Cars are *expensive*. If I was in the market for a car I’d absolutely buy a Tesla for below market price, eg a model 3 for less than a comparable Corolla. Seems like that very well could be a reality soon.
> the list of US trading partners is dominated by less than a dozen trading blocks: EU, Mexico, Canada, ASEAN, China. That's it.
ASEAN countries are eager to make a deal. The USMCA deal is still in tact with Mexico and Canada.
> The EU, which thanks to the Trump administration is already scrambling to prepare for a war with Russia, is excluding the US from supplying them arms. This is the extent to which these trading blocks are going to shed ties with the US.
Germany is in an energy crisis and a few other members are close to a sovereign debt crisis. Domestic production of weapons will be tough and expensive. The EU’s plan to sell bonds to pursue war with Russia looks horrid. They’re in no position to be in a trade war. In a few months time when this reality sinks in, they will have to make a trade deal and remove US tariffs.
> Germany is in an energy crisis and a few other members are close to a sovereign debt crisis. Domestic production of weapons will be tough and expensive. The EU’s plan to sell bonds to pursue war with Russia looks horrid. They’re in no position to be in a trade war. In a few months time when this reality sinks in, they will have to make a trade deal and remove US tariffs.
This really, really depends on how things evolve this week. Like, the EU will 100% tarriff the US (and probably China to prevent dumping) this week.
The big question is whether or not they use the Anti-Coercion Instrument, and hit US tech and financial services. Selfishly, I hope they don't (as I work for a US fintech while I am based in the EU), but this will probably happen if Trump retaliates to this week's sanctions (which he probably will).
This is gonna get a lot worse before it gets better, unless there's a unilateral pullback on the part of the US (which seems very unlikely).
> But why does the EU even want a manufacturing sector, don’t you all realize that no sane person wants those jobs?
Why do you equate responding to Trump's tariffs with "want a manufacturing sector"? Trump is pushing the US to isolate itself from the world, not the EU. A few years ago the likes of Volkswagen were investing in auto factories in Morocco.
China has been trying to build up domestic markets for the past several years. With the US imposing high tariffs on Chinese goods it stands to reason that they’re not in a position to import from Vietnam, etc. because there will be domestic overproduction.
Is that from a decrease in demand, or an increase in supply from other countries? I'm curious what the price elasticity of demand looks like for Chinese imports.
My interpretation is: it’s domestic overproduction because China isn’t exporting as much to US so it will consume domestically and then not have need for imports from the other SE Asia countries.
My question is more about where the US is then importing from. I assume some goods are more elastic than others. So will the US simply stop buying, or will it shift to buying elsewhere with lower tarrifs?
> Also, as an aside, it’s amazing to me the lengths to which people will go simply to avoid changing their habits.
I couldn’t agree more on this point.
I lost ~110 lbs in a year, exciting obesity by eating only meat and dairy with vigorous exercise.
I’ve been able to maintain the weight loss for 2 years, even after entering carbs back into my diet. I gained back 10-15 lbs depending on the week but I’m still at a healthy weight.
It was easy. No side effects. It was cheap — I largely stopped eating out. I feel way better overall everyday.
For interventions that work across populations we need to find things that work for millions of people.
It’s good that you are able to do this. I think that’s a great accomplishment and you should feel proud. The challenge is figuring out how 100 million people can. It’s obviously not easy based on how many people struggle and fail.
The hard part is the switch in attitudes and behavior that is very difficult to initiate and maintain.
Saying “I did it through willpower is easy since I did it” is about as accurate and useful as saying “World peace is easy because the Dalai Lama did it through willpower.”
We can take 1,000 people and test out your method vs. semaglutide and see which one has the bigger impact. I’m willing to bet that the semaglutide group will have a greater change.
I like this punishment — the damage has already been done, now he’s going to pay for it.
Of course he isn’t going to have, or ever earn, $1.2B but the court can garnish his wages.
The compensation to the victim will enrich her life to a degree. If the perpetrator was incarcerated all she’d be paid is peace of mind.
There’s nothing in this judgement that is stopping her from getting a permanent restraining order or anything. She may already have one.
In the US, when someone goes to prison, their life goes to serve private corporations by way of slave labor and exploitation or the prison itself, similarly by way of slave labor. This ultimately costs the tax payer around (IIRC) $50k/year.
Similarly, if Steve kills someone in a drunk driving accident and goes to jail for 25 years, the family of the deceased can rest assured that he won’t be on the road any longer but that does little to compensate for the fact that their loved one is gone.
