That's not Democrats! PEOPLE they represent vote them in and for the most part they still believe in democracy, unlike the Republicans.

If you get outside can talk to real people, you'll find out that most Americans are selfish assholes with some knowing what they are expected to say but quietly act like assholes. Possibly no worse than humanity when given too much success (in the past.)

Authoritariansim has been rising since the 70s as studies show. Even Gen Z is more comfortable with it; and their value of democracy has been waning as well. Trump really is actually a symptom of a disease.

Sorry if reality hurts.

For most people, it's another NIMBY issue and they don't want to be forced to pay a penny or be inconvenienced at all. They feel good at sometimes giving their change to the poor; when they feel like it, not when it is needed and it's just for their own gratification (or a moment of guilt when a store asks for $1 at checkout... which goes to the store's tax benefit as well as marketing at how they give back, when it's suckers contributing to that.)

Futuristic talk is an argument? There is a huge supply chain involved in a car and outside vendors and they are not all under 1 roof and deploying 100% automation; they are just beginning automation.

We still employ and employed many humans to make cars. It's still a huge expense. We don't innovate. They do. China is leading research in many areas today and headed to invert with the USA; the destruction of our university system is proving to go slowly... but it is on going.

Correction, it's not too expensive. Adjusted for inflation they line up with the past. The problem is we have less money! A continuing trend until people realize their wages are being stolen...

You are correct. AI though was probably working for Trump in the last election.

How does one go about being FAIR in leveling pricing? Even in an honest approach it's an incredibly difficult task! We are so corrupt now we make China look honest. doomed task.

Is it fair to allow infrastructure to lower manufacturing costs? So we have to tariff the Chinese free healthcare as unfair? It's a massive added cost to US manufacturing. Is it fair to allow no pollution controls in manufacturing ? no. but how do you compute the costs of pollution controls? ask industry? theirs and ours will lie about that as much as they can; neither cares about human health.
What about industrial infrastructure? we can barely pass ONE infrastructure bill every generation and even then it's mostly catch up repair from neglect. They treat utilities as infrastructure which should be shared responsibility (more government, non profit) while a treat utilities as business enterprises of competition even when it's a monopoly like electricity. We only have public socialized police, fire, roads because those were grandfathered in and are slowly in the process of privatization; probably last to go, but postal service, weather service are happening now. Social Security and Medicare have begun already to privatize... with no benefits and there won't be any except for the rent seekers taking it over.

No. #1 cost is healthcare of employees. The union is always the target of blame by incompetent management; of which we have an abundance. One can only hope MBAs can begin to dominate China and knock them down a peg before they decimate US businesses.

The #1 cost in USA cars is the healthcare of the workers. We call that an unfair government subsidy other countries do that requires a protective tariff...

A nuclear power lost...
Vietnam
Korea (tie is both losing)
Iraq
Afghanistan (twice; arguably they both lost their empires too.)
Outside nations were involved back then too.
Russian losses will be greater this time than that time. Somebody look it up; I bet they lost more money already.

It's like drug dealers. Addiction is only 1 step removed.

Robots are not better drivers. period. Eventually; soon, they will be for MOST situations. The last 10% might take decades...

Something to think about is infrastructure and the environment. It's all made to help stupid humans driver better. We are trying to have the robots adapt to a human designed environment. If we spent a fraction of that money and effort making things easier for the robots we'd already likely have the robots winning nearly the whole thing. Such as having the cars talk with each other; we don't need street lights; the cars can negotiate directly. Road markers such as painted lines are for human vision. a robot can do better with something else. Precise GPS like beacons - sure, somebody could mess with that... but then somebody could paint the lines on the road or change signs to confuse many humans. Major routes can be upgraded - special roads exclusively for robots...which would be much faster in speed as well. plus you have the massive waste of owning a car which could be driving around for others the 90% of the time it's parked with just 1 owner...

A great many idiot humans are driving; if we could stop them from driving that would greatly improve everything!

If we required humanoid robots for everything we'd have nothing today; but we have space probes etc. for generations because the situations didn't require a humanoid to complete the task... in fact, the custom built to task bots were better than humans already.

Words mean nothing anymore; especially online. "Conservative" is a brand name that within todays context in the USA means a Trumpist, a modern American franchise of Fascism... which is by design, a franchise that is customized to each nation and destined for endless war. Republican stands for even less than nothing and is conflated with "conservative." The low vocabulary clouds people's ability to think and is right out of 1984. When talking physically in the real world, it's quite different because you have a context that greatly reduces the internet word games created by missing contexts; plus the non-written communication that provides a 2 way feedback between two people. Personally, I use "hate" broadly from dislike to anger; on many things I'm habitually broad which does give me a measure from how people interpret and react. People here will say they hate a food but still eat a little of it sometimes while another food that makes them gag also gets the label.

As far as the actual meaning of conservative, I'm often classified as conservative; especially, when it comes to new technology, even more so from within the tech community.

I have relatives and friends and former friends who are American idiots that gradually just ran off the cliff the their fellow sheep over the last few decades. Gullible and slow from the start but just joined the cult as it slowly went crazy - not really noticing other than thinking everybody else is "crazy" for not agreeing with their delusional perspective.

One even began spouting racist shit openly and using the N word.

I work around a university community as well. I see righteous fanatics on both "sides" all gradually following textbook Russian subversion tactics. I have only met 1 trans fanatic who was mildly toxic; most the toxic woke are advocates for other people and they are few in number but quite harmful. Technology amplifies people who normally would be ignored and dismissed in the past and makes everything worse overall.

BS. Conservatives obsess over everything that disgusts them; it's seriously their kink. The ones I know are always raging over their disgust and twisted dark nightmares. It seems to trigger some liberals into becoming annoying trolls who piss off everybody and so we have a cycle that tries to involve the vast majority who simply would rather ignore the whole thing.

Sport is so crazy a topic; the trans sport issue had to be invented by a conservative propagandist.

I have a racist lawyer relative. I didn't need an extreme example to grasp the concepts of how people circumvent rules and regulations; but apparently you need a lot of extra learning...

Any rule you create to stop racists from harming people will be circumvented by a never ending amount of games. The ONLY way to stop them is to get into absolutes like race/sex quotas. Not forever, but it needs to happen whenever things get bad.

For a while, there will be under-qualified people; due to supply and demand but I find it quite idiotic people bitch about merit and race when there always is a larger merit problem; acting as if merit wasn't a problem before... My experience is that minorities have less of a problem than white men; most the incompetence I experienced for DECADES has been white people (I'm 100% white.) I think Americans like politicians who are incompetent and stupid because they IDENTIFY with that! The real minority is those of us who are actually competent (BTW, not even half earned degrees, the reading and math levels are at the level of children... and they voted for Trump, which is just above marrying your sibling.)

The vague highly interpretative nature of the Heritage Foundation's assault on freedom allows them a vast gaping hole of legal games to terrorize anybody who agrees to their deals. It does not matter if you kill off the old Affirmative Action, the new DEI replacement, or create something newer. If you displease them they will invent contradictions to conclude you are in violation that will take years of suffering to finally have a judge apply basic logic so you win until they invent the next assault; all of which cost them nothing.