Offhand I believe we have a few that can do light oil, but most of ours wouldn’t want to change over even if offered to do so for free. Rather the reason is the US has a lot of chemical engineers and capital and so is good at refining the more challenging to deal with and cheaper to get heavy oils while selling the easy to refine and therefore more valuable light oil we dig up down in Texas to places that have more primitive refineries.

While we could retrofit all of our our refining capacity to use our oil, it doesn’t make financial sense because your spending a lot of money to switch to an more expensive input, so companies arn’t going to want to do it unless the government forces them to, and the government would only force them to if it wanted to spite everyone else and raise domestic gas prices.

The bible isn’t the infallible word of God though, at least not according to anyone but the most fundamentalist and not particularly literate sects, it’s a collection of stories sometimes about God and mostly about their fallible human followers originating from entirely different religions, cultures, and centuries that were passed down though oral tradition and copies of copies of copies for centuries. Hence why so much of it is open to debate even within a given church, even before getting to how much of it is explicitly metaphorical or any of its actual history might have affected how said stories were retold and which parts survived.

But outsourcing them to an collection of independent bureaucracies(companies) is so much more ‘efficient’ than one bureaucracy just building what it needs to.

Besides, the government owning and developing housing would just be a huge cost to the taxpayers given how unprofitable it is to own or sell real-estate. Why the government might even build enough to actually house all the people waiting on public housing and then rent out the surplus out at below market rates but above cost in order to help fund the service, and that sounds like it could cut into the profit margins of the poor landlords.

Nope, far better to make a deal where the government assumes the risk for the project if a project fails, and the corporations get to take all the extra profit if a project succeeds./s

Depending on how frequently it needs to be connected and how much tension it needs to hold, it might be worth taking a look at some Wago connectors, as i’ve generally been impressed by how well they hold. Not really an option if the connection needs to be regularly connected and disconnected, but if it’s just occasional it could be an option.

Outside of that I would second Aubeynarf’s suggestion, but don’t have much personal experience with them.

What, founder of cryptoscam Worldcoin is going to cash out of a project sold primarily on hype. Say it ain’t so. /s

Perhaps, but to people who have spent the last few decades in the halls of power surrounded by members of a western style military who take it as given that they are a western nation just as formidable as their close allies in Europe and Asia, the idea that the nation itself could falter in such a way is certianly far from many of their minds. Doubly so for a party that is used to bulldozing its way through critical media outlets, courts, and public protests.

They’ve had general success in previous wars with most if not all of their neighbors, and something tells me the focus in their telling is not on the massive amounts of foreign aid they received in the lead up or duration.

They may often talk about how any given threat may be an apocalyptic end of the nation, but I don’t think they actually believe it, at least when it comes to the court of public opinion in some far off foreign lands.

Could a senior politician be so disconnected from the basic reality of their situation by yes men, loyalists, and wishful thinking? Well by all accounts Putin did honestly believe the FSB’s reports that Ukrainians would welcome any Russian forces in droves as liberators, and that any conflict would be over before well before the west could respond, so I’d say yes.

The path they are seeing is the path for Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right party to hold on to power for a few more years, all else be dammed.

His far right campaign and political messaging pre October 7th focused hard on how he was the only one strong enough to control Hamas, and on how he could ensure the fires of conflict would burn just hot enough that they would never find common ground and unite with the West Bank (the pretense that Isreal and the US demands they do before the West Bank authority can be recognized as a nation by the UN) but never got enough to possibly harm Isreal itself.

Between constant legal battles and scandals with Isreal’s supreme court, he was just bearly able to hold onto power when Hamas demonstrated that they clearly weren’t actually under his perfect control, and so now he needs a win a war to play the strongman and distract everyone from what he had been saying up until that point. He needs a reason to shut down media outlets criticizing him, and war powers to run over the opposition.

He also needs the votes of the farthest right of his far right party, and thusly needs to appear amenable to their position of complete Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.

All of this means that the IDF must be seen fighting a great war for the very survival of the nation, not a series of hostage rescue or series of commando raids to capture high value targets and more importantly intel. It’s also why he cannot let this end in a ceasefire or give into Hamas original terms of a hostage exchange for the Palestinians being held without charges for years in Israel, but must fight on until whatever passes to the far right as a total victory.

Little things like burning though most of Isreal’s foreign support and international reputation are at best problems for the future, and maybe even opportunities for campaigning, because when the world turned its back on Isreal only he and his party of strong men are going to be able to keep things going for the average citizen.

Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?

This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.

And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s

Don’t get me wrong, fuck the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.

The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.

Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.

Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.

If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.

Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company that just donated to our campaign and is making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.

Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into via an over the air update.

Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.

It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.

Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.

I sure am glad that the government may not be willing to provide social housing without a five year wait list while you to live in a tent under the freeway and get all your worldly possessions, photos, and documents thrown out by police, but is always proactive about ensuring that billion dollar companies never have to worry about facing even the slightest consequence of their own active decisions to undermine the fight against climate change.

Biggest /s possible.

Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…

I’m not the one who said making China’s suppply chains as transparent as the US’s would end the system of using minorities as prison labor in Xinjiang, just the one who pointed out that the implementation of said transparency here on the same problem has not lead to the end of said practice.