Money doesn’t bring them back but a mother or father having died is going to undoubtedly become a financial drain for 95% of people in the country by way of lost earnings, child care, therapy, lost productivity of survivors, etc etc.
If instead of working for pennies in prison Steve could be barred from driving for life and instead spend his time doing productive work that earns more than $0.25 and pay a hefty sum in restitution to the victims in perpetuity they’d have the peace of mind that he isn’t driving and also have assistance with their loss.
I was thinking about something similar the other day — why does anyone besides my family really care if I wear a seatbelt or not?
You know what vehicle I see all the time that doesn’t require a license or minimum age, doesn’t have any safety features and can go 15-20 mph alongside traffic and often on a city sidewalk amongst pedestrians? A bicycle ;)
You not wearing a seatbelt puts other people in the vehicle at risk because your body becomes a massive flying object in the cabin when you are hit that can injure or kill others in the vehicle with you.
Also the person that ties down loads with multiple ropes | straps truckies hitches and stoppers. Not to mention stopping every few hundred miles to check tensions and reset as required.
Loose loads are a pain in the arse and often dangerous.
A soup can rolling loose and jamming up under a brake or accelerator pedal is something that really happens .. and it's no fun when it does.
BTW I wonder why space behind a pedal is still a thing. If I were building a car, I would make it impossible to put anything under pedals, much like you cannot jam anything below a piano key.
I’d really prefer not to kill anybody else I’m sharing the road with, all else equal. It would be quite traumatic for that persons family and for me too.
True. Which is why I would like to make it the law that all motor vehicle occupants should wear helmets. This will mean saving billions of life years lost through traumatic brain injuries.
What if the helmets were giant (unlike bike helmets, the rider doesn't have to carry the
entire weight or air resistance). Then, instead of filling the helmets with hard styrofoam, we could fill them with something even softer, maybe a compressible gas. People could obviously store them in the vehicle. It might be annoying to wear them all the time, so we could mandate that cars detect when you are about to be in a crash and slam a helmet on your head. Although, come to think of it, it doesn't need to surround your whole head. What if we could make it just appear between your head and anything you were going to hit. Hey, we could even have those things hold the micro helmets. Since they are filled with air, we can use air pressure to deploy them fast, these flexible bags of air.
It's dumb to mandate helmets or any other specific technology because it removes the possibility for something better or for context-based decisionmaking.
Suppose you ride your motorcycle into the desert and then lose your helmet into a canyon. Your phone is dead. Your choices are a thirty hour walk out of the desert which might cause you to die of dehydration, or riding your motorcycle without a helmet. Should you get a ticket for making the obvious choice?
I'm not sure how you think I'm making their point for them. They said safety rules infringe on their freedom, and added an example of a more severe safety rule that would infringe on their freedom. I pointed out we also implemented a rule that does the thing they implied was more severe.
Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example. We don't list every possible emergency or every possible rule we would allow an exception to.
> I'm not sure how you think I'm making their point for them.
They argued against mandating helmets in cars. Your point was that we could do something better than helmets and less inconvenient, namely airbags. But that is an argument for not mandating helmets. And the same argument generalizes to any specific technology. What happens when someone comes up with something better than an airbag but then it doesn't satisfy the rule "is an airbag" and is therefore prohibited?
> Meanwhile, there is a general necessity defense to violating all traffic laws for your motorcycle example.
In practice this kind of general exception either consumes the rule or isn't available when it legitimately applies. If you can say you lost your helmet and would have been stranded then everyone says this and you can't enforce the law. But if you can't claim that when it's true then the necessity defense isn't meaningful.
And for the same reason the exceptions are typically excessively narrow. Suppose you lose your helmet while camping, so you have plenty of food and water and can make the 3-day walk back to civilization. There is no risk of death. But then you have a three day walk for what would have been a two hour ride, which is going to make you late for work on Monday. Is not being late for work a necessity? And yet, is it reasonable to punish someone who makes that choice?
Yes. Catering for extreme edge cases is a waste of time, just pay your ticket dumbass, how the fuck you even "lose" a helmet and why the fuck you didn't bring a phone charger?
Given the chance of the story being fabricated close to 100% catering for it is unreasonable.
You can make the exact same example, except someone without a driving license finds a car. I doubt you're opposed to mandating driver licenses, though.
You're not making the point you think you are. All a driver license proves is that you took a basic class as a teenager and have been paying the government a fee since then. You could get the same benefit just by adding the class to the high school curriculum.
