Ben Affleck knows his shit around LLMs apparently and HRC may have many virtues but "not being smart" is not among them. So even if she has trouble with grasping the fine details of the technology - she is more than smart and experienced enough to envision the implications.
A GOP win in November (albeit unlikely) creates two more years of chaotic governance, and dem win guarantees two years of disfunction while there will be a lot of weeks in which decades happens in the next couple of years.
Whomever wins in 2028 has a real chance to have Hoover and Obama first mandates - where chickens come to roost by no fault of their own and they spend 4 years trying to sort the mess. If we even assume the mess is sortable.
Conventional wisdom says she's too extreme to win a general election, but there are a lot of far-left who sit out the general election. Republican moderates are happy to vote for a far-right candidate. Democratic centrists may well vote for a far-left one.
Republicans will present any candidate as a socialist extremist anyway. They can't vote against her any harder than the voted against Biden. (They only lost 2020 because of a literal ongoing pandemic being wildly mis-managed. Democrats will likely not get that opportunity again.)
I am one of those "centrist" Democrats who doesn't particularly want the far-left wing to control the party. But I'd vote for that in a heartbeat over continued dominance by the alliance of theocrats and billionaire-worshippers.
BYD still has some work left to do then since the Volkswagen ID.Polo is 26 390 €. The ID.Polo is also considerably prettier than the Dolphin Surf, so it probably needs a bigger price cut to get customers.
Cars sold in China have 13% VAT. Cars sold in Germany have 19% VAT. Cars sold in the Nordics have ≥25% VAT. Even ignoring shipping, tariffs, local salaries, non-VAT car taxes, etc., there’s no way to price a car the same in China as in EU.
Interesting in which part of Europe are you living to make such a statement for the bit of luxury. The only country I could think of is the Netherlands and probably Belgium.
European cities are wastly more accessible as a pedestrian than australian or north american cities. And I count northern, southern, central, western and easterneuropenan cities in that.Thre other continents have some examples where the inner cities are also okayish from a pedestrian or cyclist POV, but a lot and especially suburbia is so much worse in pretty much all regions. A mining town in northern Sweden is better than suburbia on Long Island!
Outside France people don't live in big clusters. Take a look at the night satellite view. All those small/continuous towns do not have (functional) public transport. In my 12k-people town we don't have buses other than school buses and long-distance ones. And unfortunately people don't really walk other than for leisure.
As far as I know the closest city with public transport counts 100k residents, but there are 60 smaller towns in my province alone.
And what do people outside of Europe do when they want to walk for leisure? They drive to the park, because they are often not allowed to walk there!
People forget that European history before cars has lead to so many small accessible paths that simply do not exist in many American or Australian places. I know what rural Europe looks like. But you seem to have no idea what rural on other continents looks like.
Yes - car is a bit of a luxury in Europe if you don't do any of those things - live in the rural parts of the country, leave the urban core, have kids, visit parents, friends and grandparents, go to your rural property, go the mountains, the beach, buy bulky things, buy things in bulk, go to any other city just for exploration and fun, go outside the city to watch the milky way, do anything spontaneous, have job in the trades or have girlfriend.
You may not need car daily, but you definitely need it at least weekly.
I have transported 2x4s with a bike, I have moved houses with a bike, I have send a bike across countries to a place I had never been before via standard mail. I have transported 40kg of gear with a bike trailer. I cycle in -15°C to go ice-skating. All with the same one bike while I have never owned an electric bike.
I am not working in trades, don't live rural and I dont have kids. In that case I would get an electric bike. The rest I do. Heck, I have transported my SUP and a week of resources over 4km of rural road to get around rapids in a Swedish National Park. In one go in an hour because it was getting close to sun set and I had fallen in at the rapid before. My partner would like me less if I had a car.
Yeah. I was recently without a car for three weeks (bangernomics finally stopped winning) and decided that I'd learned the wrong lesson about car dependency: despite living in a city with a decent bus service, I really did benefit a lot from having a car and needed to buy a secondhand one as soon as possible, even though I am waiting for my leased EV to arrive in a few months.
You have to be quite central in quite a big city to not need a car. But that does cover quite a lot of people - I would say much of the population of London and the most central bits of Manchester and Birmingham, which is easily 10-20m people.
It varies greatly by region. I grew up in a German village - most people got a car when they turned 18, usually a cheap used one. Now I live in Berlin, where I didn't have a car for years, and now I have one (a cheap used one) that I use about once a month.
Because i don't live in a big city (and i would dread to) the 10km commute to work is either
1) 15-25 min by car
2) 25-30 min by bike
3) 40-60 min by public transport, with at least one change
And i'm lucky as we recently moved the office to be a good 4km nearer from my home. That was further out requiring 25min by car, and aobut 1h30min by public transport with at least two changes.
Also if i want to do anything beside going in my backyard on my free time, car is a necessity.
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