Because the human brain doesn’t intuitively count the way we’re taught in school.

Our brains are very good at understanding 1, 2, sometimes 3 and, “many”. That’s the data we get from smart chips, young children and isolated pre-literate societies.

Counting bigger numbers requires abstract systems. Our brains can do that but it’s much harder and we don’t grasp it as well.

The practical offshot of this is that while it’s intuitively obvious that a small space like a garage will quickly fill up with toxic gasses, it’s far less intuitive that a “very big” outside can get saturated by a “pretty big number” of cars.

I’d broaden that to a whole host of “green” and “alternative energy” sectors.

All the panic about Chinese “overproduction” of EVs and similar technologies is just China going whole hog on those industries. It’s not an “overproduction” in the traditional sense, where a company produces more than the market will bear and has to sell excess inventory at a loss. China just produces all of this stuff cheaply and at a huge scale.

About 20 years ago the general perception was that EVs were a joke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA Now we have cost effective solar and wind, efficient battery storage, good and cheap EVs and drones, modern heat pumps etc.

I don’t even think all the tariffs will matter in the long run. China is currently adopting all that stuff at a breakneck pace. Their production capacity won’t just go away once they’ve saturated the domestic market and the growing number of countries that have trade agreements with China). At that point, Chinese manufacturers will have no choice but to start actually selling below cost, just so they can clear inventory.

And this has a snowball effect too. Energy is often the limiting factor in production. An abundance of cheap energy makes it cheaper to produce more cheap energy production.

Couldn’t you say the same for the Republicans, or any party for that matter? ie, “Join them and if enough people like you join them they’ll change.”

Realistically, some new political operator isn’t going to get any relevant positions. And nobody with the relevant positions will listen to a new political operator.

That may work in theory but it’s basically saying to create a new Demcratic party from within.

What would joining consist of?

Register as Democrats? Vote whoever they tell you to vote for?

What would “in” consist of?

Democrats had both houses and the Oval Office in 2021. The Democrats were as “in” as they can reasonably expect to get unless we want to go back to 2011 when the Democrats had all that and a supermajority.

What was stopping him from doing something now? Who forced him to send more arms to Israel?

And how is the Democrats ability to do the right thing inhibited in any way by people complaining about a CEO supporting genocide?

These arguments sound a lot like when my 10 year old tells me that they’ll stop watching video games and do their homework as soon as I stop nagging them. That’s nonsense. They do their homework when I take the laptop away and tell them they can’t have it back until the homework is done.

In what way are the “Democrats and liberals” changing the situation from the inside?

Biden just approved another $680m arms package. That should be condemned, not celebrated. Acts that support this genocide should also be condemned, rather than celebrated.

It’s completely disingenuous to refer to it as just “visiting family.”

He was the one who decided to post a photo op in Tel Aviv. His previous posts make it clear that he knew he was doing so right next to an active genocide. According to the article, pro-Israelis interpreted it as an endorsement of Israeli policy.

Reasonable people still have boundaries. Reasonable people don’t “hold their nose” at genocide. Reasonable people stop believing in empty promises when every Israeli atrocity is rewarded with praise and unwavering support.

If any part of the left is OK with genocide the right is already winning and the only hope is to split with them.

It’s the timing.

Israel is currently engaged in a genocide. Some guy talking about how much they love all the beautiful things about Germany in 1942 would get down voted to hell too.

Your post completely ignore my first and main sentence.

It’s the timing that makes you an asshole, not your sentiment.

Israel is currently engaging in genocide. I know it. The UN knows it. Dogs know it.

Timing matters. I have family in Austria. I like a lot of things about Austria and I also don’t approve of a lot of things the government does and did.

If someone were to have voiced that sentiment loudly in 1942, they’d probably be an asshole.

I don’t need to guess. I know from having been to China and having talked to people.

It’s mostly a combination of 3 things:

1. Tons of infrastructure. If you decide to start manufacturing some random thing you can easily get all the stuff you need to get started.
2. Regulations are generally very favorable to small startups and businesses. This is partly why so much of the stuff on Temu is crap.
3. A huge population. That’s the main source of ultra cheap labor. Farmers in rural China can still make as little as $1.90 per day. All a factory owner needs to offer is more than that and they’ll have a line of applicants.

The thing is that it’s not PURE crap.

It’s kind of like going to a flea market. Most of it is crap and you can still find some decent and good stuff that’s way cheaper than it should be.

In other news, exponents make things big.

Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000

It happens regularly.

I’d also add that I find everyday stories from real people to be vastly more engaging that the completely unbelievable stories I see on TV.

Do you consider yourself these people’s friend?
If you’re completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.

But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it’s not zero.

Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.

Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.

Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.

That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.

There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

Maybe.

There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.