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Here is the most recent crap from MS.
He told the FT: “It is deeply disturbing that an American company would be actively working with the Chinese military to further build up the government’s surveillance network against its own people — an act that makes them complicit in aiding the Communist Chinese government’s totalitarian censorship apparatus and egregious human rights abuses.”
Google, Seeking a Return to China, Is Said to Be Building a Censored Search Engine Google is said to have teams of engineers working on a search app that restricts content banned by Beijing.

Plenty more from both of them.

He told the FT: “It is deeply disturbing that an American company would be actively working with the Chinese military to further build up the government’s surveillance network against its own people — an act that makes them complicit in aiding the Communist Chinese government’s totalitarian censorship apparatus and egregious human rights abuses.”

Holy Jesus' butt-plug you're a cock.

Not good enough, now go to the 1st reformed church of the AR-15 and repeat that sentence.

1 - automation creates jobs as well as replacing them

Yes, but those jobs also require a higher level of worker education so your case that defunding education has no effect has now acquired yet another dent.

2 - outsourcing to low cost countries has replaced jobs irrespective of automation

Quoting the financial Times (yuk, I feel dirty): https://www.ft.com/content/dec... The US did indeed lose about 5.6m manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. But according to a study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, 85 per cent of these jobs losses are actually attributable to technological change — largely automation — rather than international trade.

The lesson here is that if you want to be a player in the automated economy you better have a well educated workforce.

3 - teachers are among the highest paid earners in the US

That depends entirely upon where you are and how seriously your state takes education: https://www.forbes.com/sites/n... ... also, the teacher's complaint is not just pay most of it is actually a total lack of resources and funding to do their job properly. Because their state leadership (usually Republican) has decided to experiment with small government.

4 - the Chinese are less than 20 years of reform away from another revolution

They have managed to create a telecommunications industry that owns 1500 standards essential 5G patents and four of the leading smartphone manufacturers in those 20 years. I look forward to seeing what they'll accomplish in the next 20 years while you sit on your hands and assume they'll never have the temerity to threaten America's technological lead.

5 - I've already told you I'm not underestimating anybody, but frankly China isn't my opponent. I'm not a nation state

You do a good job of sounding like you are determined to underestimate the Chinese.

PS - 7 - I don't use the term f**ing, I use the terms fuck and fucking. You may not like them but that's your fucking choice, stop trying to impose it on me

And you still sound like somebody who thinks that inserting some form of the word 'fuck' into every sentence makes their argument stronger.

PS - 8 - I don't have a toilet for a mouth.

Yes you do.

PS - 9 - I'm not fucking American. I'm also not Chinese and I'm also capable of objectively assessing both nations. You clearly are not.

So I am incapable of accessing both nations and you are because ..... no proof?

The EU just abandoned their 2050 climate goals because there was no chance of reaching it. And Germany has seen coal use slightly rise over the last 10 years - no chance of meeting their own 2020 and 2030 commitments.

The future isn't solar and wind (because it's not working); it's nuclear. That is the only way forward out of pollution and limited power.

Germany is set to phase out coal-fired power stations by 2038: https://www.ft.com/content/cfa... Both Nucear and Coal will be killed off by the free market for the simple reason that Nuclear and Coal are the two most expensive options available in terms of LCOE and the only remaining fossil full that can compete with terrestrial wind and solar in terms of cost-effectiveness is natural gas. Isn't the free market wonderful?

No, like I said, over 11,000 miles on average, nothing to do with a pre-set course.

https://www.ft.com/content/7c8...
https://www.engadget.com/2019/...

And that's not 11,000 until an accident, that's 11,000 miles until the car acted in a way the driver wasn't comfortable with, that doesn't mean the car would have had an accident but that the driver wasn't going to wait and find out.

There is not true data about how many crashes driverless cars have because they are never really driverless yet, they're not good enough, but they could get good enough in a few years.

https://www.ft.com/content/62f...

Also, old news, this came out in December.

see here. We're still losing jobs to cheap Mexican labor (and Canadian, since companies go there so they don't have to pay for healthcare) but not at the levels of the 1980s. Germany seems to be doing just fine in the manufacturing sector and they're fully unionized.

