|
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.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread |
On December 17 2025 12:22 Sermokala wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 10:48 dyhb wrote: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. 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. From my perspective, you reacted wildly to my characterization of making certain cars illegal to be sold. I don't force you to think about it as I do, so long as you recognize it as a valid way of thinking about things.
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. Well, I did try to force you to consider the downsides. I have failed. Would you agree that somewhere between cars/gaming rigs and forcing Sermokala onto certain mandated caloric intake limits and mandated exercise time, that governments are forced to consider the downsides of just mandating things to be improved? And the targets of their mandates to just make everything better for the good of society? I am deeply skeptical of your position and consider it far too utopian and dismissive of the costs to be adequately debated. But maybe our positions are just too conflicting to have debatable positions in the middle.
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. Agree to disagree. I want to tease out more of your opinions on this, but I can only go on what I've seen you say recently. Perhaps your former posts in this thread that I haven't read admit to some non-utopian thoughts on how companies are less than evil for adjusting to government mandates that force consumers into products they never wanted to buy until their previous products were made illegal by fiat. I believe that you assign too much blame for companies to give consumers what they want that also abide by the existing regulatory environment. That's scapegoating in my view.
You can't really talk about competition when you've outlawed the smaller trucks (their size and weight mean they don't meet the new fuel economy requirements, but their larger cousins do comply with fuel economy requirements). That's a basic market distortion. Once you enact that step, you've put survival and markets into a massively distorted field. I wish the pizza example helped you understand this, but you've just imagined a way to make "better quality cheese" that would comply with cholesterol requirements. With zero downsides admitted or imagined, you live in a world where government could mandate cholesterol requirements that force cheese-lovers to buy the XL pizzas, but it's the fault of the pizza companies for not inventing compliant cheeses to meet consumer demand. I find fault in this sort of utopian thinking. Is there any product you use in your life, personal or in work, where mandating that they be better on some axis would not result in negative consequences for the consumer and the manufacturer? One where you wouldn't just blame the manufacturer for being too greedy to not instantly improve their product as a response to the order?
|
I specifically chose the cholesterol example because you really can't have cheese without it. Like you can't have a combustion engine without making CO2.
You can take two points and draw an infinite straight line connecting them, but that doesn't mean there is a physical mechanism to create such a trend. That line doesn't have to match reality just because you can draw it. Then using it as a standard isn't realistic.
Like you have the Boeing 737. They extended the wings by 5% and got fuel savings of 5% per trip. Because of the extra lift and efficient winglets. Yet doubling the wings to save 100% of your fuel and fly on fumes in some kind of perpetual motion machine is not connected to physical reality. Even though that point lies on the same straight line fit. So demanding it and blaming Boeing for being too greedy to pull it off would be weird.
The other problem with emissions regulations is they are in an offset framework. Like companies that reach carbon neutrality by building a data center and then planting 3423823 trees. Trees are good of course. But for car manufacturers the emissions standards they have to meet are averaged over all the cars they sell. So you can make up for more gas chuggers with the hybrid end of your line.
What should really the point of fuel economy and emissions standards be? That a company can't get rich making, for example, a really cheap car, whose fuel economy is so bad, yet it's so cheap, that it's cheaper for the consumer to spend the difference on gas instead, because society will end up shouldering the burden of all the extra CO2 that guy emitted, we absorb the price while those two get the benefits. Same with emissions you don't want somebody doing their best to minimize CO2 but nobody buys their cars since they're too expensive, so the standards apply to the whole industry. They should be realistic. And if they have a goal they should be designed in a way that results in that goal.
Actual examples would help this not go in circles if you know if a specific comparable truck whose emissions have gotten worse since Obama's time with the same engine displacement/comparable engine or something. Meaning the company deliberately eschewed the goal of better emissions and better fuel economy.
|
On December 17 2025 16:12 oBlade wrote:
I specifically chose the cholesterol example because you really can't have cheese without it. Like you can't have a combustion engine without making CO2.
You can take two points and draw an infinite straight line connecting them, but that doesn't mean there is a physical mechanism to create such a trend. That line doesn't have to match reality just because you can draw it. Then using it as a standard isn't realistic.
