Depends where they fall on the political spectrum. Go too far to the left and you get folks who hate EVs because in their mind everyone should just be living in a walkable city and riding a bicycle. *wink*

Being pragmatic involves realizing that socioeconomic issues are often complex, and if the "solution" fits in a tweet, it's probably not going to work out as you'd imagined it.

It's the auto industry's version of "think of the children". They don't actually give a rat's ass about the workers and would happily replace them with Tesla bots as soon as the math works on a balance sheet. What they're really worried about is their continued ability to sell those big high profit margin gas guzzlin' pickup trucks and SUVs.

Musk is Tesla. I'll eat my words when the stockholders grow a pair and vote him off the island.

I think there's also a point where a company gets big enough that they start inventing positions they don't actually need. Like, I imagine Snapchat having an entire team dedicated to focus testing the cat face filters.

I've certainly bought a few albums when most of the songs are solid, but since my tastes tend to run fairly mainstream, there's also a lot of catchy singles that really are surrounded by filler. Napster (and the various P2P networks it inspired) filled in the gap to let you essentially have your own curated playlists without having to feel like you're forced into paying for a bunch of songs you didn't want in the process. Now though, you can do the same thing with a relatively inexpensive subscription and piracy actually is the more labor-intensive option,

It does come down to personal preference, too. Most of the time I'm not in the mood to listen to an entire album all the way through and just want something playing in the background while I'm driving.

Even that still seems a bit high. What's a Spotify subscription run these days, like thirteen bucks a month? I realize the damages are based on potential lost revenue, but at this point people who aren't paying for a music subscription are probably just using the various legal free offerings instead anyway.

In the old days of Napster, there was at least the argument to be made that people might not buy an overpriced CD with a bunch of filler songs they had no interest in, but nowadays it's really not worth the effort to pirate music.

...and an electric car company owns Twitter.

How the hell does Snapchat need 1,000s of employees? If there was ever any doubt that productivity does not scale linearly...

Sometimes off-peak power can be very cheap. The math usually doesn't work out unless you've found a source of cheap/free batteries, like say, being an EV manufacturer and having access to scrap batteries, or maybe from those rental scooters that are littered all over every major city (don't actually do this).

Even many residential customers can get time-of-use rates these days. You'll almost never see ROI from buying your own bank of batteries, but in climates where the bulk of your electric bill doesn't go towards air conditioning, some people manage to make it work by charging their EV and doing dishes/laundry during off-peak hours - no extra batteries needed.

They make Amazon vans and EVs for people who have no right to be bitching about the price of gas.

Subsidized by the insurance companies (which means the cost burden is being shared by everyone paying into insurance) is not the same thing as "cheap". If someone catches HIV, is uninsured, and doesn't manage to successfully navigate the mess that is the US healthcare system, AIDS is still just as bad as it ever was.

But hey, it's killing poor people, so collectively we're okay with that. At least, that's the impression I got from how the last election went.

The glaring flaw in your argument is that people are just fine with watching the exact sort of content you're bitching about, over on Netflix.

It's probably just that people don't want to deal with the hassle and expense of going out to watch something that will be on streaming in a few weeks. Yeah, as TFS says, the studios could take their ball and go home, but that might just backfire when people decide to watch Tiger King 2.0 - Now with More Tigers! instead of Big Budget Hollywood Slop Film Electric Boogaloo (That We're Waiting Until the Heat Death of the Universe to Release on Streaming).

This is why I'm fine with my "Black Friday special" TV.

YouTube certainly proves there is a market for content produced on a shoestring budget, but that's not going to work for every possible story someone could want to tell. For example, I couldn't get through Star Wreck because the whole thing was just so amateurish.