Do they not want those conveniences? Or are they tempering their expectations based on their budget and perceived cost?
If, let's say, a typical $30k car means a large EV SUV with all the luxury gadgets and conveniences, plus fridge, massage chair, full camping setup, etc. Would 30k car buyers not expect those things?
I can afford an suv. That’s not the issue - I just find it ridiculous to move that much metal for a small family or one person. A regular sedan would do.
I used to think that way (small car is best) until I had a family. yes in theory you can fit a small family in a sedan but in reality - not being able to fit a suitcase + stroller + kids bike (or whatever) into the trunk at the same time, or having your wife strain her back bending down to strap the toddler into their seat - gets old quickly!
So in practice what happens if that if you have a family and can easily afford an SUV, you get the SUV to alleviate these painpoints,
If you have a family, a minivan makes so much more sense than an SUV. Minivans have more interior space, more cargo room, auto rear doors that are impossible to bang on the adjacent car, cost less, get better fuel economy, and more.
I live off a dirt road, and if my minivan breaks, I'm not going to buy an SUV, I'm going to buy another minivan, but I will buy an AWD model instead of FWD like my current model.
Of course, plenty of people do. But you may also have a neighbor who thinks that you having a car at all is excessive because they take public transport and walk and never needed a car.
My point is that any degree of "thing" can be enough if you accept its implications. So for example when you go on your family vacation, you make choices about what to take and what to leave. If your two year old daughter asks last minute if she can bring her scooter (and helmet), the answer might be "sorry honey no room" whereas with a larger car you could say "sure, toss it in." Or the grownup version of that, I tossed in my inflatable paddle-board, paddle, lifejackets and pump as a last minute decision for our last vacation "just in case" we want to get on the water before the kayak rental place opens up (ended up using it.) Again, the paddle-board or scooter are totally non essential - if I had a smaller car I wouldn't even consider bringing them at all and that would be totally fine, but it's nice that I can.
BTW, we got our SUV when our 1st kid was born, it was a larger car than I thought we needed but was still kinda helpful. By now we have 3 kids and the fact that "how are we gonna fit them and their stuff" isn't one of the many things we have to deal with as parents is very nice.
Again, if I couldn't afford it or was very anti-big-car, I'd find a way to make do with a smaller vehicle but it's nice to make the other choice and that's why many many many people do.
Well you're in luck! There are numerous regular sedans like a Nissan Sentra or Hyundai Sonata available at your local dealers. If you want one you can buy it and drive it home today.
Or a small hatchback, e.g. a Fit, Golf, Matrix, Yaris, etc. They might not be the most attractive looking vehicles but darn if they aren’t practical. Better cargo space than much longer sedans while being short enough to park almost anywhere.
It’s so disappointing that they’ve disappeared from the US market almost entirely.
When I was a teen I wanted to install electric windows in this vintage car I wound up with. My father said, “That‘s just one more thing that can break,” and yes it sounds kind of glib but I really took that to heart and let it shape my life in a direction of dependable simplicity.
I got out of car culture around 25 years ago, and every time I ride someplace in a modern car I'm just bewildered by all the bullshit. Do grown adults really need to be "pampered" with heated seats? How can you stand carrying around those "fobs" in your pockets — they make jeans look ridiculous, like a person is packing two sets of their junk.
I can accept the argument that they are trying to be inclusive towards disadvantaged students, and it just happens that racial make up of poor but qualified students lean towards black or hispanic.
Is that the reality? or is it middle class and less advantaged white/asian kids giving way to middle class black/hispanic ones? Or worse, is it simply raising the bar for asians because there are too many of them in higher education like they did to jews?
NYU is a terrible example to pick this fight over, given the stats I posted though.
1) The school is already 40% Asian and only 7% Black. How much higher further should we expect those numbers to move from their demographics (6% Asian / 13% Black). If it was 46% Asian and 1% Black how different would those GPA stats even be? Not much! How about 46.5% Asian and 0.5% Black? When would you be pleased?
2) Its a huge liberal arts, emphasis on the ARTS school. Nearly 20% of the school pursues ART degrees. GPA is not even the correct measure for admissions for that type of degree. Generally it's a portfolio of work. Go do this GPA-only analysis on a college's STEM program admissions or at a pure Engineering school.
Anyway, NYU has always been in my mind a "pretty good college for kids with enough money who want to have fun living in Downtown Manhattan for 4 years on their parents dime". Its selectivity is outsized to its academic quality.