Like you have the Boeing 737. They extended the wings by 5% and got fuel savings of 5% per trip. Because of the extra lift and efficient winglets. Yet doubling the wings to save 100% of your fuel and fly on fumes in some kind of perpetual motion machine is not connected to physical reality. Even though that point lies on the same straight line fit. So demanding it and blaming Boeing for being too greedy to pull it off would be weird.
The other problem with emissions regulations is they are in an offset framework. Like companies that reach carbon neutrality by building a data center and then planting 3423823 trees. Trees are good of course. But for car manufacturers the emissions standards they have to meet are averaged over all the cars they sell. So you can make up for more gas chuggers with the hybrid end of your line.
What should really the point of fuel economy and emissions standards be? That a company can't get rich making, for example, a really cheap car, whose fuel economy is so bad, yet it's so cheap, that it's cheaper for the consumer to spend the difference on gas instead, because society will end up shouldering the burden of all the extra CO2 that guy emitted, we absorb the price while those two get the benefits. Same with emissions you don't want somebody doing their best to minimize CO2 but nobody buys their cars since they're too expensive, so the standards apply to the whole industry. They should be realistic. And if they have a goal they should be designed in a way that results in that goal.
Actual examples would help this not go in circles if you know if a specific comparable truck whose emissions have gotten worse since Obama's time with the same engine displacement/comparable engine or something. Meaning the company deliberately eschewed the goal of better emissions and better fuel economy.
That's a very long post to set up a strawman to make it seem the people who create the standards have never heard of diminishing returns. They have. You're wrong.
|
On December 17 2025 16:38 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 16:12 oBlade wrote:
I specifically chose the cholesterol example because you really can't have cheese without it. Like you can't have a combustion engine without making CO2.
You can take two points and draw an infinite straight line connecting them, but that doesn't mean there is a physical mechanism to create such a trend. That line doesn't have to match reality just because you can draw it. Then using it as a standard isn't realistic.
Like you have the Boeing 737. They extended the wings by 5% and got fuel savings of 5% per trip. Because of the extra lift and efficient winglets. Yet doubling the wings to save 100% of your fuel and fly on fumes in some kind of perpetual motion machine is not connected to physical reality. Even though that point lies on the same straight line fit. So demanding it and blaming Boeing for being too greedy to pull it off would be weird.
The other problem with emissions regulations is they are in an offset framework. Like companies that reach carbon neutrality by building a data center and then planting 3423823 trees. Trees are good of course. But for car manufacturers the emissions standards they have to meet are averaged over all the cars they sell. So you can make up for more gas chuggers with the hybrid end of your line.
What should really the point of fuel economy and emissions standards be? That a company can't get rich making, for example, a really cheap car, whose fuel economy is so bad, yet it's so cheap, that it's cheaper for the consumer to spend the difference on gas instead, because society will end up shouldering the burden of all the extra CO2 that guy emitted, we absorb the price while those two get the benefits. Same with emissions you don't want somebody doing their best to minimize CO2 but nobody buys their cars since they're too expensive, so the standards apply to the whole industry. They should be realistic. And if they have a goal they should be designed in a way that results in that goal.
Actual examples would help this not go in circles if you know if a specific comparable truck whose emissions have gotten worse since Obama's time with the same engine displacement/comparable engine or something. Meaning the company deliberately eschewed the goal of better emissions and better fuel economy. That's a very long post to set up a strawman to make it seem the people who create the standards have never heard of diminishing returns. They have. You're wrong.
Thanks for jumping in. If their regulatory framework is so well-conceived, then what is the problem exactly?
|
A whole lot of competing interest. Good will usually gets the short end of the stick imo.
QA/QC versus production vs consumers vs legislation vs ...
If you're lucky you'll get a monodirectional approach but what ushally tends to happen is that many people want different things.
Easy analogy is Nimbyism: give people homes, only not here.
At least that's how I experience it, oerhaps I'm too low in the tree to really understand higher level strategical corpo stuff.
|
On December 17 2025 17:48 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 16:38 Acrofales wrote:On December 17 2025 16:12 oBlade wrote:
I specifically chose the cholesterol example because you really can't have cheese without it. Like you can't have a combustion engine without making CO2.
You can take two points and draw an infinite straight line connecting them, but that doesn't mean there is a physical mechanism to create such a trend. That line doesn't have to match reality just because you can draw it. Then using it as a standard isn't realistic.
