They can. They just need to pay a little more. We’re talking 25 pence per liter at most compared to no sugar tax. Higher sugar intake is correlated with obesity which means more health problems which is more expense for the NHS. It’s like a train ticket or gas taxes or taxes in general, some percentage of usage that causes the problem needs to pay for the thing that deals with the consequences or expenses that solve it.
It’s the companies who have decided that they would rather sell shit soda, and consumers who are probably unwilling to pay anything except the cheapest price possible - wealth inequality and poverty problems aside because that’s a different social policy that should not be addressed through a sugar tax.
Just the robot dogs for now, but I’m sure they’ll be first in line when the tech is available.
To give you an idea of who is on the tesla board of directors, it includes Kimbal Musk, his brother, and James Murdoch, of the Murdoch family you’re probably thinking of. Musk himself owns something like 20% of the company, the board owns some, his cult members also have some share. The rest of the shareholders are either institutional or retail investors who are some combination of not willing to rock the boat, don’t have enough voting power, and/or just don’t care.
Their plan isn’t to fight NATO directly. It’s to instigate domestic political support in foreign countries against entities like NATO and the EU, and push nationalism and isolationism and defeatism into enough people’s heads so that the bigger countries think it isn’t worth fighting Russia to defend another smaller country that is not their own. It’s about killing the idea of article 5 and thus NATO’s reason to exist, so that Russia can confront each country on a bilateral basis where they have the military advantage if no one is coming to their defense.
This probably wont happen with an assault on a major urban area, but little chunks of unpopulated Finland or Norway. How willing would the American public be to send pilots to die for Lapland? If the major powers blink and don’t feel like committing, Russia continues to escalate, like they’ve been doing for the past 15 years
I don’t know how anyone could ever stand going to Costco on the weekends. Just don’t. That’s like voluntarily driving during rush hour when you have the option not to. Unless you work the exact hours that Costco is open, going on a weekday evening is so much better of an experience all around. Weekday mornings aren’t bad either. I would have to be truly desperate for gas or groceries to go to Costco on the weekend vs just waiting until Monday.
BYD was selling ICE vehicles up until March of 2022, and their current split is somewhere around 50/50 BEV/hybrid so they’re still not a full EV company. Their lineup is still being supported by their existing infrastructure, subsidized by the already established supply chains for ICE that they can incrementally cannibalize while building up the EV part of the company. It’s a good blueprint for legacy auto, but not for an EV startup. That is even before mentioning the very generous subsidies and incentives for electrification provided by the national, provincial, and city governments to producers and consumers. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, because I believe the US also needs that level of investment into electrification, but my point is that it’s not the same business model.
The large profit margin SUVs are necessary for a company to achieve scale to then be able to produce the smaller cheaper stuff. Fixed costs like the factory, tooling, training, designing, that all takes a lot of money up front before even selling a single vehicle, and the smaller and cheaper the vehicle coming out of that production pipeline is, the longer the payback period will be. And when we’re talking about billions of dollars in cost, it’s hard to remain solvent when interest payments on the debt grow exponentially over time.
It’s why before tesla there had not been an American auto company startup for like 70 years, Tesla almost went bankrupt, and Rivian is just starting to head in the right direction. Lucid is probably fucked and they’re mostly Saudi owned these days anyways, and the rest of the US EV startup space ranges from a joke to a scam.
What legacy automakers already have in staff and part of the production line established is actually kind of useless when they have to wait to establish their electric motor, battery, and chassis production, which probably just means a new factory anyways. Give it a few years and the cheaper smaller stuff will come, because right now AFAIK only tesla actually has the free cash flow to fund an EV economy car at scale. Everyone else is still sinking billions establishing any EV production at all, and interest rates aren’t helping the speed of their progress either.
Write offs, PPP loans, deferrals, and all the other accounting tricks that the government carved out for the primary benefit of the wealthy are definitely a bigger loss of tax revenue. One guy writing off a personal vehicle for his personal business is probably what a busy restaurant makes in 4 months of cash purchases. Suppliers and distributors are also unlikely to deal with large volumes of cash just as a matter of practicality and risk, and the fact that you can’t have a functioning business with employees that need paychecks without going through banks which go through the government, unless you’re operating with an entirely under the table staff which is just begging for trouble.
I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well.. I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.
I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.
That’s something I wish was on lemmy but can only really find on reddit. I don’t want to read reviews, I don’t want gimmicky or nitpicky YouTube rants, I just want to reminisce about the good time we all just had and collectively complain about the things we didn’t like.
I don’t want to tell you how to play your game, but I will say that diamond is well worth the effort, even if you don’t want to get it the easy way with villagers. The amount of time you will save using diamond will more than make up for the time spent mining, and make you resent all the time you’ve wasted using stone. Just dig a tunnel down to y -59 and strip mine, you never need to see a mob or get lost in a cave if you don’t want to. A normal level 30 enchant with efficiency 4 and unbreaking 3 will last a very long time, and can be repaired infinitely if you get mending on it.
