“The Ghost of Kyiv is still training with the F-35 you sent us,” President Zelenskyy told a Pentagon advisor who criticized the counter-offensive. “This is your people’s job. Either shut up, or provide better instructors.”
I’m sorry to say that you’ve fallen for the classic blunder. Assuming the Hexbear you’re responding to is not doing a bit. We’ve all been there, don’t worry 07
Yeah, to be fair I also didn’t know you couldn’t appeal a date set by the court. I know I’ve personally requested court dates changed because I would be on vacation, so why couldn’t Trump?
Yup. Canada banned RTAs/RDAs (because 1 child died in the US in 2003 iirc) but allow the garbage dump-filling disposables … then scream bloody murder about how kids are using them.
Well duh. Bring back the rebuildables and few kids will have the money to spend and/or the drive to learn how to build coils, maintain the mod, etc.
Even just refillable tanks or pods. I have a pod based one, they last ages, refill when I need. Battery is rechargeable etc. None of the alleged “risks” of RDAs etc. As reusable as possible rather than this huge waste we have
This is institutional investors driving up price and then pulling out. Bitcoin is propped up by absolutely nothing other than betting. It has no use outside holding a value. Someone will be a bag holder. It’s just a matter of time.
I begrudgingly hold BTC, waiting for the halving in 38 days when all my coins double.
At least Monero (which is actually private like cash - sender, receiver, and amount aren’t known to anyone viewing the blockchain) has a valuable function.
I can’t wait to see companies like Visa and Mastercard become obsolete. I think it will really help out my aunt’s family business by cutting crazy high transaction fees she has to pay as a vendor.
That’s layer 1. Read up on layer 2 options. Lightning Network is the best current example, but there are others and will be more. That’s where most of the innovation is happening now. The media never talks about it because it’s necessarily more technical and they think their readers/viewers are all idiots, so why bother.
Or does the media never talk about it because the whole thing is confusing as fuck, there are about a bajillion different coins and no one knows which one to use, and there has yet to be an advantage (and often a big hurdle) to use any of these cyrptocurrencies to do things like buy a gallon of milk.
We hear a lot about how it’s better than “fiat” currency, and yet if I want to go down to the gas station and get a soda, I can pay for that soda with exactly zero cryptocurrencies unless I convert them into dollars first.
Maybe if crypto people ever get their act together, and I don’t see that happening any time soon, this will be more than people investing in digital tulips.
But hey, the local mall here has a Bitcoin ATM. In an entrance almost no one ever uses in a corner of the food court where there are no restaurants and you wouldn’t even notice it unless you happened to walk past it and look at the front panel to see what it was (I only noticed it because my daughter is in online school and still has to do gym and we walk the perimeter of the mall in the winter). So there’s that.
I didn’t miss out at something I was never interested in to begin with.
Also, I have no interest in helping you with your tulips.
Also, Bitcoin ATMs are a massive rip-off and PITA.
Huh. Maybe this whole “fiat currency” thing isn’t the worst idea then. I can get it out of my bank’s ATM from the U.S. dollars in my checking account, they are accepted everywhere in the U.S. And the bank doesn’t charge me anything.
Also, Bitcoin ATMs are a massive rip-off and PITA.
Huh. Maybe this whole “fiat currency” thing isn’t the worst idea then. I can get it out of my bank’s ATM from the U.S. dollars in my checking account, they are accepted everywhere in the U.S. And the bank doesn’t charge me anything.
Maybe you didn’t comprehend the part where I said Bitcoin ATMs are a massive ripoff. I can buy any cryptocoin sitting on my couch at nearly 0% fees, versus the 5-10% the ATMs charge. Like the 2.5-5% fiat ATMs charge. Credit cards are also a massive rip off. Are you out here campaigning against fiat because fiat ATMs and credit cards are a massive rip off, and cash/gift card scams steal more than crypto scams?
Mass. Adoption.
The (current) lack of it is the only reason it’s such a pain to get into.
But no worries, my entire back fence is littered with tulips of every color, I don’t need any more 😉. I’ll take a picture when I get home.
I can buy any cryptocoin sitting on my couch at nearly 0% fees
Cool. How can you buy a soda at the gas station with it?
The (current) lack of it is the only reason it’s such a pain to get into.
Maybe, again, if there weren’t a bajillion different cryptocurrencies that almost no one even understands how to use, there would be mass adoption. I have no idea why you expect mass adoption of something so confusing to happen first and then it gets less confusing. That’s not how anything works.
Cool. How can you buy a soda at the gas station with it?
I can’t yet unless I go to a couple smaller foreign mom and pop shops, lack of mass adoption.
