I just block and report as spam any spam text messages I get and any calls that get marked as scam likely. It was terrible before the election because I live in a swing county in a swing state and I think everyone was just mass spamming every number in the area code, but since then I haven’t really gotten much, maybe one errant text every 2 or 3 weeks. Which is much better than it was last spring and summer when the amount started picking up for me.
Give that amount of money to anyone with the most basic of simple financial management and they wouldn’t have to work a day in their entire life while living a very decent life. Almost $2M at 5% growth, below the total historical performance of the stock market, is $100,000 per year for doing nothing except sitting on money. Any amount of that which is reinvested compounds exponentially.
Never underestimate propaganda’s ability to make people believe contradictory messages simultaneously. They’ll just choose to believe whatever suits their immediate argument then flip without a single care of consistency. Don’t bother questioning it either because every excuse and justification and conspiracy theory in the book will come up and failing that, belligerence and aggression until you either back down or go away so as not to make them challenge their irrational beliefs.
I could list out dozens but just the most common: government is both weak and ineffective yet pulls the strings of society in the background, the west is both weak and should just appease Russia because they won’t win yet is propping up Ukraine and presents an existential threat to Russia that supposedly justifies invasion, states should decide their own laws but not on issues they want to force onto others like abortion among many.
Usually the stove and dryer are natural gas too
I specifically looked it up just to be sure, John Deere does have multiple factories in China and a good amount of their website wording includes “assembled in USA”, sort of like cars and appliances and a lot of things, usually to get around existing tariffs and import duties. They do also have factories in Germany, Mexico, india, and of course multiple in the USA, but I kept it simple for the sake of the explanation, because China also does produce a lot of soybeans as well.
It’s way, way more than that. Specialization and comparative advantage underpins the entire globalized economy which is the only way to allow us to get more for the same amount of labor. Without it, we simply regress. US farmers grow soybeans so that Chinese manufactures can make the tractors to allow the US farmers to grow the soybeans, and that only works with free trade. And in this scenario there is no one else making a tractor for anywhere near the same cost, and no one else who can grow such a large volume of soybeans, otherwise the trade probably wouldn’t be happening in the first place. And so the alternative is that both countries have to make both independently. And that is more expensive without the efficiencies of economy of scale, more expensive because of lower supply because we don’t have the capacity to produce that many tractors and China can’t grow that many soybeans, and more expensive because of the infrastructure costs being duplicated and spread out over less units.
And so we both end up with less tractors and less food that are more expensive. Now add in petrochemical fertilizers imported from Canada, steel and coal for the metal used in the tractor imported from Australia, all the industries that support them also getting caught into this, and where every one of those companies is tied into their regional, national, and the global economy. And that is just for tractors and soybeans.
We trade for almost everything. And every single item that we trade, we do so because it is cheaper than making it ourselves. Tariffs are an artificial tax on efficiency, and we are literally less prosperous with them in place. Some things are a matter of national security, of not allowing a foreign government leverage over your society, but we’re talking about his genius plan to put tariffs on literally fucking everything - soybeans and tractors, but also clothing, toys, electronics, appliances, vehicles, on and on and on. And a tariff on it will increase the price, because that is just how economics works.
Thanks for the advice, Kristi Noem.
Because heat pumps are popular now, and the government is helping people pay for them through inflation reduction act rebates. So they can jack up the price and price gouge the shit out of us, because they know they can and know that they will get away with it. And I bet they were never popular because the same people selling home AC units also sell gas powered furnaces for home heating. So they charge you for two appliances and two installations, with two maintenance calls every time something goes wrong and two upgrade cycles. But now that they come as one unit, they still have to find some way to return more money to shareholders than last quarter so the price goes up.
I just got whole home AC replaced with a heat pump with an integrated furnace backup because it can get very cold here, and also had all my baseboard heaters ripped out. Perfectly fine in the winter and it has freed up at least 1/4 of all my walls to have stuff right up against them if I so choose, but really annoyed that the whole thing costed $20k when it could and should have been built this way 60 years ago. Not to mention all the inefficiency of burning gas for heat when heat pumps move more energy than they consume, multiplied across decades for nearly every building on the planet.
