Just in: capitalism continues to be shit
Celebrated greed will be our end.
The kick is there is a large voting block who thinks we aren’t being greedy enough.
More of that capitalist innovation I keep hearing about huh. Finding innovative new ways to stop new technology that threatens their business from reaching a broader market! Great job
I guess one last year has been allowed. After that a flood of cheap (true prices) chinese EVs will arrive.
Don’t worry, Biden just imposed tariffs on Chinese EVs so they can rest easy now.
So when they say capitalism is innovative, they mean like regressively innovative?
Sabotaged, or just efficiently increasing shareholder value. It’s called “Fiduciary Responsibility”.
I am constantly baffled how refusing to futute-proof the company meets the definition of “fiduciary responsibility”.
“Let’s spike today’s profits by destroying tomorrow’s profits” doesn’t seem very responsible to me.
It’s because it’s a prisoners dillema. If they do it and other companies don’t, they are at a disadvantage. The only way to get proper behavior is to have the government force companies to behave.
The desires of private shareholders, which have exclusively become “give me more NOW!” are wholly incompatible with the long term needs of our species, such as homeostasis with our sole shared COMMUNal habitat. The private shareholders that dictate how our economy runs through their captured governments literally only care as far out as their next quarterly earnings/ego score report, the planet can explode beyond that as far as they’re concerned, and my pet theory is that the wealth class is so egotistical, living like Pharoahs as others suffer and still needing mooaaaaaaar, that they kind of want the world to end after they’re gone, as they were the only point of it ever existing from their perspective.
Our species only pays lip service to the second, because many to most of us have been successfully propagandized to believe in the lie that we may one day be in the irresponsible sociopath hoarder con-man class, whether through lottery or not buying lattes, lol. And heaven forbid we kneecap the gluttonous, destructive lifestyle we delude ourselves we’ll one day have with… barf… responsibilities towards the societies that facilitated such unethical levels of antisocial wealth hoarding to begin with. Punching down looks fun amirite?
Basically the self-inflicted doom of our species that we’re sleep walking towards can be boiled down to this meme:
the same reason that you’re better off taking the lump sum vs the 30 year pay out if you win the lottery.
money today that i can use today is worth more than money tomorrow.
and money today that i invest now, will be worth a lot more than money tomorrow that i can’t invest and get interest on
it’s not responsible in terms of my company lasting a long time… but it’s responsible in terms of profit.
the same reason that you’re better off taking the lump sum vs the 30 year pay out if you win the lottery.
money today that i can use today is worth more than money tomorrow.
You might be theoretically better off in an ideal outcome, but I’m pretty sure taking the 30 year payout is the generally recommended option. If I were to win the Mega Millions at the current level, I would need to make investments that paid $96,244,081 over 30 years just to equal the tax savings of taking the annuity versus the lump sum payment. That works out to a 3.1% return on the initial lump sum, every year, 30 years straight. Granted, this isn’t exactly impossible, but it does require a few caveats. For example, this assumes you don’t actually spend any of that money, investing 100% of it and never having a bad year. Of course, the average lotto winner is not exactly known for their great ability to invest their money. Meanwhile, there’s nothing preventing the person taking the 30-year annuity from investing a portion of their annual payouts, which are guaranteed, while returns on investments are explicitly not guaranteed.
A guaranteed $96,244,081 return is a better investment than a possible $200,000,000 that’s continent on absolutely nothing going wrong for the next 30 years, but the sort of people who run companies seem to forget about this these days.
money now is worth more than money later.
because of inflation, and also because i can use it now. money i am getting in 30 years is no good to me now.
this isn’t that hard of a concept.
When your justification is an uncertain investment, it isn’t that hard of a concept to realize you’re wrong. You’re literally the only person I’ve ever seen advocating for the lump sum payment as the financialyl sound move when it quite nearly halves 100% sure income.
Inflation is also much less of a concern when you’re talking about literal millions of dollars, unless you’re talking about the Zimbabwe national lotto. If you’re living in a way that your ability to live with $15,000,000/year towards the end of a 30-year annuity payout has materially changed, you have bigger issues than inflation going on.
It doesn’t.
No. So many people misunderstand that. No, it does not simply mean you automatically sacrifice longterm profits. Fiduciary responsibility is pretty widely open to interpretation because shareholders overall can want different things. Some stocks barely budge in price but the board gives good dividends. Some companies make no profit for years upon years because they are pushing for growth. Just chalking this up to fiduciary responsibility is misguided and misses many big reasons why many boards choose short term profits while sacrificing longterm sustainability. Many get most of their earnings in stock. As long as they can keep the share price up long enough for them to make bank, they have little care about the longterm health of the company. This is one of the reasons that stock buybacks have been so big over the last decade.
Then other companies do stock buybacks instead of quality control in their airplane factories…
And people don’t really care about it . Let the wheel spin and get as much as you can while you ride, don’t think about next drivers.
Japan in japan sabotages cars. The real issue is that Japan went deep on hydrogen power combined with the large increase in electric prices after 3/11 any future of electric car died for the Japanese domestic market. Toyota in particular put its money in hydrogen buses, cars and other things which lead to a galaoagos tech like half of the rest of the crap in japan. Theres also some general resistance to electric over the past decade to create a parallel technology stack to china which fizzled out.
