Lmao, two idiots fighting. This seemed kind of inevitable, they’re not compatible personality types to work with each other.

Elon definitely thinks he has more influence with trump’s crowd than he actually has, but I also think his position at twitter makes him dangerous to trump by undermining his ability to reach a lot of people who haven’t fully crawled down the maga conspiracy pipeline.

I don’t think he’s going to be able to shift much support to Vance ether. Vance and his ilk are just to weird for most trump supporters.

The thing is that cars are deeply intertwined with other sources of emissions that are much bigger than them, and realistically those other sources can’t be practically dealt with while cars are so prevalent, or at least, dealing with them are much easier in a less car dependent society.

Consider something like oil fractions, when oil is refined you get gasoline, but also fuel oil, diesel, kerosene, bitumen, and others. The production of any one of those is buoyed by the production of the rest, and you can’t do much to control the ratios you’re getting. As long as gas demand is high, all the others will be produced as well, and if they are produced, people will find a use to burn them. Airlines become more fuel efficient or decrease traffic; Previously cost prohibitive uses for kerosene become viable as the price drops due to a consistent supply and a reduced demand from high value airline consumers.

For a serious reduction in oil use, every element of it needs to be reduced in tandem so that the value of no one fraction can keep production high.

Would be nice

Money for campaigns is important, but it’s a force multiplier. If there is no force of voters to multiply, it is worthless.

Also those people in the back rooms are going to have a lot less money to throw around now, big donors don’t want to give their money to campaigns that have no chance of winning, what good good is buying influence with a politician if that politician has no influence to sell? I don’t think all that money will flow over to progressives suddenly, but the gap in budget is going to be much smaller now.

Exactly, it’s not the job of the voters to convince a party their interests are worth pursing, it is the job of the party to convince voters that they will pursue their interests.

Donor money alone can not win an election and a failure to engage with voters will sure as hell lose it.

For the CPU I’m pretty sure it’s just standard ARM64, although the GPU is apparently their own thing, so maybe there’d be issues there. Although Asahi Linux has a working driver for their GPU, so maybe it’s possible to get arm Mac OS to talk to other GPUs.

Might still be possible to run it on other ARM processors.

Their competition is literally the rest of the personal computer market?

The places where they violate trust law is in cellphone software, where the use market influence in hardware to force market influence in software and then extract undue fees from other companies.

Yah, like, there is plenty of negative things to say about Apple, but they’re actually pretty good about keeping their stuff efficient.

Like, there is a reason they could get away with 4GBs of ram in the Mac book air as late as 2016.

Exactly, we don’t know how the brain would adapt to having electric impulses wired right in to it, and it could adapt in some seriously negative ways.

Stuff like ground clearance, fancy differentials and all wheel drive will go a long way. But at the end of the day, all things being equal, less weight spread over more surface contact will get you a lot further. There’s a reason the old Suzuki Jimny/samuri’s are so renowned despite literally being Kai cars.

What’s funny is that anyone thinks this vehicle is any good for off roading. Like look at the surface contact of the wheels, look at the curb weight, I’m sorry but it’s not going to handle anything more adverse than a gravel road well.

Is it because it’s a truck and for some reason people think all pickups are good at off-roading? Like, some are, most aren’t. Large vehicles are not better at off roading, in fact they’re usually worse without being modified or designed for the task.

I don’t think the understanding of the human brain is really good enough to engineer a properly functional one.

And I suspect that any companies touting they have such a device are ether overstating how effective what they have is, or outright lying about the capabilities.

If we did have enough understanding to engineer a device, I suspect it would be possible to fix such issues without grafting in electronics.

Anything beyond publicly funded research smells of grift to me.

It’s a fundamental and inevitable outcome of how these businesses are structured and run. Were the decisions to chase larger more premium vehicles short sighted? absolutely. Was the pursuit of Financialization in car sales to make up for pricing out lower income buyers obviously a bad idea? Without a doubt. Could they have made any other decisions? Not without being replaced by shareholders.

