• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 28th, 2023

help-circle
  • But we know what it really is all about - selling more cars.

    It isn’t even about selling more cars at this point, it’s about selling securities. Their market cap dwarfs their total sales. Their P/E ratio is 67.67x, meaning they could sell cars for 67 years and still not make as much money as their stocks are worth today.

    The real product is the rising stock price. The factories are just a front.






  • That’s the only way to offer free services?! What about donation-based models? Maybe Mozilla could have set up something like what Brave has, except not based around a sketchy cryptocurrency.

    Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought Brave only gave donatable tokens to users as a reward for watching ads… ads which Brave curated for the user based on their activity. It’s just targeted ad revenue with extra steps.

    At first blush, it seems to me that both Brave and Anonym want to be the middleman for targeted advertising. What am I missing?


  • Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

    Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

    The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.




  • Transportation is a necessity, and I believe every inelastic market deserves a nationalized alternative to prevent price gouging. Like how the USPS keeps UPS and FEDEX in line. With that being said, nationalization doesn’t fix this particular problem.

    China is run like a giant capitalist cartel (in all but name), and appropriately, their ultimate weapon in their hunt for global monopolies is the provision of slave labor. The number of slaves in Xinjiang alone is estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and their labor has been credibly linked to the production of cotton (face masks), polysilicon (solar panels), and aluminum and lithium (EVs).

    It’s no coincidence that these are the industries being slapped with tariffs. No amount of subsidization or nationalization can level a playing field that’s been tilted by slavery. You don’t outcompete slavery, you either penalize goods suspected of involving it, or you go full John Brown.





  • Lets drop this whole “lesser of two evils” thing […] it certainly doesnt work with comparing governments.

    I think it is deeply unwise to take that to heart.

    I grew up deep in the American Midwest, surrounded by Evangelical-leaning Christian fundamentalism. Out there, committing one sin was considered as bad as committing a hundred (see also: Matt 5, James 2:10). They dropped the whole “lesser of two evils” thing, and you know what happened? They treated gays the same way they treated murderers, because the two sins were equally easy to condemn. They put rapists in pulpits because in their eyes, molesting a child was just as easy to forgive as ogling an adult.

    When you tell people to reject nuance in ethics, that there is no “greater evil,” you remove 90% of their moral compass. They become pliable and easily manipulated by whoever can seize power or respect (see also: Trump).

    Every person has flaws, and every system, government, or ideology created by people is likewise flawed. If we refuse to judge the severity of those flaws, refuse acknowledge that there are lesser evils in government, then we claim our own ideologies are no better than fascism – after all, both have their sins, and we just claimed that all sins are equal.