>Political systems needs vents for frustration, and the US system does not have that.
Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Because I see it differently. Trump IS the frustration vent itself but people refuse to acknowledge this and look for something else to blame as if people shouldn't be allowed to use their vote for a crazy candidate as a vent of frustration, and the frustration vent should be a virtually inexistent token piece.
> Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Proportional representation definitely helps here. You could look at the UK as a good counter-example, where the UKIP (a Brexit supporting party) got like 15% of the votes in the 2015 election, and no seats. Where people see that voting doesn't change anything, they'll look for some other way to effect change.
That being said, PR doesn't really appear to be working that well. I (personally) think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it (regardless of how insane their ideas are).
But it's complicated, monocausal explanations are typically deceptive.
With this logic doesn't the US have proportional representation as well? Didn't Trump win the popular vote and republicans the senate? The majority of voters won, end of story, and the ones who lost have another chance in 3 years to flip the board. Where exactly is the missing vent valve you were talking about?
>think that a lot of the issues relate to free flows of capital across the world, which leads businesses to be set up in areas of cheap labour, which makes people in developed countries angry and more likely to vote for anyone who'll promise to fix it
Well yeah that's the big issue, but nobody will win the elections by saying they are slaves of the capital class and doesn't matter who you vote for as they are powerless to change the crooked financial system that actually runs the world even if they win the elections since the finance systems globally connected and easily moves to the areas with most stability and tax benefits even if they are undemocratic.
Look at the right wing parties in Europe. They have a decade or two headstart on the MAGA movement. They are getting real power, but it is also moderated by what their coalition can accept.
We are also seeing for example France and the UK dealing with the same problem as the US due to its lackluster electoral system. Not allowing any vents.
The UK venting became Brexit, and then never went away and is today Reform.
The venting becomes a spectrum. One extreme is the US with large constituencies and first past the post voting. Where any vote made by the heart is discouraged.
A little bit less extreme is Australia. Still single member constituencies but you are encouraged to vote first with your heart, and then with your brain. Leading to representation heavily weighted towards the incumbents but some representation for the issues people truly care about.
Then you have proportional parliamentary systems. Here you decide what level of venting you need based on the percentage requirements to enter the parliament.
In Sweden it is 4% of national vote or 12% of a constituency. Single question parties generally need to broaden their spectrum but will get in if enough people care.
In the Netherlands it is 0.67% and you have a flourishing of parties but problems forming coalitions.
Personally I would say - do local constituencies so geographical areas are represented and pick a percentage which works for you.
Pick 10% and you focus on executive action. Pick 1% and you focus on the town hall of messages. But don't pick something where no vent is possible, like first past the post systems.
Everything is a trade-off. Farmers have a lot of influence in the EU. Personally, I think they are already too dominant, for historic reasons.
And yes, I get that food is important. Maybe the answer would be to unburden them from European regulations, which are pretty onerous. The few people active in agriculture I know complain about insane paper wars with authorities all the time.
One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count. Why are we doing this to ourselves, to 'secure our food'?
Yes. The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important going back since we were primordial organisms to medieval times when if peasants didn't have food they'd riot and behead the king.
>European regulations, which are pretty onerous.
Onerous regulations that seek to prevent ... checks notes ... the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment. But sure, let's bypass all that and import food from countries that use slave labor and toxic pesticides while the EU virtue signals on Twatter how their mission is protecting humans from racism and exploitation and saving the environment, but apparently apart from those in countries where we import our food from, there they can do whatever exploitation they want as long as they give us cheap stuff. It's not hypocritical at all.
Definitely not gonna bite us in the ass in 10+ years time when the leader of one of those countries with a shaky track record on democracy and human rights, decides to weaponize our food dependence on them to gain some advantages or just mow down some more the Amazon for profit while killing the indigenous, and all the EU is gonna do is write a sternly worded X post about "carefully monitoring the situation" at best, or at worst turn a blind eye and pretend a genocide isn't happening, just like they did with Azerbaijan's bombing of Nagorno-Karabakh because they were now dependent on Azerbaijani gas after giving up on Russian gas in 2022.
