If employees are being "paid well" to make goods then they inevitably make those goods too expensive to sell realistically.

Yes and no.

Go look up a Sears catalog from 1960.

A basic American-made fridge was the 2026-equivalent of around $5,000. An American-made 23" TV was the equivalent of $2,300. A clock radio was the equivalent of $350.

Middle-class people had these things in their homes. The difference was the guy working at the television factory was earning enough at his union job to buy that fridge, television and clock radio.

Customs has always had discretion for who it will allow into the country at ports of entry.

I'm an older GenX Canadian. This is of course correct.

The difference now compared to 20 years ago is the outright hostility you encounter more often than not from American Customs and Border Protection agents.

While never particularly friendly, in the before-times they were very rarely antagonistic. It was an efficient, almost boring exercise.

Contrast that with now while they angrily scroll through your phone in case you have JD Vance memes while barking orders (yes, they could always look through your phone, but they were looking for CSAM or evidence of immigration violations, not whether you had an AI-generated image of Putin and Trump smooching.)

Canadians like me are saying "screw that" and going to Costa Rica, Mexico, Europe or a hundred other places instead.

We're off to the Netherlands on Thursday. Two years ago we would have gone to the Eastern Seaboard.

Of course the Trump supporters reply "Fuck you, America doesn't need you anyway" but the fact remains that across the USA there are campaigns desperately trying to get Canadians to come back. To which we respond "Fuck you, America."

BoP is collecting and distributing funds

Specifically, American taxpayer dollars.

Trump's goal is to distribute those taxpayer dollars into his pockets and his corporations. Seems to me a stablecoin would be a good way to launder that money.

What do you mean *now* it's the obvious choice?!

Battery technology has improved a lot in the last 30 years. There's been approximately a 90% reduction in cost per kWh since 2010 and a roughly fivefold increase in energy density.

Will Hyundai ever fix the stupidity where you cannot precondition the battery for fast charging without being forced to use the in-dash navigation system?

I live in Canada. I have a 2020 Kia EV (Kia & Hyundai largely share the same tech stack).

My EV has a "Winter Mode" setting. When I turn it on it automatically preconditions the battery at -5c or colder.

I almost never use DC Fast Chargers, so it's turned off, but it is just a "switch" like you're asking for.

https://uni.hi.is/helmut/files...

Also no Uighur slave labor to keep costs down.

I used to think this way, but if you look at videos of the auto plants you'll see that the costs are kept down mostly through the use of robots. There are almost not people at all on the factory floors, slaves or otherwise.

(Now of course maybe the slaves are building the robots, but I assume eventually robots are building the robots that are building the robots...)

I think you see maybe a dozen people in this whole video -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If that doesn't tell you the direction Trump is driving the country and where the donations are coming from, you're not paying attention.

Certainly petrodollar donations factor into it, but It's a mistake to understate Trump's pettiness.

Most of his hatred of green energy comes from the fact that wind turbines were installed near his golf course in Scotland 15ish years ago. He spent vast amounts of money in court battling their installation all the way up to the Supreme Court, but lost.

Trump argued that the "windmills ruined the view."

That's where the majority of his animosity comes from. The Petrodollars are just icing on the cake.

Most flatties don't dispute probes, they dispute humans went.

Depends on the degree to which The Flattie has drunk the Kool-Aid.

Many believe the earth is a dome-covered plane. They call the dome "The Firmament" and argue no craft can penetrate it, ergo nothing has been to the moon.

Other morons believe rockets don't function in the vacuum of space because they have nothing to "push against." If you spray a garden hose against your hand you feel your hand being pushed away, so they argue that means rockets don't work in space. So they say probes couldn't have reached the moon.

This is a disingenuous take that does not reflect the real world.

Do the math again assuming 98% of your charging is at home, between 1am and 5am, using your home electric rates.

Spoiler alert: You'll discover you'd be saving thousands of dollars.

Why do they do this when there is no legal requirement to do so?

To save money.

Western nations that aren't the USA that care about kids more than campaign donations are rolling out laws to age-gate access to social media platforms.

For an international company like Discord it's easier (and cheaper) to just put in global rules that respect the laws in the EU, Australia etc. than it is to try to adjust the rules for various jurisdictions and/or build out complex whack-a-mole code to deal with VPNs etc.

It's similar to how you see all those cookie messages for websites in the USA, even though the message is only required in Europe. It's just easier and cheaper to present it to everyone.

Europe gets by without many V-8s, North America does not.

I live in North America. I have been driving and buying cars for 40 years. I have never once owned a V8, nor have any of my siblings.

A few years ago I drove a minivan with a 3.6 liter V6 with four passengers, a dog and a pile of luggage from Detroit to Seattle. It was not a problem at all - Even when the cruise control was pegged at 85 mph across Montana.

Just because people think they need something doesn't mean they actually do.

And that's fine if you never go far from home or have enough time of that you can sit around charging.

My EV means I save thousands of dollars per year in gasoline costs.

The small downside is long roadtrips take a couple of hours longer because of the recharging. (Less really, because I'm usually eating lunch anyway at one of those stops.)

Now it's great that you're wealthy and you don't mind paying thousands of dollars more each year to save a couple of hours now and again, but that's not me. I value those cash savings and the small loss of time is worth it.

But I realize to wealthy folks like you it's different, and that's OK.

It is indeed hilarious the straws that anti-EV people are so desperately having to grasp at these days to defend their abject hatred of electric cars.

I truly don't understand where this hatred of EVs comes from. It's almost religious.

I mean for god's sake, my EV is just a damn car. What difference does it make to them how it moves itself down the road?

We are talking about a day where there are only 10% ICEs available right now

Yes, we are talking right now about a day that is still decades away.

And by the time that day arrives there will be EVs available that address that edge use-case. Along with millions of used ICE vehicles that will continue to be available.

So it's ok that they can't buy a vehicle for their purpose? Because they are a minority.

You're asking an edge-case question about an edge case.

By the time we get to a day where there are zero ICE vehicles available to purchase for a scenario like this, there will be many, many EVs available that will address this use case.

The Sodium-Ion Batteries being discussed in this very post will provide the battery capacity that this person will need.