I am not convinced it would, TBH.
If people don’t want to buy the cars, then the production line will eventually have to stop, permanently. And you get zero compensation for lost revenue.
If a production line is hit and has to close, then insurance will compensate part of the damage and after a few days or weeks you can be up and running again.
I’m talking about long-term non-US centric policy.
I don’t mean to imply that this is a priority for the short term in the US.
If vandalism continues, then this will easily be the death of Tesla.
Nobody will want to buy a Tesla when an equivalent Mercedes has half the insurance rate.
Boycotts also hurt Tesla, but vandalism will be their death.
Nothing in this world is free. The US tax rate isn’t high. The issue is, you don’t get a good value back.
You can’t have strong unions without money for unions.
Organizing people costs money.
Union dues tend to be in the $10-50 per month range, while unions easily increase wages by hundreds a month through collective bargaining.
Most of the unions costs are fixed, so if everyone is a member the average due can easily be on the lower end ($10-20).
If you have a problem with that, then that’s exactly why you don’t have strong unions.
I fully agree.
Also, one thing that Unions always have trouble with is that there is no individual benefit to joining a union, only a cost, so you get a prisoners dilemma type situation.
Even in Scandinavian countries, union membership is on the decline.
Personally, I think the solution should be that union dues are paid by a small tax, making it ‘free’ to join a union. And the unions can provide free benefits to their members, such as legal advice and representation. This will make it attractive to join a union.
Not in the US, but it would make more sense to spread it out over multiple years to avoid the tax.
I once read an article many years about how arsonists were burning expensive cars in Berlin. The journalist indeed reported that they would light barbecue starters under the tires.
If I recall correctly, they would even place it a little bit further under the car (i.e. not the outside) so that any passerbys wouldn’t notice anything until the tire was properly burning.
This was before Tesla’s though, which have a sentry mode
With the more recent cases, I have read that they smash the windows and throw Molotov cocktails inside, but I think that would draw a lot of attention and make alarms go off.
On the other hand, I think this method might have less risk of the sentry mode filming.
Most people use seedboxes for private trackers, which are superior and just as private as a VPN.
But yeah, it’s a different ecosystem and it’s not for everyone.
I do think it has replaced the old DC++ hubs of old.
To my knowledge, both eMule and DC++ are still active, but I think private trackers have become the more dominant technology for file sharing.
I agree, except that I wouldn’t classify Israel as a top intelligence power.
Their dependence on the USA is immense.
For European purposes, Egypt (Suez) and Turkey (both Bosporus and the land link to Asia) are the most important regional allies. Both or very populous and could become a new source of cheaper labour, now that Eastern EU countries are becoming more expensive.
Iran, Iraq and the Gulf countries are important as long as we can’t have Russian and/or American fossil fuels. But even then, Turkey and Egypt are the broker between us and them.
We will have to see.
Apple can charge $400 more, but if Samsung doesn’t, then they will lose market share.
And the EU is still one of the worlds three biggest markets.
So I am not really concerned.
And worst case, I switch to a Fairphone, which might not be bleeding edge, but it is still a better phone than my previous gen flagship Samsung or the flagship iPhone that came before it.
I see it as just running 2 years behind.
Also, when it comes to Russia, Ukrainian intelligence is top notch due to historical ties.
But TBH, I do think Europe needs to find a way to make peace with Russia and with the Middle-East, specifically Turkey, Egypt and Iran.
They are our direct neighbours. The cold war idea that we could have a powerful friend across an ocean, while having strained relationships with our direct neighbours just isn’t going to be a good strategy going forward.
I agree.
Ideally, there are two types of profiles:
Archivalists who have a lot of storage and need pretty good uptime, but no need for high bandwidth. They should be rewarded for archiving, because they don’t really get a lot of upload credit.
Distributors who need low storage, high bandwidth, robust connections when online, but not necessarily high uptime. They just distribute the new and popular stuff.
I think the better private trackers recognize this and have systems in place to provide credit to people who seed rare torrents.
I consider myself someone who is always in search of truth.
When I realized evangelical Christianity has some hardcore lies and hypocrisy, I left it.
I did eventually find my way back to a more traditional version of Christianity that is interested in truth and love.
I agree with this take.
We are wired to find the next problem and to solve it. Enjoy our work for a short while and then start looking for the next problem to solve.
Whether it is cultural or genetic, I don’t know, but it’s definitely very deep in our western psyche and it will not be going away any time soon.
The main problem I see is that a lot of people in Western society nowadays use complaining as a substitute for action, and so problems don’t get solved, but people convince themselves that they took action by complaining.
My (great)-grandparents were part of the Dutch resistance during WW2. Along with a full 1.5% of the population.
Most people will not do anything, even if they are literally rounding up people for a genocide.
On the more positive side, a lot of people will support the resistance in small ways.
The number of people who actually, whole heartedly collaborated with the Nazi’s was quite small.
Even some of the German soldiers stationed in their village would turn a blind eye. Some of them realized they were on the wrong side and they just did the bare minimum of what they needed to do to not get in trouble and not get killed.
Sure, but those are relatively small potatoes.
And if a single person does it a lot, then the tax authorities can easily examine their spending and prove that they are spending more than they are officially earning. And then they can apply punitive measures.
I fully agree and in typical American fashion, affirmative action and DEI were just bandaids to quickly solve some of the effects of institutional discrimination, instead of solving it at the root.
Even I, as a very progressive person, don’t like some DEI hires. But the actual problematic DEI hires are not talented people like Kamala Harris. They are connected incompetent people.
I think Clarence Thomas would be a good example. By most accounts he is the most corrupt and incompetent justice, who just happened to run in the right conservative circles.
In the business world, I also see quite a lot of well-connected incompetent people. It used to be white gulf buddies, now it tends to be the white sister-of, or the latina wife-of, the gulf buddy.
Maybe the Trump kids are the best example of DEI hires. Ivanka Trump, anyone?
It is, but it’s also a very efficient and difficult to evade tax. For many EU countries the VAT revenue is equal or larger than the income tax revenue.
Most Europeans don’t mind it. You can control your spending, so VAT doesn’t hit us in inconvenient ways, like for example, taxes on cars and property.
European countries compensate poor people with good social programs. So in the end, poor people are getting more benefits than the VAT they pay.
Yeah, I think their CEO might have QNAP stock or something.
It’s hilarious how dumb this is.