Stupid EU regulations or not, giving up sovereignty on energy and food supply to third parties is bad idea all of the time, because it's guaranteed to be weaponized against you at some point.
>One farmer I know got a hefty fine for building an impromptu shed for extra kids that were born beyond the expected count.
Sounds like a local council, conty or national issue to me, not an EU issue.
I don't know what you're arguing about here because the farmers in EU are aggressively fighting against regulation to curtail chemicals, environmental controls and minimum healthy food quality mandates.
Yes, and WHY are they doing that? Could it be because they can't fairly compete against imported products from countries where farmers DON'T have those regulations?
"The need to feed one's self and family is pretty historically important "
So is, say, the need to defend yourself, but would you be happy about the military holding the same amount of de-facto power in the EU as the farmers do? Or would you consider it excessive?
"the use of slave labor and chemicals that damage human health and the environment."
So, there is no unnecessary regulation in your view? All of them are very virtuous and protect us all against horrible things? And as a consequence, the more, the better?
If so, how come that their level can vary from country A to country B and yet country B doesn't suffer an epidemic of grisly deaths?
Nope, not all regulations are necessary and not every one of them is virtuous and good. Some are just a byproduct of the office needing to show some activity and keeping their budget.
"Sounds like a local council issue to me, not an EU issue."
Because you are uninformed. She wasn't fined by the local council, which DGAF about an improvised shed with no fixed foundation. She was fined by authorities overseeing agricultural regulations, because that shed meant that she exceeded the allowed extent of her facilities for goats by half a square meter. (Five square feet for USians.)
"Why are you making it sound like the issue is binary?"
Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.
A bit of a motte-and-bailey. Some of them are undoubtedly good, some less so, and we shouldn't lobotomize ourselves by immediately dragging slavery out when starting discussions about the current regulatory level.
"Were those authorities doing the inspection from the EU or the local nation?"
EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.
It is very different from the US where state authorities aren't tasked by enforcing federal regulations, because the Feds have their own enforcement infrastructure.
Compared to the US, EU-own enforcement infrastructure is tiny and mostly outsourced to local governments.
>Because your declaration about the regulations seeking to protect us from big evil sounded quite absolutist in itself.
I didn't mean it to be absolutist. But then riddle me this, if the EU regulations are the problem holding us back, why not get rid of some of them to boosts domestic production, and instead kneecap our agriculture industry with regulations and make ourselves dependent on imports from potential adversaries who don't follow our regulations?
Because I don't see the logic behind this being an advantage for us. It makes the EU incompetent at best, or malicious at workst.
>EU law gets transposed into national laws of the constituent nations and local authorities then enforce it, but it is still EU law.
Yeah but enforcement is still local. A lot of countries choose to be very lax with enforcing some EU laws if the laws are stupid and nobody's getting hurt. So ultimately it's still the fault of the local nation for being overly pedantic with enforcement.
Blaming EU laws for local issues, is the ultimate cope the UK also tried, and once they left the EU, their problems persisted, because guess what, their issues were all domestically inflicted by local politics and not coming from the EU as they claimed.
Huh? High density living is way more environmentally friendly than those same people living in sprawled suburban single family homes. It might not be as nicer to live, but that's another topic.
Also, calling people who don't see eye to eye with you as "idiots" is a poor choice to try to make a point.
Yeah honestly. US urban planning is unfortunately hostile by default, but cities can be dense, efficient, and pleasant if local politics allow it. Unfortunately, a lot of places will block nice things like parks and green spaces, because "the wrong kind of person" might be able to enjoy themselves a bit before or after work.
I meet a lot of people do enjoy their nation's sovereignty especially as a shield from EU's poor and unpopular decisions that they don't get a vote in, and see the common currency and freedom of movement as just the right amount of integration. Making english an official language would be even better IMHO, but that's about it. I enjoy different countries having different politics and takes on topics, as it would be shit if all EU was a just a homogenous groupthink.
And I've never met anyone who thought the likes of Ursula and Kaja should be trusted with even more power and control over nations.
>Franco-German friendship exemplified by Mitterand-Kohl personal friendship
Ironic to call this a "friendship", when Mitterand along with Thatcher were working behind the scenes with the soviets to sabotage and stop Kohl's reunification of Germany. It was anything but a friendship, but more of a concession.
