Sounds like you have zero empathy for the real costs AI is driving and feelings that this creates for website owners. How about you pony up and pay for your scraping?
I agree. I think the whole point is someone like TFA author has a pretty broad choice of places they can choose to publish this and choosing GitHub is somewhat ironic.
Reminds me of the guy who posted an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg like "we are not for sale" on LinkedIn, a place that literally sells access to its users as their main product.
But Americans can hope for a regime (policy) change every few years though. You could argue both the political ideologies are broadly doing the same shit, but you can hope or lobby for change. On the other hand, imagine your unfavourite politician/ideology remaining in power for the eternity!
quite the opposite is and will be happening. same in his first term and same in 2nd/3rd/4th… america “first” all that (this term is including nationalizing businesses like intel which you know, works in beacons of capitalism like venezuela…)
The knee jerk anti communism is your propaganda showing. Marxist historical materialism is a mainstream mode of analysis. Nothing inherently leftwing or revolutionary about it.
Wrong. American car choice has everything to do with government subsidies, car safety standards and fuel standards. Consumer choice doesn’t matter in the US Auto market.
You are missing the point. I don’t dispute the sales data, I agree with it, it supports my point. It’s not out of preference, it’s enforced by regulations and encouraged by
the tax code.
But large cars are not cheap - they're significantly more expensive than the small cars available on the market.
Consumers aren't buying trucks because they're incentivized with money - because the truck is double the cost. Theyre buying trucks because they want them.
Does that make American consumers stupid? Yeah probably.
Id sooner blame marketing and advertising than regulations and tax codes. The reality is that when these gas guzzlers are priced outrageously, Americans still want them.
Yeah, I came to the same exact conclusion last year. Heck, even Ford’s CEO drives a BYD and thinks their a major threat.
This administration seems set on demolishing American industries though. Such a shame, but maybe we can finally get decent rail once all the car lobby’s are dead. (But probably not)
He drives a Xiaomi SU7, which seems like the best car out there for the price.
Honestly, it amazes me that Xiaomi built the car that you would expect Apple to come up with after all these years they spent researching and coming up with nothing.
According to Wikipedia, the Xiaomi SU7 Max has 1,784 hp and is priced at 73,000 USD. In some YouTube videos, they raced against Ferraris and Bugattis, and it fared better than much more expensive cars. I have no idea how they did it.
This is the point that The Economist made this week about Xiaomi. It looks like Lei Jun, the CEO, has a bit of a cult following in China.
"With the successful release of the YU7—its second electric vehicle (EV) after the SU7, a sporty sedan launched in March last year—Xiaomi has pulled off a feat that eluded Apple, which ditched plans to make its own EV after burning billions of dollars on the effort over a decade."
There's also a brutal price war going on over there. Those cars will be exported worldwide. Western countries are in a bind: protect the local manufacturer or allow the (much) cheaper and environmentally sound EV in from China?
"China’s smartphone champion has triumphed where Apple failed" [1]
> According to Wikipedia, the Xiaomi SU7 Max has 1,784 hp and is priced at 73,000 USD. In some YouTube videos, they raced against Ferraris and Bugattis, and it fared better than much more expensive cars. I have no idea how they did it.
A Cybertruck may look clumsy, but it can been a Lamborghini. Instant torque.
The highest horsepower in a Ferrari road car is 1,200 in the F80. Though, I’m pretty confident you got the HP wrong for the Xiaomi.
It's very impressive really, more so give the SU7 Ultra is a normal four seater car you you can drive to the supermarket in and then go beat Ferraris on the Nürburgring or maybe set a record on your local track.
No this administration is set on protecting industry. Tesla is still around largely because byd is kept out.
I mean the policies you see you like to think are bad are literally helping Americans out, it’s just hard to look at those policies.
Because the policies represents American inferiority. America needs a leg up because their industry is inferior to China. These policies are not fair at all.
> No this administration is set on protecting industry
No, this administration ostensibly wants to Make America Great Again, but that requires policy that is focused on the greater good -- with a long term vision on the investment.
The reality is that they are actually interested in is actually a kakistocracy and has the following concerns: self-enrichment, staying in power, and oppressing its enemies.
All of what you said is true. But you implied making America great is not part of that.
Trust me. The kakistocracy requires America to be great. The tariffs are part of that.
Let me spell it out. The ceo of tsmc has clearly stated many times. The economics of building a fab in the US don’t make sense. Everything will be massively more expensive. The reason why it’s being done is simply to give a leg up to the US so the US can perform better at something that they are inferior at to Taiwan.
All of these policies are done to produce better outcomes in the long term but be massively painful in the short term.
I hate trump but the reality is that politics and taking sides is a cartoonish attitude. People are complex and the administration is made up multitudes of people. The reason for why they do what they do aren’t simply black and white and always in favor of just funneling more power to the upper class.