Like you have the Boeing 737. They extended the wings by 5% and got fuel savings of 5% per trip. Because of the extra lift and efficient winglets. Yet doubling the wings to save 100% of your fuel and fly on fumes in some kind of perpetual motion machine is not connected to physical reality. Even though that point lies on the same straight line fit. So demanding it and blaming Boeing for being too greedy to pull it off would be weird.
The other problem with emissions regulations is they are in an offset framework. Like companies that reach carbon neutrality by building a data center and then planting 3423823 trees. Trees are good of course. But for car manufacturers the emissions standards they have to meet are averaged over all the cars they sell. So you can make up for more gas chuggers with the hybrid end of your line.
What should really the point of fuel economy and emissions standards be? That a company can't get rich making, for example, a really cheap car, whose fuel economy is so bad, yet it's so cheap, that it's cheaper for the consumer to spend the difference on gas instead, because society will end up shouldering the burden of all the extra CO2 that guy emitted, we absorb the price while those two get the benefits. Same with emissions you don't want somebody doing their best to minimize CO2 but nobody buys their cars since they're too expensive, so the standards apply to the whole industry. They should be realistic. And if they have a goal they should be designed in a way that results in that goal.
The
Actual examples would help this not go in circles if you know if a specific comparable truck whose emissions have gotten worse since Obama's time with the same engine displacement/comparable engine or something. Meaning the company deliberately eschewed the goal of better emissions and better fuel economy. That's a very long post to set up a strawman to make it seem the people who create the standards have never heard of diminishing returns. They have. You're wrong. Thanks for jumping in. If their regulatory framework is so well-conceived, then what is the problem exactly?
The automotive lobby worked tirelessly to torpedo this goal you posted and thus presumably agree with:
Same with emissions you don't want somebody doing their best to minimize CO2 but nobody buys their cars since they're too expensive, so the standards apply to the whole industry. They should be realistic. And if they have a goal they should be designed in a way that results in that goal.
They got exemptions and loopholes and backdoors implemented that assured they could continue on in pretty much the same exact way they had been since the 90s: marketing bigger=better to American people and ignoring development of fuel efficiency and emission reduction in long-standing favourite models.
Compare that to the EU, by no means a paragon of freedom from automotive industry lobbying. But the Ford Fiesta, probably the most popular US car in Europe (maybe the Focus wins) is a perfectly good and fuel efficient car. It is just designed for European markets where fuel prices are high and regulations are stricter. You could say Europeans drive less than Americans and therefore don't need the powerful cars that Americans do. But I counter with Brazil, which does have its share of trucks and other off-road monsters, but most people drive small fuel efficient cars with scaled down engines that (by law) drive on biofuel mixtures. The city layouts are far more similar to the IS and distances between places just as vast. When I lived there, the minimum I drove to go somewhere at a weekend was 2 hours (the beach: 3 hours, inland wild nature of SP state: 2-4 hours, cultural towns of Minas Gervais: 2-3 hours, hiking in mountains 4+ hours). That's without counting traffic. A friend who lived in São Paulo had a daily commute of an hour each way (although more due to congestion than distance). People who lived in suburbia had longer drives.
|
The US car culture, just like US gun culture is not something to be questioned, it's been the subject to the same lobbying and propaganda efforts just from different sources, it's obvious from the outside looking in that it's insane, inefficient, harmful and stupid, but Americans are still convinced they are right because reasons.
No one really needs a car with an engine over 2 L, you can easily get 200 HP form such cars today while maintaining good efficiency and you can drive well above the speed limit on highways using such cars, as previously mentioned, the towing and transport capacities that Americans like to tout as reasons for need for the big trucks are mostly bullshit because vans and minivans are a much better bang for the buck and are actually functional.
For reference, the most popular trucks in USA average engine sizes between 5 and 7 liters.
On average, US cars (2021 data) have a 3 liter 250 HP engines.
On average, EU cars (2022 data) have 1,5 L engines around 100-125 HP.
Those sizes don't directly correlate to emissions because US ones also have lower emission standards, so they are much more pollutant.
The fuel mileage is around 5-6 L/100 KM in EU and 8-9 L/100 KM in the US.