Politics is full of such examples that look friendly to the public, but hide a lot of sabotage and back stabbings in the background. In fact, the later is the norm in politics.
Not when the competition is a zero sum game over critical resources. This isn't a game of table tennis, it's about competition over dominance.
Friendships are just the media facing image. In reality, if a country can gain an advantage over the other they see as an economic adversary, and has the means to enforce it without repercussions, they'll do it. Then they'll meet up in front of the media, shake hands and gaslight the peasants on how this benefits everyone.
The true friendships in between countries are made over decades/centuries over shared blood, heritage and culture because humans are tribalistic and have own group preference. Forcing friendships via political declarations doesn't work.
Let me explain with examples. If Portugal would get attacked a lot of Spaniards would go fight for Portugal voluntarily because of shared history and culture. But if Bulgaria would get attacked, most Spaniards wouldn't volunteer to go die for Bulgaria, even though they're both EU members.
Austria kept torpedoing Romania's Schengen entry just to extract some monetary concession, not exactly something friends do. So if Austria were to hypothetically get attacked tomorrow, a lot of Romanians would cheer rather than want to go help since karma is a bitch. These kinds of petty squabbles are the norm in the EU.
People aren't gonna want to die or sacrifice themselves for the EU flag since it's an artificial construct, kind of like the corporation they work for, not something they feel a sense of belonging and allegiance to like a specific group of people.
The lowest common denominator, racial ("shared blood", "tribal", and also "culture" in this context) perspective is exceeded time and again, and the ones that do exceed it are the most free, most prosperous, and most powerful - NATO being a clear example, but also all the Pacific alliances around China. The poorest and least safe are the ones that follow your advice, places like Somalia. Or look at the US and NATO ten years ago compared to today.
Most countries can be subdivided seemingly infinitely into groups that could find reasons to fight each other. But humans have other common 'denominators', much higher than that. Spain, the UK, the US, France, China, and many others are unions of subcultures.
You can see so much better in the world. Instead of insisting that evil is inevitable - making you a victim of it - you can work for good. Our ancestors have had great success and made it easy for us to follow.
>the ones that do exceed it are the most free, most prosperous, and most powerful - NATO being a clear example
You're beating it around the bush. Tell me how many Spaniard would voluntarily sign up to die to defend Bulgaria if shit were to hit the fan.
THat's how you measure if strength of alliances stand the test of time, or if they're just worthless pieces of paper from a bygone era of peace and prosperity wrapped up in fake nationalism under a made up flag.
> Or look at the US and NATO ten years ago compared to today.
10 years ago a lot more people in US and NATO countries could more easily afford a house and get a decent paying job with a higher purchasing power. What were you trying to prove with this?
Feels bad faith to shit on people from your ivory tower, just because they can't afford to ditch their reliable beaters and buy a new car. Have you seen wage growth vs car price increases lately? Not everyone is on a remote six figure US tech job. Try to view and judge things from outside your bubble as well.
I'd also dump my ol reliable ICE car that's now probably worth less than a fancy electric bicycle, if someone just gave me an EV for free ;)
But since I'm poor and can't afford EV prices with decent range, nor can I afford a home with a parking place with charger, then ICE it is. European here btw, not american.
Same here. Living in the Netherlands, I drive a 2008 Daihatsu Cuore, bought for 850E over a year ago, I pay 17E /month in mrb (road tax) and 38E/month insurance. It's basically close to the costs of a scooter. And I average under 4L/100km fuel usage, for my 200km/week commute. I did some calculation and no car comes close to these running costs. Definitely no electric cars, even if I were to get them for free, because road tax here is mainly a factor of weight.
Even a Dacia Spring with its 900kg is slightly more expensive overall to run (in my circumstances. I could charge at home, but don't have solar panels atm), and a lot more expensive up front to buy (used).
It has over 304k km already, and it runs perfectly well with some occasional maintenance and some mechanical sympathy, but I was considering alternatives in case something were to happen. Conclusion? Just buy another one. Suzuki Celerio is the only one in the same ballpark, but it's about 2k EUR more expensive. And I love my Daihatsu.
