citizens had no choice.

It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?

Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.

But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.

Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.

No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.

- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams - surveilled digital communications - social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)

On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.

Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.

In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:

A field exists and produces 1 unit.

A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.

[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...

No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.

There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.

The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.

I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.

The Republicans are now a party of insanity.

though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!

And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.

At least the Chinese tech will be available to European consumers, nothing says insecure like pretending a competitor doesn't exist.

There are credible American auto enthusiasts that have got these cars and have been using them in the. US.

The superiority of Chinese EVs isn’t propaganda.

The gas pumps maybe are just a ruse but we know they are operating in China since unlike the US auto industry the Chinese one is incredibly competitive so if BYD was lying about their gas pumps the nearly 100 other competitors would have called them out

Their trajectory is incredible, and I don't see what burying ones head in the sand does to help the US or Europe or the democratic societies of the world get/stay ahead.

If they're driving a BYD, do they get stopped at the border?

What if they sold their BYD to a US family? Can it be registered and insured? I'd guess not, therefore it wouldn't get bought by a US resident in the first place.

Modifying them to meet US safety standards and then getting them approved is arduous and expensive, especially if there’s no comparable US model to emulate / borrow parts.

In the US only.

It seems to be the same small vision that lead to French cars being sold in droves in Latin America.

Is the tech better? Yes. Is protecting domestic auto capability from subsidies in the National Interest? Debatable. This convo always circles around to how we characterize subsidies (EV credits for Elon, direct state sponsorship by China) in a way that's always concealed just enough from the general public to stop people from asking hard questions.

At the same time, he was encouraging domestics manufacturers to start building their own EVs out, which opened up the possibility of unbanning, with reasonable import duties, once the American companies were competitive.

However, right now we are pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction and dismantle their EV efforts.

With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.