I know you're just trolling, but my point stands. We're running out of work most folks can do. Want to see what happens to people that nobody needs and nobody wants? Go look at an Indian reservation before the Casinos. Or Africa. It's a whole new level of poverty.

because they're afraid we might start taxing their robots.

Yes, your job might not be automated, but the millions who are about to lose jobs to automation (or already have) aren't just going to go quietly into that good night.

A lot of them will end up destitute. They'll start looking for somebody to solve their problems. A man. A Strong Man.

A lot of them will study and find new jobs. Your jobs. They'll flood the market with new labor and drive down your wages. This is what's meant by "race to the bottom". Some of you will join the ranks of the destitute looking for that Strong Man to save the day...

I keep saying it folks, we've got an election in two years, and it's going to be a turning point. We've seen Democratic Socialism work just fine where it's been tried. There aren't really a lot of other solutions to automation besides a war so big it kills off 30% of the excess workforce. And I don't think that's an option anymore. The rich aren't going to let us break their stuff this time, but we might be able to use the apparatus of Democracy to pry some wealth from their hands.

What do you think they use inside canned food these days? I'll give you a hint, but it wasn't BPA plastic. Not even back in the 1800's.

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman — 19 April 2015

The chapter on the cans is among my favorites. It contains not just a biography of the can and its extreme usefulness but also a description of the quest by a small number of people to stop them from imploding, self-Âdestructing and interfering with the food and drink they encapsulate.

Rust by Jonathan Waldman — 3 April 2015

Waldman is concerned about the chemical ingredients of epoxy can coatings, especially bisphenol-A, which may leak into the drink or food contents.

Its impact on health is controversial — some authorities maintain that it can disrupt human hormones and increase the risk of cancer and other disease, others insist that it is harmless in the concentrations likely to be absorbed even by a dedicated drinker of canned beverages.

Unsurprisingly, Waldman's suspicious questions about BPA did not make him popular at Can School.

I'll give you a hint: whatever the coatings contain (much is shrouded in secrecy) they contain plenty of BPA.

Dossier: Can coatings — December 2016

The most common epoxy coatings are synthesized from bisphenol A and epichlorohydrin forming bisphenol A-diglycidyl ether epoxy resins.

There's an insane amount of these epoxy resins manufactured in America, and then spread very, very, very thin, them maintained in constant contact with food or drink, for days or weeks or months (during highly variable storage conditions, too).

Sperm Count Dropping in Western World — 26 July 2017

The results, published in the journal Human Reproduction Update, showed a 52.4 percent decline in sperm concentration and a 59.3 percent decline in total sperm count among North American, European, Australian and New Zealand men.

Not exactly a smoking gun.

BPA is well known as a potent source of smokeless powder.

I'd love to see a graphic of epoxy can liners over the past 40 years denominated in m^2 hour per capita (average duration of food contact times total coated area of container in constant contact with food until food consumed). It just might tell a sad tale of sad tails.

biggaijin observed:

It looks like the world's largest democracy is coming into some bumpy times. Clearly, the UK does want to control its people just as Orwell predicted, but until now the Indian government has not been visibly interested in this sort of control. It's ver sad, and very bad news for the people of India.

Modi's government has displayed repressive and authoritarian tendencies from day one. Luckily, as Al Jazeera reports, his Bharatiya Janata Party lost 56 seats in parliament in local elections in the northern states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh in recent months. That's a significant swing in popular support from last spring, and it may mean India is getting as tired of Modi as, for instance, Hungary is of Viktor Orban ...

Here you go....

https://www.ft.com/content/d9b...

Of course China is really big on enforcing Patent Infringement isn't it ?

Why not? Very soon, Americans will be complaining about Chinese patent trolls.

The United States used to violate other countries' intellectual properties left and right, after it developed its industry and economy, the U.S. developed into the patent trolling business.

Ethereum had its own version of bailouts: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/20...

It's different from traditional banking, though, because Ethereum users themselves agreed to the bailout, and it wasn't really forced. The original chain does continue as Ethereum Classic, but it's a much smaller player.

Started after Obama and Xi agreed Sept 25, 2015 not to hack each other? https://www.ft.com/content/0db...

Avoided Starwood the last 2 yrs, since their prior breech.

Well you could start by reading EDF's Wikipedia page. The French version is best but the English one catalogues their financial woes too.