It wouldn’t change your equation much, but you don’t need a car charger as such, just connect to a normal power socket (which may not be available within reach).
We ran a Leaf for years like that, and it would charge overnight just fine.
We do have a charger now and it’s quicker, but it’s a luxury we didn’t need.
>. Living in the Netherlands, I drive a 2008 Daihatsu Cuore, bought for 850E over a year ago, I pay 17E /month in mrb (road tax) and 38E/month insurance.
Imagine how many people are reading this and thinking to themselves "government has to do something to drive up those numbers so it's no longer financially sensible for you to drive that car"
Well, fuel here is close to if not the most expensive in EU. That also contains a lot of tax. But I just don't drive that much.
And the insurance is cheap because of years of no incidents, and the fact that I'm over 30. But indeed, I wouldn't disagree if the government made electric cars cheaper from a tax perspective. They just reduced the tax discount to 25%, and it will be gone completely in a few years.
If they raise taxes significantly for me, I'll just sell the car and find a closer job. 20km one way to Amsterdam with an ebike, that's 2 hours per day. I don't have that much time to give away at this point in life.
Like me, you're not buying new cars on that budget anyway.
6 years ago when my ICE car became unreliable I bought a used Chevy Bolt for less than $20k. They're closer to $10k now. Plenty of range.
People aren't being asked to dump their current reliable vehicles.
What we want is for people to think about EVs when it's time to replace them.
> People aren't being asked to dump their current reliable vehicles
Depends on where the people live. In France, that's just about what they're asked. If their car is "too old" (reliability doesn't matter, only age), they may no longer drive in Paris and some other major cities on weekdays from 6 AM to 8 PM or something like that.
I have an ICE car and I agree with restrictions like that. You don't need to be Jeff Bezos to own a car that's at least Euro 5 and doesn't heavily pollute the air. If you own some 20+ year old beater that smokes like a chimney, get fined, we don't have to tolerate your health hazard mobile.
Sure, I also don't care for smelling cars' exhausts, and am delighted with the move away from diesels to electrics.
But the point I was responding to was "people aren't being forced to dump their old, reliable cars". Which they absolutely are. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is a different matter. I think it's good for health, but I also understand it can be difficult for people who struggle to make ends meet.
Look at the average car payment in the US, and the average car sale price
The ”americans can’t afford EVs” argument falls totally apart when the average(!) sale price is over $50k and you can get a perfectly good Leaf for $25k
Good point but that can be explained by familiarity inertia. People who have 50k to blow on a new car are anything but young buyers, with the average age of a new car buyer in the US is around 53 years old.
And boomers and gen-X are used to owning ICEs, so there you go.
Millennials and Zoomers would be more open to EV adoption but they have a lot less disposable income to buy new cars.
Not sure if you are familiar with the built-environment in America, but there’s effectively no biking infrastructure and people are openly hostile towards cyclists who try.
Depends on where you live. There are a lot of cities in North America that have biking infrastructure. As a general rule, the worse the winters the better the biking infrastructure. (you need to get to Minneapolis or Canada to see it)
There's a lot of bike accidents in my city in Europe too. Yearly deaths too. Still only commute by bike if the trip is through the city center since it's the only way to bypass city traffic and without dying of old age from waiting on public transport.
Life is short enough, I don’t need to waste it providing power to travel to work and back when I can save 1.5 hours per work day driving. (And more if I go to lunch.)
> I can save 1.5 hours per work day driving. (And more if I go to lunch.)
That’s going to depend where you live. Commuting by bike is half to one third the time it takes to drive for my commute.
One work location is 8km away, the other is 15km.
Yes, plenty of people choose active transportation. Once they give it a try they see that not only it is about as fast as driving, but it feels great, too.
I don't know your particular circumstances, but unless you have tried riding a bike to work you probably don't have a good sense of how long it would take you.
Many people realize that they'd rather spend an hour biking every day instead of half an hour driving each day, because they enjoy riding a bike. "Providing power to travel" is such a weird way to describe using your own body and enjoying the outdoors
Yes, it's disingenuous to insinuate through that comparison as if bicycles are replacements for cars, or that all car trips can be replaced by bike trips. Both are good for different kinds of trips. Hence why cars still have a place, even in bike dominated Netherlands, and why your comment was in bad faith and why Ic alled you out for it.
