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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
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The exploration of women in the work place in the 1970s in the show "All in the Family" was pretty cool. My maternal grandma could not get a bank loan in the early 1970s... she had to go to a "Trust Company", Canada Trust, to get her loan. But, she did it. She succeeded against the Patriarchy.. somehow. LOL.
Both of my grandmothers had pretty solid medical careers in the 1970s as this "women in the work place" was being discussed. My Maternal grandmother ran a medical lab and went on to become the President of OPSEU, a UNion, in the late 1980s.
Archie Bunker was already well placed on the incorrect/bizarro world side of the "woman's place is in the home" debate in the 1970s. He was placed as an out-of-touch dolt in the show. He did work full time and he did pay the mortgage on a fully detached small house.
On December 17 2025 01:01 Doublemint wrote:
Spinal Tap is pretty legendary, I am definitely going to check out Spinal Tap 2 at some point.
the movie takes a hard shot at Led Zeppelin's John Bonham. The drummer of Spinal Tap dies from choking to death on vomit. That is how Bonham died 2 or 3 years earlier. LOL.
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The Princess Bride is a legendary movie as well. Eternally quotable.
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Now tainting Rob Reiner's Wikipedia entry:
"President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that "a very sad thing happened", stating Reiner and his wife "reportedly died due to the anger he caused others" with "Trump derangement syndrome".[73][79][80] Trump's reaction was widely criticized[81][82] by both Republicans and Democrats; Republican critics included Mike Lawler, Don Bacon, Stephanie Bice, as well as opponents of Trump such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie.[83] Asked about his post during an event that afternoon, Trump reiterated that Reiner was "very bad for our country" and a "deranged person" accusing him of being one of the people behind "the Russia hoax".[84][85][86]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reiner
It's also insane that the phrase "opponents of Trump such as Marjorie Taylor Greene" exists.
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I didn't realize that Jack Nicholson improvised the "You can't handle the truth!" line. I suspect Hegseth imagines himself something like like Jack's character.
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On December 17 2025 01:31 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:
The Princess Bride is a legendary movie as well. Eternally quotable.
true that.
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On December 16 2025 14:06 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2025 02:39 KwarK wrote:https://youtube.com/shorts/u5C2TwHKouQ?si=GP3w7ZkcLSYfnEunSome weird stuff in this latest Trump speech where he finally addresses that many Americans are having trouble making ends meet. He has some suggestions about how Americans can get the economy back on track. First we should look at our household pencil budgets. If we're buying 37 pencils then that's probably an area where we can make cutbacks and buy steel instead. Also dolls. 37 dolls per child is just too many and Americans need to stop after one or two. All of the Biden dementia arguments were so very obviously made in bad faith in the face of whatever the fuck this is. Your youtube short gets it wrong from the very beginning by framing Trump as being "off-topic" in a 90 minute speech where he, the most powerful person in the world, is the main attraction and can talk about whatever topic he wants. The point about steel is not that America families should buy steel instead of dolls. It's that his policies broadly have helped US steel through the tariffs against China and Chinese steel - whether true or important or not, it's not a hard point to understand what his goal is after he has railed against Chinese steel for decades. The real strength of the economy is more likely to be tied to core industry. Like who can't admit there is a problem with unrestrained consumerism - there are definitely things that it's more important to be able to afford than Chinesium toys. For example the price of homes is down year over year, and new homes are cheaper than resale homes for the first time in a long time. Another of his common points, which was in this speech, too - the actual speech not just the popcorn 20 seconds of it - is cheaper oil/gas means cheaper energy, which is the root of everything's affordability. The root of the problem is that Trump does ramble, and the people who want the gist of Trump's speech points are going to have it filtered through quotes and not through watching all 90 minutes. So that's an opportunity for MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) to put a partisan filter and mislead through selective omission. Did Trump hit affordability in a meaningful way, but also give some pretty canned talking points about consumerism? You won't know from an MSNOW clip.
Trump does suffer from simultaneously trying to say "The economy is doing great because of my tariffs and economic management decisions" and "Here's what I'm going to do to fix affordability." This is my summary of around two or three weeks of his economic messages. Really, tariffs were and are hurting affordability. Inflation continues to rise. It's fundamentally a politically losing message because of how inflation hurts families, which aren't helped by hearing about the evils of consumerism or how steel is doing. They might be helped in the future if Trump reduces tariffs and relies on cheaper energy production through his policies.
