sonori

Precisely, their a gas company. Helping the planet means just turning everything off and never turning it on again, so you know the only green promise they want to keep is the green in their share price.

I mean they did go green. An average of ten percent growth in earnings per year over the last five years, seems like things were pretty green over there to me. I mean it’s a gas company, what other kind of green could they have been talking about?

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.

The problem is that people are conditioned to blame the president for the current cost of gas, and that gas should always cost the same. If not, then inflation is too high, never mind that keeping the cost the same means the real cost is falling. Or that right now gas costs two cents lower than it did in 2013 pre inflation.

Amaricans would absolutely blame the current government for gas going from $3.52 a gallon to the sill subsidized to an extent EU average $7.31 a gallon. Throw in the more realistic costs of actually cleaning up said co2 with direct air carbon capture at a $100 a ton and you get $8.20 a gallon, which is actually nowhere remotely near as bad as I expected it to be, though that would require someone to actually do carbon capture at scale. Electricity of course beats the pants off of all of the above at an US average cost of about $1.90 per gallon equivalent.

You also have the inflationary effects of the US being very dependent on trucks for most goods transport, due in no small part to rail companies entering a state of ‘managed decline’ and looting said infrastructure for scrap at a time where everyone from China and India to Ethiopia and North Korea were electrifying, and thusly being stuck with trains that cost nearly twice as much to run as electric lines run by an industry of managers who think that their customers are going to replace a single train with gravel with several thousand trucks any day now so might as well sell the tracks off.

That being said, a high vehicle registration tax on gas and diesel vehicles combined with an effectively free one on new energy vehicles seems to have demonstrated more of an effect, though admittedly places that have tried that have also tended to have a far less subsidized cost of fuel in the first place so it may only have an potent effect in combination.

Functionally the US also needs an equivalent to or allow import of the French Ami and similar such cheap city cars as well as Canadian style legislation demanding that landlords must install L2 chargers if asked if it wants for cars to still be an option for poor rural people, which unfortunately given the need to cut carbon now and the demonstrated ability of US cities to take a decade and millions of dollars to put in a bus lane it probably does. City dewellers will of course just use bikes if they can get their city to stop wasting money on far more expensive to maintain per person-mile car lanes.

All in all this problem needs a lot of complex legislation to solve, but I sopose the benefit of WAITING THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AFTER IT DECIDED THAT CONTINUED EMMISIONS WERE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE VERY EXSISTANCE OF THE NATION is that most of the possibilities have already been tried before so you can pick what works and skip what doesn’t.

Especially since the raw materials for grid scale storage are almost all mined in Australia, mass packaged into batteriy cells in China, then bought back. Australia could absolutely move up the value chain on these if it wanted to and the government put investment into it, but that would require the best nation in the world for solar to stop trying to subsidize fossil fuels at every opportunity.

China even gives you a clear step by step example of how to do it. Just take the billions they are trying to make contingent on nuclear and instead use it to provide a minimum order guarantee for LFP and Sodium Ion cells.

If you realy wanted to commit, you could join up with Chile and Argentina, all agree to build battery plants, then raise export tariffs on the raw stuff and become OPEC but with three quarters of the worlds battery production instead.

It is absolutely possible for the largest supplier of lithium in the world to package it into battery cells instead of just selling it raw, and all that it would take is the smallest bit of future planning and not outright bowing down to a dead end industry, which of course means that it’s never going to happen and the government will continue to prop up coal, petrol, and gas while its citizens continue to buy back actually useful energy infrastructure from China.

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.

Thing is, the research into direct cash transfusions and other straight basic income has shown that poor people generally have a very good idea of what they specifically need to do to get out of poverty, be that a gym membership to shower, good clothes, a bike or car, an apartment, someplace to keep documents and medications where they won’t be thrown out by cops, getting a GED after their parents threw them out for being gay, a preschool because their minimum wage job won’t let them keep a baby around the building, or other prerequisite to getting a job / a job that pays well enough for an apartment, they just don’t have the money to actually do any of it.

A person have a good community kitchen they can go to and get free food, and as such food stamps are worthless to them, but they can’t spend that same pittance on something that would actually help them get out of poverty like clothes and a gym membership or saving up for a small car where they can store their stuff and get to jobs, all because a government commite of people and lobbyists who have never lived outside of a gated community have decided what each poor persons budget should look like and coincidentally they all look the same.

People know how to learn to catch fish, they just can’t do it without the right tools, or because they have to be back standing in line at the shelter by 3PM each day.

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.

Someone else this time. The company is called Confident Health and seems to do primarily drug and alcohol addiction counseling in a limited number of states. It also seems to be security negligence instead of a major revenue stream.