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…lovely plumage.

an early warning sign of bofa

I’m skeptical of the problem being that simple. I think if that were the only issue, we would have cheaper cars.

Part of the rational for producing high margin trucks and SUVs is that investors demand the most margin possible out of every unit of production capacity. If a factory can only turn out 100 vehicles a year, its more profitable to turn out an expensive SUV that only 100 people can afford, compared to selling 100 cheap sedans that thousands of people want but you just can’t produce enough of them.

If there were overcapacity, then in a vacuum, it would make sense to put it to work turning out low margin cars that are in high demand and making some money with that capacity instead of no money.

But its hard to predict years in advance when your factories are going to have excess capacity, and to know when to begin years long engineering projects so the vehicles you’re going to want to produce will have their designs finished in time to fill those gaps. And its extra risky to begin those kinds of long range projects during times of rapidly changing regulations of ICE vehicles, and rapidly advancing tech for EVs that might invalidate years of engineering and factory tooling investments because you can’t sell the vehicle you planned to produce for a long enough time to make back your investment and start seeing a profit. Not that I’m anti-regulation - I like breathing clean air and drinking clean water.

That’s R&D cost divided over a small number of vehicles, not the cost of material and labor that goes into each vehicle. It only looks bad on paper.

For example, if you invest $100 in R&D and it costs $1 to produce each car, then the first car out of the factory costs $101. Sell that first car for $10 and you’ve “lost” $91. But if you can sell 100 cars, then each car only costs $2, not $101, and now on paper it looks like you’ve made $8 on each sale.

Time will tell if Ford made the right decisions about what kind of car to engineer and if consumers will continue to buy it long enough to make back the one time R&D expenses. That would happen faster if their margins on labor and material is high, like it is on trucks and SUVs, which makes those a safer investment.

deleted by creator

Plug in hybrids make a lot of sense during this transitional period of rapidly advancing battery technology and incomplete deployment of charging infrastructure.

Building a small, relatively cheap factory for manufacturing a small number of super expensive, pavement princess trucks is less risky than making a large investment in a megafactory capable of producing a meaningful number of affordable cars. That big car factory would need the market to demand its products for a long time for the investment to pay off. For example, if there’s a big leap in battery tech in the near future, the car manufacturer would take a loss - either they continue to offer outdated EVs and sell fewer than projected (only utilizing a fraction of the factory’s maximum output, while still paying taxes and maintenance on a larger facility), or they throw away their expensive, brand new factory tools and build expensive new ones for manufacturing cars with the new batteries.

Meanwhile, charging an EV at home still isn’t possible for a lot of people, and quick charger stations aren’t available yet in a lot of areas. However, a plug in hybrid can be adequately charged overnight by a standard home electrical outlet, letting it act like an EV for quick trips around town. Meanwhile, longer trips into not-yet-electrified areas are still possible thanks to the ICE, and the range can be quickly topped up at a gas station. More plug in hybrids on the roads also generates demand for building charging infrastructure - if someone just has $5 to spend on gas, they could get more miles by spending it on electricity at a quick charger.

Scientists: Climate Change will lead to everything going to shit if we don’t change our gluttonous ways and become good stewards of Creation.

Supply Side Jesus: HERESY!

but is it asbestos free?

The Book of Enoch is wild though. It reads like a first hand account from a bronze age tribal getting abducted by aliens.

What’s a healthy body temperature for a plushie?

The market didn’t need regulations to maintain its freeness back then because the vast majority of transactions were made with small businesses. The limited technological capabilities in transport and communication also decreased the need for government regulation by decreasing the ability of the largest concentrations of capital to succeed at implementing global anti-competitive strategies.

To achieve the same degree of market freedom today, in the era of omni-national mega-corporations wielding monopoly influence, requires utilizing levers of power outside of the market those mega-corps dominate. The intervention of democratic governments to enforce anti-monopoly laws and prohibit other kinds of anti-competitive behavior is a necessary component of any plan to transform today’s marketplace into one that looks more similar to the market of Adam Smith’s day.

It is though - this is what capitalism invariably becomes. Musky Twitter is a symptom of late stage capitalism. This is why so many people say capitalism is bad and doesn’t work as advertised.

The golden age of classical liberalism, when capitalism actually worked, the 1700-1800’s, more closely resembles what we would today call market socialism.

Once the agglomerations of capital became large enough to impose irresistible anti-competitive force, the days of capitalism’s beneficial functionality ended. They say “the freer the market the freer the people”, but an unregulated market isn’t free - it invariably trends toward monopoly and irrationally assigned concentrations of wealth and power, eg Musk, Bezos, DuPont, Sackler, etc…

Capitalism supports, rather than resists, the anti-competitive influence of capital. A truly free market requires the intervention of powers other than capital - eg, democratic governance imposing something akin to Market Socialism against the wishes of those anti-competitive agglomerations of capital.

fund it exclusively out of his own pocket

That’s how newspapers got started - they were propaganda organs of the rich and existed exclusively to manipulate public opinion. Things really haven’t changed that much, but somewhere along the way people were tricked into paying for them.

And in cases like that, its appropriate to text first to agree upon a time for that phone call.

Has Ford ever made a good EV? AFAIK, compared to the competition, Ford’s EVs take too long to charge, for too little range, and they cost too much. Perhaps there is simply a lack of interest in the low-quality offerings they’ve plopped onto the market so far?

I think its more likely that YouTube will shut down and be replaced by nothing. Its existence has never made sense as anything but an act of charity from an organization with tech resources to burn.

*novoukraine

Is it clear? Seems profitable to own that clay - the pipeline infrastructure connects Asian oil with European markets, and whoever controls it can charge rent and leverage favors. For example, back in the day when Russia used to own it, they tried using it to extort the EU, begging for ridiculous concessions and threatening to shut down the pipeline if their silly demands aren’t met.