Maybe, again, if there weren’t a bajillion different cryptocurrencies that almost no one even understands how to use, there would be mass adoption. I have no idea why you expect mass adoption of something so confusing to happen first and then it gets less confusing. That’s not how anything works.
A few are dominant already, one that’s been dominant from the start but isn’t the best yet although is improving. Do you worry about the value and exchange rates of every single mineral and resource, of which there are a bajillion? Or do you just follow maybe gold and silver, or do you only follow fiat, and not even invest it?
Edit: Since you down voted all of my discussion, I returned the favor.
You can use Coinbase or another similar intermediary to convert it to fiat instantly by using the card that comes with those services but still converting it to fiat isn’t quite the same as using DOGE coin or the like to buy groceries and I do hear you on that. However , man personally I have made thousands off of crypto. I do like some projects for their utility like Monero and Litecoin but a large percentage of so called “alt” coins and stuff like that don’t have any real utility beyond pumping so that’s true and I feel like a lot of what makes crypto seem like a waste of time to people. But certain coins have real inherent value and use cases that are beyond what people like me and you probably need. Those use cases are still important to the people who need them though. El Salvador is a good example everyone shit all over that dude for doing mass adoption of bitcoinand for ainute there it did seem like a rough idea but it worked out. I guess that’s the thing though everyone who has been in it from the beginning its because it keeps working out. Otherwise, everyone would be out of it and venture capitalist companies wouldn’t be buying in the billions. I mean, would you listen to people of they told you something you were up like 700% on was a bad investment?
I knew a dude back in '07 who was real into stocks. Always trying to get me into it and always about it. Checking charts all the time. He ended up losing real bad and killed himself. What is your opinion on stocks?
But stocks are a respectable trade and Crypto isn’t? I noticed you said people who make money on crypto are assholes, do you feel the same way for stockholders? Its just interesting that something you don’t like affects every aspect of your life (stocks, and the influence they have on bigger businesses to flourish and add value to our economy). Imagine your world without stocks. That new phone and computer probably wouldn’t be here, as a small example. Stocks are no different than Bitcoin other than one isn’t connected to a country. But saying neither have value isn’t telling the truth.
But stocks are a respectable trade and Crypto isn’t?
Please quote me saying that.
do you feel the same way for stockholders?
People who have their 401ks invested for them? No. People who play the stock market to get rich? Yes.
I have nothing but contempt for people whose goal it is to increase their material wealth through gambling. Especially the sort of gambling that will likely never really pay off unless you had plenty of wealth to begin with.
Material wealth as a goal is bad enough to begin with. Rich people making themselves richer by gambling their money on things like the stock market and cryptocurrency are not people I respect.
The products you consume and use on a daily basis (the proprietary chips in your phone and computer for example) only exist because they made money for shareholders. In other words if those rich people weren’t making money on the stocks, the need for innovation would have never been to the point it is at now. And as far as the quote goes that was a question but I can quote where you said that dude avoided “being an asshole” for not making money in something you didn’t like (bitcoin). Are you aware that business and free trade as a whole would be completely different without that same market that you hate? Why then call people assholes for investing in things? The venom just doesnt make sense. Also investing your 401K means requiring the services of these same rich folks you are against making money. Just doesn’t make sense.
Yes, I’ve heard all that nonsense about how capitalism and rich people are essential for humanity’s survival before.
The things I consume and use on a daily basis could be made by corporations owned by the people who work for them, not owned by people whose sole intent is to enrich themselves.
Not for humanity, but for the new IPhone plus max 12K whatever the fuck comes out next, yes absolutely. And a worker owned factory would have never had the same level of innovation that the stock market has brought us here. Otherwise all the “worker owned” (lol) factories and countries wouldn’t be trying to steal our shit all the time. The AI chips and all that shit would have never been, at least this soon, without making shareholders money. I hate it too dude I agree its fucked. But that plane you linked would still be a prototype in a military factory somewhere never seen by civillians if it hadn’t been in a position to make tons of money to have it available to the public. I knwo that sucks dude, but that is the truth. To deny it is to lie to yourself. I will say that stocks serve a greater function than crypto there’s no doubt to that. But to say one is a big scheme designed to fuck the little guy but the other one isn’t is just false. So why can one be celebrated and welcomed by society (otherwise people sure wouldn’t spend money on the new IPhone 12K whatever) and the other one people be called an asshole instantly if they think “man wouldn’t it have been cool to have been in on that?”
