22% of the price of their US made products going to income taxes of all sorts

Citation, please.

It's just a shame that the US Government's tax system favors moving manufacturing out of the country

That may be a contributing factor too. But the union's government-supported monopoly on labor was the original topic, let's stick to that.

Could Stem Cells One Day Cure Diabetes?

One cannot answer such question without a lot of trial and error... Which is a very costly process — so costly, it is impossible to do it just out of benevolence alone. You need a financial motive. Either the reward of a good steady salary (regardless of outcome), or a promise of a spectacular payout in case of success — or some combination of both.

Who would be the payer? Right now around half of this research is funded by the Federal government.— indeed, this article, for example, laments the government share dropping below 50% "for the first time since WW2"...

Which means, that about half of the decisions in that industry is made by the government officials, who will not themselves reap any monetary benefits from it. Their own salaries will not change regardless of whether the funded projects succeed or fail — as long as they follow the rules (or in good faith believe, that they do). And, maybe, that is, how government officials should operate — they are hired by us,; captive taxpayers — to do things, that only government can do...

But medical research does not require government's power! I'd like it to be fully financed by the "profiteers", willing to risk their — and their willing investors' — funds, time, and efforts for the sliver of hope of a lucrative breakthrough.

I don't want to have to vote once in four years on who will be appointing the people, who will be devising the policies, which will control government research spending. Even if everyone involved is sincere, I may have stark disagreement with them over the funding priorities.

For example, this guy thinks it is unethical to live beyond 75... He is, of course, entitled to his own opinion, but he is not just a random kook — he had enough influence over Democratic Administration, he is considered "an architect of Obamacare".

The older I get, the less I want him to influence medical research — yet, his power over government remains strong. Do you suppose, he — or people listening to him — would consider funding cures for Alzheimer much, for example, if most of the sufferers are above 75 anyway? Or the obesity — with it being the sufferers' own fault? Or the diabetes — for which obesity is one of the biggest reasons?

Or the anti-aging medicines and procedures? Why would government fund those, if, as a result, there'll be (much) more retirees collecting pensions? I'd like to live long, but a government's ideal citizen would die a months after retiring from workforce — we have nearly opposite priorities here, and yet it is the government that still funds about half of the medical research...

Any labor savings will go towards bonuses for the suits who saved the company money.

A dose of facts to counter Communist propaganda... Ford's labor costs will go up $8.8billion in 2024, because of the new contract with the union. According to Communists (like ArchieBunker here), had Ford's executives managed to stave off that increase, it would've gone into their bonuses — well, Ford's very CEO's total compensation was $26 million in 2023 — a rise of $8 billion would've been an unimaginable 300+-fold jump...

What does that rise cost the buyers? Considering their output of "almost" 2 million cars in 2023. Simple math tells, that just the newly-added costs will average almost $4.5K per vehicle — in addition to the labor costs already there...

Automakers compete with each other — it is highly illegal for them to collude on price-fixing and other aspects of business, and government prosecutes such crimes.actively.

But the unions do not compete — the same United Auto Workers is an official labor supplier to all American big auto-makers: Chrysler, . Ford, and GM — though, not Tesla, not yet.

The government not only does not apply the anti-trust legislation against this monopolist, various laws and rules exist to protect it.— the better to destroy the Free Market...

By what sense of logic or fairness do the anti-trust laws not apply to labor unions, I do not know. They certainly mark all the check-boxes::

• tying agreements
• predatory pricing
• mergers that could lessen competition

General Motors is reported to put in between 20 and 30 on the Silverado, depending on trim level and model

In 2023 Ford Motor Company employed 177K people. They sold "nearly" 2 million vehicles that year, or about 11 vehicles per employee. In a year — or 2000 business-hours per person, which makes the average vehicle cost about 180 hours, not "20-30".

I doubt, GM's figures are drastically different from Ford's. Maybe, your source is counting just the guys on the assembly line — excluding everyone else, leading you to incorrect conclusions.

Can't see how labor expense is making the $36.8K base price vehicle uncompetitive

Ah, those foolish businessmen moving factories to Mexico, why are they doing it?

It's already extremely safe. Cycling has a lower death rate per participant than *tennis*. And while your risk per *mile* is signifiantly higher on a bike than as a passenger in a car, your risk per *hour* is signifiantly lower. Since most cyclists aren't putting nearly as many miles on their bike per week as their car, the bike represents a low risk to them; in fact if you take up cycling your chance of dying in the next year goes down by 1/3 once the fitness benefits kick in, even though you've just added a new way to die to your personal list.