>Plenty of people live without a car.
Plenty of people also live without a home, that doesn't mean it's a good situation to be in.
I don't know what you mean by reliable beaters. By the time EVs are mandatory, my ICE car will have turned into dust and I'd have to buy a new car anyway. It would be pretty foolish to stall EVs only to then be forced to buy another ICE car.
> but China is more protectionist than any other major economy, including recent changes in US policy.
Not true. China let Tesla set up shop in the backyard of their domestic EV industry, WITHOUT the mandatory by law 51% Chinese ownership, precisely so Tesla would light a fire under the asses of domestic players, forcing them to compete better with what was at the time, the pinnacle EV brand.
China is no longer beating us with protectionism but with innovation and manufacturing. People better wake up.
Which was a good strategy. It's not that far from older "Detroit strategies" that led to Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, and GM all competing for "world leader" from "The Motor City" in a past century.
If anything the shame is not that the Chinese pulled this off successfully, but that Detroit is still barely trying to compete in streamlining their bloated supply chains in light of EV competition; none of the US automakers are sharing upstream suppliers on batteries and all are scrambling in different directions on even some of the basics.
They say history repeats itself, and this EV market shift is a repeat. A remarkable past parallel occurred with US industrial quality experts and statisticians being ignored by the US auto industry in the 1970s, then being taken seriously by the Japanese auto makers who then sling shotted themselves past US auto quality in the 80s to probably 2010ish?
In this round of history repeating, 2020s US car maker management was also actively anti-collaboration and anti-expert within it's own domain. You can see commentary by Sandy Munro on US companies ignoring design and production efficiency details - outsourcing too much of their own supply chain, and being resistant to integration improvements. And similar occurrences of Chinese auto companies hiring US auto production experts who were being ignored by the US auto industry, then going on to to improve fit, finish and quality, while building organizations unafraid of vertical integration.
>TSMC didn't become the world's supreme chipmaker by a laissez-faire aproach from Taiwan.
>Same applies to Samsung. And oh-so-many Japanese tech ventures.
You're missing a lot of context with these analogies. TSMC and Samsung started off in the 1950-1980s as cheap manufacturers of low margin electronic commodities the west was actively trying to get rid of in the name of protecting the environment(semi industry is poisonous) and increasing shareholder value via cheap(cough, slave, cough) labour, while giving western consumers who had options of better paid jobs access to cheaper imported stuff. It was a win-win-win situation, kind-of.
But fast forward to today, now that TSMC and Samsung have become masters of cutting edge high margin manufacturing, and the west finds itself exposed to lack of said cutting edge manufacturing at home, they're starting to twist their arms to get the know-how and infrastructure that they missed out on back on-shore. Had the west know the table would turn like this they probably would have acted differently.
Same with cars. German OEMs like Mercedes that were the pinnacle of auto tech especially when it came to tings like safety and self driving/crash avoidance, but got greedy and were more than happy to outsource electronics and ECU development and manufacturing to the lowest bidder in the name of shareholder value, but over time they lost vertical integration and access to inhouse critical high end technologies that made them valuable over the competition. Now China used that outsourced electronics industry to develop its own electronic auto tech and its vertical integration supply chain to beat the Germans.
The highest margin item in an ICE car was always the engine at which the Germans were the best at, and China could not catch up. Fast forward to today, in an EV, the highest margin items are the battery, self driving stack and supporting AI silicon, almost none of which come from Europe, meaning German OEMs are losing out on innovations and profits big time, becoming only system integrators of US and Chinese sourced parts on top of which they slap a badge hoping the consumers will value it more than Chinese badges because "heritage and tradition". They are super fucked.
Out of curiosity since you made this claim and said you're european, where are the EU vents of frustration that the US lacks?
Because I see it differently. Trump IS the frustration vent itself but people refuse to acknowledge this and look for something else to blame as if people shouldn't be allowed to use their vote for a crazy candidate as a vent of frustration, and the frustration vent should be a virtually inexistent token piece.
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