Maybe you’re right that they don’t give a shit about anyone other than self enrichment. But improving America in general doesn’t go against self enrichment, in fact improving America in general has massive long term upsides for trump. Don’t fall into the trope of taking a political side and thinking in terms of caricatures that trump is just pure evil.
I do think that they want America to be great, but only in the sense of "we're number one!" (chanted incessantly). Day after day I see nothing that shows that they know what they're doing (other than following the Project 2025 playbook).
I abhor partisan politics and would have no issue pointing out the plentitude of failures that happened under Dem leadership. But the Right has this One Weird Trick where they make everything political (in a partisan sense) and the act of criticizing a policy or whatnot on its merits then becomes a "biased political opinion".
Tariffs are being used in an attempt to replace income tax (Trump has been clear about that), with a benefit of being a weapon to punish perceived enemies and with a bonus of being yet another thing he can be bribed on.
I do think that Trump is pure evil -- there's zero redeeming qualities about him. Please correct my assumption if you have anything.
BYD is dominating. Tesla is doing reasonably well. That’s correct.
But Tesla is not dominating China.
Tesla dominates the US. The only reason for that is because the administration is helping Tesla. The administration helps Tesla but they do so also by harming consumers. They restrict consumer choice to an inferior choice and thus preserve industry in the US.
I mean, say what you will about third world mafia states, they do generally have trains. Mostly because the citizens couldn't imagine owning a personal vehicle. Post-soviet Russia, here we come!!
Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so. They don't make enough money to send them all to childcare all the time, but quitting their job to take care of the kids will cut their income in half and make saving any reasonable amount of money for retirement near impossible.
> Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so.
Then I put it to you that their desire isn't above the replacement rate. People with no money manage to have plenty of children.
Perhaps they simply have unrealistic material expectations not in line with individual productivity. In fact, if your expectations are a function of your childless consumption levels, then it will always exceed what you can achieve with the same income spread over more people.
Maybe in your job losing your partner's income may merely represent lowering your consumption levels, but the vast majority of people aren't earning enough money to simply lower consumption levels when their income is halved. I don't consider people living in a 2 bedroom 1 bath house, driving 15 year old cars, and buying a few video games to be some sort of excessive living or high level of consumption.
The people living a simple life as you describe have more children than the higher paid inner city folk. Explanations like yours are shown again and again to not explain reality.
But if your fixed costs are much lower (housing etc) then it makes more financial sense to have kids as there's less of a hit from the loss of lots of income (plus expenses, kids are not cheap).
Like, we have two kids and a top 10% (bottom of the top though) salary, and we have no discretionary income or ability to save (very much) after paying for the costs associated with kids and housing. I can completely understand why people don't want to do that, particularly given that 90% of households in my country earn less than us.
Sometimes there is an income problem. Sometimes there is a spending problem. And sometimes there is a cost problem. But cost is unlike the others, because income and spending are individual, but cost is universal.
Inflation from 2020-2024 was absurdly high. This was a universal hit to cost, and everyone felt it.
But outside of that recency bias, Americans have poor financial literacy. Americans have spending problems: credit card debt, car loans, and student loans come to mind. Each of these debt categories aren't inherently bad. Student loans are great if the degree has earning potential, but most Americans don't seek those degrees. Car loans aren't bad if it's a practical and affordable vehicles, but Americans like luxury SUVs. Credit cards aren't bad if you buy a washing machine to save on laundromat visits, but Americans like expensive vacations.
Americans also have problems with income, but that's even more complicated.
You mean those people with running water, indoor plumbing, central heating, electric lights, and a passenger vehicle capable of reaching speeds faster than the fastest land animal who entertain themselves with a magical rock that performs trillions of calculations a second to render 8-bit animals on an island to display on a sheet of quantum dots? Not to mention vaccines, antibiotics, cell phones, free education, supermarkets, and all the other modern wonders?
My point IS that you don't consider this to be a high level of consumption. To you it's normal. You've acclimated, and would again if the quality of life were 10x higher.
If people decide to build careers before having children, and DINKs acclimate to their income levels, then any child would feel like an unacceptable quality of life. You'll always feel like you're a rung below where you need to be, and this property would be independent of any particular scale.
Call it pedant's hypothesis. I've proposed it as an explanation. I can neither prove nor disprove it.
It's called hedonistic adaptation. Most people scale material consumption with income, and the new consumption level quickly feels normal. If this happens to you, then it's plausible that children will always look expensive, no matter your earned income.
The quality of life that modern, affluent people consider unacceptably low for a family would be considered decadent by most people who ever lived anywhere.
Sure, I'm saying maybe we should distribute public funds to reduce or minimize the affect of having children on your quality of life, if we agree that having children is a public good.