But also, the value of roads scales poorly with any of these things. The ability to have a package delivered to your front door is valuable regardless of whether or not you even have a car, and the value of it depends on what's in it rather than how much the truck cost. The most sensible way to fund any kind of basic infrastructure is from general revenues.
The point is to discourage use of certain vehicles, not to fund anything.
But yes, truck used to haul building materials for a building site is the vehicle fulfilling its purpose and any replacement for that purpose being suboptimal.
Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.
> Truck bought to haul 2 bags of groceries is not. Tax the second one.
How do you do this without taxing the first one?
If someone buys a truck to haul building materials to a building site, they are understandably not going to buy a separate vehicle just to haul 2 bags of groceries. But then how do you know what anybody is using it for the rest of the time? The list of legitimate purposes is unlimited. You're a homeowner who is into gardening and always bringing home mulch and saplings and renting landscaping equipment for projects. You're a retrocomputing enthusiast whose hobby requires you to be constantly transporting old mainframes. You're a parent who has to transport an entire junior varsity soccer team to practice every night.
How do you propose to distinguish any of these from someone who only buys a tank to carry home groceries?
Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking?
I'm stating that a number of charges go towards the upkeep of roads and related services (at least in the country I'm present in) these charges include driver and vehicle licences, fuel taxes, etc.
> So the most sensible way to ..
Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices, moreover it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
> Is it telepathy that allows you to claim that you know what I'm thinking?
It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state for anyone under the age of 79. Moreover, the amount of the fee is such that it's essentially paying for the licensing bureaucracy, which you wouldn't need if you didn't have licensing.
> Proposing an alternative doesn't negate the present practices
Present practices have to be meritorious to justify preserving them.
> it makes sense that as much of the public cost associated with roads should come from those that use the roads the most.
But what does that mean?
If it's contribution to the cost of road maintenance then the cost should be paid almost entirely by a per-mile tax on large trucks, because road damage is proportional to axle weight to the fourth power and passenger vehicles are a rounding error.
If it's value of the roads then we're back to general revenues because the value is proportional to economic activity enabled by basic infrastructure which has no real relationship to number of miles traveled. One truckload of electronics is worth more than ten truckloads of scrap iron. One life-saving ride in an ambulance is worth more than a thousand days of commuting.
> It's the fact that the driver license fee is paid at renewal, which isn't yearly in any US state
That's your quibble?
When doing the bookkeeping on revenue flowing in against cost going out it's a simple matter to look at licence fees per annum, axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
These can be broken down to monthly or per quarter, etc.
Here we have licences that can be paid for three months, or six months, or twelve months or for three years, even so the public data from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development (the federal department that oversees all the road related revenue (multiple sources), plans and funds road upkeep and extensions) talks about licence numbers per year.
The median license renewal cost in the US is around $30, for an interval of typically 6-8 years. Which is to say, less than $5/year. Subtract the overhead of the licensing bureaucracy. If the result is nonzero there's a decent chance it's because it's a negative number. In neither case is it paying for a material amount of road maintenance.
> axle taxes per annumn, fuel taxes per annum Vs road program costs per annum.
Car tax and fuel tax?
But put that to the side for a moment. Even if you had a country that collected a significant amount of revenue from driver licensing, and you inadvisably wanted to continue to collect that amount of money from that population (note: this is a regressive tax anywhere that most people drive cars), why would you need driver licensing for that instead of adding the same amount to the car tax?
Helmets are still advantageous and will continue to abate TBIs in that tool regimen. In addition, helmets can be used in a backwards compatible way to increase safety in older cars (which make up a very large fraction of vehicles on the street).
> why does anyone besides my family really care if I wear a seatbelt or not?
I care for a basic and selfish reason beyond the "human missile" one: if I'm in a car crash with you and there's only one bed available in the ER, I don't want your lack of a seatbelt to be the source of a hard choice by the doctors operating on us.
If you opt out of ER visits and are ok with being left to die if you’re in a car accident, sure, don’t wear a seatbelt.
Also, you know who dies in much greater numbers than pedestrians due to vehicle crashes? The pedestrians walking by the bicyclists.
So should pedestrians be forced to wear massive armors of steel when they walk around?
Oh wait, that’s how so many awful American cities are designed. With absolutely no space for pedestrians who have to drive everywhere.
In reality there’s only 1 source of danger on streets. Massive 2 ton vehicles that endanger their own occupants and everyone around them. Take away the 2 tons of metal usually carrying 1 person and everyone is safe.
> But in reality there's a lot of people who see any snake, insect, or arachnid, and respond with "kill it with fire."