Show nested quote +On December 12 2025 23:09 Sermokala wrote:
A lot of the issue with modern us car design is the car companies' self-sabotaging their future to get around laws and satisfy short term shareholder value.
By demanding higher emission standards you're doing a good thing. I'm not going to hear that its bad. But the car companies saw that the much easier and profitable thing to do is to make more expensive vehicles that are larger to get around having to do any design work to make their cars better. This degraded the cars value in any country that has reasonable infastructure and doesn't tolerate supermassive cars that are designed to kill kids. Having grills that are higher than the average human being is insane and shouldn't have ever been tolerated. There is nothing wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. Obviously you need to take a second look at the method if the result is the opposite of intended.
Why would companies benefit from making cars that you say are more expensive, reducing demand for their own products and allowing someone to undercut them with a cheaper and better car?
Miles per gallon have improved, and CO2 per mile have improved. According to regulatory standards of the last decade. This didn't happen from car companies not doing any design work.
The reason the trucks have gotten bigger is how the standards are regulated. They are not regulated by engine displacement (CCs), cylinders, or horsepower. (There are separate standards based on fuel like diesel vs. gas but that's it.) They are regulated by the 2D size of the car. The footprint of the car. The problem with this genius framework is any engine can be in any sized car.
Why is this less than ideal? Imagine you want to reduce the amount of cholesterol in pizzas, so you set standards for how much cholesterol can be in each size pizza (M, L, XL, etc.). This indirectly constrains the maximum amount of cheese you can put on each pizza.
Counterpoint: There are customers who like extra cheese.
Because of your cholesterol standards, the pizza shop must either reduce the cholesterol in cheese (intractable after a certain point) in order to add more cheese, or they can just sell bigger pizzas which are allowed to have more cholesterol.
This is not the company's fault. It's the fault of the people who passed standards without thinking through higher-order consequences. People would buy medium extra-extra-cheese pizzas if they weren't illegal, but instead they buy XL regular cheese pizzas because that's the only way to get that amount of cheese, which they want.
In trucks, they want the capability, the horsepower, the torque, the towing, etc., of the extra cheese. They don't particularly care how big the pie is. They would just as soon buy a less mega-sized truck, like they did 20-30 years ago, with the same engine, which is cheaper for everyone because it's smaller and therefore uses less raw materials in the body (The trucks you derided companies for lazily designing to be more expensive are more expensive because they're bigger, and bigger vehicles use more metal). But government problem-solving has brought us here. So you end up with Canyoneros that are like 20% bed. You are right on all of this. The cheaper, smaller cars and trucks that would've met their needs were made illegal. Congratulations for pushing consumers towards bigger and heavier, which company advertising teams deftly sold.
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On December 13 2025 14:33 Zambrah wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2025 14:22 decafchicken wrote:
The weird thing is other forms of transportation that have infinitely better safety and outcomes defer to the smaller, more vulnerable vehicle (air, sea). In America it's basically legal to kill a pedestrian/cyclist in a vehicle and everyones mindset is to just get the bigger vehicle that will win in a collision rather than avoiding the collision. What a delightfully perfect encapsulation of a truly American mindset.
Is this really uniquely American?
I get that applying this kind of arms-race mentality to car size, specifically, fits American stereotypes. But the underlying mindset of "I'm in competition with everyone else, so I'm going to maximize the thing that makes me win that competition, even though it results in a wasteful Red Queen's race from a system-wide perspective" is pretty universal. Like, isn't this the same tendency that underlies IR realism?
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On December 17 2025 01:50 GreenHorizons wrote:
I didn't realize that Jack Nicholson improvised the "You can't handle the truth!" line. I suspect Hegseth imagines himself something like like Jack's character.
he learned it from George Costanza.
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On December 17 2025 04:27 ASoo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 13 2025 14:33 Zambrah wrote:On December 13 2025 14:22 decafchicken wrote:
The weird thing is other forms of transportation that have infinitely better safety and outcomes defer to the smaller, more vulnerable vehicle (air, sea). In America it's basically legal to kill a pedestrian/cyclist in a vehicle and everyones mindset is to just get the bigger vehicle that will win in a collision rather than avoiding the collision. What a delightfully perfect encapsulation of a truly American mindset. Is this really uniquely American? I get that applying this kind of arms-race mentality to car size, specifically, fits American stereotypes. But the underlying mindset of "I'm in competition with everyone else, so I'm going to maximize the thing that makes me win that competition, even though it results in a wasteful Red Queen's race from a system-wide perspective" is pretty universal. Like, isn't this the same tendency that underlies IR realism?