The same way that we give people tax breaks for making donations, because we think making donations is good, people having children are donating their time, physical health, money, and earning potential to the greater good of society, so maybe they should be compensated for it.
Regulating with positive feedback is usually unstable and rife with unintended consequences.
Can we start by striking down regulations that make having children more expensive? Zoning laws, environmental laws, development approval processes, and even building codes have significantly increase the cost of housing. Regulations made daycare prohibitively expensive, while also subsidizing that model over traditional childcare models. High costs are first order effects of these regulations, but there are plenty of second and third order cost increases as well.
Many still have the desire, but today have the choice to walk away from that desire in order to pursue a career, or to just live life in a different way. Some also have the desire but have trouble conceiving, or don't have the means to support a child. The gap is definitely there.
> Many still have the desire, but today have the choice to walk away from that desire in order to pursue a career, or to just live life in a different way.
I'd say in that case they don't have the desire. They may want children all else being equal, but they don't want to put in what it would cost them to have children. Otherwise they would.
I'm not claiming that desire is zero, just that it's below replacement rate. Just like if the desire for cake isn't enough to sustain a bakery in my neighbourhood.
the deciding metric here is how old are they when they start wanting children. naturally, that factor is ignored, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it for a number of reasons.
a woman in her thirties has very slim chances to find a partner because men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties. it's a harsh truth, but burying one's head in the sand doesn't really help.
yes, there certain discrepancies between what men and women consider desirable in a partner, but we aren't really allowed to discuss this on the internet without certain folx coming out of the woods to claim that 2+2=5.
still, your claim does not invalidate my point, does it?
no, no, my point was neither of those things. my point was that "women past a certain age have slim chances of finding a man who would be willing to have children with them," and I don't think it's a particularly outrageous or controversial statement.
Then perhaps we have a real disagreement. I think for the vast majority of women over 30 there is a ready supply of men who would be willing to have children with them - just not men that those women would condescend to have children with.
I don't know where is that you live that men are so desperate and eager to commit to low-value women, but in the world I live in, men in their thirties are unmarried and/or childless by choice.
Cultures differ wildly across the world. Where I live, the median age for a male to get married is 37, and the median age for women is 33 or so, so I would suggest that you not be so dogmatic (as an aside, US people seem to marry absurdly early for my tastes).
> a woman in her thirties has very slim chances to find a partner because men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties.
This is utter nonsense. I met my now wife at 31, and can assure you that I had little to no interest in 20 somethings at that point (having made those mistakes in the past).
Clearly you live in a very different world from me, or you're just trolling (more likely given the green account name).
I doubt its realistic for powerful states like California to cecede. Is there a path from here to a near (think 50 years) future, where California and the US, sans California, exist?
But I wonder if it wouldn't be more healthy for you if the states grew a bit more independent.
It would give the president less power to decide exactly how schools and universities should be run or would open up for social welfare reforms in the states that want it.
It would absolutely be more healthy. One of the big problems facing our country is that we have centralized so much power in the federal government (which wasn't meant to have it), that everything the federal government does becomes super contentious. The election of a president should be, in a better world, relatively boring because the real action is happening at the state or even local levels. But instead, the president has so much power to affect things that the elections become a desperate fight as people perceive it to be an existential threat if the wrong person gets elected.
It's been a long process to get that much power in the federal government - it goes back at least to FDR (so, near a hundred years now), and I've seen arguments that it goes all the way back to the Civil War. But I do firmly believe that the centralizing of power is destroying us. We got away with it when the nation was more united in its values and culture, and even then it could be contentious. But today vast swathes of the country share little to nothing in the way of values or culture. Of course we can't get along when such widely disparate groups of people are tied together and a single government body is controlling large portions of their lives.
> the real action is happening at the state or even local levels
A lot of it is. For example the California housing shortage? It’s all state and local. But the same single family zoning pattern played out in many places.
I mean, a United States of America would be better. But not the Bickering States of America that exists. Might be better to have them all go their own way.
Yes, this was the pre-Civil War intent. There's a vast archive of history here that elaborates in great detail about how the Founders expected the country to be run. All that changed in the late 19th century, and was codified in the early 20th.
Hollywood is still a thing. Manufacturing, yes manufacturing. Agriculture. The Bay Area is a fraction of that GDP, and a small geographical part of California.
Something is seriously broken with this world now that completely normal and well educated person like GP is not realizing his words aren't making sense. Apple Park to LLNL is under an hour's drive. You guys can probably achieve nuclear independence in a day if needed.
It just can't be done economically, because yields of a nuke(pun intended) don't immediately map onto economical values. Not just immensely positive or negative, but actually tangential to the currency dimensions.
Agriculture is essentially a rounding error on California's GDP, <$60B or <2%. There are individual companies more economically significant than the entire agricultural industry.
The disproportionate power relative to its economic significance is a political choice.
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