Did they stutter?

One of my best fried chicken experiences was a $5 fried chicken buffet somewhere in rural Kentucky near Lincoln’s birth home.

They can. They just need to pay a little more. We’re talking 25 pence per liter at most compared to no sugar tax. Higher sugar intake is correlated with obesity which means more health problems which is more expense for the NHS. It’s like a train ticket or gas taxes or taxes in general, some percentage of usage that causes the problem needs to pay for the thing that deals with the consequences or expenses that solve it.

It’s the companies who have decided that they would rather sell shit soda, and consumers who are probably unwilling to pay anything except the cheapest price possible - wealth inequality and poverty problems aside because that’s a different social policy that should not be addressed through a sugar tax.

NOBODY LOOK

Not the person you responded to and its been a while since I’ve done it, but I’m pretty sure you can just open the file with notepad (or TextEdit on Mac), scroll down to the timestamp, make the changes, and save the file.

BYD was selling ICE vehicles up until March of 2022, and their current split is somewhere around 50/50 BEV/hybrid so they’re still not a full EV company. Their lineup is still being supported by their existing infrastructure, subsidized by the already established supply chains for ICE that they can incrementally cannibalize while building up the EV part of the company. It’s a good blueprint for legacy auto, but not for an EV startup. That is even before mentioning the very generous subsidies and incentives for electrification provided by the national, provincial, and city governments to producers and consumers. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, because I believe the US also needs that level of investment into electrification, but my point is that it’s not the same business model.

The large profit margin SUVs are necessary for a company to achieve scale to then be able to produce the smaller cheaper stuff. Fixed costs like the factory, tooling, training, designing, that all takes a lot of money up front before even selling a single vehicle, and the smaller and cheaper the vehicle coming out of that production pipeline is, the longer the payback period will be. And when we’re talking about billions of dollars in cost, it’s hard to remain solvent when interest payments on the debt grow exponentially over time.

It’s why before tesla there had not been an American auto company startup for like 70 years, Tesla almost went bankrupt, and Rivian is just starting to head in the right direction. Lucid is probably fucked and they’re mostly Saudi owned these days anyways, and the rest of the US EV startup space ranges from a joke to a scam.

What legacy automakers already have in staff and part of the production line established is actually kind of useless when they have to wait to establish their electric motor, battery, and chassis production, which probably just means a new factory anyways. Give it a few years and the cheaper smaller stuff will come, because right now AFAIK only tesla actually has the free cash flow to fund an EV economy car at scale. Everyone else is still sinking billions establishing any EV production at all, and interest rates aren’t helping the speed of their progress either.

You’re right. The consumer tech consequences of the chip ban is more important than the military implications will ever be. Huawei’s lost tax revenue cost the Chinese government billions, which itself does more damage to the Chinese military budget than semiconductor bans for systems which aren’t actually critical in a conventional war. Cruise missiles can work effectively with tech from the 70s, and you don’t need 5nm chips to guide a rocket into an aircraft carrier. And this was about Huawei specifically - look at Huawei’s global smartphone market share. Pre trade war they were on par with apple and samsung volumes, with margins and a lineup closer to apple. Then the 5G bans and a PR campaign crippled their international sales, and semiconductor bans cratered their overall production.

Other Chinese brands like Lenovo, xiaomi, and the BBK brands (oppo, vivo, one plus, realme) are doing fine though, because inside them is all snapdragon, Qualcomm, intel, nvidia, and AMD. They’re basically final assembly plants for component manufacturers ultimately based in the US, whereas Huawei were using their own kirin chips, were taking market share from apple, and were creating their own operating system called HarmonyOS to replace android. Basically every major consumer tech hardware company in the US stood to gain from Huawei being taken out, including the US government when the trump admin used it as the poster child of the trade war. Huawei’s PLA connections were a nice bonus to sell to the public, but this was first and foremost a state backed corporate hit job.

And the worst part is, because of the opaqueness of it all and combined with propaganda from every direction, it’s hard to get a handle on how justified any part of it actually was. Because you basically have to choose to either trust the trump admin, US government, and corporate America, or Huawei and the Chinese communist party, and I don’t trust any of them. Personally I’m going with, there was probably something to be concerned about, but probably at a similar level to buying US hardware which the us government has clearly signaled that they have back doors into, but the corporate power struggle for market share is the actual reason behind it all.

Not to mention that everything Ukraine has been asking for from the US, Taiwan already bought in numbers and has had in the country years ago. Patriot, F16, ATACMS, and the list extends below to HIMARS and artillery and Abrahams, and above to apaches, black hawks, Phalanx, a wide range of torpedos and ground and air launched missiles, and even entire submarines.

China would also have to attack across the Taiwan straight, and amphibious landings are insanely difficult to pull off for anyone let alone for the PLA which hasn’t actually had meaningful combat experience since the Vietnam war - their Vietnam war in 1979. Any military buildup would also be obviously spotted months in advance, meaning anything from propositioned US carrier strike groups, all the way to enough time for Taiwan to build a dirty bomb or small nuke if they felt like they needed the ultimate deterrent.