The phone thing directly affects competition in the proprietary chip market which affects the phone or laptop or other electronic device you are using to comment on here. The entire system and way of life you live is directly tied to the success of the stock market and in turn economy that system produces. And yes I am very invested in feeding my child, gotta have money to do that. I truly envy those who have never been homeless and have always had family and support to help them, maybe those people wouldn’t understand the value of money the same way because they never had to steal for their food or starve. By the way, after I made this argument Bitcoin surpassed silver to become the 8th most valuable asset in the entire world. More than Coca Cola and Pepsi COMBINED. Being upset about it or wishing it didn’t exist won’t make it go away
“Capitalism affects everything around me that I use daily” is the actual argument. And it does that through the stock market which you said yourself is like a gamble of money. But no, Bitcoin is the problem and everyone’s just an asshole if they trade it or make money on it is what you had said to that dude. But not the hedge fund worker you give your 401K to?
I don’t disagree with anything you said. Yes, it’s confusing and there’s no shortage of scammers trying to make it more confusing in order to bamboozle people.
My humble advice is to ignore “crypto”. Adopt, at least for now, the philosophy that, “it’s either Bitcoin, or shit coin.” That’ll simplify things immensely for those just getting started, and is true for at least 99.9% of other coins out there (100% if you want my honest opinion).
Maybe, in the distant future, when/if you decide to dive down the rabbit hole and really get comfortable how Bitcoin functions and what gives it value, then you’ll be in a better position to judge other coins. More likely, you won’t bother because you won’t need to.
But, mark my words, nothing is going to replace Bitcoin. Some other coins might manage to fulfill some esoteric fringe use cases that Bitcoin doesn’t, and maybe one those use cases will be beneficial to you. If so, awesome. But they’re not going to be able to replace Bitcoin.
Layer 2 protocols are tools that operate on top of the (admittedly slow and variable) Bitcoin blockchain. Lightning Network (LN) is currently the most prominent and allows secure transactions that complete in a few seconds with extremely small fees. LN addresses the “it’s too slow/unpredictable” argument against Bitcoin.
There are many other Layer 2 protocols running on top of Bitcoin in various stages of development and production addressing different issues and use cases. But, you don’t need to know about any of them, honestly. You don’t need to pick the winner (there will be many winners doing different things). When any of them catch on and go mainstream, then that will drive more demand for Bitcoin to help power that protocol.
Also they love to act as though fiat isn’t backed by anything despite the fact that fiat is actually backed by something extremely important: you are required by law to use fiat for interactions with some of the most powerful organizations in the world. I can’t pay taxes in crypto or gold or even rubles, my government accepts usd and if I don’t hand them usd every year I get in trouble. When they pay me for any reason it’s in usd. When they fine me it’s in usd. That is a backing. So long as I have to financially deal with the governments of the United States I have to have appropriate quantities of usd. And because of all of this everything around me accepts that currency, even drug dealers take cash. Why? Because it’s the local currency. And it’s reasonably stable.
And on that note, I’d never spend a wildly inflationary currency. It’s not an effective currency and because of that it winds up being entirely theoretical.
Monero (which is actually private like cash - sender, receiver, and amount aren’t known to anyone viewing the blockchain) has transaction fees of a penny or two. It works by mixing every real transaction with 16 decoy transactions. Currently there are supposedly ways to track a small percentage of transactions but it’s so secretive that only approved western government organizations are allowed access, but it doesn’t work well and it only gives a statistical probability. And it’s one of the wider used currencies current at $145 per coin.
The government hates not being able to track you.
Also BTC fees do suck but they vary. Most days they’re around $1-$1.50 which isn’t that far off from the $.50 charged (to businesses) by credit card processors.
So much for that whole "doctors are simply being overly paranoid in administering justified abortions - we never intended the law to work this way!" talking point thing they were doing. Here we have a woman whom both doctors and judges agree should be able to get an abortion, yet they're like "oh, well, no, that doesn't qualify!"
And this woman also WANTS to have the baby. She and her husband were trying to get pregnant. Unfortunately, the fetus has abnormalities that mean it won’t survive. Without an abortion, she will need to wait until she hits term, have a C Section, and then have a dead baby.
Oh, and thanks to her medical history, she’ll likely be unable to have another pregnancy after that C-section. So it’s either give birth to a dead baby now and have no more or have an abortion now and (after she recovers) try to have another baby. Only one of these options might result in a baby that’s alive and it’s the option that includes abortion.
But Paxton will scream about how he’s “protecting the unborn baby” without caring that the fetus has a nearly zero chance of survival and without caring that the woman faces potential severe (possibly life threatening) medical complications if she’s forced to continue the pregnancy. He’ll force women to carry pregnancies to term even if it kills them!
My only surprise is that this kind of scenario came up so fast. I expected years of matricide before all the right spines aligned.
