Rhaedas

A caveat that is often forgotten - inflation. It’s an economic nostalgia. We have prices set in our head that is deemed reasonable, and use that to compare against today’s costs. My parents bought a used car in 1975 for $200 that needed repairs to run. Sounds like a bargain, but that’s around $1200 or so now. A lot to pay for something that may or make not be fixable.

But that’s not even the real problem. It’s the ability to keep up with costs of expenses when your income isn’t keeping pace.

It’s also whats offered. Like you said, you can’t buy base models anymore, they have to have all the frills. Imagine being able to buy a base truck to just haul stuff in. Maybe still possible for companies who buy large amounts wholesale, but not consumers. I’d like to have my grandfather’s POS manual Datsun these days. It just ran.

Less vehicles is certainly a goal, and maybe some of them back on rails like they were before the auto industry drove them away from most urban areas. Also a US centric problem, but less sprawl and need for distance traveling, more common needs locally within foot and bike traffic would help too. It’s all connected and contributing to the issues at hand. If we designed cities from the ground up, we could make them so much better, but cities don’t grow that way over time, nor can they be changed that easily.

EVs don’t have direct emissions. Thank goodness a study showed that. They also tend to be cheaper to drive over time, once purchased, electricity costs are usually a lot lower than a tank fill up thanks to the difference in cost and the efficiency of EVs. Now we have a study from MIT showing what everyone has been saying all this time is true.

Now what?

The government should push hard on regulation to provide an infrastructure support for EVs, such as charging areas everywhere, including apartment dwellings and common retail areas. Make them solar assisted. They should run regular buy back programs to incentivize trading in older ICE cars. Any public service using vehicles should be transitioned to EVs - buses, mail, trash collection. Anything that does a lot of local stop and start movement, which is where EVs excel at their efficiency and emissions reduction vs. ICE. And while we’re using the government to improve EV conversion, how about also improve public transport (which should be all EV) to reduce the car count on the road even more.

Like everything else, we should have been doing this decades ago, as this isn’t news to anyone. Hopefully this still has enough of a positive spin for this forum.

Low hanging fruit. Cut the billions being spent to kill people. And just ending there, it’s hard to say which situation I’m talking about, isn’t it? So much of “ordinary people’s money” being spent in the wrong ways, all for the benefit of a few, or one.

“Make what I’ve done and am doing not a crime. One reason why I wanted to become King President.”

And some “lower” positions can have much larger sweeping effects.

I enjoyed Battlefield Earth (the book, not whatever that movie was), even with its issues. I read the first of Mission Earth when it came out. I don’t remember why it didn’t click for me, but I never read another.

We need a Tywin to send him to bed. He looks tired.

What a petty little man. Got to put his name on everything because he knows deep inside he’s worthless.

Her standards for an all-powerful, all-knowing god are pretty low. Or to quote Hulk, “puny god”.

Narrator: The fire detector in fact did not work.

There’s more than one kind of backup in life, check them all.

They watch out after their own kind.

Two easy ones:

No 9-11. There would have eventually been an attempt somehow, hell, maybe it would have been worse, like a dirty bomb. But the ball wouldn’t have been dropped on staying alert. Climate activism. Still think it was far too late even by 2000 to prevent the worst that’s coming (which tells you were I think we are now), but at least Gore knew the science and would have tried to change something.

Still would have had our problems, but it’s such a different path, it’s hard to say what would have still happened.

There are lots of problems, but some are more dependent on the others, so pick your battles. There are also predicaments. Whether or not the biggest problems are really that is debatable. But have to start somewhere.

This isn’t the first one made of him. So it took a few to push people over.

A reminder that it isn’t Trump, but the ones who support him that are the problem, and there are so many of them. And even they are also just a symptom of a deeper illness. A self-perpetuating one.

This is the real problem. Enablers. He doesn’t have to stay in power.

He’s embarrassing Kim Jong Un.

What, the right turn around and blame the current left administration for something that the right had caused before? Why, that never happ… okay, that’s what always happens.

May be the endgame. While the Southern Strategy was all about securing enough voters in a functional system through various means, the next step is just removing the voting issue altogether and gain even more power.

Wow, totally out of character. Who would have guessed?