A the discount grocery store I buy the cereal box that is banged up. I’ll open it to verify the bag inside is still air tight, but if the only issue is the cosmetic box itself I don’t care and will buy it. If I don’t, then its possible the beaten up box will be discarded from being non-sold. Increased shrink (retail term for product that doesn’t get sold) will mean prices go up on everything and possibly the workers don’t get raises (or not as big a raise) to cover the loss.

I’m fine with a beaten up box if it means my price stay low and workers get raises.

People also just drive a lot more today than 40 years ago, in part, because jobs and shopping are further away (it’s gone down since COVID due to more WFH). A car with 100K miles on it was an old car. Now it’s not unheard of for people to put that kind of mileage on their car in under five years. I have no argument that vehicles are much more well built today.

Well built for specific uses, but not necessarily well built to ensure lots of them are on the roads decades after their release.

As I said in another comment, I’m not arguing that cars are more capable of being on the road, just that I don’t believe people are going to choose to drive a ten to twenty year old car in 2035 - 2045 as much as they had fifty years prior.

I partially agree with but for different reasons that you’re stating.

You could put less than $1,000 into a 100k mile car in the 90s and expect to get another 50k+ out of it. At least, I can confirm that that’s what I did with my 1976 Ford Elite and later my 1980 Camaro.

That 1980 Camaro was a far simpler car that modern cars. Simple generally means more repairable, but that comes at other costs. Economics have shifted this behavior in western society. In 1980 labor was cheap and simple machines meant lower skilled workers could accomplish the work too. Meaning when your 1980s Camaro was slipping out of gear it made sense to take your Camero to a transmission shop (do those even still exist now?) and have them do a full teardown of your transmission and get the synchros replaced. Today it is almost unheard of to get transmission work done and instead your Auto Technician will simply replace the entire transmission if any problem is occurring inside with a synchro.

Further, that Auto Tech will also be part Electronic Technician with knowledge of hydraulics, air emissions, HVAC, and more. That makes for a much more expensive labor per hour charge.

Moreover, there’s nothing aside from the maintenance of the vehicle and maybe improved gas mileage that would deter anyone from choosing to drive an older vehicle. There are far more reasons today to not choose a ten year old car than there were 30-40 years ago.

Passenger safety and crash survivability has improved dramatically from cars 30-40 years old.

Automotive emissions were in their infancy 40 years ago, which is a partial cause for the climate change we live with today.

My point is about consumer choice and the advancements of technology. Will people choose to drive vehicles that aren’t compatible with future technology.

I’ve driven old cars. Things start to break that don’t break on even moderately old cars. Rubber seals on all kinds of things deteriorate. Rust claims the structural integrity. Long mechanical wear has you doing repair after repair always bracing for the next expensive thing. Its no panacea .

I think you never heard your suggestion growing up is because there are many that had no choices or ways to avoid major depression.

Doing drugs, and not going to college are active choices that people can make. Bodily and environmental chemistry as well as genetics can be causes as well as formative years being abused or neglected can certainly lead to major depression. This says nothing of what life throws as us assuming you make it through childhood okay. Those aren’t things that a person can choose to avoid to avoid major depression.

This is my problem with any new car. Practically every new car (even ICEVs) is just a smart phone on wheels now. It’s not like in the ‘90s - ‘00s when you could still legit buy a car from the ‘70s and daily drive it and repair it in your own drive way for cheap (most people in the 50s - 80s were capable of basic tune ups, etc).

Remember cars from the 70s and 80s were considered “clunkers” at 100k miles. Today that number is 200k miles generally.

My concern is that at some point the parts won’t be made anymore. Or if the LCD command console gets cracked or something your car’s totaled.

Thats true of all modern cars, not just EVs. That ICE car is full of computers named things like “Engine Control Module” etc. Its already happening where they are dying and a car is essentially totaled.

I mean, people used to own cars for at least ten years, twenty years wasn’t uncommon.

Twenty years wasn’t uncommon? For collectors cars or sunday drivers maybe. There were extraordinarily few 20 year old Plymonth Reliants on the roads in 2001.

Do you think a 2025 XYZ is going to be on the road in ten years- twenty years? What’s the resale value on that / who’s going to buy a twenty year old phone on wheels?

Even though there were other EVs before it, the Tesla Model S was the first mainstream EV that most would consider. You don’t have to wonder if they’re on the road. You can do used car searches for 2013 (11 years old!) and find them for sale.

As much as people believe EVs are better for the environment, aren’t they increasing the rate at which a vehicle ends up in landfill?

No. Interestingly one of the challenges of setting up recycling facilities for EV batteries that there simply aren’t enough EVs being taken off the road with their batteries junked to create enough feedstock to justify the facilities.

If anything, the cut corners and non-reparibilty of the many common ICE vehicles is generating far larger waste. Try to buy a rebuilt Hyundai Sonata ICE engine for a car built in the last 10 years. You will have a hard time because they aren’t very servicable and they break often. Lack of replacement engines means many cars that look amazing are headed to the scrapper because there’s no way to put them back on the road again.

At the same time though, I have to acknowledge that, without an ICE, EVs have far fewer points of failure. There’s a potential for them to be on the road much longer. I just don’t see that happening due to consumer demand.

“Electric cars accounted for around 18% of all cars sold in 2023, up from 14% in 2022 and only 2% 5 years earlier, in 2018.” source

Nearly 1 in every 5 new cars sold last year were EVs.

Gasoline consumption for vehicles is down 4.4% due to those drivers now driving EVs and not buying gasoline anymore source

Demand of EVs seems to be pretty decent.