Basically their nuclear stuff is so expensive and risky that they keep running out of money and having to delay to take more bail-outs from the government.

https://www.ft.com/content/04d...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk...

Of course the government has no choice, if EDF failed they would have to nationalize it anyway to keep the lights on.

You could argue that, but I doubt that you would win, esp. as other nations deal with your gov's Belt/Road. The nations that deal with you are finding out exactly how wonderful China REALLY is.
For example, if we were in CHina, you could not have posted the the opposite without your gov knowing and punishing you for it.
Pakistan had to give CHina a port and must alllow a number of the oil pipes that America was accused of wanting (which had ZERO value to the west, but huge value to China).
Sr Lanka had to give CHina a port, and is now importing far more than they export
In fact, CHina has forced many other nations to turn over their resources such as oil wells, ports, etc to pay the debt that they owe China.
Venezuela, Djibouti, Tajikistan, Kirghistan, Lao, Maldives, Mongolia, and Montenegro are just a few that your nation is controlling.

And the UK Government subsidizes offshore wind to undercut the price of nuclear as well. Have to make it attractive for the French and Chinese companies to come and install those turbines after all...

Wrong. In addition Germany increased their emissions in 2016, 2017 and will again in 2018. But don't let facts interfere with perception: https://www.ft.com/content/7f2...

Africans probably know that there is a good chance that most of the remaining human-based manufacturing jobs will end up in Africa, which is a situation all major corporations in a position to care are working towards.

I wouldn't bet on that at all; that infrastructure won't spring out of nowhere, and shipping costs are an increasing concern.

This is just one example of what's coming down the pike.

Bloomberg ran a piece awhile back about a Chinese company that purchased US designed sewbots and opened a plant in Arkansas. The future is in the first world's back yard; Africa and and much of Asia (with the exception of China as they're kicking their research into high gear) are fucked.

Old figure. The strike price last year was down to $57.50, significantly below the price for Hinckley.

For a continent flush with cash and a large budget surplus, every member should be able to spend an adequate amount on its own defense.

Defense from who? NATO destroyed Libya, and some of it's member nations were behind the destructions of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the rest of the world that needs defense from the United States and its poodles, not the other way around.

Odd. No where in the act does it say the Fed is publicly owned. From reading your other posts, I believe your confusing is you believe shareholders are owners. They aren't.

So your reasoning is based simply on extrapolating a graph.

I don't need to prove the null hypothesis - that the current state of affairs will continue, barring outside influence. If you expect a well documented trend to reverse, the onus is on you to provide evidence about why. All data indicates that humans cause extinction and that our impact on the ecosystem around us is only increasing, except in the cases where we've taken deliberate action to limit ourselves.

If those were the "exact figures", then all the businesses in the world would already have switched.

Because in your fantasy world it's an instantaneous thing to switch the entire grid to a new energy source, I guess? We can look at the rate of adoption of renewables to see if lots of businesses are investing in this cheaper energy, and lo and behold, renewable energy investment is dwarfing everything else. It would be increasing even more if we stopped all the subsidies for fossil fuels.

That is, I used to believe that externalities work the way you think they do, and that climate change was as serious as you think you do

Weird, because the only thing that would change my mind would be lots of compelling evidence from reputable sources. If your mind was changed, surely you've got lots of that information available? I would really love to hear about it, seriously, because I sincerely do want to have the most informed opinions possible. Unfortunately, so far you've just made weak arguments against my citations, while providing no supporting information of your own. If you can provide some, please do, otherwise I'm done going in circles with you.

The difference is even smaller when it comes to the tariffs that US exporters actually paid in 2015 — a weighted average of 1.4 per cent on non-agricultural goods sold in the EU, and 2.1 per cent on non-agricultural exports to Canada. EU exporters to the US paid an average weighted tariff of 1.6 per cent; Canadian exporters 1.3 per cent.

Or for straightforward political assassination, use good old-fashioned bullets.

https://www.ft.com/content/9b7...

http://www.core77.com/posts/37...

https://hubjapan.io/articles/1...