In my experience thats not universal.
Sure, there are some people like that everywhere and they are sadly often very succesfull but it doesn't seem to be as normalized among so many people as it seems in the US. The whole lone rider/cowboy/maverick/"me above all" --> extreme individualism seems very american.
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On December 17 2025 05:05 Velr wrote:
the US. The whole lone rider/cowboy/maverick/"me above all" --> extreme individualism seems very american.
can be true of american atheists. i don't know if it is true for americans who are more religious though.
Ayn Rand wrote the individualists bible for America atheists in the middle of the 20th century.
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United States43545 Posts
Cruel individualism is America’s dominant religion, though some sects like to clothe it in borrowed monotheistic imagery.
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On December 17 2025 05:15 KwarK wrote:
Cruel individualism is America’s dominant religion, though some sects like to clothe it in borrowed monotheistic imagery.
i disagree. americans are ok. the usa doesn't really have a single, dominant religion any longer. i remember a guy i used to work for saying "Ronald Reagan is my God". LOL 
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On December 17 2025 05:10 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 05:05 Velr wrote:
the US. The whole lone rider/cowboy/maverick/"me above all" --> extreme individualism seems very american. can be true of american atheists. i don't know if it is true for americans who are more religious though. Ayn Rand wrote the individualists bible for America atheists in the middle of the 20th century. If religious Americans cared about their fellow human and actually observed their religious beliefs the USA would be a lot more socialist.
Which is also why the 'pro-life' movement is just entirely bullshit. If they cared about life they would care about the poor and unfortunate after they were born. But they sure don't.
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Leaked Epstein Files talking points instruct Republicans how to point blame away from Trump: https://couriernewsroom.com/news/leaked-epstein-files-talking-points-instruct-republicans-how-to-point-blame-away-from-trump/
"The memo, first published by Fox News, outlines how congressional Republicans should direct any discussion surrounding the contents of the Epstein Files away from Trump, and outlined a list of accusations to allege against journalists and Democratic lawmakers. In essence, the memo gives step-by-step instructions on how to utilize a psychological manipulation tactic known as DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim and offender) in order to brush aside any alleged wrongdoing by the president, while villainizing his opposition and framing Trump as the victim."
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Isn't it fun, being a politician? You get to lie and scheme and act all Machiavellian for fun and get paid for it!
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Norway28738 Posts
On December 17 2025 04:51 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 01:50 GreenHorizons wrote:
I didn't realize that Jack Nicholson improvised the "You can't handle the truth!" line. I suspect Hegseth imagines himself something like like Jack's character. he learned it from George Costanza.
I think george right after that quote says 'I'm working on my jack nicholson'.
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On December 17 2025 08:58 Liquid`Drone wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 04:51 JimmyJRaynor wrote:On December 17 2025 01:50 GreenHorizons wrote:
I didn't realize that Jack Nicholson improvised the "You can't handle the truth!" line. I suspect Hegseth imagines himself something like like Jack's character. he learned it from George Costanza. I think george right after that quote says 'I'm working on my jack nicholson'.
Yeah GC is referencing JN, not the other way around.
