EPTOn December 17 2025 12:22 Sermokala wrote:
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 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.
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.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.
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 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.
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?
