you need to build a solar farm. The teleco subsidies are pretty much handed out w/o strings attached but if you tried to just sign up for this one you'd find yourself in jail in about 6 years when they caught up with you and prosecuted you for fraud.

at best. Sometimes worse. Hertz got out of EVs and besides unpredictable and severe depreciation maintenance was a big factor. That could just be a Tesla thing, since they were all Teslas, but by all accounts the current crop of EVs from other manufactures are still iffy. That's not a surprise, it's a brand new platform.

Also, oil changes are every 6000 miles and have been for ages. If you're low mileage you can go a whole year. I work from home and put very little mileage on my car, so I do the change with full synth once a year for about $100 bucks. but even worse case you're looking at an extra $300-$500 a year. Not cheap, but it wasn't enough to make Hertz keep the Teslas.

And yeah, people are going to take away our gas buggies. There's multiple laws on the books right now to phase them out in 6-10 years. Personally I'd rather have walkable cities and public transportation. An realistically those laws will just get pushed back. But they're getting pushed back because EVs are still too expensive for regular folk to afford. China has affordable EVs... for China. But that's more a quirk of exchange rates and their ability to use borderline slave labor. Even without the tariffs it just doesn't translate here.

And we've got a few major issues with EVs that aren't being addressed. Higher weight means they burn through tires (and put a ton of extra tire particulate into the air), an EV battery fire is a nightmare and replacing an EV or even Plug-In-Hybrid battery is fraught with risk. I've seen EVs where the battery is more than the car...

On the positive end EVs really do reduce our dependency on foreign oil. But as it stands I spend about 2 months out of the year working for my car instead of myself, and I drive an old car very few miles and own it outright. It's looking more and more like an EV is going to push that to 3 months, and I make good money.

All's that to say I don't think EVs are a solution to our transportation woes.

Don't blame people for problems that corporations cause.

How is it a "corporate" cause if people are too lazy to move around, stare at their 3 inch screen all day, eat bags of chips each day, don't bother to drink water, and don't make healthy lifestyle choices? Does personal responsiblity not enter into the equation?

There was an article on here a while back which discussed how fake credentials were being used by North Korea to allow its people to work on remote projects. They were given a fake name, fake skills, fake education, etc, which was then passed to a hiring company who then "vetted" the person without even seeing or talking to them.

So yes, it is possible the companies didn't know.

Those terrorists went to the Capitol to deliberately and knowingly disrupt the official proceeding of Congress. They weren't there on a field trip to look at the sights.

If you're claiming those people shouldn't be jailed because they were non-violent, then the same applies to all the people at Columbia who did nothing more than exercise their First Amendment right to criticize Israel's deliberate targetting of civilians, medical personnel, and journalists, such as the almost 300 bodies found buried in a mass grave at the Nasser Medical Complex, some who had their hands tied. This was the same hospital Israel besieged for days, cutting off power and letting babies on ventilators die.

Once AI starts going on an unfettered rampage, we can scorch the sky so there's no sunlight for them to power up.

A perfect plan indeed.

Replacing MS in the Fed. Gov. will cost money. That money is detailed in appropriations from Congress. If it is not a line item in their budget, they cannot spend money on it. And if it does become a line item in their spending ask to Congress, Congress will tell them whether it stays or not. Congress could also mandate they spend x on replacement. However, if they do that without increasing the budget, they have to be precise in what cuts will be made elsewhere.

"These people waste so much of our money. " Wrong, it is the American People who take most of the taxpayer money. The social programs far outstrip everything else and those are relatively cheap to run day-to-day, it is their payout to the American People that take the money.

And foreign aid is decimal dust when it comes to the Fed. Budget and are about 1 - 2 percent of expenditures:

          https://www.crfb.org/blogs/bre...

Stop repeating Fox talking points.

Coupled with the fact that they continuously buy out any potential competition means that they need to be and should be subject to additional regulation above and beyond what a normal company would be subject to. This is double for Europe and any other Nation outside the United states. It's not for example as if Europe had any choice or save in Facebook buying out multiple potential competitors as they started to gain market share with younger users. Those decisions were made on us soil by us judges.

Ideally Facebook should be broken up and it's very acquisitions turned into private companies and they should no longer be allowed to buy out potential competitors. But if we're not going to take even that basic step we shouldn't be surprised Europe isn't going to stand by like idiots

it won't meet our safety requirements (e.g. it can't survive even a fender bender with an SUV, at least not w/o pushing the whole assembly up into your guts).

So by the time BYD builds a vehicle that a) meets our safety requirements, b) has the acceleration and performance to compete with Gas cars and c) covers the cost of shipping *and* the tariff it's not worth it.

The reason they're targeting Europe is that it's not a wasteland of SUV hell. I think shipping might be easier too, but do not quote me on that.

That said, I'm all for protecting local industry with tariffs here. That $13k car won't be $13k very long if our entire auto industry shuts down. And honestly I'd rather have walkable cities and public transit anyway.

unless we see *massive* changes in how our species is organized. i.e. ending war. That's because the Auto Industry is kept around in case we need their manufacturing capacity to build tanks and shit. That's why our ruling class didn't just move all the factories overseas. You can't just build that kind of manufacturing overnight, so if a real war breaks out we need them to build the stuff that'll fight in the second wave.

Now the question is if you think that's good or bad. Most people will _say_ it's bad, but ending it means moving from a competitive society into a cooperative one.

And as soon as you say that you've lost 90% of Americans. Because the idea that competition solves all problems is rooted further in our society than mom & apple pie.

This common line of reasoning people use for buying these giant vehicles really annoys me because their wonderful view of the road comes at the expense of anyone driving behind them in a car not being able to see any road conditions up ahead beyond the back of their giant vehicle. It's annoying every single time I'm behind one (not to mention less safe since I cant see road conditions beyond one car in front of me) and they're absolutely everywhere.

It's one thing if one has a practical need for one of these vehicles (although even then most of the time a smaller truck or SUV would do), I'm just not a big fan of people whose luxuries come at the expense of others.

2016 bleh

Trump is mad. He's been anti-FISA since it came out that the Steele dossier was used to secure FISA warrants against his campaign staffers in 2026.

You'd have to kick him pretty hard, since he's in the House, not the Senate.