Roe was passed in the courtroom on privacy - which another future court can still make a solid case for - but it was sold to the people as protecting women. Abortion is going to happen, that’s the hard truth. How many women, and girls, have to needlessly die? That’s just future mothers being removed from the field. Population goes down when abortion is outlawed, because girls will travel, or take it into their own hands. There isn’t some mythical white baby boom. There is, however, a marked decline in crime starting ~20 years after Roe was passed. Cuz all the unwanted children weren’t born and raised being reminded that they’re unwanted their whole life.
I’m not a fan of abortion as elective birth control, but I can acknowledge when my opinions would make terrible policy. The “irresponsible” women who couldn’t stick to a pill a day, or re-up on her implant appropriately, if she can’t handle that, do we want her to raise children?
That’s rhetorical. The answer doesn’t matter. It’s the implied reasoning that’s the point.
In my humble opinion, Paxton can’t leave this planet fast enough, Texas needs to go blue, and Republicans can prattle on and on on Fox news until they become a meme, the face of white fragility.
I’d love to see abortions be safe, legal, and rare. If people want to reduce how many abortions occur, they should find out why women get abortions and then figure out ways to help women so that they aren’t in those situations.
For example, if women are getting pregnant and resorting to abortion as “birth control,” then give better sex education and make contraceptives as affordable and available as possible.
Sadly, the right seems to want to make it so more women NEED abortions while less have access to them. Using birth control again, they like pushing abstinence only sex education (which doesn’t work) while restricting access to birth control. Some have even been calling for making birth control illegal!
Way more dangerously: those white old blokes honestly think that their opinion should have any weight when a judge has told them it hasn't and a doctor has told them the facts.
Republicans are selling some delusion they have (or lie if they know better) that there’s a magical moment a doctor can 100% determine whether or not someone will live or die at that exact point if they do or don’t get an abortion. Doctors mitigate risk whenever possible, you can’t wait until things are a total catastrophe and then expect doctors to be able to rescue a patient from it unscathed. It’s just not how medicine works, it’s probabilistic. There’s no way you can write a law about this that will accurately capture all situations, any law limiting the ability of doctors to perform abortions will hurt people in the end. Government needs to keep itself out of the doctors office and let patients make these difficult decisions with the help of their doctor.
That’s the problem when they look at the world in black and white. In medicine doctors are dealing with complex systems, using limited information, and leaning on statistics both for the likely diagnosis and the proper treatment.
Admittedly I just realized I misread the initial post I responded to. I thought it said, you can’t be pro-palistine without being pro-hamas. None the less, nobody’s have are clean in this conflict.
Right, which is why I think both sides suck. The gray is that there is a lot more history then the last couple of weeks. None of it justifies current actions, but it’s not black and white…
A stance of “Both sides are bad” is just a stance that favors the Status Quo.
The underdog needs the extra assistance, the superior doesn’t.
So for that reason I’m pro-Israel, don’t want either side winning, don’t want aid to either side, so that defaults to a pro-Israel stance.
I’m comfortable being labeled as such.
I get it. It’s a dirty situation with tons of gray area. I think Israel has the edge in higher ground, but every new article that comes out of their atrocities erodes away that high ground.
Sorry what high ground has Israel. Over the years they proved how morally corrupt they are. And the civilian casualties are way higher on the Palestinian side.
Checking the historical number of kids and women who succumbed on both sides is showing a terrifying trend.
This recent escalation just proves once again how bad they are.
Read about proximity shielding. It’s a made up kind of human shielding Israel and other countries have used as a shortcut to not be seen as committing a clear war crime.
Israel brings death and genocide to the Palestinians, Israel is Nazi Germany in this scenario.
Rule 28. Medical units exclusively assigned to medical purposes must be respected and protected in all circumstances. They lose their protection if they are being used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit acts harmful to the enemy.
the protection of medical units ceases when they are being used, outside their humanitarian function, to commit acts harmful to the enemy. This exception is provided for in the First and Fourth Geneva Conventions and in both Additional Protocols.[37] It is contained in numerous military manuals and military orders.[38] It is also supported by other practice.[39]
While the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols do not define “acts harmful to the enemy”, they do indicate several types of acts which do not constitute “acts harmful to the enemy”, for example, when the personnel of the unit is armed, when the unit is guarded, when small arms and ammunition taken from the wounded and sick are found in the unit and when wounded and sick combatants or civilians are inside the unit.[40] According to the Commentary on the First Geneva Convention, examples of acts harmful to the enemy include the use of medical units to shelter able-bodied combatants, to store arms or munitions, as a military observation post or as a shield for military action.[41]
Yeah except the majority of the dead were civilians. Israel has no proof of this anyway, and there being tunnel under the hospital does not mean any medical staff is cooperating.