I would compare it to something like drinking instant coffee all the time and finally tasting a properly brewed, high quality coffee. Or only buying cheap shoes all the time and then investing in a proper pair of very comfortable and well made ones. Or playing video games on a 5 year old hand me down Mac then upgrading to a decent gaming pc.
You’re right. The consumer tech consequences of the chip ban is more important than the military implications will ever be. Huawei’s lost tax revenue cost the Chinese government billions, which itself does more damage to the Chinese military budget than semiconductor bans for systems which aren’t actually critical in a conventional war. Cruise missiles can work effectively with tech from the 70s, and you don’t need 5nm chips to guide a rocket into an aircraft carrier. And this was about Huawei specifically - look at Huawei’s global smartphone market share. Pre trade war they were on par with apple and samsung volumes, with margins and a lineup closer to apple. Then the 5G bans and a PR campaign crippled their international sales, and semiconductor bans cratered their overall production.
Other Chinese brands like Lenovo, xiaomi, and the BBK brands (oppo, vivo, one plus, realme) are doing fine though, because inside them is all snapdragon, Qualcomm, intel, nvidia, and AMD. They’re basically final assembly plants for component manufacturers ultimately based in the US, whereas Huawei were using their own kirin chips, were taking market share from apple, and were creating their own operating system called HarmonyOS to replace android. Basically every major consumer tech hardware company in the US stood to gain from Huawei being taken out, including the US government when the trump admin used it as the poster child of the trade war. Huawei’s PLA connections were a nice bonus to sell to the public, but this was first and foremost a state backed corporate hit job.
And the worst part is, because of the opaqueness of it all and combined with propaganda from every direction, it’s hard to get a handle on how justified any part of it actually was. Because you basically have to choose to either trust the trump admin, US government, and corporate America, or Huawei and the Chinese communist party, and I don’t trust any of them. Personally I’m going with, there was probably something to be concerned about, but probably at a similar level to buying US hardware which the us government has clearly signaled that they have back doors into, but the corporate power struggle for market share is the actual reason behind it all.
Not to mention that everything Ukraine has been asking for from the US, Taiwan already bought in numbers and has had in the country years ago. Patriot, F16, ATACMS, and the list extends below to HIMARS and artillery and Abrahams, and above to apaches, black hawks, Phalanx, a wide range of torpedos and ground and air launched missiles, and even entire submarines.
China would also have to attack across the Taiwan straight, and amphibious landings are insanely difficult to pull off for anyone let alone for the PLA which hasn’t actually had meaningful combat experience since the Vietnam war - their Vietnam war in 1979. Any military buildup would also be obviously spotted months in advance, meaning anything from propositioned US carrier strike groups, all the way to enough time for Taiwan to build a dirty bomb or small nuke if they felt like they needed the ultimate deterrent.
The difference between this and 08 though is that in 08, way too many people were allowed to buy houses that were already built, taking on debt they could not handle, and speculating to an insane degree on the health of those mortgages. A structural issue with no structural cure except to bail out individual homeowners who took on way too much debt which was never gonna happen. For evergrande (as I understand it) it’s just the property developer running out of cash to pay for the construction. The homes were already paid for, so at most the house buyers will just be either SOL or directly bailed out by the government for which there is a strong case to do so, and evergrande shareholders losing their investment is not really a big deal since they’ll probably be paid out in the bankruptcy. I feel like this whole thing is a really big parallel to Silicon Valley bank, for which all the doomers were out there peddling the impending collapse of the financial system which never happened.
If anything is gonna bring down China it will be their demographic collapse, and that is impossible to fix and already manifesting. There is of course the usual argument of a huge tax base suddenly becoming a budget liability with a significantly smaller population of people to financially support them. But the big thing that will hit the private sector is the lower population causing rising labor costs which is driving away manufacturing, and the bulk of their entire industrial infrastructure is now set up for something they will no longer be very competitive in, and for a sector which young educated urban people don’t really want to work in.
If they can get within artillery firing range of the train line that goes through Tokmak, they can disrupt all rail reinforcement going to anywhere west of tokmak, which then puts the only rail reinforcement to crimea and the Kherson oblast through the long way across the Crimean bridge. M777 maximum range is 24.7km, they are 29km away, and are making steady progress. Russia knows this and is reinforcing which is making the entire front line weaker, and if Ukraine can keep up the pressure then we hopefully might be able to see something like Kharkiv happen again.
That is way too much for anywhere. I’m amazed that people don’t move to the Philadelphia suburbs where I am, because 800k can buy you a small mansion - at least 5k sq ft. About 90 minutes away from NYC, NJ beaches, or poconos skiing, never too far from a regional rail connection straight into the city. And compared to the Midwest the winters are milder, compared to the south the summers are cooler, compared to the west coast there’s no looming existential dread of everything collapsing in an earthquake or consumed by a wildfire or no water because of drought.
That’s been their mission ever since they bought and killed alien blue and released a pile of shit in its place. They can’t make a good app so have been slowly tying more and more exclusive features to it, and to new Reddit, hoping that this new shiny useless thing that no one asked for or wanted will get people to use it. I think with interest rates rising, their investors are looking for profits higher than t bills and so this trend that has been going on for the past few years is now kicked into overdrive.