The sad part is that I would hesitate to even call it a social program either - it’s the bare fucking minimum. It’s just taking the money that you paid into it and paying it back out to you later in life. It provides some financial structure and stability to those who otherwise would not have it, and that’s important, sure. But considering that this is height of our vital government social programs, then the bar is already so pathetically low. This is fighting to keep the scraps when private industry is already milking us for healthcare, education, public transit, utilities, etc, etc, etc, and it’s pitiful that we have to fight to even keep this.
50 years ago during the Cold War the economic trajectory of the two wasn’t so different, and pakistan also included what would become Bangladesh. Nixon was opening relations with China after the sino Soviet split, and India probably wouldn’t agree to ally with someone who was in the process of economically integrating with a country that they were actively fighting a border war with (sino Indian border war 1962-present). Pre Iranian revolution Iran was also a major ally and shares a significant land border with Pakistan, and probably most importantly, Pakistan was an ideal country to serve as a funnel for military assistance to the mujahideen to help fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which would arguably lead to the economic drain and political quagmire that was a primary factor in its collapse.
Of course the mujahideen would then evolve to become Al Qaeda which Pakistan would harbor, Iran would have its revolution, Bangladesh would gain independence, and the Pakistani military dictatorship would squander the potential of their country on a nuclear program and trying to maintain an army of equal strength to a country 10x their population. But the choice had a lot more geopolitical merit way back then, and once it had been made it is not so easy as forgive and forget or to counter the logistical inertia just because the circumstances change.
I see that as offering services that people clearly use and value, and that the bills have to be paid somehow. So as long as proton can deliver the privacy and security features it promises, I personally don’t see anything wrong with providing an alternative when the only other options are built on monetizing your data.
Unfortunately Reddit is still one of the best and easiest ways to find stuff like this - here is the full performance
One of my best fried chicken experiences was a $5 fried chicken buffet somewhere in rural Kentucky near Lincoln’s birth home.
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.
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.
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.
ElegantBiscuit
joined 1 year ago
I specifically looked it up just to be sure, John Deere does have multiple factories in China and a good amount of their website wording includes “assembled in USA”, sort of like cars and appliances and a lot of things, usually to get around existing tariffs and import duties. They do also have factories in Germany, Mexico, india, and of course multiple in the USA, but I kept it simple for the sake of the explanation, because China also does produce a lot of soybeans as well.