If they wanted to raise your taxes they would just raise your taxes like how Trump did it using tariffs.

This isn't about getting revenue this is about curtailing the power that comes from having that much money. This is about saying, hey you Mr billionaire you can't order me what to do just because you have fuck loads of money because I'm going to take that money from you. You'll still have a lot of money so you can pay me to do stuff and I will do it but you won't have so much money that you can utterly destroy my life at the drop of a hat if I even slightly annoy you.

Don't you get tired of being a billionaire bitch? I don't mean like how you're repeating there talking points which you certainly are but what I mean is they can order you to do whatever the fuck they want and you're going to do it or they're going to effectively kill you. Maybe they won't put a bullet in your head like they do in Russia or China but they can make you completely unemployable and they can kill any business you try to start.

The only reason you're safe is because they're busy with other targets. That's no way to live your life son. Always pretending that you are your own man when you really belong to somebody else because they called the shots.

California billionaires.

It's not their money. They stole it.

And they're coming for your 401k too. You better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food and you better decide on a dry choice because you're not going to be able to afford the wet stuff every week.

Or do you honestly believe that Elon Musk does 40,000 times more work in an hour than you do? Do you really think he invented rockets and the electric car? Are you genuinely unaware that he has an entire team of people at every company he owns whose sole job is to prevent him from making decisions because every fucking time he does it's a colossal disaster.

Even if by some bizarre miracle you really think that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are geniuses we could not possibly live without, why not cap their incomes and then get them out of the way and let somebody else take a shot at it?

When was the last time any of these tech bro wannabes produced something new and useful that made your life better? How long has it been since we got new electric car tech that didn't just actually come out of a public university? How much better is muskrats rockets than what NASA was already doing?

We always talk about losing these billionaire geniuses if we tax them but it's like, there's 340 million people in America why don't we let one of them take a shot at innovating? Because as it stands you can't really even begin to compete with these guys they will just buy you out and shut you down or run you out of business.

I like paying taxes as long as those taxes are being put back into my community instead of into some rat bastard trillionaires pocket.

I don't like members of the Epstein class ripping me off. I do like having universal Health Care and roads and schools and trains and the military to prevent my country from being invaded and my fellow citizens and myself from being slaughtered etc etc.

I know we don't like nuance around here because we like to think like 12-year-olds because we spend way too much time on nostalgia bait but yeah there is some fucking nuance to paying taxes. I have family members who are alive because you paid your taxes and that paid for the medical care that they needed to live. And somewhere out there is a kid with cancer or who needed a heart transplant because of some congenital thing or something and they are alive today because I paid my taxes.

Render on the Caesar that which is Caesar's.

That's fine. They are not contributing anything they're just sucking down resources. So why the fuck would I give a rat's ass if they leave?

You can go home but you can't take the ball with you. At the end of the day California is a nice place to live and we're going to text the shit out of you one way or another. And once California shows the rest of the country that you can pass a billionaire tax then every state worth living in is going to do the same damn thing real fast.

Billionaires don't have money they have power. That's what happens when you're talking about dollar amounts that are so huge that the human brain can't really understand them anymore.

I will never understand why people who claim to be small government conservatives think it's okay for a single individual to have that much money and power. I mean do you really think that if they told you to do something that you wouldn't do it?

Sure they might start with the carrot but the stick would come out pretty damn fast if you turn to them down and they really want it you to do it.

Bottom line if Elon Musk told you to suck his dick or else the or else would be you being blacklisted by every company on the planet and there would be fuck all you could do about it. He could run any business you started into the ground and he could prevent every business you apply that for a job from hiring you. Hell he could probably get the Department of Justice to arrest you. Maybe after a year of legal battles bankrupting you you'd get acquitted...

We are all just relying on the fact that like ants scurrying on a kitchen floor the billionaires can't crush us all.

I think the problem with solving that is billionaires or kind of like a cosmic horror. It's something so far removed from daily life your brain isn't equipped to process it.

Elon Musk has more money and therefore more power than 172 countries. That's out of I think 196.

You are not a free man when somebody in this world has that much power. Because anytime they want they can order you what to do and you're either going to do it or they're going to kill you and there's nothing you can do about it.

People on the right wing don't want to be free, they want to be slotted into a hierarchy that puts them as close to the top as they think they can manage to weasel their way into.

The dude is so old he literally fought in the civil Rights movement. Like the one that gave black people the right to vote that we are gradually taking away again.

Bernie is following an old activist playbook that used to work back in 1960 and stopped working around the mid 70s when the at the time millionaires and now billionaires adapted to those tactics and made them moot.

It feels like he's after attention because what he is doing is so completely balls to the walls ineffective. But that isn't because he's attention seeking it's because he's using tactics from over 50 years ago that his opposition adapted to over 40 years ago.

America has a left wing, but they are living in the past which is somehow I think ironic assuming I'm using the word correctly. I've been bitching about it for some time howdy left wing and the progressives are extremely conservative when it comes to tactics. We are like a high school football player reliving that one touchdown over and over and over again.

Made in Sunderland, batteries made in the UK too. EV tech developed jointly with Renault.

This is just more pissing in the wind.

It's easy to use propaganda and culture wars to get right wing extremists to 45% in any election. From there you've just got to use 7 hour wait times and illegals voter registration/signature challenges to stop 6% from voting and winner take all politics takes care of the rest.

No surprise here. Why is this even news? Every product that uses memory is raising their prices. This "story" is merely Apple mollifying their customers.

Might check out this film: The Eagle Obsession.

(only in pre-release screening now, but there's a youtube preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )

Except, of course, for the front part, which was weirdly aerodynamic

Easy to do when you have no fuel tanks.

I have no idea how you calculated mass. But about a third of the vehicle (not including the detachable part) seems to be the landing pads, which doesn't seem very optimum.

Yes, the lack of fuel tanks is a real problem. Also, how do they fly? They only have engines in back, but they skim over the surface of the moon like they are levitating. What holds them up? When they blast off to go into deep space, do they rotate 90 degrees to point the main engines downward?

The headline says "sold at a loss", but the summary doesn't:

"the profit margin for China's auto industry plunged to 4.4 percent and dropped further to a historic low of 3.2 percent in early 2026."

Profit dropping is not the same as "sold at a loss."

Were the X-Wing and millennium falcon kits out by the late seventies? For some reason I thought we didn't get those until the 80s. Although I never really built kits until I got into gunpla. I guess I did do a few Macross kits back in the day. I seem to remember the Star wars kids being kind of pricey. At least initially

Most of the R&D in China is done with private money. The government does contribute, but it's more long term guarantees than it is cash.

In a democracy, policy can change ever 4-5 years. Look at the US, it's been alternating between pushing renewables to banning them to pushing them to banning them again, over the last 4 administrations. If you were a company developing renewable technology, would you have faith that your investment in R&D wouldn't be banned by the time it reaches market? Doesn't even have to be a ban, just an administration that is hostile to your business, and an electorate that would rather roll coal than see a wind turbine 20km off-shore.

The Chinese government said that EVs were the future and it would ensure that future came quickly and stuck around. It made sure the infrastructure was installed, and promoted them to consumers as a way to reduce pollution. Loans for development were made available. And it stuck to that for the long term, not just the next 4-5 years.

Democracy can do that too, but not in a two party system. Look at European democracies where coalition governments are the norm, where the system is designed to prevent any one party gaining complete power. Planning is longer term, and there is more certainty in future policy direction.