There is still plenty of fast and powerful cars in Europe, the difference is that almost all American cars are bigger and have worse economy because of, in my opinion American car culture, which is, again, to me, just like the gun culture harmful and stupid.
|
Not just fuel efficiency and power, the big pickups with hoods that come to your shoulders means that if you hit anyone they are just dead, whereas EU cars have actual safety requirements for pedestrians in collisions.
road traffic deaths (per population) in the US are 3-4x higher then in the EU at least partially as a result of this.
|
freedom is not free. gun policy, individualism as a religion... regarding cars the worst examples are like "who are you to tell me I cannot drive a gas guzzler where I make a chimney out of the exhaust and blow it in your face as I speed away"...
punishing the "makers" with taxes while the "takers" on SNAP are the actual problem. . .
going "full freedom" borders or goes beyond insanity/stupidity. finding a decent balance is hard in comparison.
but let's not pretend everything's great in the EU either, we "needed" the US to wake us up of our "Diesel stupor". as great as the Diesel engine still is/was - Volkswagen AG did irreparable damage to its image by "cheating" to reach emission standards. while calling everything A-ok.
the EU agencies/national car clubs that were testing the emission standards of the engines under highly dubious and unrealistic conditions did not look so great either.
consumer protection agencies/law firms/people employing the former and angry that they bought a car with an engine not up to the standards of the law are - to this day - fighting for reparations across major EU countries/markets.
this incredible VAG/EU scandal happened under Obama II in 2015.
funny thing was that over the years many more car brands were found to do similar things to "tune" their engines to the emission standard tests as they are very specific compared to real world conditions, only by then no one really cared anymore and Volkswagen was the undisputed poster child.
now... did the US do this for the good of the environment? or was it an easy way to make a point based in good faith and maybe help a struggling national car industry? who can say really 
......................................................................................................
to something else, not in the least less worrying...
Miriam Adelson pledges $250 million for a third Trump term at White House Hanukkah party@JPost
US President Donald Trump said that Miriam Adelson pledged $250 million, as the pair teased a third term for the president at the White House annual Hanukkah candle-lighting on Tuesday.
Adelson, an Israeli-American philanthropist, was the wife of the late billionaire Sheldon Adelson and a prominent donor to Trump's 2024 campaign.
Adelson spoke at the Hanukkah event, noting that she had spoken with Trump's lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, about the legality of a third Trump term.
“Alan, I agree with you,” Adelson announced, then turned to Trump and said, “So, we can do it, think about it.”
After the crowd began chanting "four more years" in response, Adelson turned to Trump and whispered something, after which Trump announced to the crowd, “She said, ‘Think about it, I’ll give you another $250 million.”
To which Adelson responded, "I will give."
I think they mean business you guys.
|
|
|
On December 18 2025 00:04 pmh wrote:https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-leads-jd-vance-for-first-time-in-2028-election-matchup-poll-11212339The democrats are gearing up to lose another presidential election in an ultimate effort to keep the republicans in power. Vance has zero change he would lose against a random dude pulled from the street. But he obviously would win against aoc. The system is beyond repair. It is at the point that i hope the democrats make aoc their candidate just to be able to see them lose again. Apearently there is still room for things to get much worse.
Why do you think AOC would lose the general election to JD Vance (assuming she wins the Democratic primary)?
|
|
|
On December 18 2025 00:22 pmh wrote:
Nothing personal against aoc but she would be a horrible candidate on the national stage as i see it. The fact that she is a women is one thing (unfortunatly) but its far from the only reason. It will not be easy but i do think a women could win the presidency if its the right women with the right image.
Its many things combined. She has a progressive image but its the wrong kind of progressive image. ts the progressive image that is easy to rail against for people. The angry and upset , and in some way naive , kind of progressive. Aoc is the stereo type progressive that americans love to hate. Mamdani has a way better image when it comes to beeing progressive and sanders also is way better (though he is to old now). I just dont see her image ever working out on the national stage but maybe i am wrong.
Can you elaborate more on the key differences that you see between Mamdani's image/approach and AOC's? What does Mamdani do right that AOC does wrong? Just happy approach vs. angry approach? Because Sanders does both of those.
|
|
|
AOC has a great image. She's sexy. She only has to look a little sultry sometimes and do some wordplay and all the sexist coomer (boomers) gooners will flock to make her the powermommy she deserves to be.
