As an American, I used to perceive US made vehicles as rugged and durable, with European vehicles as luxury models, and Asian models as efficient. Quality has dropped significantly for American and European vehicles. Innovation and quality has increased on Asian made vehicles.

While I agree that China subsidizes it's auto industry, I do not agree that the solution is to ban competition.

If US auto makers need subsidies to compete, ask for them. Be direct. Tell us what is holding you back. Is is financial? Do you need cheaper materials? Do you need trained workers? Do you need Engineering graduates? What is it that China is providing to it's companies that the USA is not providing to it's companies that renders you unable to compete? The US government can address the specific issues that you name.

A ban on imports just encourages the domestic auto industry to make bad vehicles that are too expensive for Americans to afford and unable to compete on quality and features in the international market.

I do not wish to defend Musk, but you are significantly devaluing emergency responders.

Emergency responders are dedicated to doing what is needed to save lives.

They will break a window, cut a seatbelt, use the jaws of life to pry doors off, etc. If they need the vehicle to physically move, they will push/pull it.

Do not underestimate emergency responders.

Everything... except user error.

That exception is pretty big.

I'm sorry, your ridiculous shitpost seems to think there is some conspiracy around a deranged lunatic with a rifle deciding to put a hot one into an outspoken right-wing rabble-rouser by your use of "your side."

You're going to have to prove that inference before we just accept it as background for the rest of your shitpost.

Nice try.

Now let's see how well it operates with a 12 gauge round of #01 buck blown through it's chest plate...

Anyone who says we need to do X to solve climate change is wrong, because there is no one "X" that does it.

We need renewables, nuclear, electrification, synthetic fuels, forestation, mangroves, direct air capture, BECCS, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, cloud enhancement to increase albedo, possibly orbital solar shading, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and more that I don't know about including things maybe no one has yet thought of.

We created this problem through a wide variety of mechanisms, burning many different kinds of fossil fuels in many different contexts, and we're going to need an even wider variety to fix it.

And even if they happened faster, it still wouldn't be enough. The focus on emissions reduction to the exclusion of everything else is going to kill a lot of people.

The only way we're going to fix this is to get to net negative, and while emissions reduction can help it will never be enough. That being the case, we should be investing a lot into capture and sequestration research.

Absolutely. We should admit that we're in for some more CO2 rise before we can make it fall, no matter what we do, and invest in geoengineering research focused on techniques to directly reduce insolation and ocean acidification.

None of this is either/or. We need to be doing all of this in parallel: Electrification, renewables, nuclear, and synthetic fuels to reduce burning of fossil fuels, carbon recapture, especially at high-intensity carbon sourced (e.g. cement plants), but also from the atmosphere, and geoengineering to directly cool the planet and increase ocean pH. And we can... but the laser focus on renewables and electrification and renewables is harming the future.

That seems like it would be relatively easy, and safe as long as no one makes a suicide cord and tries to use it to power the house. I don't know if any of this class of equipment provides it.

Need? There are lots of things you don't "need". But this seems like something that could legitimately improve my oral hygiene because -- like most people, I suspect -- I don't floss nearly as often as I should. Having it integrated into the brushing process would mean I do it 2-3 times per day, rather than once every few days. Is that worth $500? I guess it depends on how important $500 is to you. I'm not very price-sensitive and I am very lazy.

I'll wait until these have been available for a while and see what the reviews look like... but if the reviews are positive I'd say there's about a 95% chance I'll buy one.

I have one, and I don't use it enough. It takes time and effort to fill, use and clean up. Did I mention I'm lazy?

The notion that democracy and capitalism are innately incompatible is rather interesting, given that every long-running democracy has a predominantly capitalist economy. There has never been a durable multiparty democracy with a state-owned or centrally-planned economy. Not one! There are several examples of non-democratic nations with capitalist economies, but the complete lack of any successful non-capitalist democracy argues pretty strongly that capitalism is a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite for a healthy democracy, which is the opposite of incompatibility.

I did note that you attached the qualifier "unfettered", but has there ever been an example of unfettered capitalism? I'm not aware of one, and it seems fundamentally impossible. Capitalism requires a state to enforce property rights and contract law, and it's hard to think how any state could exist that does those things but doesn't also impose some regulation. If by "unfettered" you mean "lightly regulated" rather than the literal meaning of the word, then it becomes a question of degree but democracies have gone through many cycles of liberalizing and regulating without ceasing to be democracies.

No, in fact most attempts at democratic socialism have been entered peacefully. They tend to begin by election of a socialist leader with enough support to begin nationalizing all or most industry. Examples include the Allende regime in Chile, India's government for much of the latter half of the 20th century, Sweden's Meidner Plan, Venezuela (Chavez' second attempt; his first try was a coup but then he was elected), etc.

Socialist revolutions almost always install non-democratic regimes, though many claimed to be democratic (e.g. the USSR had decades of elections in which every race had only a single candidate, chosen by the nomenklatura).

They did make as good an attempt as anyone... but still had to restrict emigration to prevent their population fleeing the workers' paradise.

Fair, many people do use the term imprecisely.

I doubt it. Which is why the cheaper devices being discussed won't provide backup power during an outage.

The discussion is about equipment that is designed to plug into the house wiring via an outlet, not a standalone battery that provides its own outlets. If you want to discuss an entirely different sort of equipment, then obviously the conclusions change.

This is too strong. There's a large distance between "Unwilling to tell a pollster they regret" and "Are quite happy".