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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • Their plan isn’t to fight NATO directly. It’s to instigate domestic political support in foreign countries against entities like NATO and the EU, and push nationalism and isolationism and defeatism into enough people’s heads so that the bigger countries think it isn’t worth fighting Russia to defend another smaller country that is not their own. It’s about killing the idea of article 5 and thus NATO’s reason to exist, so that Russia can confront each country on a bilateral basis where they have the military advantage if no one is coming to their defense.

    This probably wont happen with an assault on a major urban area, but little chunks of unpopulated Finland or Norway. How willing would the American public be to send pilots to die for Lapland? If the major powers blink and don’t feel like committing, Russia continues to escalate, like they’ve been doing for the past 15 years


  • I don’t know how anyone could ever stand going to Costco on the weekends. Just don’t. That’s like voluntarily driving during rush hour when you have the option not to. Unless you work the exact hours that Costco is open, going on a weekday evening is so much better of an experience all around. Weekday mornings aren’t bad either. I would have to be truly desperate for gas or groceries to go to Costco on the weekend vs just waiting until Monday.


  • 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.


  • ElegantBiscuit@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlF#€k $pez
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    7 months ago

    I also think a big part of it is how active users are counted. Saw in a different thread that it only counts accounts who have commented or posted in the last month. Well… I browse and vote on probably an average of 30-50 posts and many of their comments every single day, but the last comment I left was over a month ago.

    I also wonder if the active user count is counting people who made multiple accounts across different instances and was therefore always massively overinflated to begin with. I have 5 lemmy accounts - one on lemmy.world when I first joined, one on lemmynsfw for happy fun times, and 3 more trying to find a different instance with the de federation policy and hoster that I wanted after lemmy.world was going through their ddos downtime issue.


  • I don’t want to tell you how to play your game, but I will say that diamond is well worth the effort, even if you don’t want to get it the easy way with villagers. The amount of time you will save using diamond will more than make up for the time spent mining, and make you resent all the time you’ve wasted using stone. Just dig a tunnel down to y -59 and strip mine, you never need to see a mob or get lost in a cave if you don’t want to. A normal level 30 enchant with efficiency 4 and unbreaking 3 will last a very long time, and can be repaired infinitely if you get mending on it.

    I would compare it to something like drinking instant coffee all the time and finally tasting a properly brewed, high quality coffee. Or only buying cheap shoes all the time and then investing in a proper pair of very comfortable and well made ones. Or playing video games on a 5 year old hand me down Mac then upgrading to a decent gaming pc.


  • 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.