But if they want to be serious, she's still the best. She's young, has a coherent idea on how the coutry should be run and is articulate.
She's proven herself already and is concerned about hearing everyone's voice. I think she stomps Vance in a head to head. Easy.
|
On December 17 2025 15:28 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 12:22 Sermokala wrote:On December 17 2025 10:48 dyhb wrote: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. 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. From my perspective, you reacted wildly to my characterization of making certain cars illegal to be sold. I don't force you to think about it as I do, so long as you recognize it as a valid way of thinking about things. Show nested quote +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. Well, I did try to force you to consider the downsides. I have failed. Would you agree that somewhere between cars/gaming rigs and forcing Sermokala onto certain mandated caloric intake limits and mandated exercise time, that governments are forced to consider the downsides of just mandating things to be improved? And the targets of their mandates to just make everything better for the good of society? I am deeply skeptical of your position and consider it far too utopian and dismissive of the costs to be adequately debated. But maybe our positions are just too conflicting to have debatable positions in the middle. Show nested quote +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. Agree to disagree. I want to tease out more of your opinions on this, but I can only go on what I've seen you say recently. Perhaps your former posts in this thread that I haven't read admit to some non-utopian thoughts on how companies are less than evil for adjusting to government mandates that force consumers into products they never wanted to buy until their previous products were made illegal by fiat. I believe that you assign too much blame for companies to give consumers what they want that also abide by the existing regulatory environment. That's scapegoating in my view. You can't really talk about competition when you've outlawed the smaller trucks (their size and weight mean they don't meet the new fuel economy requirements, but their larger cousins do comply with fuel economy requirements). That's a basic market distortion. Once you enact that step, you've put survival and markets into a massively distorted field. I wish the pizza example helped you understand this, but you've just imagined a way to make "better quality cheese" that would comply with cholesterol requirements. With zero downsides admitted or imagined, you live in a world where government could mandate cholesterol requirements that force cheese-lovers to buy the XL pizzas, but it's the fault of the pizza companies for not inventing compliant cheeses to meet consumer demand. I find fault in this sort of utopian thinking. Is there any product you use in your life, personal or in work, where mandating that they be better on some axis would not result in negative consequences for the consumer and the manufacturer? One where you wouldn't just blame the manufacturer for being too greedy to not instantly improve their product as a response to the order?
Yes, and from my perspective the idea that the government is at fault for the car companies not making cars that are compatable with global markets is wild. That you can see better cars sold in america that correspond with american car laws that are made by foriegn makers disqualifies the idea that the government is at fault for the car companies situation.
The government has to mandate that things get better, beacuse thats the only way things get better. Companies can't be trusted to act in the public good when they're answerable to the few instead of the many. I'm not dismissive that there are downsides to having standards, and that some standards are opressive, but at the same time the very clear performance of american car acompanies in places that don't have the same laws as the united states has to be considered if the fault for the american car companies decline is beacuse of american car laws or if its the responsiblity of these car companies to continue to innovate if they want to survive in capatalism.
Look at Kaizen JIT and other innovations that had to come from outside the united states. Brushless motors also came from foreign areas. The best thing americans have produced is exoskeletons for workers and even that hasn't been implimented nearly on the scale that it would make a difference.
I don't see companies as evil or not evil, I see them as no different then wild animals. They have very clear very obvious modivations and the ones that survive follow those modivations. You cannot cry about killing a bear that starts eating humans but its also not that bears fault if humans keep trying to kidnap its babies. If the car companies deserved to live they would have made the cars that people wanted, they are failing to do this beacuse of their choices.
Again, the characterilzation that smaller trucks have been outlawed is false. You can't purchase cars that don't have seat belts and other basic saftey features. The legal standards for the product you can sale was updated the same as the code for buildings is updated all the time.
The best example is electric vehicles. Tesla did not make good vehicles, they just made a vehicle that the other car companies simply failed to develop. There is no sigifigant technological advancement that has made electric trucks more viable in 2025 than they were 10 years ago, there was just no intrest from the car companies in making them.
The pizza companies are free to make pizzas that aren't filled with poor quality cheese, they can choose to make smaller pizzas that contain different ingredients and different styles to service the same market. Isntead in your example the pizza companies are not at fault for instead abandoning the market and simple making larger more profitable pizzas instead.
