I am convinced this has been the plan from the start; the sudden break of Lowe from Farage was unexpected at the time.

Ah the ol’ lucrative Hacker-Convict-Security Consultant pipeline.

Sort-of. What I’m imagining is a small selection of vehicle sizes from small hatchback to estate/people carrier to van/kei-sized pickup that have a common battery pack size, motor, and inverter.

You’d choose the type of vehicle that has just the basics built-in like safety and AC.

The rest is customisable and allows for 3rd party manufacturers to make ancillary products for it. Do this by using existing standards for 3rd party automotive parts and then create new standards with open sourced designs for things that aren’t: i.e. the battery pack size and interface, and inverter size and interface.

Eventually what I’d like to see is a market where people can keep these vehicles running by upgrading, repairing, recycling.

If I had a billion dollars laying around I’d sink it into trying to create an automotive co-operative to get at least 3 different sized vehicles with a common battery, motor, and inverter made, through certification, and then released. Then let the market do it’s thing when presented with a new opportunity: adopt and grow.

And I know that I’m certainly missing a lot of issues with this idea but that’s just what it is, an idea and it’ll probably stay that way unless someone else has the resources to make it.

Slate Auto is a good start, what I’d want is something that’s beyond what they’re offering at the moment.

Wishing them best of luck, despite Jeff Bezos, the Amazon cunt, backing them.

What I’d like is a EV that has no additional shite attached other than what I want.

Just give me a chassis with a standardised battery pack, that has AC. Then let ME choose what after-market 3rd party options to put in such as:

Heated seats, Radio/CD/BT/carplay or android auto using standard car DIN box sizes, reversing sensors, cruise control, cab lighting, etc.

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After you then mate.

Slashing 10% of your workforce annually is something Jack Welch thought of when he was CEO of General Electric; essentially it shifts that 10% of staff overhead cost straight to profits per year.

The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. What this effectively does is two fold:

1. Anyone who’s focusing on delivering stuff the company needs long term isn’t always or sometimes never will produce nice neat KPIs that can be measured along with the rest of the company. This means these people are under constant pressure and can often get swept up in the firings.

2. It makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool. Because everyone is automatically incentivised to deliver KPIs NOT the actual company deliverables that generate the added value and therefore the profit.

This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that’s left of the company’s institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.

If this AI fuelled trend keeps up then companies like Cisco and Meta will eventually implode at some point.

I dunno I seem to recall this one chap who definitely was and a couple who’d fit the definition better trying to get elected.

It won’t just make the USA irrelevant in the oil domain: it’ll impact the entirety of the OPEC group who’ll have to massively scale back production to keep the price high enough to sustain their economies.

The petro-dollar will be replaced with the electro-dollar (that is if the US dollar remains the world currency). So a different group of rare earth rich countries will emerge that’ll become more relevant than OPEC in the energy domain but not quite to the same extent as countries that are both gifted with geography to make them major energy exporters and have neighbouring countries/super-grid connections/renewable storage export capabilities will emerge as big players as well.

Both heavy and light oil will still be needed for other processes and products that can’t be replaced/way more difficult to replace than fuels. But decoupling oil from energy and transportation will have a huge impact on the market and be better for everyone in general.

I want to buy one just so I can do custom sound effects:

Use the accelerometer to detect when in free fall and play the Goofy falling scream then, on impact, cut it off and play the GTA “Wasted” sound effect.

Honestly that’s standard for a foreign national when appearing before government investigation committees, particularly one who doesn’t think they’d do well when grilled by people with way more experience in arguing the point, see Mark Zuckerberg not attending his invite to a UK parliament select committee hearing.

It’d be a bold and stupid play for him to show up and incriminate himself further, though it would have been entertaining to watch the moment of realisation that he’s in way over his head spread across his face.

Watch as Trump goes full Henry VIII and starts his own church purely to make raping pre-teens a religious practice and for the tax exemption.

It’s both, because reducing the number of people and the options they have available to work the system is both usually cheaper to operate and it makes key performance indicators that their bosses have set go up.

The latter is where the stupid comes in and is usually more insidious because everyone always forgets that when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be an effective metric. The end result is a rats-nest of perverse incentives and compliance theatre. But the c-level bosses don’t care because arbitrary numbers went up.

Incoming Clarkson rant in three, two, one…

But who the fuck is actually introducing these bills? Which entity/organisation/individual/company are they getting the ideas from?

Sorry to be pedantic but strictly speaking “shareholder profit” isn’t the issue with capitalism because that would include worker-owned cooperatives which are not causing the same problems.

The issue is the legal obligation of a private or public company to make an increase in returns for shareholders year on year.

This is why decisions like downgrading quality, design by committee to appeal to focus groups, everything becoming a subscription service, and firing staff to reduce wage overheads in the last financial quarter exist.

Because it’s easier for the company directors / C-level executives to make these decisions which make line go up, rather than try to justify to shareholders why a steady or small dip in returns is necessary for longer term investment and growth.

This is compounded by the shortsightedness of companies only planning quarter to quarter then governments + central banks basing all economic decisions on GDP figures.

Because the easiest thing to make national line go up is to give tax cuts to the owning elites for them to shuffle even more money around in the stock and commodity markets, they buy up all the assets of the working class, the middle class, and the governments selling them off.

But funnily enough, centralising all the apparent wealth in the hands of a few silver-spooned arseholes is not a basis for a functioning society.

Words fail me right now, all I can think is: AaaaahhhAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

It’s how I talk to everyone when I’m not masking or following social scripts. It’s the most fun I get out of social interactions.