The uncomfortable nature of this issue is that it is very difficult to quantify the impact that Russian propaganda had on the US electorate, and the big question over whether it altered the outcome of the election is probably impossible to answer. Counterfactuals are hard, we can't easily go back and spin off a different parallel universe without the Russian operations to form a control and compare the differences. The election was close enough (but not as close as 2000) that we might not be able to reach a conclusion even if we were willing to expend significant effort and resources in trying to answer that question.

Contrast this with the French elections, the Russians tried to some similar efforts to help out Le Pen versus Macron, but Macron won 66% to Le Pen's 34%, so it's pretty clear that the Russians had no substantial effect on the final outcome in that match up. The only plausible thing that they could have made a major effect on that I can think of would be in the first round of the Presidential election, where most of the top candidates had in ballpark of 20% of the vote but Le Pen at 21% and Macron at 24% were the top two and made it to the runoff. It's a lot more plausible that Russian psyops could shave a percent or two off the next in line, Fillon or Mélenchon, who had around 20% of the first round, to put Le Pen in the second spot. FT has an interesting graph showing how the different electorates split between first and then second round candidates.

Of course, the Russians wouldn't resort to psychological warfare if they thought the effort would be inherently pointless. As highly a people like to think of their own intellects and inability to be manipulated by information and disinformation, there wouldn't be so much propaganda if it didn't work.

As some anonymous coward pointed out in this thread:

"Clearly deliberately. He has been thinking about this since 1999:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"If they think you're serious, they'll negotiate, and it will never come to (nuclear war)".

Trump then formed a coalition with China and Japan to hit North Korea with sanctions so severe, that they were going to run out of foreign currency and suffer economic collapse within the year:
https://www.ft.com/content/db9...

Given how everyone thought Trump was going to drag the world into a nuclear bomb exchange with North Korea, clearly Kim thought he was serious too.

So, presented with these facts which ended up bringing Kim to the table, how are you going to resolve your clear cognitive dissonance and hatred towards Trump? Continue to deny reality and assume that Trump doesn't know what he's doing?"

Looks like it was a deliberate plan. You may argue that it was a stupid plan and he got lucky, but he went out and achieved exactly what he said he would by having the world believe that he was the madman willing to enter into a nuclear exchange with North Korea just because of insults on Twitter. But then you would have to acknowledged that he had planned this all along in the first place.

Part of this may be due to antibiotics being used as a diagnostic tool and also because patient expectations may lead to antibiotic prescribing.

Anecdotally, my wife recently had an onset of acute bronchitis, which is, in most cases, a viral infection. Her doctor prescribed antibiotics "just in case" it was bacterial.

Uber loses appeal in UK employment case / Company must treat its drivers as ‘workers’, tribunal rules https://www.ft.com/content/84d...

The US and Australia are actually leading the way in renewable energy production. Google and Apple just went 100% renewable with their energy use. Other US companies are looking do the same

Individual companies aren't a good guide for what is happening. In this case, government policy matters a lot. It is true that Australia has a boom in solar power, but that's despite the current government https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/11/australias-solar-power-boom-could-almost-double-capacity-in-a-year-analysts-say https://www.marketforces.org.au/campaigns/ffs/ not because of it. And in many respects Austarlian coal plants are producing all sorts of pollutants that wouldn't even be allowed in most of China https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/15/australian-coal-power-pollution-would-be-illegal-in-us-europe-and-china-report.

On the other hand China and India are ordering more coal plants be built than any other counties. China is taking a look at scaling back coal use but still major cities in China are simply unfit to live in because of pollution.

It is true that China and India are building new coal plants also, but that's only a fraction of their new grid production. In fact, Chinese cities have become substantially cleaner in the last few years https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-pollution-beijing-insight/beijing-may-be-starting-to-win-its-battle-against-smog-idUSKBN1EN0ZJ.

Africa is scheduled to become major problem in the next ten years too as more power is needed to provide for their growing economies. Coal is the only source of fuel for Africa that is cheap enough for them to exploit.

Actually, there are a lot of solar projects in parts of Africa also. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/26/the-race-to-solar-power-africa, but if you note in the comment you are replying to, I specifically included a link to the Solar Electric Light Fund; as I explained in that comment, it is particularly important to help get solar panels for Africa precisely so they don't turn to fossil fuels. So if you are concerned about Africa's fossil fuel production, then by all means donate to SELF.

