The US is trying to keep these tiny ones out because they want you you buy their big gas vehicles or larger, more expensive electrics. Larger vehicles consume more resources, take more to produce, and even large electric vehicles draw more from the dirty grid than a small personal conveyance like these designed to move you and your groceries.

And that’s a strawman to infer that our self-destruction hinges on this single point. This is yet another example on the heap of the larger problem. “it might hurt short term PROFITS for our greed mongers, so we won’t allow something that might begin to mitigate the scale of the problem.”

That said, it sounds like you agree with them, and if that’s the case, I have good news, they’ll continue to get their way in every economic sector, and yes, cumulatively, our species is paying and will pay an even greater price for allowing blind, insatiable greed to make every decision.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/mexico-central-america-us-heatwave

If we cared about having a future for the species at all, Humanity’s only mission right now would be to END the global economy’s jihad of growth/metastasis, every major nation would institute child limits, and we would work to end consumerism and find homeostasis/equilibrium instead for the sake of our very survival, because this reverse terraforming we’ve done in decades will take millions of years for the earth to heal from. That’s nothing to Earth’s 3.8 billion year old story of life, but it might as well be eternity to our short term monkey brains. Our reality, our world will continue to heat, and if we stopped tomorrow entirely, would take many times longer to go back to normal than our species has existed for.

But as common economic decisions like this demonstrate, we have decided to burn the future so as not to disrupt the reckless party of avarice and gluttony for our owners today. Is what it is.

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Thats a new spin to me. The only thing monopolies secure is their own existence.

Because “free markets, competition, being voluntary” are propaganda by capitalists using their owned media and purchased government to make its victims double as its defenders.

The goal of market capitalism is to end competition often by buying out up and coming rivals to kill the threat, manipulate the markets to your advantage using anything from bribery to cost benefit analysis of potential consequences/fines for sociopathic actions to potential profits, and conspire with your economic sector to coerce the workers you need into accepting less.

This is just expanded indentured servitude with a marketing team.

Capitalism is clearly going to death us first.

The Earth is 🔥burning🔥, by our own hands, and we’d still rather play team sports for greedy sociopaths than prioritize even doing it a little slower with cheap EVs.

The Earth will heal in a few million years once we’ve destroyed ourselves. ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

And there’s no making it right. This is the world. At least for this year.

And it will be hotter next year, and the next.

Why? Toleration that led to celebration that led to worship of unchecked, insatiable greed.

I’d say maybe lets force the owner class to stop though revolution and dismantling of our needless consumer culture so our children and theirs have at least a minimally habitable planet for humans and the other surface dwellers we don’t give shit one about to live on, but we’re not going to anyway. So burn baby burn I guess.

Israeli warmongers like Netanyahu perverting what it means to “learn from history,” and dishonoring the struggles of those that came before them by taking on the methods of those that tried to snuff them out to snuff out a different people. (and it wasn’t just camps, they starved them in the ghettos they locked them in as well.)

The I’m sure intentional lack of self-awareness is darkly cartoonish.

What a lovely metaphor for the self-created doom our species is sleep walking towards.

We’re patient zero for the world’s current greed disease.

Not only won’t we go along, our purchased government will internationally war against this. Never forget we destabilized the South American continent, a government at a time, to keep their markets open for capitalist exploitation and snuff out any potential examples of an economy that serves its people, as opposed to a society that subsists in service to an economy as it is here and increasingly everywhere.

We’re a big reason the global owner class has so much unelected, unaccountable power that needs to be fought to begin with, our government has spent decades convincing other governments to “turn the bull loose” to open their markets to unchecked capitalist exploitation and betray their people under the promise that their elite can live like gluttonous modern Pharoahs for their betrayal. The UK has fully fallen to this as just one example.

This initiative for all intents and purposes is an attack on the United States and everything its people THAT MATTER, not us, stand for.

“It’s just business”

-Sociopaths

It’s amazing the inhumanity that little thought terminating cliche validates. Basically “Just following orders” for capitalists.

The reality is hurting others for money as the motivation makes hurting others worse not better. I might hurt someone to save my child’s life from certain death in some odd hypothetical, or to avenge my child’s death in another, but hurting people… for money? That’s as monstrous a reason as doing it for fun.

It’s like we’re taking crazy pills. “Oh, they were cruel and hurt that person? Let’s get them! Ohhhh they did it for private profit, well that’s ok then nevermind!”

Tots and Pears.

Covid kind of disillusioned me to the whole “all humanity needs is a common enemy/suffering to get right” concept.

Same, if we can’t even, in actions not rhetoric, start from a baseline of “we’re all in the same boat, we all have needs and seek happiness, how do we maximize everyone’s well-being to facilitate that?” then we’re still just savage animals wrestling in the dirt, but with the dangerous capacity to devise technologies for selfish ends we aren’t wise/evolved enough to truly appreciate the consequences of using.

“According to The Atlantic, an asteroid that weighs more than 1.7 quadrillion metric tons could sterilize Earth by raising the temperature of its water above 100°C. This asteroid would be 10–1,000 times heavier than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs and would be between 60–96 kilometers (37–60 miles) wide.”

The Atlantic article itself is paywalled, but yes, and it’s entirely dependent on the mass of said Asteroid.

Maybe the 10 commandments posted in every Louisiana classroom will stop the asteroids.

Whenever I dare to hope about the lofty, admirable star trek future, I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

As a species, we aren’t going to spread out there. Still too primitive, and probably too self-destructive to make it out of this phase of evolution. This might be one of those great filters scientists postulate as to why there aren’t signals from innumerable civilizations out there.

We aren’t even capable of caring for one another, let alone the EASIEST to maintain, most naturally human friendly habitat we would ever encounter in the cosmos as we evolved to fit it. No airlocks, the air/water/waste recycling was already fully automated, all we had to do was not recklessly grow/metastasize to the point we strain the absolutely massive system out of greed and glut, and stop carelessly shitting where we sleep. We all know how that’s been going since we figured out how to make dead animal poison rocket us accross town.

Master space? Master planetary defense? We can’t even defend this world from our own habitual consumerism. We’ll be lucky if we aren’t scattered tribes living near the old hardened structures of the before times for emergency shelter from the new normal weather events in a hundred years. We’re already starting to argue over the resources it’s taking to rebuild population centers from the current new normal. We have played pretend we were since human civilization began, but we are NOT and never have been this world’s owners or masters, and we are still very much its subject.

And Reminder, what we’re doing and have been doing in decades won’t be undone for millions of years. The Earth is a self-correcting system, and the damage we’re doing is inconsequential to its 3.8 billion year old, beautiful story of life growing out of every crevice, just not on a timescale humans can benefit from or even truly appreciate.

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell - Great Filter

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Everyone still into saving Elon from himself.

I don’t, I live in the US, where we let our own people who don’t play ball get cast out to die of exposure and police capital defense force harassment for the crime of not producing enough value well enough for their owners:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/u-s-homelessness-up-12-percent-to-highest-reported-level-as-rents-soar-and-pandemic-aid-lapses

herp derp wealthiest nation on Earth!