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On December 17 2025 04:06 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2025 14:06 oBlade wrote:On December 13 2025 02:39 KwarK wrote:https://youtube.com/shorts/u5C2TwHKouQ?si=GP3w7ZkcLSYfnEunSome weird stuff in this latest Trump speech where he finally addresses that many Americans are having trouble making ends meet. He has some suggestions about how Americans can get the economy back on track. First we should look at our household pencil budgets. If we're buying 37 pencils then that's probably an area where we can make cutbacks and buy steel instead. Also dolls. 37 dolls per child is just too many and Americans need to stop after one or two. All of the Biden dementia arguments were so very obviously made in bad faith in the face of whatever the fuck this is. Your youtube short gets it wrong from the very beginning by framing Trump as being "off-topic" in a 90 minute speech where he, the most powerful person in the world, is the main attraction and can talk about whatever topic he wants. The point about steel is not that America families should buy steel instead of dolls. It's that his policies broadly have helped US steel through the tariffs against China and Chinese steel - whether true or important or not, it's not a hard point to understand what his goal is after he has railed against Chinese steel for decades. The real strength of the economy is more likely to be tied to core industry. Like who can't admit there is a problem with unrestrained consumerism - there are definitely things that it's more important to be able to afford than Chinesium toys. For example the price of homes is down year over year, and new homes are cheaper than resale homes for the first time in a long time. Another of his common points, which was in this speech, too - the actual speech not just the popcorn 20 seconds of it - is cheaper oil/gas means cheaper energy, which is the root of everything's affordability. The root of the problem is that Trump does ramble, and the people who want the gist of Trump's speech points are going to have it filtered through quotes and not through watching all 90 minutes. So that's an opportunity for MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) to put a partisan filter and mislead through selective omission. Did Trump hit affordability in a meaningful way, but also give some pretty canned talking points about consumerism? You won't know from an MSNOW clip. Trump does suffer from simultaneously trying to say "The economy is doing great because of my tariffs and economic management decisions" and "Here's what I'm going to do to fix affordability." This is my summary of around two or three weeks of his economic messages. Really, tariffs were and are hurting affordability. Inflation continues to rise. It's fundamentally a politically losing message because of how inflation hurts families, which aren't helped by hearing about the evils of consumerism or how steel is doing. They might be helped in the future if Trump reduces tariffs and relies on cheaper energy production through his policies. Show nested quote +On December 12 2025 23:09 Sermokala wrote:
A lot of the issue with modern us car design is the car companies' self-sabotaging their future to get around laws and satisfy short term shareholder value.
By demanding higher emission standards you're doing a good thing. I'm not going to hear that its bad. But the car companies saw that the much easier and profitable thing to do is to make more expensive vehicles that are larger to get around having to do any design work to make their cars better. This degraded the cars value in any country that has reasonable infastructure and doesn't tolerate supermassive cars that are designed to kill kids. Having grills that are higher than the average human being is insane and shouldn't have ever been tolerated. There is nothing wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. Obviously you need to take a second look at the method if the result is the opposite of intended. You go on to explain what you mean by this, but let me state for the record that there is something wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. You can raise them to a level that isn't justified by current vehicle technology and design costs. You can make reasonably efficient trucks and SUVs illegal by pursuing very high targets. There is nothing wrong with a modest baseline efficiency standard, but there is something wrong in considering the idea of just raising the standard as a pure good. Show nested quote +Why would companies benefit from making cars that you say are more expensive, reducing demand for their own products and allowing someone to undercut them with a cheaper and better car?
Miles per gallon have improved, and CO2 per mile have improved. According to regulatory standards of the last decade. This didn't happen from car companies not doing any design work.
The reason the trucks have gotten bigger is how the standards are regulated. They are not regulated by engine displacement (CCs), cylinders, or horsepower. (There are separate standards based on fuel like diesel vs. gas but that's it.) They are regulated by the 2D size of the car. The footprint of the car. The problem with this genius framework is any engine can be in any sized car.
Why is this less than ideal? Imagine you want to reduce the amount of cholesterol in pizzas, so you set standards for how much cholesterol can be in each size pizza (M, L, XL, etc.). This indirectly constrains the maximum amount of cheese you can put on each pizza.
Counterpoint: There are customers who like extra cheese.
Because of your cholesterol standards, the pizza shop must either reduce the cholesterol in cheese (intractable after a certain point) in order to add more cheese, or they can just sell bigger pizzas which are allowed to have more cholesterol.
This is not the company's fault. It's the fault of the people who passed standards without thinking through higher-order consequences. People would buy medium extra-extra-cheese pizzas if they weren't illegal, but instead they buy XL regular cheese pizzas because that's the only way to get that amount of cheese, which they want.
In trucks, they want the capability, the horsepower, the torque, the towing, etc., of the extra cheese. They don't particularly care how big the pie is. They would just as soon buy a less mega-sized truck, like they did 20-30 years ago, with the same engine, which is cheaper for everyone because it's smaller and therefore uses less raw materials in the body (The trucks you derided companies for lazily designing to be more expensive are more expensive because they're bigger, and bigger vehicles use more metal). But government problem-solving has brought us here. So you end up with Canyoneros that are like 20% bed. You are right on all of this. The cheaper, smaller cars and trucks that would've met their needs were made illegal. Congratulations for pushing consumers towards bigger and heavier, which company advertising teams deftly sold.
