Getting under $60/bbl has been a big deal. But a lot of that has just been the economy slowing.

we’d have a more competitive and distributed market for these technologies and a lower future dependence on Chinese imports for said technologies.

I don’t see a future where at least one of the two largest populations of educated professionals doesn’t lead the way on electric vehicles. And that really only leaves you with China or India.

You might have a broader distribution or more regionalized production. But there’s no world in which a country with the manufacturing capacity plus the enormous population advantage doesn’t come out on top eventually.

Right now, I can see a chokehold forming on that sector

I don’t see a chokehold on EVs any more than Taiwan has a chokehold on CPUs.

There’s a building comparative advantage, but the global market is enormous. Plenty of room to catch up.

That’s why China has ten competitive major brands right now

Sure. But that doesn’t change China’s economic growth path. You aren’t changing their behavior

Tesla is definitely “trying” by number of units produced. Volkswagen is also taking EVs very seriously, at least by current and projected manufacturing numbers.

I hate Trump, but I hate Xi Jinping with an equal fervor

Bribery is how the US political system has operated for the bulk of the country’s history

But, for the most part, the bribery was intended to increase private profits. Rarely have we seen industry bribe the feds in an act of self-sabotage.

nobody stopped them

What would “stopping them” have even looked like?

I can’t understand why you keep downplaying the situation we’re facing

“The situation we’re facing” has no impact on people’s primal desire to fuck.

You’re trying to apply a long term rationalist lens to horny 20 year olds.

They are as powerless as you and me.

Educated, able bodies, and socially conscious populations have enormous revolutionary potential.

Everything I’ve heard about these camps suggest ICE agents are free to sexually assault the detainees.

Gotta wonder what it says if the women in these camps suddenly have a higher pregnancy rate than their unincarcerated neighbors. I guess people are just really optimistic about the future in there?

Homeless encampments don’t appear out of nowhere. Have you talked to anyone in these camps? As often as not, they’re migrant population forced from one place to another.

If the weather warms (or the police clear them out) and they move somewhere new, will you assume the economy improved?

If they’d been rounded up by ICE before they arrived, would you think the economy was still doing fine?

I agree. But this is totally divorced from the urge to have children, which is far more biological and has never been blunted by economic downturn.

Economic downturns contribute to higher infant mortality which often leads to people having more children with the anticipation that some won’t survive to adulthood.

When the treatment is clear and the recovery virtually guaranteed, the support is freely given.

The rising price of insulin and other common pharmaceuticals would suggest it is not freely given.

Artist has never had a physical health struggle before. It’s far more often the bottom picture

Memers, mostly

Judging by slices I see on Reddit/Facebook/Twitter, they are in alternate reality where all this is hysteria.

It is hysteria. The outcry is fully unreflective of social conditions, at least within the United States. Go back to the 1980s, when all the millennials were being born, and describe the modern era - historic low crime, a superabundance of cheap consumer goods, massive housing surpluses, cheap and inexhaustible energy, no nuclear wars. We’re not living with acid rain or radioactive wastelands or Soylent Green levels of food shortages. The scariest thing about AI is that it sucks.

Imagine how many people wouldn’t have had kids 40 years ago knowing the modern state of America.

So much of this shit really is just terminally online doomerism. It’s not material.

My siblings’ kids are all angry at the hubris their parents had to birth them.

It’s a weird thing to be angry about. They now have agency over the world they live in. If they hate it, they can change it. That’s an opportunity given to vanishingly few life forms on the planet.

Sort of crazy to look at the birth rates in, like, the DRC or Afghanistan and conclude they must have done everything right.

America can have birth rates on par with Pakistan and Somalia if they just obliterate access to birth control and end all public education. Concentrate large numbers of American teenagers into ghettos and refuge camps where there’s nothing better to do than fuck. Guaranteed you’ll get another baby boom inside ten months.

The writing is on the wall

I’ve been seeing so much AI generated content of late, any real life human doing real life work is a blessing.