Kickstarter works like this too. If you know anything about fixed manufacturing costs, when you see hardware projects with a 4-digit goal, you cringe. Some have other sources of funding, but the reason you set an artificially low goal is that it 1) gets people more excited when they see the % of goal go to 800% or 3000%, and 2) people are more inclined to back a project that's already hit its goal, regardless of how crowdfunding works.
It is hard to tie cause and effect together for people here. Prices may go up months after the tariffs got coverage, they may be slipped in with shrinkflation, they get lost in the noise of your personal budget, etc. My goal here was to provide a different perspective that highlights the problems beyond price.
You have to make a distinction between Grok the twitter bot run by X, and Grok the AI model built by xAI. The twitter bot is not to my knowledge deployed in the government.
I like closing the loophole, but the overall turbulence seems to have made many sellers just turn off US sales. I had sourced an off-the-shelf part for our product, so cheap that I wouldn't mind paying 300%, but I can't see the page on AliExpress unless I change my VPN origin.
Don't we all? This is one of the very basic human needs. Since they don't need to worry about food and shelter, they focus on social status and entertainment.
In the age of the internet, I don't think its the media doing the gatekeeping. Arguably, exploitive social media algorithms have put a serious dampening on surfacing better information to the average citizen, because unfortunately thats were seemingly the majority of folks consume media, and that is optimized for what is effectively outrage, regardless of the platform.
What we've lost is independent media having outlets to reach an audience. Pre proliferation of centralized social media platforms, it was easier to find independent voices on the internet through more de-centralized means. I remember coming across the works of Fredrich Hayek and Paul Krugman via the same message board in the early 2000s. Diversity of thought was at least respected, even if it got heated.
I've noticed a steady decline in diversity of thought co-existing on the internet as general social media coalesced around Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Snapchat, Twitter and TikTok. Reddit has also had a slower but meaningful decline in the co-mingling of ideas on merits, and perhaps subjectively, I feel it took longer to get there but ultimately has ended up in the same place, an echo chamber.
There was a time I remember, when progressive, liberal, and conservative people also could seem to agree on some baselines, like not enabling racists.
Where are these "good enough" third parties? In my (mostly but it's complicated) Democratic state, there have been third party candidates in various local positions, especially in urban areas, but it's been more a way to thumb their nose at Democrats rather than any political differences. I struggle to see how any left-leaning third-party would have much relevance in any of our bluish states and they are unlikely to get any traction in red states. If we want to talk about a third-party that looks like Eisenhower Republicans, now that might be interesting but thus far the right-wing of the country has shown little appetite.
Then it is possible to replicate German success in vehicle safety in the U.S. without increasingly draconian speed limit restrictions. As for laws/culture/training, look at NYS:
1. There are annual mandatory vehicle inspections. Driving an uninspected vehicle is illegal and you cannot get the inspection certificate for your windshield unless your vehicle passes.
2. The state requires a driving test to get a license (in addition to prelicensing education requirements) and effectively forces everyone to take driver education courses every 3 years by raising insurance rates if they do not.
3. There is a points system for violations. Reach 11 points, and you lose your license. Reaching 11 points is fairly easy to do.
It is unclear how driving skill in Germany would be much different than driving skill in NYS. If you believe it should be, then you should have reasons for it that would give concrete things that can be changed.
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