From what to what? It’s always been about sports gambling, with war profiteering as a side-hustle.

Data isn’t very valuable if you can’t transmit it.

At some point you need to trust someone

Hehe. Of course not.

You mean high speed rail and electric cars?

Combining French snobbery with Linux snobbery could set off some kind of chain reaction.

How soon until Quebec joins the Bloc de L’nux?

That’s what my government tells me

No no no. China is Fake News. They don’t even make cars. If they made cars, I would have seen Chinese cars driving around in America.

“China Battery!” typically trips everyone’s “Fake News! Evil Company! Communists Killed 100 Billion People!” alarm

The way to safer is to reduce the amount of cars.

Hersey! Blasphemy! Unamerican!

Ah, so they’ve already exploded, thus rendering them safe for use.

The lawyers always win

Not always

Steven Robert Donziger (born September 14, 1961) is an American former attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. The Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion ($13 billion in 2024 dollars) in damages, which led Chevron to withdraw its assets from Ecuador and launch legal action against Donziger in the US. In 2011, Chevron filed a RICO (anti-corruption) suit against Donziger in New York City. The case was heard by US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who determined that the ruling of the Ecuadorian court could not be enforced in the US because it was procured by fraud, bribery, and racketeering activities. As a result of this case, Donziger was disbarred from practicing law in New York in 2018.

Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan’s RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron’s forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as “judicial harassment.” Human rights campaigners called Chevron’s actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger’s case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022

There’s an easy solution to this:

Legislation

Legislation. A famously easy to advance and trivial to enforce solution to any social problem

Beginning to think copyright has become a tool of the plutocracy to harass and dispossess the working class.

The CHIPs act also favored union work and even funneled some money to worker owned shops.

It overwhelmingly favored Intel, for better or worse. And the early influx of cash did nothing to prevent Intel from axing 15,000 jobs.

I’m not here to praise Trump for any of his trade policies. But what Biden pitched through the CHIPs Act was largely a bailout for under-performing domestic producers more focused on dividends than scaled production or R&D. He’d have been better off nationalizing Intel than just handing them bricks of cash in the form of grants and low-interest loans. That is (kinda) what Trump ended up doing when he ordered the Treasury to take a 10% stake in the firm.

😡

It’s an outdated legalism. 250 years ago, the patent office operated as an incentive to record and register ideas to the public in exchange for exclusive commercial license.

Now that simply isn’t an issue

quietly

Stop putting “quietly” in your fucking headlines, you hacks. This wasn’t “quiet”, it was very publicly announced.

That said, there sure are a lot of Teslas and Rivians driving around today.

Toyota outsells Tesla 10:1.

You notice Teslas because they look bizarre, while Toyotas fade into the crowd. Same with Rivians. Ford fully outstrips them by volume, but damn if that chasis doesn’t pop.

If you have an electric car that can recharge in the same amount of time that it takes to fill the tank with gas

You don’t. Even the highest end Chinese EVs need a solid 5 minutes to get to 70% charge.

I’m stick stuck on hybrids for the off instance I need to make a 400 mile drive.

Damn shame they cancelled that HSR through Texas. Would love to not drive at all.

one president signed a bill to move chip production to the US then the next president raided the chip-making facility and arrested all those chip-making people for trying to show the locals how to make chips

Chip making production has begun to migrate largely as a consequence of the Trump tariffs. The Biden plan to send Intel a few billion in kickbacks in exchange for a chip fab industry that wasn’t the laughing stock of the planet only enriched shareholders and executives.

I’m not sure what you’re referring to. Maybe Operation Low Voltage, which was a raid on a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia? I can’t find anything about a raid on a chip fab plant.

In fairness to Trump leadership, a bunch of these workers were, in fact, overstayed on their visas. Although, as usual, Trump sent guys in with shotguns to do what a sternly worded letter would have just as easily accomplished.

But these are the two faces of Western Capital. The bailout and the beat down. Liberals throw money at the problem. Conservatives slap you around on the thinnest pretexts. Neither president seems to have benefited the US domestic consumer.

It’s debt stacked on debt. The money isn’t real, just the consequences of decades of credit expansion.

Now we either deal with a cascading wave of defaults (a la '29, '73, '86, '08, and '23) or we rush in with state credit to bail out all the private lenders.

But there’s very little real money in real pockets. At the end of the day, it’s borrowing power that makes you a billionaire.