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I'm personally super upset with basically all non-Chinese brands. They used the post-covid inflation to drive prices up and like many people are saying here, now the 12k entry-level car is a 25k car. I bought a brand new VW T-Cross in 2021 for 19k and now the entry price is 27k, for the same exact car. It's insane. I understand people want bigger cars and even price conscious costumers are now going for compact suv (VW T-Cross instead of a Polo) so makers are definitely cashin in on this.

But there is also a Greed side to this story. Automakers have hiked prices, customers have kept buying and we finally (i hope) reached a breaking point. Jeep prices were apparently too high and sales plunged.

All of this makes me actually quite happy for the arrival of Chinese manufacturers. The price/quality ratio is extremely good and when i see the price i finally feel that it's a good deal. It makes me want to buy that car, while with most European manufacturers i'm just thinking of being scammed!


Agree, however i feel that NYT plays it smart. I currently pay only 4$/month which is negligible enough for me to keep it on.

Since i'm a happy subscriber of Bloomberg, i am really not keen to pay another 30$+/month for WSJ but i find myself trying to read some of their articles. Would love to find a cheap solution that gives me limited access (max 10/20 articles/month)


I'm toggling between Disney, Apple TV, HBO. This also allows me to build up a backlog of a handful of high-quality shows on each platform while paying only for one per month. The one i cannot cancel however is Netflix since multiple households now depends on my monthly payment.


of course bro, i'm sure that no self-driving car is gonna crash as soon as i deliberatly click on the wrong bicycle picture.


lol I'm imagining a captcha that says "please hurry" to disambiguate a situation in realtime



“Twitch plays drive an autonomous vehicle”


Glad you asked. Since i despise the horrible UX of these Captcha where i get exploited to train a neural network, i very often click on the majority of correct result plus one wrong one.

On average the captcha let me go through which is actually very scary, since it looks like it prioritize algorithm training over bot detection...

Does anyone else do this?


No, because it is a waste of time. Your answer set is compared with many other answers, and eventually the wrong answer is disregarded completely by the AI.

You gave it a mostly correct answer, which it can cope with -- by design. It let you through, after all. You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.


Fully agree that the system propose the same challenge to many people and fully agree that my wrong answer is just diluted in a bunch of correct answers.

That's exactly why i was asking if other people were doing that. If i'm the only one..then yes, it's only useful for myself to fell less like a exploited brain, but if say 20% of the people start dumping random error on purpose...than the situation changes quite a lot...and potentially even the business model of shit-captcha might not work.


If they do the same kinds of error, yeah.


Maybe someone can build a re-capture extension for Chrome/Firefox so that more people can join the fun. But again it needs to train data first :D


> You're not really accomplishing anything by being defiant, other than making yourself feel slightly better.

Isn't that the goal of all virtue signaling?


aaaand again China doing whatever it wants and nobody doing anything about it. When will this stop? Personally i'm boycotting their product and services as much as possible.


And Spain, apparently. And a few others, too.

https://www.nationalfisherman.com/national-international/oce...

[Insert monkey puppet meme.]

Not defending them, but it looks like it's a wider problem than just "China bad".


> Personally i'm boycotting their product and services as much as possible.

Good luck with that.

Turn over pretty much any item in your house, and you’ll see ”Made in China.”

Every single one of our nations has its markets dominated by corporations that have found the only way to compete, is to manufacture in China.

Many nations are now incapable of manufacturing their own goods.

Once you’re a pickle, you’ll never be a cucumber again.


All it takes is a little research. You can find a US manufacturer for almost anything if you look hard enough. Most people don't want to pay the higher prices that sometimes come with many of the products.

https://www.madeinamerica.co/pages/thelist


Find me a single electronic device on the planet that isn't made with some Chinese parts. AFAIK all passive electronics components are made in China.


There's no way the DOD would allow only China to make components that their contracts require. I'm sure there are domestic producers.

Here's a site from a quick search. https://www.tedss.com/LearnMore/American-Made-Capacitors

Here is a site for US built computers with the option to specify US only components. https://usamadeproducts.biz/electronics-computers.html


You misunderstood my point:

Made in USA != all parts made in the USA. Kinda like how "Made in the USA" cars/trucks are often 90% made overseas then sent to the US for final assembly to earn that sticker.

I'll ignore the fact that the very first link in your computer URL is Apple, which does not have a 100% made in the USA product.

The second computer company in your link is Digital Storm. They use MSI boards which are made in Taiwan and China.


No, I didn't miss your point. The link I posted has computer manufacturers that say they can use US based components, including in-house engineered parts. I also showed that components are made in the US and that the DOD contracts will require that Chinese parts not be used.


I still have things in my house marked ‘made in East/West Germany’. But I am old.


Taiwanese products are also marked as "Made in China". So it's not as bad as you think.