Did you have a natural (or learned) revulsion for bugs? If so, how did you get over it?
I’ve gotten over mice completely, never felt right killing one in the first place.
I’ve been trying to make peace with bugs; I unplugged my mosquito zappers last summer shortly after getting them when I realized they were zapping mostly everything but mosquitoes.
Still something inside of me that has such a visceral reaction to bugs. I wish they would just stay away from me and I’d happily respond in kind :’(
> I wish they would just stay away from me and I’d happily respond in kind :’(
I mean, that’s kinda the line I draw and live with.
Anything in the house is fair game. I don’t feel good about it, but mice, insects, or anything else that’s in my living space has to go. I’ll do what I need to to keep my living space mine.
Anything outside… that’s shared space. As much as I can I try and co-exist. I see the bugs as much a part of the nature I appreciate as the bunnies, the deer, the turkeys, the foxes, the ducks, and everything else. None of it exists without the rest. Anything that isn’t an existential threat to myself or my property I leave alone. If I can’t personally handle them right now, I can always go back in the house.
Where I can, I try and balance my use of the space with everything else. I appreciate the nature where I live, so I only do what’s necessary to make it livable for me.
I mow only enough space around the house for us to use. I’ve been working on evicting some groundhogs because they’re trying to turn the ground under my garage into swiss cheese. I get rid of poison ivy when it encroaches in our space but we don’t “weed”. When the mosquitos got so bad we were scared to open a door I did spray some pesticide immediately around our house, but made sure to keep the space I sprayed well mowed to discourage the bees from coming here and getting caught in the crossfire.
I guess it’s just a small mindset shift—I still want the bugs to stay away from me, but I can’t be pissed about bugs when I wander into their home any more than I could wander in to a bear’s den and be annoyed that a bear attacked me.
Oh, except ticks. Fuck ticks. Those are kill on sight.
BTI is a great targeted solution for mosquitoes. Tick tubes can work well for ticks. Although targeted, the tick tubes have some potential for larger impact. More effort, but there tick drags and CO2 traps too.
Oh wow, not sure how I missed that one. I'm up in Canada so it's probably restricted or only sold in tiny 100g retail packages, but if I can chase down some industrial sized bags of that somewhere I'll definitely add that to my toolbox. A little bit of that spread around the wet spots during the spring melt would probably go a long way.
So far I've been primarily relying on permethrin. A gallon of 36.8% was something like $100 and dilutes out to ~600 litres of spray for my purposes. It's not water soluble and binds strongly to soil so I don't need to worry about it getting into the water table and spreading beyond where I spray it (or into my well water). I've been spraying just around my house (and, well, _on_ my house) to make a moat to keep away the mosquitos, ticks, ants, and all the other bazillion things that kept finding their way in.
We've also invested in a couple of the CO2 traps for mosquitos. Have those out in the yard a little ways out.
End of the day though... we live in the middle of a forest situated on wetland. That's part of how I got to a place of picking my battles. I know I'm not going to make much of a dent. As long as my house isn't overrun, it is what it is.
I have seriously considered it, but I do wonder about the neighborhood response. Although I don't think there's any danger and that there's actually more danger from the mosquitoes carrying every disease under the sun, I'm not sure if it's a battle I want to take on if someone has an issue with it. Once the bats are in place, I believe it requires engaging with state wildlife authorities to relocate them. Maybe I'm being too paranoid. I mean, there are already bats in the area anyway. They probably just have a hard time finding shelter.
I have a bat house. It's been empty for years. Apparently they prefer my neighbor's attic. But all least they'll have a place to go if they get evicted from the attic.
Sorry, late reply. I've never really had any serious issues with bugs, but desensitization by exposure is the way to go. I've used the iNaturalist app photographing and identifying insects for years, so when I find a new to me species I learn about their life history, and explore what I've seen in its taxonomy. So I'm comfortable around most bugs now since I know which are harmless, and which are the handful that have a sting/bite they'll actually use. Most insects, like most animals, don't want to fight, and would prefer to be left alone. Bees aren't going to sting unless you harass them or you threaten their hive, most wasps don't sting, and very few are aggressive. Grasshoppers and katydids totally do bite though, they scare me. Also I steer clear of anything that looks like a fire ant, centipede, warrior wasps, hornet, or yellowjacket.
That’s the reasoning for my question. Just last night I was reading about a local homeless man who was scared to go to the local shelter and had things stolen when he had.
But I also wanted to ask the OP (who mentioned housing as a right) how that could be avoided.
