer where we stopped using hairspray and Freon and whatnot (mostly the industrial grade use of freon and other such gases). There was a problem and we took action and we mitigated the problem.

The real trouble is nobody ever gets a ticker tape parade for preventing a disaster. Because that doesn't make good TV. Good TV requires the disaster to happen and then for somebody to come in and save as many main characters as they can while lots of extras die in the background. Now that is some good TV.

Also the fact that people cannot tell the difference between reality and television...

Because you're obsessed with individual action for systemic problems. I'm American but I figured out years ago that individual action cannot solve systemic problems.

Recycling is a scam from the plastic industry. You can Google and easily find that out. You don't have a choice but to drive. If you're using that little amount of electricity it's probably because you don't live in a place where it gets extremely cold or extremely hot. Other than that or you live in some place that gets very cold and you've been using gas.

That's fine people need to live I'm not calling you out on it. Blah blah blah there is no ethical consumption under capitalism blah blah blah.

But what I'm saying is you're trying to solve systemic problems with individual action.

The actual solution would be to transition to walkable cities and public transit to do a way of the cost and damage from cars and then to transition our electrical grid to renewables especially wind and solar to stop the excessive emissions from oil and gas. Meanwhile do away with disposable plastic because the actual costs to society are extremely high.

And there's the phrase you're missing, externalized costs.

Whether it's the trillions of dollars of damage done by climate change or the trillions of dollars of damage done by us being filled with microplastics and needing healthcare to deal with that companies that make these products, and oil and plastic and cars are all products in a way we don't think of them as such, those companies get too externalize the costs on to you so that you pay them and they get all the profit.

Unfortunately you can't just magically wave a capitalist wand and make them pay. You have to break down those systems completely. And then again we get back to it being a systematic problem not an individual one.

But the thing is you have been programmed just like the rest of us to view everything as an individual problem because very powerful and very rich assholes do not want you solving the systemic problems that they profit from.

And the fact that you think right now that I may conspiratorial lunatic is part of that programming. What we need is a kind of deconstruction for corporate capitalism like we have today similar to how religious extremists will go through a deconstruction to get away from a cult.