This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The US: less electric cars, no high speed rail network, terrible infrastructure that's crumbling but at least you have a war that made gas prices soar.
It's almost as though it's a backwards country, full of stupid people or something
They made their bed, now let them sleep in it
Was doing enterprise IoT consulting a while back. Asked why they needed to collect all the data? Nobody could answer. Someone finally said, so we can analyze usage patterns. I asked, "OK, but why?" Finally, someone said: "So we know when and where to advertise our sales."
Also did automotive consulting work. Connected vehicles. Asked the same questions. I'm not too worried about my car collecting a lot of data. It's so they can plan their next sales event.
Not that it's OK to violate privacy. Just saying, the reason may be way more banal than we think
Yeah that's why they collect data, because it's money. What they don't talk about is that somewhere along the line they realize they got bunch of data that'd be very valuable to others too, so they'll sell it. Also, they don't really care if gov agencies come ask for it
And there are hackers, too. And foreign security agencies.
What are you talking about, I love paying for Google maps premium...
I love Open Street Map.
Nothing becomes affordable in the US. We run on capitalism. How would oligarchs make more money if they lowered prices?
But capturing consumers, establishing monopolies, and stifling innovation? Hell yeah, let's burn this place down! (Literally, like, sea levels are rising, water is becoming scarce, species and ecosystems are going extinct, etc)
America's extreme form of capitalism isn't the the only form of capitalism.
With proper regulation and governnent incentives it is possible to make capitalism work to benefit the average Joe, and not just the oligarchs.
Europe for example runs on that capitalist model, and it works pretty well. You get the benefits of capitalism when it runs as it is supposed to, together with the benefits of the welfare state.
I'm sorry, but I have to vehemently disagree.
Europe is a useful example but not in the way you think.
The Nordic and Western European mixed economies you're pointing to weren't built by capitalism behaving itself. They were built by strong labor movements, socialist parties, and the credible threat of communist revolution making concessions politically necessary for capital to survive. The welfare state wasn't capitalism working as intended but was capitalism being forced to share under duress. The moment that pressure lifted, the erosion started.
And it is eroding. Housing crises in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin. Healthcare privatization creeping into NHS and other systems. Austerity gutting social programs across Southern Europe. The same private equity firms extracting the same rents from the same essential services. The guardrails aren't holding because capital accumulates political influence the same way it accumulates capital. Continuously, patiently, and structurally. It doesn't need to win every fight but instead keeps the pressure on, just aa it has in the US.
The US didn't fail to regulate capitalism in that Americans are uniquely stupid or uniquely corrupt (they are plenty of both though, I'm American, I know). It failed because capital had enough runway to capture the regulatory apparatus before the guardrails were fully built. Europe had a head start on the welfare state and is watching it get dismantled anyway. The difference is timeline rather than trajectory.
So yes, regulated capitalism produces better outcomes than what we have. Which is authoritarianism, greatest wealth disparity, lowest health outcomes, etc etc. The question is whether those outcomes are stable without continuously fighting the same structural forces that produced American oligarchy in the first place. History suggests they aren't. Which means the guardrails aren't a solution. They're a holding action that requires winning the same political fight indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its advantages over time.
At some point you have to address the root, not just keep patching the symptoms. And that root, friend, is capitalism. A system designed to extract profit. The foundation is to amass profit, and the only way to do that is through exploitation. Capitalism rewards the most narcissistic, the most unempathetic, the most willing to exploit. And whenever capital amasses, it just becomes a simple math problem where buying influence results in deregulation which results in greater profits.
We've a planet full of life, nature, food, wonder, and instead we created debt, war, and capiralism. How can such a flawed system ever be implemented "correctly?" Instead, the American way is the intended implementation of capitalism. It always was.
The welfare state isn't capitalism working as intended. That wasn't what I was saying, nor am I saying that the welfare state is a result of capitalism. That was ultimately a result of workers fighting for their rights.
What I am saying is that the government not leaning heavily into laisez-faire capitalism, and them interfering in capitalism where needed, is what is making the European capitalist model largely work as capitalism is supposed to work. The government is there to prevent negative externalities and prevent monopolies from forming.
Ultimately the "correct" implementation of capitalism doesn't exist. Only one which creates the most benefit for the people while reducing its negative outcomes.
It is a tool you can use in places where it makes sense to use it in order to drive innovation and lower costs to consumers.
