SUVs typically have less cargo space than SWs

An electric SUV is the stupidest thing. They have shit range. There’s an electric SW from Nio with 1000 km of range.

Call it American Party X and we have a deal.

A lot of these arguments are not logical.

Yes you can have large PHEVs, but the trend for bigger stupider cars is independent of power source. You can get a PHEV Renault Clio and it’s 20% lighter than the smaller electric Renault 5. And uses 80% less precious minerals because you have a smaller battery.

The gas engine needs maintenance of course, but you do use it much less than the electric motor, requiring much less maintenance than a normal car.

The fact that people buy PHEVs for the tax incentives and use them as gas vehicles is stupid and annoying, but that’s not a fault in the technology itself.

Plug-in hybrids are ideal. They get the cleanliness and efficiency of regen breaking, the efficiency of an electric motor, with the much smaller footprint of a battery 15% the weight of an ev battery. They effectively suppress range anxiety while still heavily incentivizing electricity use instead of gasoline. And when they do run on gasoline in exceptional circumstances, they are running more efficiently than conventional gas cars.

Eurotunnel was not state owned. Yes it can technically go bankrupt, but it won’t.

Well Eurostar is a state owned company. It can’t go bankrupt. But if it starts losing a lot of money, it can be scaled down.

Well it’s both. Which tells you something about the French. Organized and intolerant to this kind of shit.

Yeah but there’s no more “get out of the rer at the wrong stop and you’re fucked” at least !

They unified the ticket system last year, you can go anywhere with one ticket now.

Barely made a dent commercially, but put the company in a difficult financial situation where build quality was a bit lower and cars a bit more expensive for a while.

The point of these punishments should never be to kill a company, but to hurt investors, who are ultimately responsible for setting the CEOs agenda.

And, well, VW stock is still down about -80% compared to pre-dieselgate. So I would say eurocapitalism working as intended.

No, what did it was removing headphone jacks and selling only crappy non-repairable headphones.

Well yes it’s ridiculous we have (in EU) a mandatory warranty of only 2 years on anything electronic.

Phones should be 5 years. Appliances should be 10 and cars 15 or 200k kilometers. How have we normalized the fact that it’s okay for a car to break down after two years and the manufacturer is not on the hook ?

I mean we just vote on Sundays it’s a pretty simple fix.

They’ll make iPhones in India. Which is actually what they are doing right now. Or in Vietnam. Or Ethiopia. You can’t tariff everyone 140% if you want your economy to work.

Yes. This is called lying. This is what these people have been doing for a while now. I don’t think this will change soon.

Didn’t it ? Russia started imposing tariffs on Ukraine in 2012.

Trade breakdown is a clear precursor to armed conflict.

Nations that trade extensively with each other don’t go to war. Trade wars are an accelerator of armed conflict.

People talk about tech giants, but Facebook and Google are actually advertising giants. They pour much more money into their advertising than they do into r&d.

Many brands have a cost structure where, for each product sold, more money goes to advertising than to the person who actually made the product. Sometimes 2 or 3 times more. That’s where the battle for attention is taking us, a place where attention from customers is worth much more than the effort of the worker.

None of this is inevitable, advertising should be heavily taxed and regulated.

5 years ineligibility means she can’t run for president in 2027 or for another MP seat. It means others will take over and gain visibility over her.

And 2 years in prison is going to cook her career prospects too.

Funnily enough, when the law was introduced a few years ago, her party wanted the penalty to be lifelong ineligibility. They are probably happy it’s 5 years, now.