Unfortunately based on the rules of was the medical staff do not have to cooperate, or even be aware, simply storing weapons, or a command center, or staging armed soldiers for war next to a hospital removes the protections.
The rules of war aren’t about making things perfect, they’re very much a do not let perfect be the enemy of good and filled with compromises.
If you want protections for medical staff you have to clear a section of ground for them that isn’t used for war.
I didn’t make these rules. These rules were agreed to in order to try to prevent total war. Where carpet bombs flattened entire cities like what happened in Dresden.
That’s BS. Proximity shielding is used to excuse war crimes. You should not kill people especially if they aren’t even aware. Using it as an excuse for murder is propaganda.
He’s suggesting that “medicine” has effects backed by some reasonable amount of scientific study. Telling people to ingest random substances that don’t have that is essentially witchcraft, not medicine.
But if you want to label progesterone as “faith items”, don’t they become even less controlled? If they are labeled as a medical item (or whatever makes sense to keep nut jobs from ‘prescribing’ it) wouldn’t they fall under more observation and inspection and control? The whole reason I’m asking these questions is because it seems like you all want to give religious nut jobs the ability to dose people with hormones as part of a religious ritual. Is that what you all are saying? I did say at the beginning that I might be misunderstanding.
I see your point, but I’m pretty sure there’s a legal way to both prohibit doctors from prescribing it and from witch-doctor nutjobs from “prescribing” it.
Yeah, it’s a hormone. Which is why I imagine any synthesis of it would be controlled like a medication and not declared as a faith item. But maybe I misunderstand
It shouldn’t be able to be marketed as medicine, because medicine is held to a higher standard. Kind of like how supplements and naturopathic stuff can’t claim to be medicine.
Well, I assume progesterone has some valid medical uses as a drug…. This ain’t that, though, and they’re should create a law that says “medically unproven treatements are bad and can get you canned”…
If biology for humans were such that both participants had an unpredictable, uncontrollable, 50/50 chance to carry the baby, abortion access for all and would be a non-issue.
Alternatively, if Jerry Falwell never existed, it still wouldn’t be nearly as contentious an issue.
You’re supposing the judge obeyed the Constitution here. He did not; freedom of religion is not freedom to defraud, and the people selling this drug are committing fraud.
I’m using it right now, it’s so much more usable than Lemmy. But that’s whats great about opensource. You can come up with your own changes or a big group can polish an ugly turd into something awesome.
I do wish they tried to push people to smaller servers instead of cramming everyone in the same top 3. Send people to the server which matches their interests
My shortcut is still called wefwef but I know what I’m using haha, I’m just lazy.
I love the app and you made my transition from Apollo so easy. I would probably be wandering around in the dark with no content if you hadn’t pulled this off. So again, thank you.
While that is part of it, the other, bigger part is that Western countries actually do have higher labour costs: better salaries and conditions for our workers.
When China was outcompeting us on undesirable, low productivity, jobs, we accepted that. It was better to raise a billion Chinese out of poverty than to protect our lowest productivity factory workers. And those workers mostly transitioned to other jobs with higher productivity.
But now China is richer and their labour force is shrinking, so they will compete with highly productive factory jobs.
Politically, it is unlikely that car workers will accept unemployment. Nor will other highly paid workers.
So a trade war is brewing, you better brace yourself for it.
China wasn’t “outcompeting us on undesirable, low productivity, jobs”. Corporations were shipping jobs to China to undercut highly productive factory jobs back then, too, so they could save on labor costs. It’s only now that China is undercutting corporate profits that these same corporations come crying and shitting their pants. That’s also why you see a ramping up of negative media pieces on China. It was never about charitably raising people out of poverty. It was always about corporations undercutting labor to gain greater profits. Fuck 'em, bring on the cheap cars.
Making toys and other plastic shit was never a high paying job in the West.
And no, it wasn’t charity, it was a win-win that increased living standards on both sides.
But it did have an impact on low paying manufacturing jobs in the West and that impact was accepted by Labour unions for the two reasons I gave: we (rightfully) concluded there were enough other, better jobs available and didn’t want to keep Chinese workers poor.
The “good for people” argument (which has been misportrayed here as “charity”) was made by politicians to justify tearing down the trade barriers that allowed wealthiest countries such as the US to be a higher-income bubble.
Once those trade barriers were down, all those jobs which had no other price protections than said trade barriers (jobs like, for example, assembly workers, but not things like Legal professions specialized in a country’s Law and which require registering with a local Law Society to practice) were suddenly competing with similar people all over the World, and a lot of countries in the World are full of people who would sell their work in those areas much cheaper than equivalent workers in high-income nations.
