Getting under $60/bbl has been a big deal. But a lot of that has just been the economy slowing.

we’d have a more competitive and distributed market for these technologies and a lower future dependence on Chinese imports for said technologies.

I don’t see a future where at least one of the two largest populations of educated professionals doesn’t lead the way on electric vehicles. And that really only leaves you with China or India.

You might have a broader distribution or more regionalized production. But there’s no world in which a country with the manufacturing capacity plus the enormous population advantage doesn’t come out on top eventually.

Right now, I can see a chokehold forming on that sector

I don’t see a chokehold on EVs any more than Taiwan has a chokehold on CPUs.

There’s a building comparative advantage, but the global market is enormous. Plenty of room to catch up.

That’s why China has ten competitive major brands right now

Sure. But that doesn’t change China’s economic growth path. You aren’t changing their behavior

Tesla is definitely “trying” by number of units produced. Volkswagen is also taking EVs very seriously, at least by current and projected manufacturing numbers.

I hate Trump, but I hate Xi Jinping with an equal fervor

Bribery is how the US political system has operated for the bulk of the country’s history

But, for the most part, the bribery was intended to increase private profits. Rarely have we seen industry bribe the feds in an act of self-sabotage.

nobody stopped them

What would “stopping them” have even looked like?

🤣

If they want to beat the charges, they need to announce their own AI trained on the data several billion in Series A investment funding.

If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported

The definition of “defensive use” ranges from “discharged weapon at assailant” to “announced possession of weapon at scary noise”. So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.

But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.

I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.

And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.

it’s better than the rest of TX that I can find. I’m open to suggestions.

Texas Tribune is still good, even if they’ve been on the downswing due to budget cuts. Houston Landing might have been good, but it flamed out when they couldn’t find enough advertisers or build a subscription base fast enough. I enjoyed City Cast Houston from time to time, but they’re gone now.

sigh

I forgot Propublica

They’re definitely good.

Anyone can fake a chat stream. And Owens is a notorious hack who will happily just make shit up for her rube base.

Publicly, Kirk was never anti-Israel.

Grifting requires an audience to grift to

In 2024, Kirk channeled $85M through his organization, largely via the Mercer and Adelson families. He was getting this windfall precisely because Tucker (their former leading conservative flak) had started drinking his own kool-aid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Hamsun#Racism_and_admiration_for_Hitler

Woof.

No. He died because he got shot in the neck with a bullet at a Utah far-right pep rally.

His friend Candice Owens has been pumping out a bunch of conspiracy theories that Kirk was secretly anti-Semitic. His other friend Ben Shapiro keeps insisting Kirk was always an AIPAC loyalist. And that’s created a ton of friction at the latest CPAC convention.

But there’s no reason to believe Kirk had a dog in the fight one way or another. Charlie’s primary goal was raising money for Republican candidates and organizing college Republicans to do free labor in exchange for invitations to the various keggers and orgies TPUSA became known for. He wasn’t outspoken on Israel either way before his death. That made him a great blank slate for the various sycophants in his orbit to project their own reactionary ideology onto.

YMMV for a lot of these. The Guardian is notoriously transphobic. The AP and Reuters are a grab bag of real news coverage and naked propaganda pieces. Big City Papers are inevitably mouthpieces of the local reactionary billionaire, leaning heavily on the “If It Bleeds It Leads” rule of thumb.

My own local paper - the Houston Chronicle - is lousy with native advertising and reactionary hot takes.

Not the worst paper in the world, but this town used to have no less than six major periodicals of record. They were all strangled by media consolidation. And the last paper standing is barely more than a coupon book for the real estate industry, with a conservative newsletter spliced in.

Turns out we’re a nation of immigrants. Therefore, everyone’s eligible to be deported.

Does raise some questions about why ICE exists to begin with and what its purpose has actually been.