The government can set regulations in order to guide capitalism to that outcome, and can directly interfere to do things themselves in industries where it deems fit to do so.
Edit: Fixed a typo in my first sentence, making me say the exact opposite of what I was trying to say..
We're closer than we were, and I appreciate you engaging honestly. But I think the "capitalism as a tool" framing is where we still fundamentally diverge.
A tool is neutral. A hammer doesn't have preferences on what it impacts. Capitalism does. It has a built-in optimization function that rewards specific behaviors regardless of who wields it or what guardrails are placed around it. It rewards the accumulation of capital. It rewards externalizing costs onto workers, communities, and ecosystems because those costs don't appear on a balance sheet. It rewards buying political influence because the return on investment is demonstrably higher than almost any other capital deployment. That's the system executing its own logic correctly.
You're describing a government that "interferes where needed" to correct those outcomes. I'm asking who controls that government and why we should expect it to maintain that independence indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its political influence the same way it compounds its capital. Europe is the test case and the results are coming in. The interference is losing ground. European governments haven't stopped wanting to intervene but because the structural pressure never stops and the political will to resist it has to be continuously regenerated while capital only has to keep pushing, it is a system you'll never win against.
You said it yourself: the correct implementation doesn't exist. Only one that minimizes harm. I'd push that further: a system whose internal logic actively works against minimizing harm isn't a tool, but instead a system doing what it was designed to do. The harm is the output of the optimization function running correctly.
At some point "we need better regulation" becomes "we need to replace the thing that keeps eating the regulation." That's where I am. With as much abundance as we have within the world, why must we restrict ourselves to a single system of economics that has been proven to fail, that is both anti-democratic and anti-life?
As is often said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, eh?
We are in the middle of another mass extinction event. Holocene extinction event; brought to you by the rich and powerful
We're only holding ourselves back, at some point the subsidies for oil aren't going to be enough. We'll be watching the rest of the world continue on into the future that we thought we were heading towards
In April 2023, the Joe Biden administration set a target to ensure 56% of all new cars sold in the U.S. by 2032 would be electric.
and we would've been able to easily achieve that if he didn't also slap 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs.
Subsiding and supporting domestic EV manufacturing while tariffing Chinese EV's which are also subsided heavily is politically intelligent. He isnt hurting the EV transition. He wanted it to happen and he wanted to retain the manufacturing capability and jobs.
What trump did is the stupid version, removing EV subsides and tarrifing Chinese EVs.
At the end of the day EV or no EV doesnt matter china is polluting the planet so much we'll never ever undo the damage. We are past the point of no return and Indian still hasnt industrialised.
Where is my coal powered car????
Wait, coal is much too new-fangled. I found a gem for you in my Nazi granduncles garage: A car running on wood gas!. For a cheap 100,000 $ it's yours!
Coalie crew represent!
Electric cars were not meant to save the environment. They were meant to save the auto industry.
How is my $12k used EV city car, getting charged on 10kw of solar on the roof, not making at least a minuscule dent in the clarity of the air?
How typical do you believe your situation to be?
I see more Cybertrucks and electric Humvees than I do Nissan Leafs (Leaves?).
Fwiw, I'm not denying that they are less harmful to the environment than gas cars, rather that the stated motive is bullshit. If they were truly serious about the environment, they would also be promoting WFH. A mile not driven at all is even better than an electrically-driven mile.
Yeah, but fortunately there's a whole world outside of 'Murica where we drive normal EVs because we're not trying to compensate for our inadequacies
The problem is that your stance is needlessly binary. Just because they were intended to "save the auto industry" doesn't mean that they're not also better for the environment.
The narrative that the manufacturing of EV's is just as bad as the pollution from ICE vehicles has long been debunked and even if you're charging from home via the grid, that doesn't mean it's environmentally bad, the push towards renewable energy production is ongoing.
The US is vastly behind the times but that's not the fault of EVs. Take the UK for example, which is producing more and more green energy. It stopped burning coal years ago and regularly runs almost entirely on pure renewables. That means EV's charging there are regularly being charged from renewables, even when pulling from the grid.
Increasingly common in countries other than the USA.
For example Australia has a huge uptake in home rooftop solar and now home batteries due to gov subsidies, and thanks to the USA fucking with the Iran and consequently severly affecting our fuel supply, EV sales are now taking off.
We threw the auto industry a bone and the American companies still ficked it up lmao
