So, as y'all know. I made a call to action to protest the Supreme Court Ruling.
As part of this, I reached out to multiple local political organizations. The Pima County Democratic party was pretty excited to work with me. And we'll be having some mutual announcements soon about some neat things we're doing together.
However, contrasting this with the Tucson DSA is stark.
They absolutely refused any sort of solidarity because I had placed some initial rules about not protesting Bidens nomination right now. It's not that I don't believe in that cause (I do!), its that I want to keep the protests from falling to the same issues as Occupy by keeping a narrow focus with specific talking points.
They essentially refused to talk about it at all and walked away.
Folks, to build power, we have to work together. And if we assume everyone else is extremely rigid and walk away any time something even slightly challenges your personal truth, we're all worse for it. We must be open to the fact that compromise is possible
The Democratic Socialists of America will fail to build power. They are too extreme, too dogmatic, and are extremely hostile to even having conversations. They don't build much for anyone except themselves and rely on performance to communicate their virtue.
What was so hard about having a conversation with me on this? I wasn't stating these decisions were final in any way. Yet they weaponized one condition to cast this site as ideological enemies. I was totally down to be like "Well, how about we protest Joe Biden on X day?". Yet we couldn't even get that far because the Tucson DSA slammed the door in my face.
So yeah, I used to donate to them, I even used to like them. But they have failed as a political entity and will continue to fail because they would rather have virtue to signal than to actually build something in the community they are apart of.
I don't understand The Democratic Socialists of America's insistence on turning small disagreements into reasons to not work with allied parties. I formally denounce their performative bullshit and purity testing.
EDIT: Cooled a bit, and decided and use less expletives and refined the conclusion.
I understand the sentiment... But... This is a terribly reasoned and researched article. We only need to look at the NASA to see how this is flawed.
Blown Capacitors/Resistors, Solder failing over time and through various conditions, failing RAM/ROM/NAND chips. Just because the technology has less "moving parts" doesn't mean its any less susceptible to environmental and age based degradation. And we only get around those challenges by necessity and really smart engineers.
The article uses an example of a 2014 Model S - but I don't think it's fair to conflate 2 Million Kilometers in the span of 10 years, vs the same distance in the span of the quoted 74 years. It's just not the same. Time brings seasonal changes which happen regardless if you drive the vehicle or not. Further, in many cases, the car computers never completely turn off, meaning that these computers are running 24/7/365. Not to mention how Tesla's in general have poor reliability as tracked by multiple third parties.
Perhaps if there was an easy-access panel that allowed replacement of 90% of the car's electronics through standardized cards, that would go a long way to realizing a "Buy it for Life" vehicle. Assuming that we can just build 80 year, "all-condition" capacitors, resistors, and other components isn't realistic or scalable.
Whats weird is that they seem to concede the repairability aspect at the end, without any thought whatsoever as to how that impacts reliability.
In Conclusion: A poor article, with a surface level view of reliability, using bad examples (One person's Tesla) to prop up a narrative that EVs - as they exist - could last forever if companies wanted.