Seems a bit more practical to build some desalinization plants. From what I have understood, recent advancements in membrane tech would make it far cheaper than in the past. Plus, there is the added benefit of lithium production.

https://www.ft.com/content/107...

There's a fairly extensive list here: https://www.ft.com/content/204...

It seems like the majority lean to the right, being either Republican party members or having expressed conservative views in the past (e.g. several of the actors).

If you are a man and constantly see men of all stripes in the news being harshly penalized for mere public accusations of sexual misconduct often decades after the alleged misconduct took place, with little to no evidence of the alleged crimes happening (other people saying "yeah, that happened" is not evidence) and no criminal case ever being brought, are you going to assume that "I don't harass or abuse anyone so I'm okay!" is good enough?

If you think that then you're wilfully blind. Take the Article AmiMojo linked to https://www.ft.com/content/204...

A significant fraction of those have the person in question admitting the accusations are true. If the alleged says "yeah that happened" then yes, that is pretty strong evidence.

A very significant fraction.

The problem is most of these allegations haven't been proven.

The FT has a list of guys who were accused and what happened to them: https://www.ft.com/content/204...

Quite a few have continued on with few/no consequences.

I agree that there should be investigations where they don't simply admit it like Bushnell did. That's only fair and proper. But it's not true to say that "most" of these allegations are not proven, as in most cases they were investigated and/or the accused admitted it.

And the cherry, the US, the Country FOUNDED on the principles of freedom, drops to 21....well done....
http://theweek.com/speedreads/... [theweek.com]

I have a hard time taking any analysis that ranks Germany, Canada, and the UK above the US. Hate speech laws. Arrests for tweets and facebook posts. Compelled speech... Not exactly bastions of personal freedom and civil rights. Any report that thinks countries that employ those laws are free are delusional and fundamentally flawed in their analysis.

I honestly would not trade my citizenship of the US for with any other nation on Earth. The US has it's problems no doubt but the protections for individual liberty are still foundational. I can say what I want and I can defend my right to say it myself without the government.

The volatility is a serious problem. Variation of 10% in a day is not uncommon. A sudden plummet in reaction to this news is pretty typical.

The value is so speculative. It rather reminds me of this parable about wisdom of crowds. People speculate it has value because everyone else is.

Says the guy who so absolutely hates James Damore that he didn't even read the memo

Liar.

That's the problem though : they are not the press.

Are you stupid? Go check the actual print newspapers. Like here:

https://www.ft.com/content/99c...

1. Feeding, clothing and sheltering around 1.7 billion people--around 20% of Earth's human population.

This is just stupid Goldilocks talk, we get that a lot on /. from people with no arguments... the nations in Europe are too small. China is too big. The US is different from everyone else and just right. Bovine excrement.

2. A massive air and water pollution problem that is already affecting the health of many Chinese.

Life expectancy is 76 years, far above the world average of 71.5 years and trailing the US by <3 years. China's GDP/capita is now around the world average, half the world is poorer than China and in total they're second only to the US. They have a huge net export ($500,000 million/year) and very low national debt (41% compared to 106% in the US). Basically they're already in good health and have a massive unused economic muscle they could use to buy polluting goods from others, create greener tech, subsidize greener tech, levy taxes on polluting goods they produce and so on.

Truth is that China is far from worst in class: Smog-cloaked Delhi looks with envy at Beijing's cleaner air. Not only particulates, but China's Sulfur Dioxide Emissions Drop, India's Grow Over Last Decade. Those are the two biggest local pollution issues. Their total energy consumption and CO2 emissions are growing but that's a global problem that won't more adversely affect China than anyone else. If you think any of these are "collapse of China" class problems you're wildly delusional.

75% of the migrants will still be unemployed in five years or ten years time according to the immigration minister

https://www.ft.com/content/022...

Ms Ozoguz insisted that the new immigrants shouldn't be seen primarily as an economic resource.

"We don't take in refugees according to their skills set," she said. "The only criteria should be to help people fleeing war and political persecution."

As Murray pointed out people try a bunch of excuses and eventually come back to 'they're no use economically or culturally but we have no choice because of Yuman Rites.

Google arbitrarily blocks Amazon devices from accessing its content... https://www.ft.com/content/500...

https://www.ft.com/content/e7b.... Exactly. Chinese gov subsidizes their fishing fleet to go into others waters.

