They’re surprisingly good, particularly BYD cars, in my experience.
Americans’ vehicles tend to be huge, wildly inefficient for their daily usage, and they throw off externalities like pedestrian and cyclist risks, road damage, and support for countries who use our gas spending to make the world less liberal.
VW, Honda, Toyota, and Datsun capitalized on American vehicle bloat to build massive, multinational companies with products in every segment. The Chinese are going to ruin our domestic manufacturers, once they decide to build bridgehead plants here.
Today, I’m driving an Acura that is made in Marysville, Ohio. Not assembled; it is substantively made here in the States. And, the chain reaction that led to Honda, a Japanese company, exporting profits made from American productivity in 2024, started with the Big Three making massively bloated, inefficient, expensive, poorly designed cars, leaving a gap in the market that foreign companies exploited with right-sized, efficient, affordable, reliable vehicles, starting in the ‘60s and exploding with the ‘73 oil crisis.
I don’t have time to find a link, but there have been studies that demonstrate that the exact choices being made by American manufacturers today—to not fully serve the bottom of the market—sow the seeds of their own future declines in the middle and upper markets.
This is how you get nobility. Before Reagan, wealth typically dissipated by the third generation. We are heading toward the old European model, where families are rich for a millennium.
This is not a smart take. It’s basically conspiracy thinking.
Otherwise, the Supreme Court is clearly partisan, because Alito and Thomas unashamedly contort into any position needed to face the MAGA base, and Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett will typically tend to do so in any issue involving civil rights or business interests.
The GOP is the body that executes the will of whatever conservatism is at any moment; they are inseparable at the executional level. The doctrinal vehicle the GOP uses to get where it’s going is originalism, but the great thing about justices playing professional-amateur historians is that they can cherry-pick history to suit party-doctrinal needs.
I can’t figure out why BlueSky never comes out of invite-only. It would absolutely crush Twitter in this moment when there is so much demand for a direct replacement.
Prediction: The world will return to something that looks like feudalism, with increased clamping on birth rates until a few rich holders remain with their human retinues solely there to entertain and flatter them. Otherwise, AI and robotics will cosset them.
Once production is automated there is little need for workers, and once knowledge work is automated there is no need for a professional and technocratic class. Consumers have nothing to spend, so they are effectively a drag on the economy of wealth.
That world then looks a lot like the time before the merchant class developed. Everything of any quality is made for the wealthy, and everyone else exists solely at the pleasure of their masters.
Only problem I have left is getting NGINX Reverse Proxy Manager set up, so that I can offer Overseerr webpage. The Let’s Encrypt cert generator keeps throwing an internal error at the last step. Something is preventing LE from reaching my server, and I’m too clueless to solve at this point.
It was fascinating to watch the rideshare companies convince their San Francisco drivers to actively support and evangelize the bill in California that ruined their ability to get benefits and employment protections, then turn around and extract so much value away from those drivers in the period since that most of those drivers, who tended to be American-born and have relatively nice cars, have been replaced by recent immigrants driving fleet-owned older cars. I would also not be shocked to learn that the latter are being cheated by whoever signs them up and helps them navigate Lyft and Uber’s processes.
The intellectual and professional desert of center-lib media is fascinating: The same rotating cast of five MSNBC guests who are on every day, all day, are now primary fodder for print stories trying to get in on wishcasting monetization, like this Guardian piece. Newsweek and HuffPost literally report MSNBC show opinions now, like they’re news.
There are hundreds of qualified law professors and law firm partners with either deep legal theory or direct practice experience relevant to the Trump cases, but good luck hearing from them. Instead, we get Vance, Litman, Katyal, McQuade, and Weissman, all day every day, and now also in print.
This desert isn’t good for us. The MSNBC wishcasting monetization model left Americans poorly prepared for the Mueller outcome. The guy was canonized as a genius Marine Superman who would undoubtedly smite Trump; other professional voices weren’t invited on.
About 25 years ago, I took in a shitty Brazilian-made .380 to be destroyed by local police dept. Filled out the form and answered questions from a young officer who seemed incredulous that I actually wanted a gun destroyed.
After I finished and was escorted out to the reception area, I used the bathroom. When I came out, I heard the officer yell to everyone the back area, “Hey, does anyone want a Taurus .380?”
They’re surprisingly good, particularly BYD cars, in my experience.
Americans’ vehicles tend to be huge, wildly inefficient for their daily usage, and they throw off externalities like pedestrian and cyclist risks, road damage, and support for countries who use our gas spending to make the world less liberal.
VW, Honda, Toyota, and Datsun capitalized on American vehicle bloat to build massive, multinational companies with products in every segment. The Chinese are going to ruin our domestic manufacturers, once they decide to build bridgehead plants here.
Today, I’m driving an Acura that is made in Marysville, Ohio. Not assembled; it is substantively made here in the States. And, the chain reaction that led to Honda, a Japanese company, exporting profits made from American productivity in 2024, started with the Big Three making massively bloated, inefficient, expensive, poorly designed cars, leaving a gap in the market that foreign companies exploited with right-sized, efficient, affordable, reliable vehicles, starting in the ‘60s and exploding with the ‘73 oil crisis.
I don’t have time to find a link, but there have been studies that demonstrate that the exact choices being made by American manufacturers today—to not fully serve the bottom of the market—sow the seeds of their own future declines in the middle and upper markets.