Yes, it is always very much about control with our government, this is where you can legitimately bothsides because they are both authoritarian. That's why we're fucked, because it's how we came to this pass. It wasn't Republicans insisting that we be mass-surveilled and Democrats insisting that we not be, it was Rs saying let's do this and Ds saying well how much of this can we do and how should we do it? Womp fucking womp. Now the very idea that we should have privacy is equivalent in some "minds" with terr[or]ism. Orwell wept.

Agreed, but they would have to contract it out, there's no competence for that on the average staff. Logically this might be handled at the party level, especially in the case of Republicans, who have been very successful with unified messaging.

Well, if it happens, I hope they build more GAZ 66s.

Our drunken ancestors had little access to spirits until fairly recently and only a few people had figured out how to make beers over about 5% ABV so it really depends on what time period you're talking about. Americans drank about four times as much before prohibition as they do now, so there's that.

There is almost nowhere you can smoke cannabis publicly, so statistically no one is going out to smoke weed at an establishment. Therefore we can compare to drinking at home. I buy 12 packs of reasonably high test beer for around $20. Two of those is generally plenty. You can easily spend more than $4 a day on cannabis without even getting into the top shelf stuff. Hell, most smokers can do that even with $8 eighths.

Cannabis is taking over because it's less harmful in every way than alcohol.

The emergency is that they cannot produce enough fuel for the vehicles they have. The only non-drone vehicles they really need to produce more of are bombers, since Ukraine has blown up some of the few they have left, and they cannot really produce those either either. (They can make a few a year, maybe.) Without Ukraine, Russia's manufacturing capability was already limited. It was an important center for military vehicle production for the USSR.

You couldn't be more wrong overall if you used a LLM to generate your answer. Not only was it a sodium battery power station, but diesel is fuel oil, it's fundamentally different from gasoline, as in it's a different fraction of the crude.

The appeal to popularity is a logical fallacy. I stopped reading there, thanks.

Spoken like a typical coward.

So was the bluetti power station the guy shot up which turned into a pyrotechnics show secretly using a lithium battery?

Russia can't do it because they're broke. Even if they could they would have to build something with soviet technology at this point because they can't get modern components in quantity. And if they could, it would be seconds from China. While I think air cooled diesels are neat, they aren't ideal from an emissions standpoint...

The only way in which German cars are at all special is that they make very high horsepower gas burners and nobody else bothers to do that in quantity except for the USA. But that's special as in eating crayons because it's completely ass-backwards in every way.

Japan has been making vehicles of superior quality since the 1990s, which was possible because Germany stopped making vehicles as good as they could in the 1980s and went for absolute cost savings ever since, so it's all the same flimsy plastic shit as everyone else. This is not about valve covers, it's about all the parts which matter. The difference is that the Japanese are actually better engineers. German vehicles depend on parts quality, Japanese ones have more resilient systems. Since Bosch is a bunch of trash like everyone else now, this strategy no longer works and the result is that German cars sprout a new expensive problem every week once they get to be about ten years old. This isn't a problem for rich people who sell cars every couple of years, but it is for everyone else. Incidentally Hitachi hasn't gone to shit like Bosch has so that's another win for Japan.

The very top halo vehicles are somewhat special, although I've seen some reviews of those cars showing parts reuse from lesser models in a lot of them, so they're not as special as you might think. But returning to those plastic valve covers, they don't actually seem to make the cars cheaper, do they? BMW is still charging the same price premium for their marque, just with crappier parts than in the eighties.

That's capitalism.

Capitalism is destroying our ability to derive profit from the land.

That's what's happening under capitalism. You will own nothing and suck it.

Slavery is capitalism. Literally nothing could better exemplify capital controlling the means of production.

You don't know what any of these words mean and shouldn't be trying to use them in public.

Mission in progress

Cars with no powertrain electrification at all no longer make any sense. Combustion cars only make sense in countries with lots of cheap fuel, except really they still don't make sense because AGW, but I'll go ahead and put that aside here. The performance and even reliability benefits of a hybrid are just too significant, and the cost continues to fall. The price is only an issue here in the USA, where we don't make the batteries or controller components at scale yet/anymore and it will take time to ramp up in the best case.

I don't honestly myself want a Chinese car, and I even see a national security argument against them, but don't know if that really merits banning them or just installing some auto-deploying pop-up bollards in places which really should have them already.