Less Taiwan and more China. https://www.ft.com/content/e7b...

Sorry, that's been done - it's called car sharing clubs:

https://www.ft.com/content/478...

Yeah, I'm very much on the side of believing Russian interference is a big problem now, in part because I'm not stuck in an American bubble - I'm not stuck with the very American partisanship thing in believing it's a Trump vs. Hillary thing. There's widespread evidence of it across every European country too, and some of it's not even hidden or in dispute - i.e. the Russian money given to Le Penn, the hosting of European far right parties by the Russian government Russia etc. and the impact of Russian money and expertise at Cambridge Analytica in both the Brexit AND US presidential vote - these things were all either done in public or are now out in public (the UK's electoral commission investigation highlighted the Cambridge Analytica foreign funding issue in the Brexit vote), thus I don't think Russian support for divisive parties in candidates is even in dispute at this point, it's merely a question of how deep and how far.

Most debates I see here revolve around US partisanship and that claims of Russian interference are just sour grapes by the losing party, but that attitude shows a profound ignorance of the bigger picture over the last few years, i.e.:

https://themoscowtimes.com/art...

https://www.ft.com/content/010...

If you think it's just sour grapes you're just a useful idiot - this is an attack on the West that stretches way beyond and above mere American partisanship. Even if you ignore the stuff that's mere hearsay and speculation right now, there's enough other evidence to show the threat and problem is genuine and real to at least some real and problematic extent. Saying "We do it too" isn't an excuse, maybe we do, but for all it's flaws, I prefer the Western way of life over the poverty and corruption stricken neo-Soviet way that afflicts Russia and it's hijacked states (e.g. Belarus), so it's still something we should all stand against if we hate corruption, hate the idea of police states, and hate the idea of seeing a reduced standard of living and quality of life - you should be against all that whether you voted for Hillary or Trump, and that means standing against the Russia state, not white washing it because you're scared about accusations your candidate may have benefited from it.

But even I think this is maybe pushing it out there a bit, I'm not saying it isn't possible that the Russians were involved but I think it's more likely to be the case that state employees were inept in the way they looked after and managed these machines and just wanted to cover their tracks - no one wants to be sacked for being the person that let something this badly misconfigured or generally weak be used for critical infrastructure. Let's face it, it's quite likely that when the issues came out, whether Russian interference was proven or merely imaginary, heads would still probably roll based on the general weakness of the device and the ineptitude of those responsible for securing them.

It's a sign of weakness for Russia. They've had to send in Russian troops pretending not to be Russian troops. The West has proxy fighters; the West arms and supports Russia's enemies and they have fought Russia to a standstill. Russia used to have proxies as well, but many of those are gone now.

Ukraine isn't the hopeless basket case Russia wanted to make it. The economy is recovering and is now free of Russian domination. Russia has ruined one if its best trade relationships.

Meanwhile Russia is in subsistence mode; while it's true Russia isn't suffering an economic collapse, it has stagnated and is not developing. Western capital has dried up and Russian manufacturers are cut off from the richest markets on Earth; as per the story we're reading today. The rest of the world is leaving Russia behind.

Putin seriously miscalculated and the Russian people, thrilled to have a hairy chested patriarch to care for them, followed him to failure.

Did you fail to read the article? Or do you simply not know how the electricity market works in the UK?

Either way, I suggest that you don't bother posting when you don't have the facts at hand.

In this case, the installation is "subsidy free", which means that it must compete with other sources to sell electricity into the grid. You might also note that UK-produced nuclear power is heavily subsidized.
https://www.ft.com/content/b8e...

4) Enact some kind of incentives to move to electric motors for lawn equipment.

This is a good point, but why stop there? Norway has the highest amount of electric vehicles on the planet per capita even though they're a major oil producer because they pay no taxes on EVs, meaning no VAT and no additional vehicle taxes that normal cars are subject to. Additionally, electric vehicles are not subject to road tolls. AT the same time, gas costs 2 dollars a litre, meaning 7,5 dollars a gallon, and that's cheap for Norway, the last time I was there it was higher.

