Oh no! Is it time for the auto industry to collapse, get 81 billion dollars, change nothing, and berate the American consumer for being too poor to buy their cars that now cost twice as much for no specific reason other than capitalism again?
It sure as hell isn't time to ride the bus or build a train. So I guess we're doing your thing.
Noice. Schedule another for 2041?
That's optimistic, better pencil in 2029
I'll hold the date, thank you.
Have they tried CLOSING more EV Plants and DISCONTINUING More EV Models? That MIGHT help!
-CEOS!
Nah. When reelecting Trump, America acknowledged that our country will collapse with the oil industry. We'll fight a war to preserve our hegemony over oil, and the resultant oil crisis will be the final straw that gets everybody else in the rest of the world that have money to buy a new vehicle committed to electrification.
It is the Iron Law of Institutions in macro scale. The oil industry and American car companies would rather see America suffer and lose its position in the world, than to help facilitate a transition to some other energy source that would threaten their own entrenched power.
When reelecting Trump, America acknowledged that our country will collapse with the oil industry.
If you look where Trump (really, any Republicans) win big, it's inevitably an area with a big O&G footprint.
Of late, that's shifted slightly to Tech Data Centers. But the nature of lucrative extractionary industry is that it gives you a ton of money to pay one half of the working class to restrain and abuse the other half.
It is the Iron Law of Institutions in macro scale. The oil industry and American car companies would rather see America suffer and lose its position in the world, than to help facilitate a transition to some other energy source that would threaten their own entrenched power.
My dad worked for Exxon. He used to joke that they had a big switch in the back of the HQ that read "Green Energy". And as soon as fossil fuels stopped being profitable, they'd flip it and become a solar/wind giant overnight.
He died back in the 90s, so he never got to see the big milestones. But if you ever look up T. Boone Pickens, this oil billionaire was saying very much the same thing in the late '00s. Natural gas is temporary. Wind is where the real infinite money machine lives.
And now my own state of Texas leads the county in wind production and runs a tight second to California on solar.
So much of this is absolutely already happening. And it's being financed by the same folks who said it was impossible twenty years ago.
That was a blatant choice to back old fossil fuel money against alternative forms of energy. Nobody made trouble for them. They made trouble for themselves. It'll always happen when you pray at the temple of capitalism.
Don't forget union busting and a general failure to pay workers enough to afford their products. Billionaires' greed always fucks us over.
End of the day, I can't afford a new car no matter who makes it. $30,000 for a DRM'ed shitbox that will shut itself down if I'm 30 minutes late on a payment? No, thanks.
One of the most hubristic miscalculations of the 20th century was the Western managerial class in the 1980s and 1990s assuming that globalization would permanently consign developing nations to the manufacturing of cheap plastic junk while domestic blue collar jobs were offshore.
The higher ups in Western corporations operated under the arrogant delusion that their own expertise would forever remain insulated from global competition. They fundamentally failed to foresee that the very countries they relegated to the bottom of the ladder would inevitably ascend the complexity and cognitive value chains.
The same market forces that the managerial class so eagerly unleashed upon others starting in the 1980s are now beginning to affect their own bottom line, and suddenly what was once championed as "optimization" and "the future" as they dismantled the livelihood of the working class, has become a crisis. It serves them right, how it bites back.
One of the most hubristic miscalculations of the 20th century was the Western managerial class in the 1980s and 1990s assuming that globalization would permanently consign developing nations to the manufacturing of cheap plastic junk while domestic blue collar jobs were offshore.
I don't think it was a hubristic assumption so much as an engineered economic plan.
When you look at our history of sanction and regime change, the countries we love to target are the ones that won't comply with this model. Doubly so, the ones we outright invade.
And China's moat is the ecosystem that they are building around EVs. The mining and refining tech for lithium, battery tech, motors, drivers and manufacturing that will be impossible for any other country to replicate.
US auto makers were too busy doing stock buybacks and building Canyoneros while the Chinese were building next gen factories and investing in battery technology. The Chinese government has subsidized their auto industry to dominate the EV market while the USA subsidizes their auto industry but with wild and often stupid swings in expectations.
That may be true, but do Chinese EVs smell like steak and seat 35?
Didn't think so.
Canyoneeerrrroooo!!!
They did it to themselves. By limiting competition in a lazy move to maintain dominance they have lost.
Don't worry the invisible hand will save them
/s
Oh, they haven't lost. It's us who have lost. Government is protecting their profits.
They have definitely lost.
Can I start losing then? I’d love to have great grand children that never need to work a day in their life.
News about global trade deficits isn't mildly interesting. It's mildly boring.
Yeah this is the wrong comm, should be /c/actually_infuriating@lemmy.world
Drill, baby, drill!
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.