I mean the transparency available in the US still hasn’t resulted in an end the same system of minority prison labor here at home.

Ya, I agree people should be getting a fair wage, I just don’t see how a tax on products sold more directly helps with that in this case. People will just shrug, say it’s still cheaper than the same model on Amazon, and buy it all the same. A company is always going to try and pay the lowest price they can while pocketing the rest, and the best you can typically do is help the workers bargain for more.

I mean things like BDS can work, but they have to be targeted very carefully and specifically to get a board of directors to take a specific action, and the wider the net you cast the more dilute it gets and the more likely companies will call it the cost of doing busines.

US condemnation of the system would probably also have a bit stronger effect if it wasn’t using the same system of minority prison labor farmed out to various companies and saying it’s perfectly ethical fine so long as the people you arrested on thin pretext for race get a few dollars an hour that they then spend right back at the prison.

Put another way, if the EU put the same import tax on products and companies that made things in Mississippi on us because of the general prevalence of undocumented black prison labor in the region, do you think that the we would suddenly change things?

This predisposes that much more expensive one sold locally is not also the same model and manufactured in the same factory. When so much of what is sold at Amazon or Walmart originates from Alibaba or bulk orders from said factory, the only difference in the exploitation is if Bezos gets a cut on top.

Functionally, I think you’ll have a lot more luck pushing for and requiring supply chain transparency from the Amazons and Walmarts of the world, or directly using national economic and political pressure, than focusing on increasing the cost on the small market of people going direct to the source.

Admittedly though this is less true as it has become more widely known that Temu and the like have the same product selection as Amazon, and indeed that seems to be the actual reason this legislation has been proposed.

Nevertheless I can’t see the US government taking slightly more of a cut having much of an effect when most of the products which heavily involve Uyghur labor are meant for internal use or export to the third world. You would need to propose serious practical consequences for the leadership of the CCP and follow though on those consequences to force external end to a political project that’s popular domestically like this, or at least a very closely and precisely targeted BDS campaign, and not just continuing business as usual but with higher taxes.

Note, since the 80s the vast, vast majority of piston driven aircraft engines have been able to operate on unleaded fuel. We know this because for decades GA pilots have been filling out the paperwork for an experimental fuel variance and then running these engines unmodified on the cheaper unleaded they got from the gas station down the street without any apparent issue or rise in engine maintenance/failures among pilots that do this. The main hurdles being the necessary and not insignificant paperwork as well as concern over insurance rates.

From my understanding there was a problem with one series of engine in the seventies that was suspected to be due to unleaded fuel among the more modern product line of a major manufacturer, and while the engine was modified to fix it neither Lycoming nor Continental, the two primary piston engine manufacturers who make up the vast majority of the market, saw significant pressure to drop the official recommendation for unleaded until relatively recently.

Since the US finally started to get serious about phasing out leaded avgas in the 2010s, and the aditude of its been fine so far so why risk any change has run up against said pressure, both have to my knowledge dropped the requirement retroactively with no modification necessary for the majority of their historical and current product line.

You might need to re-engine or more likely just get an exemption for flying history aircraft, but the benefit to the hundreds of thousands that live near GA airports in terms of reduced damage to children’s nervous systems far outweighs the nebulous cost of switching the default form of avgas.

What does that have to do with the drivetrain of the car? That would be due to things like better hood and road design, better enforcement of speed limits, and since you cited a stat that includes drivers as well pedestrians over forty years the move to requing roll over protection, expansion of airbag systems, more available crash modeling, and of course the near worldwide mandate that cars include seatbelts.

Most of this is either structural and thusly uneffected by a drive train conversion, or governmental.

The biggest dangers involved with a drivetrain conversion are going to be the same as any major home automotive work, namely something heavy fall or slips during work, followed by getting fingers/hair/clothing caught in moving parts, etc…

None of this is going to endanger the public, at least not to the extent that it can compete with the chance of getting distracted driving and plowing through a pedestrian or right hooking a cyclist.

Honestly the unsafe part is that they are a ton or so of metal going at speed only decimeters from civilians with only the concentration and control of your average idiot there to prevent manslaughter.

Compared to that, there is very little you can actually do to a car that will move the needle on safety, especially for anyone but its occupants.

Really? Doesn’t seem that wild to me that a place where cartels have openly claimed responsibility for assassinating politicians that threaten the status quo might see a large pushback against a change to the status quo.

Honestly, I doubt needs are diverging so much as marketing has diverged between markets as various companies try to create and maintain places and growing markups for themselves.

Companies in the US focus on competing to sell the largest and thusly highest margin vehicles they can, companies in the Germany focus on upselling customers on speed because they have smaller parking and stricter emissions, and in the price competitive market of China, the focus is on infotainment systems that add something to market and upsell without actually costing much to add.

That being said, while marking can shape demand there is only so much that marketing can do to change the actual needs of car buyers. People still need and buy pickup trucks in europe and asia, rich Americans and Chinese still love their absurdity fast cars, and I doubt that the US or Europe are going to see an end to increasing electronics to increase markup anytime soon, China is just ahead of the curve on that one.

I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.

Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.

The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with shit bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.

I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really shit and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.