This isn't rocket science, the 2 primary factors affecting the adoption rate of electric vehicles are: the prices of the vehicles themselves, and the price of gas. Both can be heavily affected by taxes (and tax-breaks) I understand that in the current American context where you're used to having gas that's dirt cheap (don't get me wrong, the Norwegian prices are high as hell even for a European standard, but even here in Finland we pay around 6,10 $ a gallon, (E9510 which is 10 % ethanol) raising the tax on gas is probably a political no-go for several reasons, but even just giving significant tax-breaks on the electric vehicles will increase adoption rates significantly.

Secondly: start putting pressure on the oil companies themselves to create less polluting fuels that can be used to power conventional ICEs. You could set a goal of: by the year NNNN X % of all fuel produced most come from non-fossil sources. You currently produce around 140 million gallons of biodiesel a month (figures from june), with the yearly total capacity being around 2,3 billion gallons, which is less than 1 % of all the oil you currently consume. You can do a lot better, as can the rest of us..

The thing is, we (as in, the globe) don't have a lot of time to react if we wish to keep the warming below 2 degrees celsius, after which point it starts getting beyond our control due to feedback-effects from the glaciers melting as well as methane starting to be released from the permafrost, after which we're royally screwed. This means drastic actions are needed from everyone, so focusing on lawn mover engines is putting a bandaid a paper cut while the body is suffering from cancer that needs immediate treatment.

The good things is we can do this, we (the advanced economies) have both the money and the technological knowhow to ditch fossil fuels at a rapid pace, and we should, but for that to happen we need large players like the US, together with EU and China to start actually doing large scale systemic changes in the ways energy is both produced, used and taxed. Emission costs are currently heavily externalized, in that fossil fuels are waaaaaay cheaper than the should be considering the damage being done to everyone by their continued use, but as the effects only appear years after the stuff has been burned, they've managed to remain as cheap as they have. This needs to change in the relatively near-future, because the economy will naturally reroute to low-emission alternatives once fossils become economically inefficient. However we cannot wait for that to happen naturally (ie. waiting for the oil to start running out) because at that point it's likely going to be too late, so really, a carbon tax of some description, together with other sensible policies like those mentioned above by you, me and others, is the way to go.

You can't raise the price of gas (yet) with so many people dependent on it, but if you aggressively push for adoption of EVs not with bans, but with sensible market policies, once the price of an EV is below the price of an equivalent ICE vehicle you can start to increase gas price at which point it will only further increase

Exactly what do you think is competing here?

They've been applying for a patent on an electronic cash system since 1999. They updated the patent in 2009-2011 to something that resembles very, very much, Bitcoin.

These bankers do own Bitcoin. Lots of it. In the last few hours we've seen massive buy orders that have made the price start to rebound.

While this can't be proven, these signs suggest price manipulation by JP Morgan in order to buy more cryptocurrency at a much cheaper price.

They're using Musk as a canary. When his company gets something that actually sells, they'll make better versions, sell ten times as many and just price him completely out of the market.

Yes, because US automakers are famous for making good versions of things?
Yes, because they've succeeded at competing with Tesla so far?

The big automakers if anything are burdened by their existing outdated infrastructure, while Tesla's is the latest technology. Tesla can hire away people with decades of experience at will. Against most startups, the big automakers could cite their cash advantages. But Tesla is worth more than them; they can finance anything that will ultimately help their bottom line with equity.

Here, try this on for size: where are their gigafactories? No, seriously. Mass battery manufacturing is a fundamental requirement for mass-scale EV production. You think something like that just pops up overnight? A consortium of German automakers just announced plans to make one, slightly larger than Tesla's. Construction however won't start for two years (because they're just now entering the conceptual stage) and full production is long way down the road. Meanwhile Tesla is already doing the design work on something like six more Gigafactories.

This notion that the existing major automakers are going to sleep for the next few years and then suddenly whip out a couple million EVs per year that everyone wants to buy is fantasy. They're on the defensive.

The recent meeting of Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen are having a Blackberry moment. Their hopes of a diesel future look dashed, and Tesla is putting the Model 3 straight against the BMW 3 series and similar, beating it on standard features, performance, and price without even having to take into account subsidies and fuel savings (which in Europe can be thousands of dollars per year). They're meeting to try to figure out what to do. But the way forward is not going to be easy. They waited too long.