The solution to this problem is not just to “kick the bums out”, these companies need to have their management and ownership restructured in a way that generates incentive structures to maintaining a stable long term market rather than quarterly revenue growth.

Some companies, like Nissan, didn’t pursue the big premium trend and they got burnt as well, largely because the trends of the rest of the market and surplus of used cars is undermining their new sales. To some extent their choice to so heavily pursue sales to fleets like rental companies didn’t help.

The interesting thing is, Tesla is perhaps the most obvious and extreme example, but they’re not the only auto manufacturer this is happening to right now. Nissan is in a bit of a tail spin as well.

There are so many problems slamming in to the auto industry right now. Even beyond the tariff instability.

In the US in particular, As cars have gotten more reliable and longer lasting, the market for new “budget” cars has dried up. Car buyers who might have once bought budget are now buying used cars that probably have a good many years left. The sales of new cars have been declining since 2016 but new car price have been skyrocketing, keeping up revenue growth for automakers.

This seemed ideal for automakers as it meant they could drop the lean margins of cheap cars and focus on higher margin markets, which looked much better to shareholders. Those companies that focused on this budget market have suffered, the best example being Nissan. The ideal for automakers is that people will buy “up” the value chain over time, buying higher end or “less used” vehicles when they trade in their old vehicle, going from a twice used, to a once used and eventually to a new car.

This kind of came to a head during the pandemic. Not only was the supply of lower end used vehicles dwindling as less and less entered the market due to less being made a few years back, there was also a shortage of new cars due to supply chain break downs and an increase in demand. Many people were taking out insane financing on massively over priced cars, both new and used. Now a lot of people are underwater on those auto loans from the pandemic because the trade-in/sales price is less way than what they have left on the loan. Many are also defaulting on those insane pandemic auto loans and their repossessed cars are ending up back on the market, increasing supply in the used market.

Many who are underwater on their auto loans but can still make payments can’t afford to make even larger payments, so rolling over the principle from the last loan into a new loan on another car is impractical. So they aren’t buying, let alone moving up the market to buy new or higher end. The demand being suppressed in the used market and the supply being bolstered by repos means used prices are massively depressed. This depressed used market carries over to the new market in turn, as most people buying new probably couldn’t afford to do so without trading in their old car, so a depressed used market hurts their purchasing power. Why would someone buy a new car when the only new one the could afford is probably worse than the existing car.

Tesla is getting a lot of focus because of the political entanglement of their high profile CEO, but the whole industry is under strain. Nissan is frantically looking for buyers to help them out of the debt hole they’re in, and groups like Stellantis (owners of Chrysler, Fiat, Jeep, Ram and Dodge) are desperately chasing new revenue streams as absurd as ads in the central console.

“Of course the Americans introduced the Colorado potato beetle! After all, where is Colorado? America! Check mate liberal”

For real though I hate those little fuckers. Every time I try and grow potatoes in a garden I get an infestation and it’s a pain to deal with in a small plot, can’t imagine how much of a nightmare they are on a proper field.

Propaganda, is a craft, it’s a whole world of tricks and manipulations. Not just censorship and positive stories about the leaders. It can get shockingly sophisticated. We usually only take note of the obvious and obtuse propaganda.

People aren’t dumb for believing it, it’s a whole field of figuring out how to convince people about things. Often if the propaganda doesn’t work on you, that’s because it’s not designed for you, or it has worked but the goal of it wasn’t what you thought it was.

I mean, no? He lived in England throughout the controversy, he didn’t move to Japan till 2022, years after his controversy died down. He probably moved because he’s a fucking dork.

They’re lying about using AI to write software, they probably have required all their programmers to have an AI plugin installed, and are thus counting any code they make as “written by AI”, and then are counting any minor edit to existing code as the entire thing being “written by AI”.

The software is bad because it’s written to serve the infinite growth imperative. The reason they claim they’re writing code with AI is because that being true is the only hope that they have for achieving the infinite growth imperative. It’s a con, it’s a cult, they are extracting as much value as they can before everything falls apart.

The AI is not the reason their software is bad, but their software is bad for the same reason they’re claiming to use AI to write it.