I think it's mainly corruption. A significant amount of budget (hundreds of millions) is allocated to "deal" with homelessness in SF, so efforts to actually solve the problem are going to face significant challenges from existing beneficiaries.
Since a few years ago, especially as layoffs started at big name companies, there have been a massive investment in funding and talent into modernizing traditional industries. This effect will be felt by IT departments that built in-house software and small product or consulting shops.
US car manufacturers other than Tesla have not been very successful at producing EVs despite subsidies. It'll be interesting to see how this affects future policy making. Will there be subsidies to protect legacy US automakers? Does that mean gas cars are here to stay?
If a building's rent is higher than its surrounding ones, renters are less likely to live there. The same applies to cities, if, after adjusting for job/lifestyle/etc, people feel it's too expensive to live in a city, they move away, eventually reducing demand.
China does not ban YouTube or Instagram because they're foreign, They have some very onerous rules about censorship, which I disagree with, but are applied equally to all companies operating in China, including Chinese ones.
A good example is that google is banned but bing is not, and tiktok is also banned in China because they don't follow those laws.
That's the sanitized on-the-surface naive explanation of why China wants to control the social media (and search) landscape. The 'laws' you refer to are that Google was required to take down things that were unfavorable towards the Chinese government. So quite obviously the Chinese government simply doesn't want to be undermined by foreign entities, right?
This isn't too far from the US governments motivation to not have it's political power undermined by a foreign entity, and the propaganda situation is different between a democracy and an autocracy. It's politically impossible (and would be inconsistent) to ask specifically TikTok to remove all political content that could either bolster support from one party, or detract from another, as the US has the tenet of free speech enshrined in constitution. But instead of making up some nonsense law that social media companies must yield to coarse-grained censorship by the government, the US are at least being honest about their intentions.
That's completely untrue. I can't say if the algorithm is the same. In my short experience of using Douyin for the past couple weeks, I get zero education content, but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices.
> but a surprising amount of content about inequality and injustices
Is it inequality and injustice. where pointing it out. would actually threaten the power of the CCP?
When I started reading Chinese language media I was surprised how much apparent criticism there is -- but if you read carefully, anything approved in the PRC is always criticism of individuals, or maybe corporations, more rarely a local government, doing something that's already supposed to be officially prohibited, or which is not too sensitive, and never criticizes core official policy or high-ranking CCP members.
Which is how you can have anti-corruption, anti-sex scandal, anti-pollution news commentary, or even protests and marches, in China. But should official permission to disagree be withdrawn, the topic can very quickly become taboo. A couple years ago there was ongoing discussion in Chinese media about same-sex marriage and a member of the Yuan even introduced a bill to make same-sex marriage legal in China. Voted down. But an acceptable topic to discuss, not officially taboo. I suspect that has changed recently, with the campaign against the apparent feminization of Chinese men and now explicitly linking LGBT rights with the Western agenda. That shift, as I understand it, comes directly from Xi.
Devil's advocate: you'd need to be in both countries on different device IDs. If you go US -> visit to China, their algorithm "knows" this as opposed to "you are in China and have never been to US before". Just a guess.
China is not a single entity. Huawei is not going to choose low quality high price local startup over suppliers with good reputation if they have that choice.
Sanction means those uncompetitive local startups don't have to compete with established players, giving them chance to catch up.
I wish more people knew or understood this. The central government, as much as it wants, doesn't have great control on the local level. It's even enshrined in a Chinese idiom: 天高皇帝遠 or "Heaven is high and the emperor is far away". Furthermore, China's model is actually quite decentralized. There's a lot of freedom at the provincial and local level -- it pretty much has to but the CCP has been able to leverage it to experiment with different ideas at different provinces.
As that article describes, Huawei is effectively employee-owned, though the legal arrangement is not straightforward (because of China's laws on stock ownership at the time Huawei was founded).
The article says that it's claimed that Huawei is... but that it's misleading (virtual shares) and that whenever ask the question dodgy answers are given.
The answers make perfect sense in the context of Chinese law.
This is how Huawei was set up decades ago. They would have had no reason to hide or obfuscate their ownership back then. They used a legal device - the union holds shares on behalf of the employees - to get around restrictions on the number of shareholders in a private company.
The fact that people believe in journalistic integrity shows how successful they are at brainwashing the public.