Because heat pumps are popular now, and the government is helping people pay for them through inflation reduction act rebates. So they can jack up the price and price gouge the shit out of us, because they know they can and know that they will get away with it. And I bet they were never popular because the same people selling home AC units also sell gas powered furnaces for home heating. So they charge you for two appliances and two installations, with two maintenance calls every time something goes wrong and two upgrade cycles. But now that they come as one unit, they still have to find some way to return more money to shareholders than last quarter so the price goes up.

I just got whole home AC replaced with a heat pump with an integrated furnace backup because it can get very cold here, and also had all my baseboard heaters ripped out. Perfectly fine in the winter and it has freed up at least 1/4 of all my walls to have stuff right up against them if I so choose, but really annoyed that the whole thing costed $20k when it could and should have been built this way 60 years ago. Not to mention all the inefficiency of burning gas for heat when heat pumps move more energy than they consume, multiplied across decades for nearly every building on the planet.

Idk what to tell you then, cause it’s still up for me. Don’t know if it’s geo blocked, but I’m in the US where it would be most likely to be blocked by NBC

The video is the post itself, not in the comments

Not the person you responded to and its been a while since I’ve done it, but I’m pretty sure you can just open the file with notepad (or TextEdit on Mac), scroll down to the timestamp, make the changes, and save the file.

BYD was selling ICE vehicles up until March of 2022, and their current split is somewhere around 50/50 BEV/hybrid so they’re still not a full EV company. Their lineup is still being supported by their existing infrastructure, subsidized by the already established supply chains for ICE that they can incrementally cannibalize while building up the EV part of the company. It’s a good blueprint for legacy auto, but not for an EV startup. That is even before mentioning the very generous subsidies and incentives for electrification provided by the national, provincial, and city governments to producers and consumers. Not to say there is anything wrong with that, because I believe the US also needs that level of investment into electrification, but my point is that it’s not the same business model.

The large profit margin SUVs are necessary for a company to achieve scale to then be able to produce the smaller cheaper stuff. Fixed costs like the factory, tooling, training, designing, that all takes a lot of money up front before even selling a single vehicle, and the smaller and cheaper the vehicle coming out of that production pipeline is, the longer the payback period will be. And when we’re talking about billions of dollars in cost, it’s hard to remain solvent when interest payments on the debt grow exponentially over time.

It’s why before tesla there had not been an American auto company startup for like 70 years, Tesla almost went bankrupt, and Rivian is just starting to head in the right direction. Lucid is probably fucked and they’re mostly Saudi owned these days anyways, and the rest of the US EV startup space ranges from a joke to a scam.

What legacy automakers already have in staff and part of the production line established is actually kind of useless when they have to wait to establish their electric motor, battery, and chassis production, which probably just means a new factory anyways. Give it a few years and the cheaper smaller stuff will come, because right now AFAIK only tesla actually has the free cash flow to fund an EV economy car at scale. Everyone else is still sinking billions establishing any EV production at all, and interest rates aren’t helping the speed of their progress either.

Write offs, PPP loans, deferrals, and all the other accounting tricks that the government carved out for the primary benefit of the wealthy are definitely a bigger loss of tax revenue. One guy writing off a personal vehicle for his personal business is probably what a busy restaurant makes in 4 months of cash purchases. Suppliers and distributors are also unlikely to deal with large volumes of cash just as a matter of practicality and risk, and the fact that you can’t have a functioning business with employees that need paychecks without going through banks which go through the government, unless you’re operating with an entirely under the table staff which is just begging for trouble.

That’s something I wish was on lemmy but can only really find on reddit. I don’t want to read reviews, I don’t want gimmicky or nitpicky YouTube rants, I just want to reminisce about the good time we all just had and collectively complain about the things we didn’t like.

Not to mention that everything Ukraine has been asking for from the US, Taiwan already bought in numbers and has had in the country years ago. Patriot, F16, ATACMS, and the list extends below to HIMARS and artillery and Abrahams, and above to apaches, black hawks, Phalanx, a wide range of torpedos and ground and air launched missiles, and even entire submarines.

China would also have to attack across the Taiwan straight, and amphibious landings are insanely difficult to pull off for anyone let alone for the PLA which hasn’t actually had meaningful combat experience since the Vietnam war - their Vietnam war in 1979. Any military buildup would also be obviously spotted months in advance, meaning anything from propositioned US carrier strike groups, all the way to enough time for Taiwan to build a dirty bomb or small nuke if they felt like they needed the ultimate deterrent.