Tens of billions of dollars worth of subsidies. They were indirect subsidies so they're not as noticeable but they were still subsidies.

The point is that it's not surprising these companies are having to splash cash to build out electric cars.

But at this point electric cars are basically inevitable because solar power is basically free. Look up the technology connections video about it on YouTube. If it wasn't for the oil companies slowing down the transition we would be well on our way to completely ending fossil fuels. Apparently even in China the coal powered plants being built are just being built because of old money that owns coal plants and corruption.

So I wouldn't terribly much worry about some short-term losses for car companies. The bigger issue is things like the job market collapsing making cars unaffordable. Remember even if you have a nice big nest egg and a career you don't think is going to go away if a quarter of the country can't afford cars anymore that means car companies are going to drastically raise prices in order to make up the Lost sales on volume.

It's just another crisis to put on the pile that we refuse to talk about or address because we've become obsessed with letting the billionaires do anything they want in the name of capitalism. Up to and including dismantling capitalism and the Democratic systems necessary to support it.

We became so terrified of socialism from years and years and years of anti-communist propaganda that we ignored other threats to capitalism and free commerce

So nobody cares about bugs. You fix them and you move on. The only place where a software bugs matters is the airlines and that's only because there are specific laws with heavy fines left over from the days when only rich people could afford to fly.

I suspect this is them pumping their stock but then again there really isn't a hell of a lot too Spotify it's literally just a streaming MP3 player you learn the right one of those in a 102 level computer science course for Pete's sake.

To stop voting republican. They are objectively bad for the economy and the environment and everyone knows it but people keep electing them.

The problem is you have to get people away from right-wing media and 90% of all media is now owned by billionaires.

On top of that it's not socially acceptable to point out that Republicans are bad. We have been conditioned for decades that partisan politics is a no no topic. We are all just supposed to pretend that both sides bad and all politicians lie.

I fucking wish the Democrats would go back to lying to me. Even Obama never lied I think the last Democrat who told me an honest to God lie is Bill Clinton.

Lies win elections. The Democrats stop fighting dirty when LBJ was out the door and they've been getting their asses kicked ever since.

But I don't think we will see it because ice has really spooked the Latinos and the Republican party based their entire electoral strategy on the Latinos.

I do think that we need to figure out something about how conservative Latino voters are. Also Indian voters. Those are two huge voting blocks for the Republicans that the only reason they don't reliably vote Red is because the Republicans are racist as fuck.

"you stoled what we stole so you stole and that's bad"

We can all just close doors for a living. That we can be plumbers for the other plumbers. Because it's plumbers all the way down.

Or at least they certainly think they are. The entire point of the cs requirement was to lower wages by flooding the market with programmers. They don't think they need to do that anymore.

Most of your complaints about education and college or because colleges are built to serve the needs of big business and not your kids. If you look at the experience at a extremely expensive college it is very different than the one you get at a public university especially these days.

The wealthy tell you to skip college and then they send their kids there and they tell you to skip your vaccine and get all their shots. It's always do as I say not as I do

It's a social credit score system similar to what the Chinese dictatorship uses. When a cop pulls you over he has already run your plates and looked you up in that database to decide how dangerous he thinks you are.

In order for that database to really work it needs a lot of data sources that it can combine together which is why companies like ring and flock were working together.

It's crazy how America is doing all the fascist and dictatorship bullshit that China is doing but it's being done by private companies so everybody's like whatever it's fine. Americans don't care if there's a boot on our necks as long as the boot is privately owned

No matter what. Look it up. 70% of middle class jobs lost since 1980 got taken by automation not outsourcing.

The Republicans don't talk about it because it lets them shift wealth to the top and as the right wing party that is a positive outcome in their minds.

The Democrats don't know what the fuck to do about it because outside of wealth redistribution there really isn't anything you can do about it and the voters don't like socialism.

We've got to figure something out fast. America is at 25% functional unemployment. That means 25% of the country do not have a job that allows them to buy food and shelter. They are mooching off the barely functional 75% to get by and that is not sustainable.

25% unemployment was enough to get us into world War ii.

Trump isn't going to be able to do much to hurt the elections because the elections are heavily decentralized. There was a risk of the supreme Court allowing him to directly interfere with State elections but they signed off on California's gerrymandering law so it's pretty clear that the courts aren't ready to do that yet.

The real problem is county level voter suppression. The most common tactic is thousands and thousands of illegal signature and voter registration challenges. If you get one you have to go down to the courthouse on a weekday in most jurisdictions and most people either can't or won't do that.