Huh, what market are you in? Just yesterday I bought a tool that was “Made in Taiwan” over two “Made in China” alternatives.


There are items made in China by Taiwan-based companies, which are marked as such, but stuff actually manufactured in Taiwan is marked as made in Taiwan


Yes, but this still adds to the atrophy of local manufacturing expertise.

This did not start with China. Japan did it after WWII (remember "cheap Japanese"?). Korea did it after Japan.

Now, both Korea and Japan are becoming known for high-quality, pricey stuff.

Many Korean and Japanese corporations manufacture in China, Thailand, and Vietnam.

China is headed that way too, but it may take longer.


I’ve seen a lot of things marked as made in Taiwan. Look at bike frames and you’ll quickly notice one made there.


Unless you’re very rich or living like a monk, boycotting Chinese made products is not an easy task. Go to any American supermarket and look at the labels, I bet a majority of them are made in China.

Voting with wallet only works when there are options. I bet the devices that you and I used to write these very comments are highly likely made in China too, at least partly


> Go to any American supermarket and look at the labels, I bet a majority of them are made in China.

A great deal of our overall consumer products are, but most of our consumables come from the US or Central/South America.


Walmart has made an effort to stock mostly American products. Clothes and shoes are main exceptions at any store, although options do exist.


The reigning choice since Kissinger seems to be “appeasement”. His reasoning was their population size.


Fishery regulation cheating is pervasive everywhere, almost none of these rules have working teeth. Every ocean species for which there is a market anywhere is being catastrophically overexploited, regardless of what regulations say.

That said, I guess... I'm actually OK with jingoist anti-China hatred in this particular case if it helps drive attention to a genuine ecological catastrophe? The woke hippies welcome you aboard, mate.


I was going to make a similar point - this is a persistent problem anywhere there are profitable fish stocks, and absolutely not just by the Chinese - the French, Spanish, whoever, there are plenty of people at it.


Nobody has yet mentioned the UK, but: reduced regulation on fishing was a big motivator for Brexit, where the campaign had its roots deep in coastal towns.


Well, British fishermen thought we'd be "taking back control of our waters", and wouldn't be in the situation where they have smaller quotas that the large Spanish and French vessels that fish British waters do.

Of course, it didn't work out like that.


I assume the thinking was somewhat broader than that (fishermen only have 10,000 votes between them).

I assume that people understood their town's local economy would be uplifted by a renewed fishing industry.

Of course, that was never a real possibility.


Which is deeply self-defeating, because those jobs are going away when the fish disappear anyway. The only question is who gets to eat the last ones.


US ships trawl and overfish as well. The Anti-China sentiment is uncalled for.


Is it even possible to boycott China at this point?


Probably not, but governments need to start weaning themselves from China’s teat. It won’t be easy and it will take a while, but it can be done.


When military vessels open fire on and sink Chinese Fishing Boats located inside territorial waters.


It was Isaac Asimov who, in the Foundation series, once famously said that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."


The character who expressed it as their maxim also ended up engaging in violence to solve the problems facing their world.


The purpose of the military is to maintain the territorial sovereignty of the nation, against illegal entry from migrants/smugglers or chinese fishermen.

If the military cannot perform this task then why does Argentina spend $3billion on them?

The obvious answer is that Argentina is a failed state, incapable of defending itself.


Sovereignty is a slippery abstraction. What we’re talking about here is doing violence against someone on a boat who has directly harmed no one, whose only crime is crossing an invisible line and perhaps stealing some food.

Now, I’m not going to get down in to the weeds about fishing property rights, but it looks like you’re trying to climb up this abstraction layer (“territorial sovereignty”) to justify violence against the peaceful.

If indeed they are stealing from someone under the law, I don’t think violent action via a national military is in any way whatsoever a proportionate response. You seem to be advocating for collective guilt because there are so many, and collective guilt or group punishment is a violation of human rights.


That's true except for the times it isn't.


Obviously you don't just resort to violence. First you threaten violence and if THEY are incompetent they won't heed the warning, forcing the violence


Would any person in any country argue that their leaders aren't incompetent?


it seems there's another level below that, an inability to distinguish violence from defence.


I mean you can say this same thing about several countries. USA, Russia, China all come to mind. Turns out countries with power often act similarly as people with power, unethically in order to advance their own interests. It's not just a "someone needs to stop china" problem, it's more systemic. Stopping china from doing this one thing is just treating symptoms, not the underlying cause.


The US has overthrown multiple democratic governments to get what it wants. I personally prefer China's blatant disregard for the rules over the United State's efforts to forcibly rewrite the rules in their favor.


That’s like people who preferred Donald trump. Indications from other areas showed he was going to be worse, but he hadn’t already had an actual history in office so many former supporters were unable to extrapolate.

Xinjiang, Tibet, and events in Hong Hong don’t bode well. Trends in the South China Sea show that China doesn’t respect its neighboring countries claims either. So the external events that do exist are not promising that China will be better.