The people it was good for were people in those “open to competition” occupations in Low Income but reasonably safe countries like China (whose income went up as manufacturing moved there) and the people who owned the means of production (who got higher dividends due to the higher profits being made by paying low-income country manpower costs and receiving high-income country prices for products and services) but nobody else as even the eventual fall in prices that occurred (over the years, as all those companies with China costs started competing on price because they could thanks to the bigger profit margins due to much lower manpower costs) was not enough to make up for the faster and deeper downwards pressure on salaries in high-income countries that happenned due to said manpower competition with workers in countries with much cheaper salaries (for example, in the mid-70s about 23% of corporate revenue in American went to salaries, whilst by 2012 it was down to 7%).
Heres the problem with the talking point of needing to bring manufacturing jobs back: we can’t fill the manufacturing jobs that we have
I work for a company that sells services to warehouses and industrial facilities. We can’t fully staff our locations, we can’t keep most of the people we hire and neither can our customers, and it comes down to the fact that the jobs absolutely suck. Who wants to work in a loud, poorly temperature controlled factory with heavy equipment and a high risk of injury while doing backbreaking work when you could work at a store or resteraunt for not much less and put far less risk to your life, limb and sanity? Bring the automation on, these jobs need to become a thing of the past.
Sounds like the one thing you’re not mentioning - pay - is probably shit.
If the salary offered was enough for a whole family of 5 to live of it, including a good house and a car, like in the old days, I bet you would have trouble keeping candidates away.
The “people don’t want to work nowadays” arguments invariably forget to include the little detail that even a “competitive” salary in industry today is in real terms (of what it actually buys) nowhere as much as it was 50 years ago.
Industrial job salaries relative to cost of living are still way less than back in the 60s. Even the “best paying work” in that domain still pays comparativelly crap given the real cost of living in the US in the present day. My point is that there has been a sistemic fall - across the board - in pay for all such jobs when compared with cost of living, and that’s due to Globalization.
Office work in open-office or even cubicle environments isn’t really better (at many levels) than factory work, and in some countries that kind of work tends to slip into personal time (such as getting calls about work when at home in the evening and weekends) - the kind of harm suffered by employees is different, not less, so people end up having strokes, hearth attacks or simply die from overwork (the latter more of a Japanese phenomenon) rather than the more physical kind of accident or consequences of physical overwork. Office work does, however, tend to pay more than factory work, so lots of people invest in higher education to work in an office doing mindless work and they’re not going to apply for factory work.
Whilst office work pay has also been falling in the last decade or so, and now is actually not that much more than pay in a good industrial job, those people who invested in higher education are highly unlikely to admit to themselves their degree is worthless (and hence their time and money was wasted) and hence are unlikely to apply for the kind of work that doesn’t require a degree even though sometimes they would be better of doing it, plus still now at least theoretically there are more opportunities for promotion and income growth in a shit office job than a well paid industrial job.
Manufacturing and union membership took such massive hits in the US over that period of time. It was win-win for the corporations who greatly expanded profit margins, and the Chinese government, who were happy to use their citizens as sweatshop labor to get ahead. You lived through the propaganda at the time and decided to accept it as the truth.
I hate it when corpos use the “oh we can’t lower prices because our staff is getting paid too much”-narrative. What about the CEO who takes half the profits for himself?
It’s the workers who create value for a company, they don’t take it away by getting paid for their work.
A corporation might have 10 C-level guys dividing $50 million amongst themselves and 10.000 workers earning $70K, which costs about $100K due to overheads (health insurance, retirement, etc). Together, that’s a billion, which is 20x more than the C level guys.
The C level guys aren’t the big expense, not by a long shot.
Labour, government and shareholders divide most of the earnings amongst themselves.
For the record, I do think we need to tax the wealthy more and the workers less.
Without the workers there’s no product, no income. The C-suite is dispensable. The workers aren’t.
Besides, worker productivity has been skyrocketing for the last 50 years, as has cost of living, but worker wages have been stagnant. C-suite pay has kept up with the increase in productivity, though, if not outpaced it.
Saying that the C-suite are paid too much compared to workers isn’t contradicting that greedflation is the main reason for higher prices. The two are in no way mutually exclusive.
I’m not downvoting you for responding. I’m downvoting you for spreading commonly believed pro-corporate apologia.
Don’t think labor costs is a big factor. Car production is the sector that is most automated. Just think of this endless bands of hanging cars with robot arms working on it. Tesla even topped this.
It’s mainly the unwillingness to design and sell cheap cars due to less profits. In Germany we had electric cars for 20k€ or even combustion cars under 15k€. But they stopped building it. Although it was sold out in weeks.
