• 10 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Good for them. The point is not that they are doing “bad things”. “Dumping” is not a curse word, it’s an economic strategy, one that’s practised by a whole bunch of companies, and not just Chinese ones. When Auchan is selling watermelons at a rate where they barely make any money over a single sale - but make a ton of money on other stuff you get while shopping for watermelons, it destroys farmer’s markets, for example.

    All I’m saying is that the choice before the EU leadership was either letting Chinese EVs into the market and risk getting into a position where Chinese companies - and by extension the Chinese government - can pull the levers on the EU car market, in exchange for us getting to buy cheaper EVs right now.

    The EU - and you can fill in the blank whether they did it because they wanted to protect EU carmakers’ business, or they wanted to prevent another situation similar to the one with Russian gas - decided that the risk is not worth it. My guess is that some voted as they did because of the former, others because of the latter. That said, you can’t really say that the EU would be “crooked” for either of these things, as fighting for the EU car industry against other countries’ car industries is well within their mandate, as is protecting the EU’s strategic political autonomy.

    It’s just how things are, like with the great firewall. If someone wants to sell software services to China, they have to conform to their standards. You can say it’s good or bad, but that’s just how things work. As a European, I don’t care about this specific issue either way, we should be buying fewer cars, electric or otherwise. People who live in places in the EU where you need cars because there’s no good public transport also tend to be living in places where you can’t afford to buy new anyway, not even at BYD prices.


  • From the original source:

    Board members Jacqueline Rosario and Gene Posca, who voted in the majority, were backed by Moms for Liberty during their campaigns, according to Treasure Coast Newspapers. The third “yes” vote came from Kevin McDonald, who was recently appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

    “We are elected — I was appointed, vote of one — we are here to represent the parent’s decisions, and the school board is the final authority for our citizens,” McDonald said at last month’s meeting, explaining some of his disagreement with the book.

    “The title itself and the theme challenges our authority. And it even goes so far as to not only to mention books that are deemed inappropriate by school boards, including ours, it not only mentions them but it lists them.”

    These people are just caricatures of themselves.



  • I think that there was just no good choice in this matter. I mean, look at how great it turned out for Europe to bond together with Russia over cheap gas. I know that cheap gas and electric cars are not the same thing, by far, but still, if we got dumped by electric cars in China, we’d be wide open for economic attacks like it happened just a few years ago.

    That said, I’d love if we compensated for this by finally shifting subsidies from flights to rail, or by shifting from 100LL to 100UL in general aviation, or cracking down on ships using bunker fuel.

    Or put the screws on BMW and VW to pull their heads out their asses and start being competitive.



  • And Netanyahu let Hamas do this by intentionally weakening their border security before Oct 7, despite there being an anniversary of the last intifada, and despite being told by multiple countries that an attack is in the works. He also had a hand in funding Hamas against the PA. And he is also holding on to power undemocratically, as he is postponing an election he would most likely lose if not for the current “war”.

    They have a symbiotic relationship, neither could really exist without the other. Just to be clear, what Hamas does does not justify what Likud does, and what Likud does does not justify what Hamas does.

    Also, I don’t think I have the information to really cast either of them “the worse one”. Both organizations have genocidal maniacs leading them, and I agree with the ICC prosecutor who wants to cite the leadership of both for genocide. Saying one is worse would be relativizing the deaths of either the Israeli people murdered by Hamas, or the Palestinian civilians murdered by the IDF.





  • Except we would grab loans from our banker friends who are also in on the scheme, and use some of that money to pay taxes and buy some congresscritters to avoid further taxes. The banker guys would then grab some loans themselves, preferably also from each other, as they slowly repackage the whole thing and then sell it to retirement funds to make it everyone else’s problem. /s