Japanese car manufacturers actually sell a lot of EVs… in Japan. They don’t seem to be interested in selling those mini EVs abroad.
Well to be fair, trying to sell anything with the word mini in it in America is it uphill struggle; if there’s one thing us Americans hate, it’s walking uphill.
Or just walking.
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You say that as if Americans don’t want kei cars, but we do. Even rural off-roading Youtubers (who would probably be revealed to be ultraconservative if they didn’t keep their politics out of their videos) love things like Suzuki Samurais and Subaru Sambars.
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but kei cars aren’t street legal for most consumer purposes in the US
Speak for your own state.
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They sell slightly modified kei cars in other countries, but not these electric models.
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Maybe in the US, but in Asia, a huge portion of sales for Honda, Toyota and Suzuki are for their modified kei cars. Even so, they still don’t seem interested in releasing their electric models there. This gap is currently filled by Chinese EV manufacturers.
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Imagine where we’d be if this stuff was allowed to mature in the 2000s alone
Who [Is Killing] The Electric Car
Watching that in my high school electronics class was a early radicalizing moment
Today I learned: the “conspiracy theory” about the oil industry killing electric cars in the 90’s was absolutely true.
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Great timeline isn’t it
Nothing surprising.
EVs have been developed since the 90s at least as far as I know, and progress on them has been sabotaged at nearly every turn by the industry.
Technically the first one was developed in the late 1800s, but it had a range of about 5 meters.
41 miles at 20mph.
Wasn’t aware of that. My thoughts were more towards the EV1, although I assume there were many others before that.
Here in Australia I busted someone with a locked Facebook profile who apparently worked at a ford reseller lying about Kias EV9.
He did the whole laugh emoji and called me a stalker, but deleted his message a few minutes later (probably got a call from his employer who I tagged who was probably worried about the legal repercussions). I pointed out it was libel to lie like that
hating EVs is a lifestyle choice for too many people in australia
in the world*
car goes vroom vroom and stick shift goes shift shift is honestly a lot of fun in responsible amounts. it will be a battle to undo the carbrain propaganda in people, including myself.
Actually… Just noticed one talking shit about EV’s who works for Land rover.
But yeah, I’ve realised the same people talking shit about EV’s, tend to be the same people causing issues for everyone… They always have a locked profile (because they troll that much), they’re often anti-vax/anti-science and they’re the kind of toxic a-holes who were buttheads in high school, and continue to be.
I guarantee they also stocked meat and toilet paper during the pandemic, and tend to leave trash when 4wd’ing
It’s the policy of an entire political party. Remember “War on Your Weekend”?
Seems kind of spurious to call lobbying sabotage as if the politicians being lobbied are machines and not human beings doing what they’ve been elected to do as nominally bourgeois party members.
Seems weird to assert politicians do anything they were elected to do. They’re far more worried about what the donor class wants.
Politicians from bourgeois parties are going to serve bourgeois interests. Nobody should expect anything different from them.
is that purely because they can’t make them well or is there another reason?
honestly the japanese EV ive been in felt decent?
I know Toyota is still ragging on EVs because they invested a lot into hydrogen tech and want that to be the next big thing instead. But I didn’t know Honda, Mazda and Suzuki also under-invested.
Honda is full-on for hydrogen as well.
i hear it has to do with the fact they don’t have much space for solar?
I know someone with a decade old Leaf and that thing is still going strong with more than 300k on it.
yup that was the one! and it wasnt even that old. which is why i’m confused, it seemed good enough.
japan seemed to me like one of the places where great EVs would consistently be coming from.
What about the batteries, though? How would Japan source those? All-in into aluminium-air?
it would be sick if they could make an aluminium-air battery
Japan doesn’t have enough electricity. After Fukushima, they lost most of their nuclear. The country is densely populated, and the parts that aren’t populated are covered in forested mountains, which all makes building the required amount of renewables very difficult. So today and in the future, Japan runs on coal and natural gas. So they make cars that run on hydrogen (which is more efficient to create out of their imported natural gas than burning the gas for electricity) and then sell those abroad greenwashed as “but you can produce hydrogen from green electricity!”
Japanese carmakers were trying to go with hydrogen fuel and did a big grift on their government to get it subsidized. I think the idea was that Japan would have a national disadvantage with EV production as they don’t have the material base for batteries but they could have an advantage with hydrogen.
Those failed, or course. Now they’re a decade behind - there were only two Japanese EVs sold internationally just a few years ago.
The margins are thinner. There’s almost no resale value. Someone might buy a 60k car and eat the payments for a few years, knowing that they can sell it any time for a decent price.
Buying a 60k EV is more like setting your money on fire. The car might be fine, great even, but it just won’t hold it’s value.
Those are reasons people don’t want to buy EVs, not reasons for companies to sabotage the change over.
Companies give zero fucks about anything but money.
Completely retooling for EVs is expensive with a lot of risk. And they’ll make less money afterwards…
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why is that? i don’t think lithium batteries degrade THAT fast?
if the used market had these dirt cheap evs here id probably be considering them.scratch that there is no way to charge them in my country unless you live in a house, or unless you can use regular power outlets hahaha
At this rate Saudi Arabia will beat Japan on EVs. A very big claim but I have cause to believe it.
The Saudis are also huge investors in Lucid Motors .
Companies doing austerity internally to own the clean energy enjoyers
