That give it a few weeks and Rebecca Watson over on YouTube will probably do a video dissecting the scientists from this article.

Yeah, and unlike humans we can easily cut animals open and look.

I don't have the energy in me to do it right now but I would bet good money that if I dug into those scientists careers I would find money from the plastic industry.

I'm a little surprised that the guardian hasn't done that for me. They're usually better than this.

He blundered into one good idea and since he was well to do and well connected he didn't have it stolen from him. From there every time he's faced a competitor he just bought them and since we don't enforce antitrust law he could do that. There's been a couple dozen social media platforms that began getting significant traction only to get bought out by Facebook.

When Zuckerberg had to make something on his own it was a complete and abject failure.

It really shows that it's not skilled that makes these people billionaires but luck and having the resources so that somebody with more money doesn't steal it from you.

So we were going to take a big hit.

I've been going through the cycle since I was a kid and I'm old as dirt. Voters put a republican in charge and the Republican breaks the economy. Then voters put a democrat in charge who tries to fix it but they don't fix it fast enough for the voters liking so they put another Republican in charge who breaks the economy worse this time.

It is a fact that the economy does better under Democrats but ask voters and they'll tell you the opposite is true. Because facts may not care about your feelings but voters don't care about facts.

Ordinarily we get 8 years of the Democrats trying to patch it up before the voters fuck up and put another Republican in the office but we only got 4 years this time so Jesus fuck is it going to hurt ...

This really is a partisan issue. The Republicans are objectively bad for america, and for your pocketbook if you have less than 100 million dollars in the bank.

I think it's just as likely that EVS are in the luxury class because they cost more to produce and putting them in the luxury class covers up for some of those costs.

It's like if you're buying a graphics card and you're buying a mid-range card an extra 20 bucks you're damn well going to notice it but if you're buying a $2,000 video card then the manufacturer can pretty easily tack on an extra 100 bucks and you're not going to notice it.

Or another more close to home example, when gasoline prices Spike gas stations make a ton of money because when gas is $0.99 you notice an extra five cents but you don't notice that extra five cents of profit for the gas station when gas is $5 a gallon.

You can easily find articles from reliable news sources talking about electric cars totaled in situations where a gas car would have just been repaired.

And consumer reports has covered the increased cost of electric cars versus gas cars. The fact is that it didn't turn out that the maintenance was less costly. Maybe that will be the case for some cars someday but right now it's not the case, electric cars cost more to maintain than gas powered cars

Don't get me wrong I don't have a dog in this fight. I think we should do away with cars and switch to walkable cities and frankly we're going to do that whether you like it or not because the ruling class has gotten tired of paying your wages and they're simply not going to give you enough money that you can afford a car for much longer. And you're in no position to tell them no any more than I am.

But if we're going to pretend that the American people are going to continue to be allowed to own cars in Mass then electric cars as they stand right now are not the solution. Maybe the tech will keep getting better until they are but that's a maybe it's not guaranteed especially given that car companies tend to Target more expensive luxury vehicles anymore

Just Google fender bender EV causes car to be totaled. You will find several articles detailing cases where it has happened. To be fair it does seem to be much more likely with the cybertruck but regardless it happens with other electric cars too.

Keep in mind I'm using the phrase fender bender loosely. We're not talking a little bit of paint. We're talking in actual fender bender with a fender itself gets well, bent. Enough of a hit that the insurance company is deciding whether they're going to Total the car but not enough where it's painfully obvious the car is done.

As a cheapskate when I've been hit if the car wasn't really really wrecked, which to be fair only happened once, then I just took the check and didn't bother fixing the cosmetics. I'm not so sure I could do that with an electric car but even if I could it's still something I have to think about in the back of my head.

It's looking like electric cars or more expensive to maintain than gas cars. Even without including the battery since surprisingly it looks like the batteries will last it's the rest of the vehicle that's the problem.

Also there's one other major problem with electric cars we don't talk about, if you get in a fender bender it's not uncommon for the whole car to be totaled because the cost of recertifying the battery pack so that you know it's not going to blow up on you is more than the car is worth in a lot of cases.

I don't think these are problems that are completely unsolvable but it does mean that for the time being unless you're somebody who switches your car out periodically and can't afford the hit if your car gets totaled then an electric car is probably going to cost you more and you need to take that into account.

They demand everyone get food and shelter and healthcare. Maybe if they go really crazy they want to nationalize factories but they still want to give everybody food and shelter and healthcare.

That's kind of a big difference because when somebody goes off the deep end on the right wing they become extremely racist and start defending the Holocaust.

The best part is I sound like I'm trolling but everything I wrote above is the gods honest truth and we all know it.

I'm not a fan of his music but from what I understand he was targeted by a right-wing music producer who makes it a point to try and turn stars in the right wingers. Kanye's pretty obvious we not all there in the head so it's not really a surprise that if somebody really went after him he might fall into it. And that would explain all the absolutely batshit crazy things you hear him say.

When it comes to famous people there is a concerted effort to turn them into useful idiots like how Scientology goes after famous people.

I don't think you see it as much with politics because unlike religion people are more on their guard with politics. So it's a little harder to get people into a political cult than a religious one

Companies don't just uniformly increase prices they pick and choose consumers.

So a reliable consumer like a business is more desirable than an unreliable consumer like a individual person.

In Practice this means that they're going to prioritize business customers over you and they are much more likely to raise your rates than business rates.

Because electricity tends towards Monopoly we do have regulations in place to limit that but well, we've been fighting those dastardly bureaucrats for the last 50 years so most of those regulations are gone.

TL;DR your power bill is going to double in the next year or so.

There's no point to even debating this because it's not going to happen. Trump has pushed left-wing pro consumer policy several times and been called out on it by Alexandria orcasio-cortez only to back pedal or wait for the news cycle to eat it.

Trump is not on your side. He's a billionaire. He's not in your class.

The real question is was he always a asshole or did he become one. From what I understand he had a period of several years where he could not speak due to a neurological condition. That's going to really mess with you in ways I can't even imagine.

It's hard to imagine someone who was as aware of how terrible corporate America was becoming a right-wing nut job though. On the one hand he was pretty rich and money changes people and like I said he had that neurological problem

I am reminded of senator John fetterman becoming significantly more right-wing after suffering a stroke...

If Trump said it that means our power bills are going up 1000%...

It's not just the power it's also the water. We have had droughts for the last 20 years. At the moment I think California is out of the drought but that just means they're getting rain water reservoirs are still heavily depleted.

Funny enough I think almonds are going to go away. They require absurd amounts of water and they won't be able to compete with data centers for water.

They have to treat the water they use for the data centers with chemicals in order to prevent corrosion in the coolant pipes so the water is completely useless when they're done with it. And since it costs a little bit more to recycle that water instead of just using your drinking water they don't do it.

We're going back to feudalism. But without the peasantry. If you want to know what your life is going to be like look at native American reservations before the casinos. That's your future. Course the baby boomers will probably be dead by then. I got mine fuck you and all that

That's the same thing. Ignoring the fact that Congress has basically stripped the divisions of government of the funding needed to battle stuff like this out in court the reality is that after decades of Court packing with pro corporate judges none of those finds will ever be levied unless it's against something like a hobbyist.

And people pay fines all the damn time without involving the courts. There is decades of precedence for that.