It's a good article about an important subject. Also thanks for the link around the paywall (We dropped the W. Post when Bezos brought in that Brit to run it).
My theory is that the chicken tax makes big pickups etc. the most profitable thing US car companies can make. So they focus on that and relegate everything else to the margins. I suspect that worldwide there will be many more electric sedans than pickups and that, as the article suggests, the US auto industry will end up like the UK auto industry.
I don't know how societies set "primary goals". After spending 15 years in a tenure track -- tenured position, I thought setting goals well was important.
I take pleasure in how mathematics and science help me understand the universe better than I understood it before I studied the fields. I believe that my understanding has helped me contribute to society.
Yes! US agriculture (Mostly a red state industry) needs potash. Google AI says that most potash comes from (in order) Canada ("is the primary global exporter and supplies nearly 80% of U.S. imports"), Russia, Belarus, China, and "smaller volumes are supplied by countries [...]".
If I were king of Canada, I would restrict supplies of such materials needed by red states.
I had a summer visiting professor job at Intel at the time doing signal processing. They set me up to use MatLab under Windows95. I installed Linux and code from Numerical Recipes to get around various limitations. Andy Grove had just banned Macs because they didn't use Intel chips. They believed the WinTel duopoly was giving them "more money than God." (A phrase that I first heard at Intel that summer)
Sort of related. Across the street from my cousin's house in Portland, OR, a car ran over the curb and into landscape features that knocked off the car's bumper and license plate. The perpetrator then backed up and drove away. My cousin's doorbell camera caught it all. Police are not interested, saying no one can prove who was driving.
Who needs a license plate reader when you can get a license plate?
My theory is that the chicken tax makes big pickups etc. the most profitable thing US car companies can make. So they focus on that and relegate everything else to the margins. I suspect that worldwide there will be many more electric sedans than pickups and that, as the article suggests, the US auto industry will end up like the UK auto industry.
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