In my region there was a Startup by the Aachen University RWTH (which is an elite university in Germany) bulding small EVs for around 20k€. They simply bought all parts from suppliers and just assembled it. And engineered and designed it first. Unionized and still competitive. Unfortunately, they didn’t fly.
EV building is rather simple. The software is key. And this is the missing part at car makers capabilities.
I second your thoughts on trade war. However, I guess it will be much simpler with high taxes, high quality regulations, and may be less support by car workshops. We will see…
There is still a shit ton of people working in a car factory. Tesla had to scale back their amount of robot workers since humans could work much faster. Tesla expects to have 60,000 people working in their Gigafactory in Texas when the production of the Cybertruck ramps up.
It is, but as the article mentions some manufacturers are making a loss of 35k per car.
If those cars are then sold for 5k less than the US/EU/Japanese equivalent, despite lower wages and environmental standards, you have to ask yourself questions.
Yes you just described the business model. Everyone from Walmart to Amazon to Uber uses it. They take a loss in the short term, relying on new investor money or other products.
No reason why western countries also can’t subsidize EV car companies to remain competitive.
Like…what are we supposed to do? Be content with ridiculously priced EVs and be willing to pay a small fortune for them? Fuck off with that noise.
Western corporations have had no problems fucking over the average consumer for decades or laying off thousands of employees at the first sign of trouble. Let them adapt or die I say. Competition is always good. Western corporations have the smarts and the resources to compete, they just need to be forced to.
Controversial take: the problem isn't car prices. They haven't increased that much when compared to inflation, and you're getting far more and far better cars for your money when adjusted for inflation.
The problem is wages haven't risen and housing prices have risen too much, meaning people have less to spend on a car.
E: I googled. In the US the cost of a median house was 18k in 1953. An average car cost 3.5k.
Now, the median house costs 400k.
400k/18k x 3.5k = If car prices had risen as much as house prices, the median car would cost 77k.
Yes… cars now are faster, safer, and more efficient than they were in the 50s.
Even if you discount all the “features” they’ve added the bare necessities of a car are tons better than mid-20th century cars or even late 20th century cars
That‘s a terrible idea. Just because China throws irresponsible amounts of cash at cars doesn‘t mean we have to do the same mistake. We can simply say it‘s not OK to sell products under manufacturing costs to gain market share and that‘s that. Let‘s not inflate the already oversized car market even more.
I agree it’s a bad first step. I’d keep trying idea on the table, but I’d start by working with the European car manufacturers to create huge tariffs on those cars. Make it impossible for them to be sold at those prices in Western markets
They can simply say they don’t subsidize their manufacturing and operate profitably at those prices.
Just saying something doesn’t make it work unless there are legal things that back up the position. And in foreign trade, that means tariffs… which economists have been screaming about (for decades) having negative ramifications that ripple through the economy.
A lot of western countries are subsidizing EV sales. Most western auto companies just waited a decade longer than they should have to start making EVs and are in the thick of developing technology when the early movers are hitting maturity.
On top of subsidies at the national level, most legacy automakers are selling their EVs at a significant loss, but that is because they haven’t reached economies of scale yet… not because they are trying to undercut competition. It’s hard to develop new products and even harder to get them to scale production. Ford has been making cars for 120 years, but that isn’t the same thing as making an EV. They effectively have to start over in a new field… a decade behind companies that invested early.
A lot of the press you hear about EV manufacturers cutting back because demand is low has to do with them cutting back because they are losing $50-70k per vehicle they are selling and can’t stomach the losses. The demand is there, they just can’t make an EV at a price that generates profit. They trim commissions at dealerships to try to help defray cost, but that minimizes incentive for sales teams to try to move them and exacerbates the problem. On top of that, their ICE sales are diminished due to high interest rates and an overall market slowdown in large purchases so every vehicle they sell at a loss hurts the bottom line that much more.
They’re trying to wait to push the cost involved in getting to scale until interest rates go down and it’s more affordable to invest in new technology. They are fucked. Tesla is currently the only American company that is profitable at scale and Elon can’t shut the fuck up on eX-Twitter long enough to stop pissing off the marketplace. The table is set for Chinese EVs to flood the US market, but I don’t think people will be as open to Chinese vehicles with the current data privacy issues and the tense geo-political position between the US and China.
I’m thinking that, if it gets bad enough, the federal government will disincentivize Chinese EVs with tariffs to offset the Chinese gov’t subsidies… if the current US EV tax incentives don’t do enough to spur legacy automakers to kick it into high gear… which it doesn’t seem to be doing. It’s going to be a rough decade for legacy automakers.