So the Republican party gets volunteers usually old bitter angry retired people to do all those voter signature and registration challenges. It's not legal but the Democrats are wussies so they allow it. Last election it seems to have cost Kamala about three and a half million votes.

Next one of Trump's billionaire cronies has bought up the company that does most of our voting machines and the other common tactic is to send broken voting machines to Blue districts causing long long wait times. In 2024 they hit as high as 7 hours.

So they don't do anything as dramatic and cool as try to declare elections illegal they just do rank and file voter suppression at the county level and rely on the fact that the Democrats instead of actually hauling anyone into court and charging them with crimes will just tell voters to make a plan to vote...

We use it like kleenex. There's only about 85,000 of them a year which isn't nothing but we hand out about a million green cards a year and a little more than half of that is high skilled labor. A handful of doctors and then the rest is mostly tech workers.

I mentioned it on another comment but the fees the Trump administration imposed don't have any effect on reducing H-1B desirability because they are so much cheaper than local talent. A recent study showed they make around 20 to 30% less than hiring locally and they also have fewer benefits.

This was from a pro-immigration website that was trying to calm fears that businesses would not be able to afford to bring in people on work visas.

And that's just the H1B there are dozens and dozens of other work visa programs we don't think about because in our minds we've gotten into the habit of lumping them all into H1B.

That said there might actually be an effect to what Trump is doing with ice, there are some indications that immigrants are afraid to come here and that it's going to drastically reduce them. That's apparently what happened the last time he was in charge and he was a lot more restrained that time.

I don't think he can keep up the violence though. It's scaring the hell out of the Latino voters and the Republicans entire electoral strategy was built around conservative Latino voters. Today they announced ice is pulling out of Minnesota completely for example. The left wing Pat it themselves on the back thinking the protests did it when in actuality it's just electoral politics...

I don't think that the reduction in immigration though is really going to benefit us because Trump is doing so much damage to every other area of the economy that it's more than canceled out. It's possible after the midterms the Democrats and Republicans will reign him in but it's unlikely because it would require a 2/3 vote from the Senate to overcome a Trump veto. Although the house did just barely vote to take away his rights to do tariffs on Canada that is mostly because Kentucky is in danger of going blue because 20% of their entire economy is apparently selling booze to Canada and other countries and that kind of just went poof due to the tariffs...

Especially if it turns out they're not just hiring folks here on work visas.

Trump is absolutely destroying the economy but he is chasing off the immigrants though. Still I think that's going to turn out to be mostly low-skilled work that gets chased off I don't think it's going to have a large effect on the kind of positions and promotions folks here are looking for.

A recent study showed that the $100,000 fee for H1 B's has no effect whatsoever because they tend to make 20 to 30% less than a locally hired person and have fewer benefits because they're contractors so the costs are still much lower than a one-time 100k splash out

I remember seeing recently The dungeons & dragons fiasco and the mess with the unity game engines.

You keep seeing this where some suit sees a whole shitload of users and they get dollar signs in their eyes and get excited about how much revenue they can suck out of them in exchange for basically nothing.

WordPress isn't magic it's quick and dirty code and that's what made it popular if you add cost to it it's just going to get replaced by something else.

But you never know what you can get away with until you try and everything's a grift now so here we go with another round of it.

I wonder if there are any actual successes of this particular type of rent seeking that I just haven't heard about. The two I mentioned above were complete disasters, unity in particular has never fully recovered and basically created a viable competitor that was way behind previously with Godot. Their little snafu brought literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra funding to the Godot project and has allowed it to catch up. D&d just barely managed to recognize their fuck up and back off before losing everything.

I'm sure as usual the big investors will be protected and taken care of but for everybody else most of the technology is built on publicly available knowledge out of universities that literally anyone can pick up and run with and these companies success is mostly based on whether they can get their data centers up and running and get the employees they need that can implement the University papers describing the theory.

That means until winners and losers get picked there are definitely going to be some losers and it'll be a volatile industry.

Also there isn't really a valuable product here. The benefit is in the wages it replaces but the cost is so high that cheap overseas labor can and often does outperform AI to the point where it's become a running gag to call AI another Indian.

The main benefit for AI is for the very very top class because it disconnects them completely from labor and they're dependency on it and in that sense it's probably worth any cost. You can every now and then catch a billionaire showing how they really think about us working stiffs and they absolutely hate us with a passion. I remember seeing mitt Romney trying to hobnob with regular people when he was running for president and he just could not hide his disgust. It was one of the reasons he lost