Fair enough. Not all monopolies are bad monopolies. There’s a narrow set of circumstances where a monopoly can exist within a market without making that market something other than free.

Government owned utilities for example - natural monopolies that are allowed to exist in a highly regulated state.

Monopsony can also be good for the free market in sectors with inflexible demand, such as healthcare.

But those are exceptions, and not the general rule.

It always becomes monopoly.

One person telling everyone else what’s going to happen isn’t freedom.

Speaking to reporters early Wednesday, Tver Gov. Igor Rudenya said that all drones in the region were shot down and that there was a fire on the ground as a result of debris from a downed drone. As he spoke, loud explosions could be heard in the background.

Yeah, an unregulated market isn’t free.

Prisoners may find it difficult to make the commute and show up on time for a factory shift.

But actually yes, their labor contribution is a significant component in the supply chain.

For example, if an undocumented worker labors to produce food, that frees up another person’s labor for working in a factory.

Some of the things used in the automotive industry that are made by prisoners:
-wiring harnesses
-interior components like seat covers, upholstery, and floor mats
-lighting components like headlights and interior lights
-repair and refurbishment of government fleet vehicles; brakes, body work, painting, mechanical repairs, etc…, which also frees up the labor of skilled mechanics to work on returning broken EVs to the road

Other goods and services produced by prisoners that indirectly assist the production of EV’s include:
-circuit boards, mostly for government use, but lower demand for civilian circuit board manufacturing capacity lowers the prices of EV components
-office furniture
-eye-wear, including prescription lenses and safety glasses that might be worn in the EV factories
-metalworking, including making toolboxes, lockers and shelves that may be found in EV factories
-government warehouse & distribution jobs free up civilian labor that can go into EV supply chain logistics

Yeah, tax incentives and consumer rebates won’t encourage investment in American EV manufacturing capacity because they could disappear overnight and the extra capacity would then be wasted.

Free money to build new factories will do it though, and that’s what Uncle Sam has been spending on - its less risky to tool up a factory for mass production of a low margin family sedan when somebody else is paying for the tools and you won’t lose money if your new model sedan doesn’t sell enough units to cover the one time factory startup costs.

I don’t think the Bolt was a practical vehicle? You can’t take road trips with it, even across the charger-dense East Coast USA - it won’t get you from Miami to Orlando, or from New York to DC.

Driving it from 80% to 20% charge gives a range of 155 miles, which is decent, but then a fast charging station would need 1.4 hours to charge it back up from 20% to 80%.

I also don’t believe for a second US car manufacturers are not milking customers with features they don’t really need

Japanese car makers do the same in the US market.

same problem with unregulated higher education prices + loans

The Chinese supply chain benefits from government money increasing demand by lowering prices of finished goods, without having to lower prices of supply chain inputs.

Tariffs negate the increase in demand by increasing the price of finished goods. If the prices are brought in line with what the goods would have cost without the subsidies, then the Chinese government has spent that money for no gain, and the US government collects that much money by taxing its citizens instead of letting them have cheaper cars. If the tariffs are even higher than the subsidies, the Chinese government’s loss is greater, but the US government’s gain is smaller - lower demand leads to less revenue for the Chinese supply chain and fewer taxes collected by the US government.

If you buy a Chinese car that has American tariffs placed on it, the only loser is you. China and USA both benefit.

That exists in USA’s supply chain too.

Prisoners are the most glaring omission from the Constitution’s abolition of slavery.

Undocumented immigrants are exploited even harder than other working class people living in America, and that’s the real reason that neither party will do more than give lip-service to securing the border, or even talk about going after employers who hire undocumented workers.

Eat the dragons.

Bet that would be fun to take off road. The dimensions are similar to a jeep.

If the sun became a red giant tomorrow, and Earth found itself inside the outer layers of solar atmosphere, then drag would start slowing it down. In less than 70,000 years, it would fall close enough to the center to be torn apart by tidal forces like one of Saturn’s moons (assuming it hasn’t already been vaporized).

If we’ve already waited 5 billion years to have our revenge, whats another 70k? The lowest amount of Delta V we can spend on this project is zero.

Sagittarius A* would like a word, and you’ll never get that word back.

What if we catch a gravity assist off Jool, and do the retrograde burn at perijool to gain some free Oberth Effect DV?

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.

Wait a minute, are you talking about taxi services? Those are for people who don’t own a car when they need to make short trips that can’t be done through public transportation. For people who do own a car, those kinds of short trips can be done with a PHEV without burning any gas.

For longer trips, its cheaper and more convenient to rent a car compared to taking a taxi. Yes, if the trip is to someplace with chargers along the way, an EV would be ideal. Yes, if there are no chargers along the way, then a HEV would be ideal. But a PHEV is almost as good as an HEV in that case - certainly better than a diesel in terms of emissions - and it lets you make the short trips without burning any gas, without having to make car rental reservations for long trips to areas without chargers, and without needing to purchase an entire second vehicle for driving in areas that do have chargers.

OK, so we’ve established a person can do the math and come up with some value of long trips where its not economical to rent.

Given that a person needs to make that many long trips, how many short trips would they also need to make for the gas savings from a PHEV in EV mode during short trips to exceed the gas loss from doing long trips in a vehicle that gets somewhat lower MPG on long trips compared to a pure hybrid?

How much value might a person reasonably assign to the flexibility to take a weekend road trip without having to plan ahead and make reservations with a rental company?