There's plenty to not like about the CCP, but their strategic investment in the country as a whole is impressive. It would be great to have that on our side as well but with the current state of things that is a non-starter.

We have a lot of propaganda to deprogram regarding it being evil to do that.

This cannot be emphasized enough. The rise in egg prices was such a thing. Avian flu was an impact, but not to the degree that egg prices increased. Those producers are reporting record profits.

The current admin is actively hostile to EVs, but I think the real problem was the chicken and egg issue of charging stations: they wouldn't be built because there wasn't enough demand for them and EVs would be limited in sales because they wouldn't have chargers to use on the road.

This is where Tesla made a huge difference with Supercharger stations. I am no fan of Elon, but that work was fundamental in making EVs viable in America.

Nevertheless, there seems to be zero buy-in from commercial players in the US. It's such a weird uphill battle.

I live in the US, but every summer I spend a month in Sweden, and the past two years I've rented EVs for the entire stay, and the buildout of chargers these past 4-5 years has been astonishing. It's gone from crap to fantastic in a very short time, and that's without massive government intervention or subsidies or screaming and cajoling.

Because in Sweden, the primary driver of charging stops along highways and in the cities are gas stations.

They already make all their profit from incidental purchases and not the gas itself, so them pivoting to EV charging stops makes perfect sense. They already have the infrastructure in place to sell you overpriced hotdogs and coffee and snacks for your road trip, they already have restrooms in place.

But they also do the same in the cities, it seems like every city gas station has also put up a couple of 350W charging stations. It's not half-assed, they mean business. They all see the writing on the wall, in neighbouring Norway EV's are 90+% of all new car sales, Sweden is at ~30% right now, and climbing, so gas stations will go out of business if they don't pivot to EV charging.

It's fundamental market economy forces at work, the kind of stuff that the US normally prides itself of.

So why is that not happening in the US?

I think it's because the incumbents do not know how to build competitive, desirable, affordable EVs. I'm just an armchair observer, but that makes a fair amount of sense.

The other part is that a lot of money is made in the production and sale of fuel and those players have significant influence in how things work -- this is evident in the Trump admin's demonization of renewables and going all in on fossil fuels.

Watching all this craziness from the sidelines is crazymaking and heartbreaking. We can only keep China at bay for so long, and then when the dam breaks the domestic auto makers are going to go down, along with the whole economic ecosystem that supports them. It doesn't have to be this way...

> authoritarianism is called for

Maybe it's a language thing, but authoritarianism is never called for.

Rule of law that is just and enforced fairly is what is called for.

One can take some hope that Germany recovered from its descent into fascism. But that was in a time where there was no social media and other brainwashing technologies embedded into the population.

My hopes are tempered, to say the least.

They also had 45 years of being split in half with one side being under a totalitarian government, and the other being partially administrated by three other countries with troops stationed there and the threat of thermonuclear war should ever the two sides get in a disagreement.

Also, many of the same ills that caused fascism the first time are starting to re-emerge. You can see this in the rise of AfD.

I think's actually worse than Brexit. The destruction of institutions and the industrial weaponization of partisanship has done significant damage. Add to that the tariff circus and the alienation of every single fucking foreign power with the lingering effect of demonstrating that long term trust is no longer possible.

We are on the cusp of a full fascist takeover and the only thing possibly preventing that is the incompetence and self-dealing at the top.

I expect to get downvoted by the partisans here, but I stand by my words and would love to be shown wrong with credible evidence, but that is extremely doubtful.

People in general tend to be very tribal -- it's in our DNA. When it's about "yay community!" its kinda nice but most the time it's "other tribe bad". I think this is a core to a lot of legislation.

Not having a tribe to belong to I find the whole thing simultaneously amusing and horrifying looking in from the outside.

> When it's about "yay community! its kinda nice

I don’t find it nice. I’ve gotten free stuff on multiple occasions from co-ethnics (lots of Bangladeshis working in hotels in the New York area). It doesn’t sit right with me, because at the same time we tell white people that ethnic favoritism is one of the worst social crimes. We would be very upset if they displayed the same kind of favoritism within their own group.

For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone. So either “yay community” sentiment is acceptable, or it’s not. It’s in my interest for such sentiment to not be acceptable for white Americans, so it follows that it must be unacceptable for me as well.

I hear you, I'm trying to find the bright side in "community" where people who don't know each other at least treat them as "brothers". The insular part is fucked and we need need to evolve past that.

> For rules to have legitimacy, they must apply equally to everyone.

Preach, brother! For this to happen we need to be prepared to examine the rules and how they are applied and call out when that isn't the case. Color, gender, faith, sexual orientation, origin, etc should never be qualifiers in how one is treated.

tribalism, Us vs. Them, racism, patriotism/nationalism, etc all seem closely related.

In terms of social life, and romantic life, it's interesting how heavily we rely on shared/common background, which tends to cause this clustering effect.

The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.

That's called the paradox of tolerance and it's not the gotcha that you think it is. If you think "mankind should overcome bigotry" is such a divisive statement that it splits people into "tribes," that reveals more about you than it does about me.

Did I even write anything about political contents of your signalling? I believe I didn't. I also didn't "reveal" anything particularly bad about you. I said that your urge to ring it is of the same social nature (aka tribal), we (humanity) have been exhibiting for all written and unwritten history, while the message itself expressing that you're above it makes it contradictory in ironic way. No matter what your signal proclaims, the process of tribal-building around it is most certainly divisive[1], with obligatory bit of outwards directed derision. So... then you reacted with suggesting I'm some sort of morally inferior outgroup voice. Which I think, proves the point you have missed.

[1] Which is not always bad. This is core mechanics of our competitive adaptiveness probably. It's just that being more aware of this gives us a chance to be better in more universal terms with other humans. Including in politics, of course.

P.S. If you felt offended, sorry! I can't say I care too much ngl, it's the internet after all, but it wasn't my intention either. I also didn't downvote you.

That others have learned a different lesson from history compared to your beliefs does not mean that they are ignorant of it.

You're projecting. I wrote a factual statement, that bigotry still exists in today's world, and you somehow took that as an assault on your values.

So what exactly is the different lesson you're referring to? Given that bigotry still exists, I can only take that lesson to mean "bigotry good."

I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.

You've got it backwards. That's a defeatist take that results in the exact kind of misery and cruelty documented in detail throughout history. Society prospers when people look past their differences and work together to improve things. It suffers when demagogues successfully divide the public and exploit the chaos to loot the resources required to improve the lives of everyone. Making punching bags out of a group of people is sure way to create instability.

I don't know what kind of games you could fit on a watch (Tamagotchi type things?), but getting kids to actually use things requires them seeing some sort of direct reward.

We bought cheapo dumb phones for our kids and they'd never remember to take them with them, but once we were forced to get them smart phones suddenly that was never a problem.

And by forced I mean the endless wearing down of the whining and crying and petulance because all their friends had smartphones. Ugh, one of many occasions where I failed as a parent.

Likely TrumpCoin is the correct answer.

Gold bars are his top preference.

Why would he want it back?