Yeah, what you’re saying is true, but it’s not what they’re saying. Even by their own words, their goals are a bit silly.

Guys come on, it’s unreasonable to expect a luxury car brand to be at the forefront of technology.

It’s great to have, great value, and the car really does look good, but it’s not miles away from the Atto or the MG Urban, both of which are great cars for the money.

Fuck off with Ezra Klein.

I think the global car industry is in one of those shock-denial-anger-acceptance cycles. They cannot fathom how BYD (and China in general) can do this, and the answer is that like a decade ago, they bought up mines which they are now using for a fully vertically integrated production pipeline. This means that some of what they’re saying is true, and some is cope.

Having said that, the article still reads like “you are getting cars worth more than you are paying for”, or “cars which are less than our manufacturing costs”, and like, yeah, we can tell. The big issue with Hyundai isn’t the price, it’s that they cannot make better cars. You compare the Inster against even the Kia EV3 and it’s just a bit shit. They literally have all the weirdnesses of the Chinese automakers alongside being Euro-car expensive.

They don’t need to get cheaper, they need to get better.

Conservatives: Add politics to climate change Also Conservatives: Let’s take the politics out of climate change.

OK. Go for it. There are plenty of countries where the conservatives never politicised climate change.

Maybe the entire train of thought for slavery is bad? Like maybe decolonise your mind? Maybe the thing we’re aiming for isn’t just pastoralism + technology, but ecology. Maybe the goal isn’t exploitation at all, but coexistence.

I think a bunch of cottagecore creators have talked about how the fantasy is the cottagecore life but without the labour. Add to the idea that the aesthetics come straight from America during slavery (or Europe when the rich had servants), and there’s a pretty straight line between cottage core and who is mysteriously supposed to be doing this labour. At the very least, the idea of cosplaying rural life while servants actually do the labour has been part of the fabric of cottagecore.

Having said that, it’s an aesthetic (unlike Solarpunk which is meant to be a movement), and there are plenty of folk who are into the aesthetic and just like knitting and so on.

A lot of people like the word “solarpunk” but don’t really like the meaning behind the manifesto. Part of the issue is that they don’t want to be decolonised, so they don’t really see PoC voices as being inherently valid. That connects to the aesthetic, becoming increasingly “white but with plants”. This is also why there’s that connection between Solarpunk and Cottagecore, despite Cottagecore implying that you’d have slaves.