I don't know who lied to you and told you that they made smaller cheaper cars and trucks illegal but you shouldn't trust people who don't respect you like that. They raised standards, they could have simply met those standards, instead they saw the more profitable route was to make worse vehicles that cost more. It was more profitable short term, but you can't act surprised when those short term shareholder capitalism philosophies end up killing you long term.
Oblade characterized it correctly that these companies slowly taught a subsect of the population that they needed or wanted a car that was fundamentally worse for them in every objective fashion. Making a better vehicle that could compete on foreign markets is hard, so don't do that. He has this weird take that its not the companies fault that the company makes mistakes. Companies have agency in capitalism, or they're not operating on a free market. The car companies made their choices knowing that they were too big to fail and that the pubic would just bail them out beacuse it would be worse for the country to let the corpses fall now instead of letting them zombie walk for another generation to solve.
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On December 17 2025 10:12 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 04:06 dyhb wrote:On December 16 2025 14:06 oBlade wrote:On December 13 2025 02:39 KwarK wrote:https://youtube.com/shorts/u5C2TwHKouQ?si=GP3w7ZkcLSYfnEunSome weird stuff in this latest Trump speech where he finally addresses that many Americans are having trouble making ends meet. He has some suggestions about how Americans can get the economy back on track. First we should look at our household pencil budgets. If we're buying 37 pencils then that's probably an area where we can make cutbacks and buy steel instead. Also dolls. 37 dolls per child is just too many and Americans need to stop after one or two. All of the Biden dementia arguments were so very obviously made in bad faith in the face of whatever the fuck this is. Your youtube short gets it wrong from the very beginning by framing Trump as being "off-topic" in a 90 minute speech where he, the most powerful person in the world, is the main attraction and can talk about whatever topic he wants. The point about steel is not that America families should buy steel instead of dolls. It's that his policies broadly have helped US steel through the tariffs against China and Chinese steel - whether true or important or not, it's not a hard point to understand what his goal is after he has railed against Chinese steel for decades. The real strength of the economy is more likely to be tied to core industry. Like who can't admit there is a problem with unrestrained consumerism - there are definitely things that it's more important to be able to afford than Chinesium toys. For example the price of homes is down year over year, and new homes are cheaper than resale homes for the first time in a long time. Another of his common points, which was in this speech, too - the actual speech not just the popcorn 20 seconds of it - is cheaper oil/gas means cheaper energy, which is the root of everything's affordability. The root of the problem is that Trump does ramble, and the people who want the gist of Trump's speech points are going to have it filtered through quotes and not through watching all 90 minutes. So that's an opportunity for MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) to put a partisan filter and mislead through selective omission. Did Trump hit affordability in a meaningful way, but also give some pretty canned talking points about consumerism? You won't know from an MSNOW clip. Trump does suffer from simultaneously trying to say "The economy is doing great because of my tariffs and economic management decisions" and "Here's what I'm going to do to fix affordability." This is my summary of around two or three weeks of his economic messages. Really, tariffs were and are hurting affordability. Inflation continues to rise. It's fundamentally a politically losing message because of how inflation hurts families, which aren't helped by hearing about the evils of consumerism or how steel is doing. They might be helped in the future if Trump reduces tariffs and relies on cheaper energy production through his policies. On December 12 2025 23:09 Sermokala wrote:
A lot of the issue with modern us car design is the car companies' self-sabotaging their future to get around laws and satisfy short term shareholder value.
By demanding higher emission standards you're doing a good thing. I'm not going to hear that its bad. But the car companies saw that the much easier and profitable thing to do is to make more expensive vehicles that are larger to get around having to do any design work to make their cars better. This degraded the cars value in any country that has reasonable infastructure and doesn't tolerate supermassive cars that are designed to kill kids. Having grills that are higher than the average human being is insane and shouldn't have ever been tolerated. There is nothing wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. Obviously you need to take a second look at the method if the result is the opposite of intended. You go on to explain what you mean by this, but let me state for the record that there is something wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. You can raise them to a level that isn't justified by current vehicle technology and design costs. You can make reasonably efficient trucks and SUVs illegal by pursuing very high targets. There is nothing wrong with a modest baseline efficiency standard, but there is something wrong in considering the idea of just raising the standard as a pure good. Why would companies benefit from making cars that you say are more expensive, reducing demand for their own products and allowing someone to undercut them with a cheaper and better car?
