This is an absurd abuse of government power, which "small government" Republicans are going along with because the AM radio listening audience skews right. By the same logic, I suppose the next step is to force homeowners to subscribe to a landline and cable TV.
So you're just talking about the look of the car? Because BYD has been doing EVs far longer than Porsche, so if anyone is doing a rip-off of the tech, it would be Porsche.
As far as design goes, BYD's aesthetics in recent years has a lot to do with them hiring big-shot European designers like Wolfgang Egger. If they're pulling from the same talent pool as other top carmakers, it's not so obvious why you'd accuse BYD of copying others, and not vice versa.
There are valid commercial reasons not to go through a forced sale with a ticking time limit, which will inevitably carry a steeply discounted price. Rather than getting robbed, it makes sense to hang on to the company and take profits from the rest of the world.
As I understand, using VPNs to access will be illegal in principle, and the VPNs can be on the hook for stiff penalties.
In practice, it will depend on how zealously the government plays the cat and mouse game. Kind of the same situation as with China and VPNs that bypass the Great Firewall (ironic!).
I wonder how much of the aid to Ukraine shows up as money that Ukraine can decide for itself how to spend, as opposed to money that U-turns straight back into pre-determined US defence contracts.
In a normal economy, balancing growth versus inflation is certainly an important issue. But when an economy is undergoing hyperinflation, getting that under control has to be priority number one.
Keynes, for example, wrote eloquently about this a century ago. Some of his passages apply quite eerily to the case of Argentina:
The preservation of a spurious value for the currency, by the force of law expressed in the regulation of prices, contains in itself, however, the seeds of final economic decay, and soon dries up the sources of ultimate supply. If a man is compelled to exchange the fruits of his labors for paper which, as experience soon teaches him, he cannot use to purchase what he requires at a price comparable to that which he has received for his own products, he will keep his produce for himself, dispose of it to his friends and neighbors as a favor, or relax his efforts in producing it...
The effect on foreign trade of price-regulation and profiteer-hunting as cures for inflation is even worse. Whatever may be the case at home, the currency must soon reach its real level abroad, with the result that prices inside and outside the country lose their normal adjustment. The price of imported commodities, when converted at the current rate of exchange, is far in excess of the local price, so that many essential goods will not be imported at all by private agency, and must be provided by the government, which, in re-selling the goods below cost price, plunges thereby a little further into insolvency.
This is a really neat technology that Noda (the author of the article) has been plugging away at for decades. The main problem, from my understanding, is that people haven't been able to find applications.
We already have conventional laser diodes that work extremely well, they're not that bright but bright enough to make laser pointers, disc read/write heads, etc., which are applications where miniaturization is important.
On the other hand, in industrial applications like cutting steel, we have fiber lasers. Those are about the size of a briefcase, compared to the photonic crystal lasers in this article which about a centimeter. But they can reach incredible brightness, about 1000x the output power of the photonic crystal lasers (and about 1,000,000 times that of ordinary laser diodes). And in industrial applications you don't really need the laser to be miniaturized (especially since the power source itself will be a chonky piece of equipment).
So somehow, right now this neat tech is falling into the cracks. One day, I'm sure someone will find the perfect application for it, though.
Edit: the potential application that people are most hopeful about is lidar; if, in the future, lidar gets integrated into consumer electronic devices like cellphones, then photonic crystal lasers will probably prove their usefulness.
Chinese companies do business with whoever pays them. Ukraine, for example, is heavily reliant on Chinese drones and has been buying over half the global supply of DJI's Mavic quadcopters.
And Chinese companies aren't alone in this. Lots of developing economies don't feel they gave a stake in the conflict and have continued to do business. Most of Russia's oil exports have been going through India. The fact that the US has been so muted in its response to this, because they feel like India is "on-side" in the confrontation against China, makes the singling out of China seem hypocritical.
We can argue actuarial tables all day, but the point is that replacing Sotomayor with a younger liberal justice has zero downside. It's as close to a free lunch as one can get in politics.
I hope so, they're in it for the long haul. The Vietnamese basically sacrificed two generations to beat back the US; Ukraine will need a similar level of long term commitment. The recent wobbling over mobilization is not a good sign in this respect.
The most likely best case scenario is a frozen conflict. But Zelensky doesn't want this because such an outcome would call into question everything he did politically up to now. As for Putin, I'm not sure.
I think there's a widespread implicit hope among Western policy makers that if they keep propping Ukraine up, and get Ukrainians to hold out long enough, Russia will suffer a sudden internal collapse and be forced to withdraw. That may be, but it seems equally (more?) probable that Ukraine will be the one that suffers a collapse.
This cloud-brightening stuff seems finicky compared to stratospheric aerosol injection. Clouds are hard for climate models to handle as it is, so it would be hard to predict the impact on climate change ahead of time. If you want to do geoengineering, this seems pretty far down on the list of alternatives.
At one point, one of the six attendees showed Biden printed photos of malnourished Palestinian children, according to NBC News. The president said that he had seen the pictures before, but that was unlikely: The attendee, a doctor, said the photos were from her own phone.
This is an absurd abuse of government power, which "small government" Republicans are going along with because the AM radio listening audience skews right. By the same logic, I suppose the next step is to force homeowners to subscribe to a landline and cable TV.