So tech like this is unlikely to reduce *absolute* risk very much, because absolute risk is already very low. It so happens this particular tech could reduce the most fatal type of accident -- being struck by an overtaking motorists -- but these types of accidents are very rare, as are cycling fatalities. Since there's only about eight hundred cyclist mortalities / year in the US there's not a lot of room for improvement, especially as this tech is bound to be installed on only a tiny minority of bikes. It does nothing for the two most common types of accidents: (1) cars entering the street to make a turn and hitting a cyclist traveling along that street and (2) cars passing a cyclist and making a right turn at an intersection across the cyclist's path (the "right hook"), so it's unlikely to affect metrics like ER visits and hospitalizations very much.

We have to sharpen our thinking about what we're actually trying to accomplish when we talk about "making cyling safer". I'd suggest there's two things we can be reasonably trying to do: eliminate as many *preventable* deaths and injuries as possible and make people *feel* safer when riding a bike. There's a lot of injuries that can be taken off the table by designing and marking intersetions better and improving lines of sight. Many of these changes would also reduce car-pedestrian accidents and car-car accidents too.

Technologies like this can't make cycling statistically much safer than it aready is. But they can do a lot to make cyclists feel safer -- much the way some cyclists are spending hundreds of dollars *today* on rear-facing radar units. Those are good things, but they're no substitute for better design which would both make cyclists feel safer and make everyone statistically safer.

Sure, if you just fixed people, that would work better than any conceivable technical solution.

But you can't fix people, so there's no point in complaining that *some* people are *sometimes* stupid, careless, or irresponsible..That will never change. Sometimes, even, that careless person might be *you* on a bad day. We all rate ourselves based on our performance on our good days; which is why we all think we're better-than-average drivers, but really our risk to ourselves and others is dominated by the days we didn't get enough sleep, are stressed out, distracted, and running late. Those are the days when the things we habitually do right go out the window.

If you frame the root of the problem as being "people aren't good enough to operate the world we've built", then you're stuck putting band-aids on the problem. That's not unreasonable as it sounds, think of how things would be if you didn't *have* band-aids. People would be getting limbs amputated because otherwise insignificant cuts got infected.

So it's perhaps better to frame the problem this way: the world we've built is not suitable for people to operate in with acceptable safety. The root of the problem is design, so that should be highest priority. But even so, we'll still need to address the failures that better road design can't fix. Even the most safely run factory still needs a first aid kit, and that first aid kit is going to be stocked with band-aids.

But it matters to the research and operation teams whether their downtime is two months or nine months. Such a reduction could alter the economics of a robotic exploration program, which would surely be a prelude to a manned mission. So the robotic program could both provide input into planning of the manned mission while proving the propulsion technology is reliable enough to be man-rated.

Current concepts for a manned Mars missions would last 22 months, 21 of which would be spent in transit and one on Mars. If the round trip transit time were reduced to 4 months, you could spend 18 months on the surface in a mission of the same length. In such as scenario with robotic missions you could avoid staging supplies that only *might* be needed knowing you could send them if the need arose *during* the mission. You could respond to unexpected circumstances, or return samples to Earth for analysis that could alter the priorities of the mission.

So it could make sense to build unmanned vehicles with such a technology -- as part of a manned *program*.

What an awful song though. Had to turn down the volume.

I believe such things happen far more often in other states.

You believe that power outages that last 17 days happen far more often in other states? Or you believe that power outages that result in 210 deaths happen far more often in other states?

Define "many." I believe only the electric F150 comes with the capability, and even then your house needs to be wired to support that.

Right. Faking the first moon landing took Stanley Kubrik and tens of millions of dollars, and even there they didn't get it quite right. The next fake moon landing, in five years or whatever, will just need a laptop computer and maybe a few Photoshop experts to polish it up.

There is no social credit score system in China. It's almost entirely a boondoggle of the Western imagination.

Chinese government is the worst for real, no need to invent or perpetuate a myth about how bad they are.

Peer reviewers are volunteers who don't get paid, at least that's not the norm in science. Arguably they should be given the importance of the task. If you've ever seen peer review comments, some of them are obviously phoned in. Occaisionally institutions will offer honoraria for reviewing proposals -- typically $200 or so. This is not a lot of money considering how much work it is.

Here's how I look at it: generative AI is dsigned to create plausible-looking output in response to a prompt. That's how the lawyer who submitted a ChagGPT-generated brief got caught. The references the AI generated for the brief looked plausible enough to pass a cursory inspection, even by an expert, but if you looked them up they didn't exist.

This wasn't a failure of the AI; the AI did exactly what it was designed to do. It was the fault of people who relied on it to do something it wasn't designed to do. Surely someday soon a *lot* of the work of peer review will be automated by AI before a paper actually gets reviewed by a human, to avoid wasting reviewer time with obvious shortcomings.