Miles per gallon have improved, and CO2 per mile have improved. According to regulatory standards of the last decade. This didn't happen from car companies not doing any design work.
The reason the trucks have gotten bigger is how the standards are regulated. They are not regulated by engine displacement (CCs), cylinders, or horsepower. (There are separate standards based on fuel like diesel vs. gas but that's it.) They are regulated by the 2D size of the car. The footprint of the car. The problem with this genius framework is any engine can be in any sized car.
Why is this less than ideal? Imagine you want to reduce the amount of cholesterol in pizzas, so you set standards for how much cholesterol can be in each size pizza (M, L, XL, etc.). This indirectly constrains the maximum amount of cheese you can put on each pizza.
Counterpoint: There are customers who like extra cheese.
Because of your cholesterol standards, the pizza shop must either reduce the cholesterol in cheese (intractable after a certain point) in order to add more cheese, or they can just sell bigger pizzas which are allowed to have more cholesterol.
This is not the company's fault. It's the fault of the people who passed standards without thinking through higher-order consequences. People would buy medium extra-extra-cheese pizzas if they weren't illegal, but instead they buy XL regular cheese pizzas because that's the only way to get that amount of cheese, which they want.
In trucks, they want the capability, the horsepower, the torque, the towing, etc., of the extra cheese. They don't particularly care how big the pie is. They would just as soon buy a less mega-sized truck, like they did 20-30 years ago, with the same engine, which is cheaper for everyone because it's smaller and therefore uses less raw materials in the body (The trucks you derided companies for lazily designing to be more expensive are more expensive because they're bigger, and bigger vehicles use more metal). But government problem-solving has brought us here. So you end up with Canyoneros that are like 20% bed. You are right on all of this. The cheaper, smaller cars and trucks that would've met their needs were made illegal. Congratulations for pushing consumers towards bigger and heavier, which company advertising teams deftly sold. I don't know who lied to you and told you that they made smaller cheaper cars and trucks illegal but you shouldn't trust people who don't respect you like that. They raised standards, they could have simply met those standards, instead they saw the more profitable route was to make worse vehicles that cost more. It was more profitable short term, but you can't act surprised when those short term shareholder capitalism philosophies end up killing you long term. I just reject your framing. You’ve made certain cars previously bought and sold to be illegal, and dislike that language because you endorse changing the standards. You do not enjoy the privilege of forcing others to adopt your perspective.
Oblade characterized it correctly that these companies slowly taught a subsect of the population that they needed or wanted a car that was fundamentally worse for them in every objective fashion. Making a better vehicle that could compete on foreign markets is hard, so don't do that. He has this weird take that its not the companies fault that the company makes mistakes. Companies have agency in capitalism, or they're not operating on a free market. The car companies made their choices knowing that they were too big to fail and that the pubic would just bail them out beacuse it would be worse for the country to let the corpses fall now instead of letting them zombie walk for another generation to solve. You appear to have completely missed the major section analogizing this to forcing pizza companies to lower the cheese content (indirectly through cholesterol controls) in smaller sizes of pizza, thereby forcing customers who like cheese to purchase larger pizzas (which are allowed to have more). The topic would be much easier if you were able to reduce this to corporate greed, but you ignore without discussion the impact on consumers through government. That’s a major aspect of the issue! It’s like telling the government to force computer gamers to buy less energy-consuming rigs, and expect gamers to just stop desiring them as a consequence. You think gamers would be content to blame computer parts manufacturers and video game makers should their upgrades be made illegal to purchase by government regulation? Maybe then you’d see consumers blame regulation, and justifiably so, that makes them buy reclassified parts to meet their desires for power and graphics.
It appears that belief in the regulations themselves force you to make companies and capitalism a scapegoat for unintended consequences.
