Bruh it’s a showerthought, not a doctorate thesis

Now now. I said everyone thinks they are special but that doesn’t make it true. I absolutely did NOT say that no one is special. That’s a different statement.

I’m not expressing any opinion one way or the other on this instance, but I think we might want to keep in mind that with hindsight, predictive signals can always be pointed to. It says Israeli authorities heard of the plan but didn’t consider the plan plausible. How many plans do they discard as implausible? Is this something they do 5 times a day, where they were 100% correct until this day, when they were only 4/5 correct? I think it would take a lot of knowledge about intelligence work and these particular reports to really decide if a gross mistake was made or worse, there’s complicity.

I’m not excusing Israel or making claims one way or the other. But I recall this with 9/11 and other episodes too: with hindsight we can always find signals that were there but didn’t get the attention they needed. This doesn’t always signal wilfull negligence.

Didn’t I just say that everyone thinks they are special? I’m quite aware that they do. That doesn’t make it true.

deleted by creator

It’s just more pronounced in EVs right now because there’s been a huge rush to build EVs and a lot of manufacturers are in their first or second year of offering them. Tesla fares relatively well because they’ve pumped out millions of cars for several years and they focus only on EVs. Meanwhile the EV shitboxes being rushed out by Ford and Chrysler are… shitboxes.

The brand graph is useless here because many of these brands make gas and EV cars. I want to know how the Nissan Leaf fares, for example. They’ve been making it for years. Has it reached the same reliability as other Nissan cars?

I mean not surprising since we’ve had over a century of time for everyone and their uncle Bob to open an auto repair shop for traditional cars.

Much though it might seem EVs are going main stream, it’s still very much in progress and will be for quite a while. They should be treated as a new technology not an immediate replacement for all.

Thats my big concern is that GM will overdo their shift to EVs and lose some money when they overproduce them, then abandon the tech completely because “it didn’t work out” or “people didn’t want them.”

You sound white and privileged and trying to shove pro-gun arguments into the mouths of minorities because you think that’s some kind of uno-reverse card to liberals.

Oh he didn’t ignore it, he gave you some enthusiastic whataboutism concerning ladders.

I am in fact incredibly careful around ladders, fwiw. And power tools. But those things have constructive applications, where the gun is by its nature destructive.

Even if you chose them, did you simply chose from the presented options?

“But not me!”

—everyone

Yes but supply chain disruption applied to virtually everything, yet we don’t see the US seeking to become entirely vertically integrated for every good and resource. Supply chain disruptions of pandemic magnitude would also disrupt US production, anyway. So I don’t know if your observation really adds anything. No, the US is spinning up chip foundries because of what is happening between China and Taiwan, which is fueled by bald Chinese imperialism and old scores that the CCP wants to settle with the PRC. It’s humans being assholes at the highest level.

I mean virtually all the hardware our culture runs on is less than 100 years old.

Exactly. We all adapt to what’s around us. Which, for me, explains how prisoners can eventually come to help their kidnappers. People consider Stockholm Syndrome incredibly strange, unexplainable. But it’s the basic thing we are built to do.

I was thinking about a character in a TV show. He’s a Christian monk who is captured by Viking raiders and kept as a slave. He’s still quite young though. And while he has no freedom, he isn’t whipped or treated like an animal, he just lives as a very low status person. Eventually, after years, he starts wanting to improve his status with the tribe around him. Maybe he’s tired of being at the bottom. Maybe he’s just starving for some kind of human connection. When they come under threat, he asks to join the Viking fighting force. This seems like pretty clear Stockholm Syndrome to me - fighting for the people who enslaved you.

But is it really that different from waking up as a child in a certain culture and over time, absorbing its ways, and feeling the desire to grow your status in that society? How many people absorb their home culture’s ways because they think about them and deem them best? It’s a process of absorption.

So yes, while there’s always a little sass and irony in showerthoughts, I think there’s a connection here with pondering. You didn’t elaborate on your “yeah no” comment at all. Perhaps now you will?

Ding dong, the bitch is dead.

Now there’s one protest I wouldn’t mind seeing bulldozed with tanks.

I think you’d be surprised how much of even modern capacities can be traced back to simple things like the availability of water and shipping access. Sure, Taiwan isn’t a world leader in chips because of their weather today. But their climate is key to their population size via how many people they can feed, which is quite weather dependent. Having robust food supply is what allows a society to specialize its labor into technology, industry, and modernization. And why is Taiwan in an entrepreneurial mode to make such investments at all? Because of their geography - as an island they were not so easily taken by the CCP and the PRC have been able to hold out there for many decades.

Basically, yes, it’s just several decades of investment that has led to their dominance. But they were only in a position to do all of that because of their starting conditions. They played their conditions masterfully. But for example the DRC couldn’t go do the same thing tomorrow.

Yes I’m well aware. I’m not blaming the Americans at all. They’re just being smart and trying to prepare. China are being major motherfuckers about it all.

This really saddens me and shows how we’re going backwards as a species… When we study history we always learn about “trade routes” and when we learn economics we hear all about “free trade” and I never really understood the way that word “trade” was being used.

Here’s what it means: wherever you are in the world you have different conditions: natural resources, weather, population count, sea access, etc and these conditions make you better at some things than others.

Probably, your unique set of conditions makes you the best in the world at one or two things. What if everybody in the world only focused on the one or two things they’re best at? And then we all shared around our products?

That’s “trade.”

Taiwan has obviously crushed the chip manufacturing industry. They’re simply the best at it. Ideally the US should just let them be the best and focus our energy on other things that we can be the best at.

But because we can’t come together as one global people, and have all these asinine geopolitical dramas, now the US has to make its OWN chips. Because Russia is an imperial asshole, they don’t get to enjoy American good and have to settle for their own second rate shit.

We talk about “chip independence” like it’s a good thing, but it only is in the context of these insoluble geopolitical conflicts. If we could get along peacefully, it wouldn’t be necessary for every country to master every industry. We could all specialize and then benefit from each others strengths.

Instead we tussle stupidly with each other like kids in the back seat of a car. And that car is our planet Earth, which we are ruining all the while as we obsess over whether someone is one inch on our side.