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Comment Re:Big labor is a state-sanctioned extortion racke (Score -1) 122

Because rule by technocratic corporation is just such a big win. Your's is a perfect example of how our chimpanzee brain can overwhelm those faculties that make us human. Greed is based largely on short term gain (your paycheck right now) and not on long term prosperity (what will my paycheck look like if the government and unions are hamstrung or outright eliminated from labor regulation and negotiation).

So what is it? Are you a chimpanzee, or a human being?

Comment Re:Japan too (Score 1) 224

It will be the standard Conservative talking point; that the recession doesn't really exist, it's all these evil economists, many of them civil servants, trying to get Labour elected. Labour has now been out of power so long that it can't be directly blamed for the woeful state of the British economy, so the next strategy is to deny there is a problem at all.

All the Brexit "dividends" that were promised have proven phantoms. Creating any kind of friction with your primary trading partner is utter stupidity. Britain has been a merchant nation since the Middle Ages, with deep links to the Continent. In fact, whether it was the Habsburgs, Napoleon, the Kaisers or Hitler, the primary objective was to create a continental system that would keep Britain out. Heck, even de Gaulle got in on the "keep Britain off the Continent" when he blocked Britain's entry into the customs union at a time when Britain's economy was falling over a cliff.

And lo and behold, this time it wasn't some Continental demagogue trying to wrench Britain away from Europe, it was the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson who accomplished what Britain had been fighting to prevent since the Battle of Agincourt.

Comment Re:Japan too (Score 2) 224

I think a review of post-WWII history will show that Britain spent decades in a spiraling decline. It's empire and the kind of locked in economy that that vast empire had created began to disintegrate. The huge debts accrued between the late 1930s and 1945, much of it owed to the United States in one form or another, left it the sick man of Europe. It probably would have entered the Customs Union earlier, but de Gaulle had an absolute hatred of the British and did everything he could do to block it. A seemingly permanent turn around happened as it integrated into the European economic community. It had to replace its Empire with something; and the Commonwealth had proven an enormous failure; with the preeminent Commonwealth nations like Canada and the Australia resigning their economic relationship with the UK to the dust heap.

Comment Re:A warning to well-meaning spiritualists out the (Score 3, Insightful) 120

According to the OT God told Abraham to murder his own son, only stopping Abraham at the last moment. God is a fucked up dude, so maybe He did tell this putz to scam people. God has done far far far worse (if you believe the Bible).

For me, it's just another con artist using religion to gain money. He's at the lower tier of con men; the big ones like Joseph Smith, L Ron Hubbard and Billy Graham wanted power.

Comment Re:nope (Score 2) 382

My brother lives in Calgary and when the cold snap hit there, there were plenty of ICE vehicles knocked out. Even the block heaters were struggling, and that's before they were told to conserve electricity during the evenings. Intense cold snaps pretty cause different problems for ICE and EV engines, but the result is the same; the vehicle won't start.

Comment Re:Increase reliability, stop subsidizing batterie (Score 4, Insightful) 382

The large majority of the US has a commute of about 26-27 minutes, or just under an hour both ways. Let that sink in for a moment. Discard the outliers, like guys who live in Montana and have to drive fifty miles uphill both ways to and from work. The average American spends less than an hour moving between home and work.

So what that says in the vast majority of usage cases, an EV is more than adequate, and if there are issues, it isn't with battery capacity, it's probably limitations in the electrical grid.

I don't know of too many other fields of inquiry where the obsession is purely with the least likely use case scenarios; of some guy with a 10 cylinder Dodge Ram that tows a 10 foot utility trailer up a mountain range five days a week, and that decisions are made at the highest levels based on that guy, as opposed to the 90+ other people who don't have a commute like that at all. I would imagine that if I were to look for a historical counterpart, it might be when they started building the canal systems in England in the 16th century, and I'm sure there were guys who horse and ox-pulled carts right pissed that their livelihoods were threatened, or when the canal system itself was again made redundant by a new group of capitalists and bureaucrats laying down track. I'm sure all the horse-drawn cab drivers were outraged by stinky petrol-swilling exhaust-puking automobiles literally tearing their livelihood out from underneath them.

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