That just means they’re well-connected to the establishment and probably know something we don’t.

Get out of here with that Qanon logic.

India is strengthening ties with Russia (via BRICS) and will probably get involved somewhere.

India is abusing Russia as it has power over them. Its one of the few countries that will still do business with them on some level, and they are demanding (and getting) absurdly low prices for Russian goods. India is paying and settling in Rupees (India’s currency) and Russia is now has an excess of them. The only place you can spend Rupees is on Indian goods.

Even worse, his argument is that teens aborting unwanted zygotes are costing the state money because the state gets less power in congress because the state can’t count unwanted zygotes as population because those aren’t carried to term. That AG is a real piece of shit.

China would love for RMB to become a default reserve currency. There are strong accusations that China is a currency manipulator though. I’m not educated enough on the topic to have an opinion on it. However, countries choosing it as a reserve currency may be left holding the bag.

I think it could, yes. Not much (more comes out in the neutron star on neutron star action), but yes some from single large start explosions.

there ways to mitigate that, without relying on the dollar and although they are not insignificant,

Sure, you can rely on other stable currencies like Euros or GBP. Alternatively you can rely on gold, but if you have the ability to trade your own currency to someone willing to accept it and give you sufficient gold, and that you can produce that gold on demand to buyers, you don’t really need a fiat currency except to facilitate transactions easier. The problem is these countries aren’t backing their currency with gold (or other precious metals).

The tradeoff to gold backing is that you can’t grow your economy either. The amount of currency in circulation will always be limited by the ratio of gold you’re backing your currency with. This is why the USA abandoned the gold standard, and it was the right decisions. Before doing this, if you wanted to borrow money, you had to FIND someone with money that would be willing to lend it. There were instances of limits in growth simply because all the folks that held the vast majority of the wealth (and thereby gold backed currency) weren’t lending it, so loans couldn’t occur in volume.

The whole point of the article is that basically China can overcome tariffs by focusing on overcapacity.

I don’t think you read the article or you have poor reading comprehension. The word “overcapacity” appears exactly one time in the article and it is cite as a reason China is expanding to create manufacturing in foreign countries.

If you want a layman approach then this Youtube video about where gold comes from is pretty good. You can skip most of the first half about the culture of gold. The second half of the video is the creation part.

If you want a technical approach then you want to talk about Rapid Neutron Capture and GRB. You’ll find that kind of talk here. Warning: When you start digging deep into scientific explanations you discover that there’s more we don’t know. As the article ends with the idea that our current working theory of r-process doesn’t happen often enough to explain how much gold we have so there’s likely at least one other way gold is created in the universe. Welcome to cutting edge science!

Stars take orders of magnitude longer than 4k years to create lead as well, and there is no way of lead being created that could happen in 4k years, unless you start getting into “God made the universe look old” territory?

Thats correct, but the meme is written as a scientific explanation and its is wrong/incomplete. To correct it, go with what you said, not with what the meme says.

Most elements exist as a result of stars smashing atoms as per my understanding.

In a single star the heaviest element you can make is Iron.

To get anything heavier than Iron, which Lead is, you need your first start to blow up making iron, and the stuff left behind to eventually form a bigger star, then that star needs to blow up (where you’ll get some gold, lead and a few other slightly heavier elements. Then the remaining parts of the star need to form a neutron star. You then need that neutron star to find and eventually crash into another neutron star, and thats where you get the really heavy elements like uranium.

Feel free to post the alternate currency that was more stable for the history you’re showing. I’d wait, but I’d die waiting.

This is a great example of how to beat tarrifs/ why tariffs don’t work.

If it is causing manufacturers to produce the goods in the foreign country’s domestic market, then that would be a benefit to imposing tariffs. The country that is imposing tariffs gets to benefit from the spending on labor inside their own country, as well as corporate taxation for domestically produced goods, and finally for the increase to GDP which again goes to the tariff imposing country.

I think this is bad science. Its important to call out bad science to prove that good science exists.

I don’t think all lead is the result of radioactive decay.

I voted early at the county Board of Elections yesterday in Ohio. There is HEAVY turnout for early voting. The parking lot (which is mostly empty for any other elections) was packed with people circling waiting for a spot. There was a nonstop stream of people coming in and out. I only had to wait for about 2 minutes for a voting machine though. This is the third week of early voting in Ohio.

How will this be any worse on BRICS Clear than it currently is on Swift ?

Lets say you’re Egypt selling cotton to Russia. BRICS Clear is pushing local currencies. So Russia wants to pay for the Egyptian cotton in Russian Rubles. Lets say the amount of Rubles would buy 10,000 barrels of crude oil at the time of settlement. Russia is currently in economic dire straights and the currency value is dropping. When Egypt wants to spend its Rubles, if it can find a country willing to take them, it could only buy 5,000 barrels of crude oil.

How eager will Egypt be to settle another transaction in BRICS Clear when the value can evaporate. This is way international trade wants to settle in stable currencies.

Here’s where it falls apart, right here:

[Vladimir Putin] also said the increased use of BRICS national currencies for transactions will “minimize geopolitical risks.”

Some of the BRICS countries have wildly volatile currencies either because of governments “printing money” to devalue their currency for economic stimulus for exports or to pay down debts. Alternatively straight up currency manipulation by the sovereign states issuing them. I would think this makes settling transactions in these local currencies a big risk for commerce. You don’t know if the value of the currency you accept tomorrow will be worth what it is today. These are reasons GBP, Euro, and USD are so valuable as currencies, they generally have pretty consistent values.