Western manufacturing tends to be much more automation heavy. Chinese manufactures don’t bother with buying a $100k machine that can make a car part when they can just hire 10 guys at $10k/yr to make that same part with a $50 drill press and some hand files.

It’s not that it all strictly balances out, but if we actually gave a shit we could potentially be cost competitive for a lot of price brackets, especially given the costs to move whole ass cars across the Pacific.

Bear in mind these sub $10k Chinese EVs are not something US consumers would really be interested in buying, they are basically tiny car shaped golf carts with extremely minimalist feature sets. Think ‘no audio system at’ all type interiors.

Or not subsidize oil and gas to the tune of ~$20 billion/yr and corn at $2.2 billion/yr and redirect that towards EVs.

Fuck HDMI. The committee makes doing custom hardware near impossible unless you’re a mega corp

https://github.com/nivekuil/rip This is what you’re looking for

There might be a few layers to this one. Drones are becoming a central part of strategic production and the US doesn’t really have many competitive companies manufacturing small ones at volume.

They need to force the domestic market to build up local expertise and manufacturing capacity in the event that small drones are the direction warfare ends up going more broadly.

The us defense apparatus is still on the fence about this given that their volume of use in Ukraine could be more of an aberration due to the respective industrial bases and static nature of the war. That said the numbers are insane enough that they warrant some action just in case.

The unspoken part is that unless Gabe has a very strong plan involving some sort of employee co-op, when he retires or dies the company will likely get sold by the estate to private capital which is 100x worse than being a public company.

Why the popularity in Yemen? Weird laws or something?

It would be an insane mistake to underestimate that group. Like the other comments said, they are the Taliban and the military/police. However even if they somehow weren’t, it still means we have potentially tens of millions of domestic terrorists running around armed to the teeth and that’s not a great feeling.

Yeah I’m becoming increasingly nervous with the blue states systematically trying to disarm everyone and the red states are trying to whip everyone into a traitorous frenzy over the dumbest shit while arming everyone with a pulse.

Otoh, and this probably sounds absolutely fucking nuts, I’ve found republicans tend to understand “strength” and they are strangely respectful of liberal and leftist gun owners because that’s a dynamic they can comprehend. It’s not a good state of affairs but it’s better than them believing they can just run things because they’re the only ones with “strength”

Ok I hate all of this.

They’re not the same, but they’re kind of the same personality type. They frequently care about the same things, they just want very aggressive change to fix them. The issue is the path to get there and those are wildly different in terms of what the problem is and the underlying world view.

… Why does the sunflower oil factory have a plasma cutter?

Much of the operating system software on the switch is derived from older FOSS systems that existed before the GPL became widespread.

It very much should be open source, we just didn’t always have the tools to force assholes to keep the stuff we gave them open