And in internal politics and equality, we haven’t yet forced academics and professionals into labor camps but it may be trending that way.

Edit: I’m by no means downplaying the terribleness the USA did in South America, the Middle East or elsewhere nor our own internal discriminations and worse, I’m pointing out that given the limited information we have, it does not give any confidence that China will be an improvement. My own feel given my fairly limited understanding is that overall it will be worse for the environment and justice globally and at the very best essentially the same but with a new face.


Rules are a way for whichever party is more powerful at the time of rule writing to lock in advantages in their favor. Take a look at any US election cycle, each parties tries to create laws that it knows will be difficult to overturn even if they get voted out in 4 years.

Is it any wonder a rising power chafes at rules that it didn't get same amount of influence over at the time of writing because it was weaker? Our entire structure of international law is based on decisions made in those first few years after WW2. It's been 70+ years since then and the world has changed dramatically. I'm quite concerned that if the current international structure isn't flexible enough to bend and accommodate the pressure those changes, its going to break like an earthquake fault and we could very well have a WW3 scenario on our hands.


how does argentina fit into this equation


Looks like you are being downvoted for no good reason. Comments like this always seem to go down after the sun rises across the Atlantic

“I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he's wrong, than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”

I remember this quote from an old Ice Cube btw


Is it? Waymo seems to be doing pretty well, it has the largest fleet of autonomous cars and from what i remember by far the most extensive testing program on real streets. This looks more like an attempt to spread the R&D cost on lidar by selling to third parties. I guess as more and more companies sell their lidar solutions, it becomes more of a commodity and less a differentiation factor, like self-driving software for example.


Am i the only one struggling to use Zoom properly since they introduced the latest security changes? The slack integration (write /zoom to start a meeting) was working ok-ish even though we always had problem with the meeting not starting unless the host of the meeting was logged in (gosh...why so complicated?)

Now they added this waiting room, there is no sound notification to let you know that people are waiting. Doing daily standup become a sufference. It's crazy how quickly they lost us as users with literally two badly implemented features.

Happy to hear if any of you also had the same struggle and if there is a good alternative.


Maybe set a (strong) password instead of using the waiting room?


I think most of these are settings that can be changed in the advanced settings menu. Zoom changed the defaults, but you can still change the settings to what you prefer them to be


I would think that meetings being company users only by default could side step a lot of these clunky security measures. You would only need them for external meetings. No zoom bombing or war dialing issues with that default permission set.


The issue is that everyone with a gmail address is in the same "company", because they use your domain to determine what company you're in.


For our daily standup we use meet.google.com as it's more convenient than ZOOM. ymmv ofc


My company has been trying to find a solution since the Coronavirus hit. (We're not used to working from home)

We were using Slack's built-in conferencing at first, but aside from the quality being generally bad, there was a 15 person limit, and we're ~ 17 people.

I didn't want us to use Zoom with everything that's going on, so I suggested Google Meet. We tried it, and it worked, but not well—people's voices would frequently break up and become hard to hear.

And so we tried Zoom this past Monday.

It was incredible. I could actually hear and see everyone. I'm not happy about all their issues, but damn their product is just really good.


It's hard to argue that a product from targeted-advertising companies like Google and Microsoft wouldn't exhibit much worse privacy concerns, and the other major competitor, Cisco, was the architect of China's great firewall. Zoom works pretty great. I have been on very large conference calls almost daily over a year and they've been pretty flawless. They also sign HIPAA BAAs which is great for the industry I'm in.


That's odd. We haven't had problems with google meet, so we use it. Though we use zoom too, for all hands meetings for whatever reason.

Maybe it's locality to the servers, or just packet loss heavy internet in your neck of the woods. Either way, I get it.


I'm getting extremely pessimistic about our chances at stopping this. It looks like even though we drastically reduce our emissions (which looks very much unrealistic) we haven't yet factored in all these variety of negative feedbacks that exacerbate the problem even more. It looks more and more like the chain of negative effects like the lost albedo effect, the methane released by the melting permafrost and tons of others will create a unstoppable runaway reaction. :(


Nitpick: in system dynamics, a self-reinforcing loop is called "positive feedback", whether it is desirable or not. A "negative feedback" is a stabilizing mechanism.


Yea, I’m generally an optimist but the last few weeks of headlines all seem to be of the “worst than expected, “sooner than expected” variety.

It’s infuriating how cheaply and seamlessly this problem could have been solved if we started gradually, 30 years ago.


People that knew about it and decided to do nothing should be prosecuted and put to jail. They wont have to live with those decisions long enough to see how disastrous they were but OUR children will..


That's a fair point. I guess a mine like Mountain Pass in California would still be a much cleaner site than a chinese mine, even though the EPA is now a clown agency basically. Anyone can confirm this?


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