Yep. They‘re doing exactly what we usually call hostile underbidding to heavily inflate prices later when they‘re a top dog. A practice that is not quite legal in most parts of the west. And whoever wants to know when things still don‘t work out for the car maker because subsidies dry up: Search for Chinese manufacturer ‚Weltmeister‘. That will make you think thrice about ever coming near a Chinese EV.
The kind of thing usually results in a trade war, sanctions and tariffs.
The problem in Europe, is that our manufacturers are so reliant on Chinese parts and manufacturing, that they've asked our government NOT to intervene. China has them by the nuts, because they've outsourced too much. IRC they can't even make batteries without using Chinese parts.
Unfortunately for Hershey, they only have license to use the Cadbury brand name in the USA and for specific products only. In fact, Cadbury Creme Eggs sold in the USA are made in Canada by Mondelez, who actually owns Cadbury. Second in fact, if you read past the headline of the AI written article you supplied you’ll also find that Mondelez owns Cadbury. Then Hershey, then Cadbury, then Mondelez, but holy shit I don’t think you could have picked a worse article to try and prove you are right in an internet argument. I’m not even sure AI wrote this shit.
Yeah, take a shot every time one of us dirty commies denies the existence of Saddam’s WMDs. The biggest propaganda machine in history would never lie about it’s rivals.
It’s wild that I didn’t even mention brigading, but most of the comments from hexbears are defensive about it. It’s not brigading to comment on posts on other instances, so stop feeling insecure about it. Especially when there are so many other valid reasons people hate you guys.
Yeah my bad, I mistook you for another idiot.
Of course we are defensive about it! Its a tiring accusation.
Yes so much to hate like analysing news, investigating claims and not tolerating bigots. Gets you big mad.
I was speaking more along the lines of the endless emotes and troll comments. I don’t think people have a problem with many of the comments that have actual meat to them, even if they vehemently disagree with what’s said, like I often do. The ones posting the same trollface emote fifty times though? That’s assnine and annoying. Then those same users complain that nobody wants to “debate” them. That’s not debate. It’s not even a conversation.
take a step back and notice that those comments are in response to someone else engaging in bad faith behaviour. Hexbear does not have a downvote function, which has fostered a culture of mocking people acting in bad faith. If you do not like people dunking on idiots, then get mad at the idiot
Brigading is clicking on the article that is on the top of all brigading
Why is it inherently bad to be negative towards NATO and good to be positive towards Russia, China or the DPRK? I thought you guys liked nuance.
I have yet to see anyone do genocide apologetics or dismiss human rights violations. Thinking critically and investigating claims is a good thing, and you thinking otherwise shows how pathetic you are.
New drinking game:
Take a shot when libs call people disagreeing with them “brigading”
Take a shot when libs use the word Tankie or authoritarian without being able to define them.
Take a shot when libs fail to provide a source.
Take a shot when the only source they can provide is Wikipedia, Kiev independent or Radio Free ____
Take a shot when they do double genocide theory.
Take a shot when they use bigoted language.
Take a shot when they act like smug little shits and then cry foul when they get treated like smug little shits.
Here is the thing. It’s only liberals that threats this as a football game were you have to cheer on one of the teams. If you actually know the history and some form of idea about the geopolitical stage, you can be on the side that actually wants peace. Not “until the last Ukrainian is dead” that the west wants.
Why would you do that? How does it sound funny to you that US propaganda is so important to you that you would poision yourself if you weren’t surrounded by it? It get you were trying to make a joke but the joke is that, " if I encounter anything other than US propaganda I need to self harm so I don’t acknowledge it."
It is just wild to me that you exist in a state where this seems like a banger post.
You do understand reality exists right. It isn’t just US propaganda vs Russian propaganda. There is an actual objective truth that can be found. It isn’t particularly hard. No one here is claiming to have special wisdom here.
It’s true that US propaganda machine is unparalleled, but at this point one has to work hard not to see the gap between the narrative they’ve been fed and the reality.
Russian economy was supposed to collapse within months, Russia was supposed to be isolated geopolitically, Russia was supposed to run out of weapons, Russian military was supposed to crumble, western wonder weapons were supposed to be game changers, and so on.
It’s been around two years now, and literally every one of these predictions has turned out to be completely false. This is openly reported in mainstream western media nowadays.
Given that, I fail to see how any person capable of even a modicum of critical thought continue going along with the narrative.
And we see this same behavior manifest itself in many other areas. For example, people continue to believe articles claiming that China’s economy is going to collapse despite decades of such articles being false.
Continuing to believe media that has been so consistently wrong does require at least a certain amount of gullibility in my opinion.
reuters.com
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