These standards have not come overnight, this process is decades in the making. The idea that the companies didn't have a generation to plan for increaseing emission standards is a farce.
The best example of this is the Prius. Probably one of the best new designs for a vehicle in a while. The second generation Prius contained almost no wear parts making them insanely reliable and long lasting. They're also an incredibly cheap car. So why do chinese electric car companies make the best electric cars in the world? Tesla didn't design a new car, they took the existing design of a vehicle and swapped out the parts in it. The F-150 lighting has more ultility as a vehicle than anyone knows what to do with. Instead they fucked around for a generation with just making it from aluminum.
|
On December 17 2025 16:38 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2025 16:12 oBlade wrote:
I specifically chose the cholesterol example because you really can't have cheese without it. Like you can't have a combustion engine without making CO2.
You can take two points and draw an infinite straight line connecting them, but that doesn't mean there is a physical mechanism to create such a trend. That line doesn't have to match reality just because you can draw it. Then using it as a standard isn't realistic.
Like you have the Boeing 737. They extended the wings by 5% and got fuel savings of 5% per trip. Because of the extra lift and efficient winglets. Yet doubling the wings to save 100% of your fuel and fly on fumes in some kind of perpetual motion machine is not connected to physical reality. Even though that point lies on the same straight line fit. So demanding it and blaming Boeing for being too greedy to pull it off would be weird.
The other problem with emissions regulations is they are in an offset framework. Like companies that reach carbon neutrality by building a data center and then planting 3423823 trees. Trees are good of course. But for car manufacturers the emissions standards they have to meet are averaged over all the cars they sell. So you can make up for more gas chuggers with the hybrid end of your line.
What should really the point of fuel economy and emissions standards be? That a company can't get rich making, for example, a really cheap car, whose fuel economy is so bad, yet it's so cheap, that it's cheaper for the consumer to spend the difference on gas instead, because society will end up shouldering the burden of all the extra CO2 that guy emitted, we absorb the price while those two get the benefits. Same with emissions you don't want somebody doing their best to minimize CO2 but nobody buys their cars since they're too expensive, so the standards apply to the whole industry. They should be realistic. And if they have a goal they should be designed in a way that results in that goal.
Actual examples would help this not go in circles if you know if a specific comparable truck whose emissions have gotten worse since Obama's time with the same engine displacement/comparable engine or something. Meaning the company deliberately eschewed the goal of better emissions and better fuel economy. That's a very long post to set up a strawman to make it seem the people who create the standards have never heard of diminishing returns. They have. You're wrong.
His question is also a bizzare gotcha. "Can you show me an example of a company selling a product that isn't compliant with the law? didn't think so, checkmate atheist."
|
On December 18 2025 00:25 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:Show nested quote +On December 18 2025 00:22 pmh wrote:
Nothing personal against aoc but she would be a horrible candidate on the national stage as i see it. The fact that she is a women is one thing (unfortunatly) but its far from the only reason. It will not be easy but i do think a women could win the presidency if its the right women with the right image.
Its many things combined. She has a progressive image but its the wrong kind of progressive image. ts the progressive image that is easy to rail against for people. The angry and upset , and in some way naive , kind of progressive. Aoc is the stereo type progressive that americans love to hate. Mamdani has a way better image when it comes to beeing progressive and sanders also is way better (though he is to old now). I just dont see her image ever working out on the national stage but maybe i am wrong.
Can you elaborate more on the key differences that you see between Mamdani's image/approach and AOC's? What does Mamdani do right that AOC does wrong? Just happy approach vs. angry approach? Because Sanders does both of those.
She's a Latina. Americans don't vote for women and they don't vote for brown people. That's all you need to know.
|
On December 18 2025 01:27 Sermokala wrote:If the car companies deserved to live they would have made the cars that people wanted, they are failing to do this because of their choices. American car companies figured it was easier to make people want the cars they were making, then make the cars people wanted.
And that is why Americans now commute in big off-road pickup trucks that never haul cargo or go off-road.
|
it'd be cool if Vance et al can transform the US education system in the ways he alluded to when complimenting the Swiss apprenticeship system//Dual Education System.
the dual system i went through worked great for all levels of students.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