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On December 17 2025 10:48 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 10:12 Sermokala wrote:On December 17 2025 04:06 dyhb wrote:On December 16 2025 14:06 oBlade wrote:On December 13 2025 02:39 KwarK wrote:https://youtube.com/shorts/u5C2TwHKouQ?si=GP3w7ZkcLSYfnEunSome weird stuff in this latest Trump speech where he finally addresses that many Americans are having trouble making ends meet. He has some suggestions about how Americans can get the economy back on track. First we should look at our household pencil budgets. If we're buying 37 pencils then that's probably an area where we can make cutbacks and buy steel instead. Also dolls. 37 dolls per child is just too many and Americans need to stop after one or two. All of the Biden dementia arguments were so very obviously made in bad faith in the face of whatever the fuck this is. Your youtube short gets it wrong from the very beginning by framing Trump as being "off-topic" in a 90 minute speech where he, the most powerful person in the world, is the main attraction and can talk about whatever topic he wants. The point about steel is not that America families should buy steel instead of dolls. It's that his policies broadly have helped US steel through the tariffs against China and Chinese steel - whether true or important or not, it's not a hard point to understand what his goal is after he has railed against Chinese steel for decades. The real strength of the economy is more likely to be tied to core industry. Like who can't admit there is a problem with unrestrained consumerism - there are definitely things that it's more important to be able to afford than Chinesium toys. For example the price of homes is down year over year, and new homes are cheaper than resale homes for the first time in a long time. Another of his common points, which was in this speech, too - the actual speech not just the popcorn 20 seconds of it - is cheaper oil/gas means cheaper energy, which is the root of everything's affordability. The root of the problem is that Trump does ramble, and the people who want the gist of Trump's speech points are going to have it filtered through quotes and not through watching all 90 minutes. So that's an opportunity for MSNOW (formerly MSNBC) to put a partisan filter and mislead through selective omission. Did Trump hit affordability in a meaningful way, but also give some pretty canned talking points about consumerism? You won't know from an MSNOW clip. Trump does suffer from simultaneously trying to say "The economy is doing great because of my tariffs and economic management decisions" and "Here's what I'm going to do to fix affordability." This is my summary of around two or three weeks of his economic messages. Really, tariffs were and are hurting affordability. Inflation continues to rise. It's fundamentally a politically losing message because of how inflation hurts families, which aren't helped by hearing about the evils of consumerism or how steel is doing. They might be helped in the future if Trump reduces tariffs and relies on cheaper energy production through his policies. On December 12 2025 23:09 Sermokala wrote:
A lot of the issue with modern us car design is the car companies' self-sabotaging their future to get around laws and satisfy short term shareholder value.
By demanding higher emission standards you're doing a good thing. I'm not going to hear that its bad. But the car companies saw that the much easier and profitable thing to do is to make more expensive vehicles that are larger to get around having to do any design work to make their cars better. This degraded the cars value in any country that has reasonable infastructure and doesn't tolerate supermassive cars that are designed to kill kids. Having grills that are higher than the average human being is insane and shouldn't have ever been tolerated. There is nothing wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. Obviously you need to take a second look at the method if the result is the opposite of intended. You go on to explain what you mean by this, but let me state for the record that there is something wrong with the idea of raising emissions standards. You can raise them to a level that isn't justified by current vehicle technology and design costs. You can make reasonably efficient trucks and SUVs illegal by pursuing very high targets. There is nothing wrong with a modest baseline efficiency standard, but there is something wrong in considering the idea of just raising the standard as a pure good. Why would companies benefit from making cars that you say are more expensive, reducing demand for their own products and allowing someone to undercut them with a cheaper and better car?
Miles per gallon have improved, and CO2 per mile have improved. According to regulatory standards of the last decade. This didn't happen from car companies not doing any design work.
The reason the trucks have gotten bigger is how the standards are regulated. They are not regulated by engine displacement (CCs), cylinders, or horsepower. (There are separate standards based on fuel like diesel vs. gas but that's it.) They are regulated by the 2D size of the car. The footprint of the car. The problem with this genius framework is any engine can be in any sized car.
Why is this less than ideal? Imagine you want to reduce the amount of cholesterol in pizzas, so you set standards for how much cholesterol can be in each size pizza (M, L, XL, etc.). This indirectly constrains the maximum amount of cheese you can put on each pizza.
Counterpoint: There are customers who like extra cheese.
Because of your cholesterol standards, the pizza shop must either reduce the cholesterol in cheese (intractable after a certain point) in order to add more cheese, or they can just sell bigger pizzas which are allowed to have more cholesterol.