I see that as offering services that people clearly use and value, and that the bills have to be paid somehow. So as long as proton can deliver the privacy and security features it promises, I personally don’t see anything wrong with providing an alternative when the only other options are built on monetizing your data.
Power, water, internet, healthcare, education, transit, there’s a lot of things that should be public utilities or at least with a convincing public option because of the clear conflict of interest between private corporations and social benefit, but aren’t, because money controls politics.
Idk what to tell you then, cause it’s still up for me. Don’t know if it’s geo blocked, but I’m in the US where it would be most likely to be blocked by NBC
The video is the post itself, not in the comments
Unfortunately Reddit is still one of the best and easiest ways to find stuff like this - here is the full performance
They can. They just need to pay a little more. We’re talking 25 pence per liter at most compared to no sugar tax. Higher sugar intake is correlated with obesity which means more health problems which is more expense for the NHS. It’s like a train ticket or gas taxes or taxes in general, some percentage of usage that causes the problem needs to pay for the thing that deals with the consequences or expenses that solve it.
It’s the companies who have decided that they would rather sell shit soda, and consumers who are probably unwilling to pay anything except the cheapest price possible - wealth inequality and poverty problems aside because that’s a different social policy that should not be addressed through a sugar tax.
To give you an idea of who is on the tesla board of directors, it includes Kimbal Musk, his brother, and James Murdoch, of the Murdoch family you’re probably thinking of. Musk himself owns something like 20% of the company, the board owns some, his cult members also have some share. The rest of the shareholders are either institutional or retail investors who are some combination of not willing to rock the boat, don’t have enough voting power, and/or just don’t care.
Not the person you responded to and its been a while since I’ve done it, but I’m pretty sure you can just open the file with notepad (or TextEdit on Mac), scroll down to the timestamp, make the changes, and save the file.
BYD was selling ICE vehicles up until March of 2022, and their current split is somewhere around 50/50 BEV/hybrid so they’re still not a full EV company. Their lineup is still being supported by their existing infrastructure, subsidized by the already established supply chains for ICE that they can incrementally cannibalize while building up the EV part of the company. It’s a good blueprint for legacy auto, but not for an EV startup. That is even before mentioning the very generous subsidies and incentives for electrification provided by the national, provincial, and city governments to producers and consumers. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, because I believe the US also needs that level of investment into electrification, but my point is that it’s not the same business model.
The large profit margin SUVs are necessary for a company to achieve scale to then be able to produce the smaller cheaper stuff. Fixed costs like the factory, tooling, training, designing, that all takes a lot of money up front before even selling a single vehicle, and the smaller and cheaper the vehicle coming out of that production pipeline is, the longer the payback period will be. And when we’re talking about billions of dollars in cost, it’s hard to remain solvent when interest payments on the debt grow exponentially over time.
It’s why before tesla there had not been an American auto company startup for like 70 years, Tesla almost went bankrupt, and Rivian is just starting to head in the right direction. Lucid is probably fucked and they’re mostly Saudi owned these days anyways, and the rest of the US EV startup space ranges from a joke to a scam.
What legacy automakers already have in staff and part of the production line established is actually kind of useless when they have to wait to establish their electric motor, battery, and chassis production, which probably just means a new factory anyways. Give it a few years and the cheaper smaller stuff will come, because right now AFAIK only tesla actually has the free cash flow to fund an EV economy car at scale. Everyone else is still sinking billions establishing any EV production at all, and interest rates aren’t helping the speed of their progress either.
It doesn’t really matter what happens with nato, trump is technically commander in chief of the armed forces and just the chaos alone of the first few hours and days is where it makes all the difference. Jan 6 for example would have looked a whole lot different under a different sitting president where the national guard and military were sent in when they should have been, because as it was, disaster was minutes and tens of feet away that day.