If you ignore reality then sure that may be your version of the truth. It's not car companies pushing this by the way, there's countless examples of independent tests showing they are more efficient.

Also what do you mean "last longer"? Unless you're driving on a race track your transmission should well and truly outlive the rest of your car. Also in America automatics are cheaper to buy, have been for a decade or so now, and a transmission replacement sucks regardless of what type it is. It's the equivalent of an EV battery replacement: Fucking expensive regardless of what car you have, and something that 99.9% of people will never do in their lives.

Yeah it's rough. Having driven a car with AEB and a manual, and having had it activate in anger when getting cut off it isn't actually bad at all. Modern cars with these features almost certainly feature a auto stop engine (as did my car). The car simply slammed on the brakes and stopped the engine, and as soon as I put my foot in on the clutch the engine auto-started again. Likewise lane assist doesn't care what your engine is doing. The rest of your list is on point though.

That's a regional quirk due to production. In Europe manuals very much are still dominate the entire cheap lineup of cars. And I say line-up because many car companies no longer provide the choice between manual or not. The choice of transmission is now part of a more complex package. For example You want a Renault Captur you can have that in a petrol manual, or a mild hybrid automatic. Same with a Skoda Octavia, petrol manual, or mild hybrid automatic. The Karoq on the other hand does have a direct comparison, and the "sportsline" model is the one with the automatic transmission while the regular one has a manual. The sportsline has a 4500EUR (~10%) premium and there's very little difference between the models beyond the transmission.

Automatics have been cheaper in the USA for a really really long time, but in Europe it just hasn't followed this trend.

Its worth noting why some of us are against unions. This is an international forum after all, not all of us live in a country where worker protection laws are just the text "Hahahaha fuck you."

I am against unions. I don't need them. Where I live they add little but cause tremendous waste. America does, absolutely, need unions for worker protections.

I'm curious to see that "study". There really was a Inverse-Cramer ETF: SJIM which bet against everything Cramer said, and it went bankrupt after losing all its money even while the market was on an up.

Cramer is not someone I respect for his delivery and his fake authority (as you said, he's an entertainer). That said, while he's not an investment genius, he's also no where near as bad as most people make out. He's just average in his predictions, and yet the problem is his delivery and conviction to some stupid bets isn't just news worthy, it's actively meme'd to the point where the only thing anyone knows about him is that he's "always wrong". You can't learn anything comprehensive by reading news headlines.

I think totally sucking definitely was part of what he had in mind. Fourplay is important.

And no I didn't make a typo.

I think more people have physical CD players than CD drives in their computers these days. I think you're applying more logic from your own experience than most people deserve. The reality is a shitload of people buy it for the ownership "cred".

We have a solution already. Trump will tariff the smoke away. I mean Canada sent firefighters when America was sending smoke, but maybe tariffs will be just as effective, no one knows until we try right?

We already have one, it's called the Mustang mach-e (though being one of the worst EVs I've driven maybe we shouldn't acknowledge it exists).

The manual transmission is a work around for a technical problem with ICE engines. The modern automatic is a technically superior solution (with pedal shifters). The modern EV does away with the problem entirely.

It sounds a lot like putting speakers in EVs to make vroom vroom noises. Whatever affection people have to it, the manual gearbox worked around a technical problem with engines and isn't in any way superior for driving. Yes having control over the engine is important, but the best option for that is pedal shifters. This seems like Ferrari chasing a nostalgia market rather than developing a performance car.

But then this is the same Ferrari that just released the Luce so that would track.

I'm not painting all Americans the same. I'm not talking about a civil war here with republicans fighting democrats. I'm talking about crazy gun nuts. There are many normal republicans (IMO of questionable intelligence, but still normal all the same). However in any country of 330million people you will statistically have a significant number of nutjobs who truly believe in defending the nation against dictators.

The problem is I've met some of these people, and a significant portion of them only care if that dictator was black or a woman. Still I'm genuinely amazed Trump has had only 3 attempts against him.

Internet? My friend I've met real "people". I dare not call them actual people since clearly they only care about defending themselves from their government while Obama was president.

No one is requiring this, including Australia. The rules say that AI datacentres need to either provide their own power or underwrite development of external powerplants. The environmental angle here is exclusively around the water use. In fact the greens are complaining that this isn't tied to any renewables target. These rules are about insulating the public from rising power costs.

With any luck they won't be as stupid as to let something like Musk's Colossus II datacentre which is still now after several years running from many small "temporary" generators basically being a worst case scenario in terms of environmental impact. I think that kind of thing is effectively is prevented by these rules, but still there's no environmental benefit from the announcement on Tuesday.

Google is an established European corporation in 15 EU countries. Moving servers does not allow you to not follow rules, all that would do would be put them in breach of data sovereignty rules and force them to give up all government contracts while still having to obey all other rules.

What you actually want is for Google as a multinational to de-register in 15 countries making up the largest market share of wealthy westerners in the world, subjecting them to external barriers to sale.

That would give up a significant chunk of that $100bn revenue.

Probably cheaper than having someone like you not understand the regulation. Precisely no IP or trade secrets were requested. Anonymised data is not the same as what is used for targeted advertising.

Maybe understand what is being asked before jumping to conclusions.

Not at all. Google's core property is your targeted data. Anonymised data is no where near as valuable and they have provided anonymised data in the past to various groups.