This is not the company's fault. It's the fault of the people who passed standards without thinking through higher-order consequences. People would buy medium extra-extra-cheese pizzas if they weren't illegal, but instead they buy XL regular cheese pizzas because that's the only way to get that amount of cheese, which they want.
In trucks, they want the capability, the horsepower, the torque, the towing, etc., of the extra cheese. They don't particularly care how big the pie is. They would just as soon buy a less mega-sized truck, like they did 20-30 years ago, with the same engine, which is cheaper for everyone because it's smaller and therefore uses less raw materials in the body (The trucks you derided companies for lazily designing to be more expensive are more expensive because they're bigger, and bigger vehicles use more metal). But government problem-solving has brought us here. So you end up with Canyoneros that are like 20% bed. You are right on all of this. The cheaper, smaller cars and trucks that would've met their needs were made illegal. Congratulations for pushing consumers towards bigger and heavier, which company advertising teams deftly sold. I don't know who lied to you and told you that they made smaller cheaper cars and trucks illegal but you shouldn't trust people who don't respect you like that. They raised standards, they could have simply met those standards, instead they saw the more profitable route was to make worse vehicles that cost more. It was more profitable short term, but you can't act surprised when those short term shareholder capitalism philosophies end up killing you long term. I just reject your framing. You’ve made certain cars previously bought and sold to be illegal, and dislike that language because you endorse changing the standards. You do not enjoy the privilege of forcing others to adopt your perspective. Show nested quote +Oblade characterized it correctly that these companies slowly taught a subsect of the population that they needed or wanted a car that was fundamentally worse for them in every objective fashion. Making a better vehicle that could compete on foreign markets is hard, so don't do that. He has this weird take that its not the companies fault that the company makes mistakes. Companies have agency in capitalism, or they're not operating on a free market. The car companies made their choices knowing that they were too big to fail and that the pubic would just bail them out beacuse it would be worse for the country to let the corpses fall now instead of letting them zombie walk for another generation to solve. You appear to have completely missed the major section analogizing this to forcing pizza companies to lower the cheese content (indirectly through cholesterol controls) in smaller sizes of pizza, thereby forcing customers who like cheese to purchase larger pizzas (which are allowed to have more). The topic would be much easier if you were able to reduce this to corporate greed, but you ignore without discussion the impact on consumers through government. That’s a major aspect of the issue! It’s like telling the government to force computer gamers to buy less energy-consuming rigs, and expect gamers to just stop desiring them as a consequence. You think gamers would be content to blame computer parts manufacturers and video game makers should their upgrades be made illegal to purchase by government regulation? Maybe then you’d see consumers blame regulation, and justifiably so, that makes them buy reclassified parts to meet their desires for power and graphics. It appears that belief in the regulations themselves force you to make companies and capitalism a scapegoat for unintended consequences.
You can't try to force others to your perspective and then try to shame them at the same time. The previous cars bought and sold could still be made, they would have had to simply keep up with the same changing standards that have been changing for decades. This idea that it was simply impossible to keep making the cars people want is a farce.
You're again trying to place the blame of peoples car buying behavior directly onto them. The pizza companies could have gotten better quality cheese and made new kinds of pizza that didn't have the kind of cholesterol that the government wanted them to lower. Instead the pizza companies in this analogy saw that it would take effort to do those things so they simply stopped selling the smaller sizes of pizza.
Forcing a limit on the amount of energy that a rig can consume would be a good thing, we've seen how the creeping energy requirements of graphics cards is doing to the cables that power them. Trying to acept this axis of thought that the thing that gamers really care about in their computers is how much energy they consume and not things like price and reliability is silly.
No one is making capitalism a scapegoat for this. If you accept that capitalism is the moral judgment, then you would need to accept that the American car companies are morally wrong, as their products can't compete in other markets. Do you think the car companies have agency and are allowed to make choices? If you think that they do then their failings are their responsibility, at least partially. If you don't think that then again no one is blaming capitalism because capitalism isn't being employed in this situation.
You can't just defend capitalism when it works you have to be able to recognize when it fails, like now when shareholder capitalism prioritizes the short term gains that led to their bailout over their long term survival. They're zombie corporations walking into their graves beacuse thats what capitalism says that they have to do for loseing in the marketplace.
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