Why do I get the feeling that if the answer is that they're polluting more as well, parent will argue that makes it OK for the US, as if we should be following their lead. But if the answer is they're making progress on lowering emissions, he'll argue the opposite?
I don't know if you've been paying attention lately, but the US Government is very hands on when it comes to directing businesses these days, and Congress lets the President do whatever he wants, whether strictly legal or not.
Do you really not think the current President wouldn't lean as hard on a US corporation as he needed to in order to get whatever he wanted?
Many, many Americans are in denial about how shockingly the country has fallen. It's just staggering at this point seeing Americans, of all people, warning about Chinese ties with business.
I remember everyone fear-mongering because some business member in China had ties with the Communist party. The US is literally commissioning executives from tech companies in the armed forces (https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/1255164460/1a-army-07-03-2025), business leaders like Elon Musk literally became members of the administration while many more (Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, among many others) are defacto mouthpieces of this administration. Trump is exerting absolute, unchecked, utterly lawless power to do whatever he wants whenever he wants, while occasionally looting those very companies for various kickbacks.
The US is currently an international shame, and a shame to 240+ years of its history. It is an abomination compared to all of its historic values and laws and checks. And anyone blind to this, yet still pointing at China, is intellectually defective.
I thought that was weird too. Surely this is a breach of whatever licensing they agreed to with the free trial. Are they allergic to getting paid for their work?
I already pay for Google One storage, so it's the cheapest of the paid LLMs for me. That's 99% of the reason I use it, and honestly I don't really
have any strong opinions on it compared to ChatGPT. It's about the same level, and with new models constantly being released for all the different LLMs I've kind of lost track of what it's particularly good or bad at compared to others.
I will say the video with Gemini live is pretty impressive. My family and I tried it a bit yesterday, and my kids wanted to show Gemini all our pets. My kid showed it our cat, picking it up roughly as she is wont to do, and I was impressed when it asked "Is [name of cat] always so patient being handled like that?"
> I already pay for Google One storage, so it's the cheapest of the paid LLMs for me. That's 99% of the reason I use it, and honestly I don't really have any strong opinions on it compared to ChatGPT
I'm on a ChatGPT pro plan, been using it for a good while but got an offer on Google One storage so tried it out for a month. Google's models are far behind compared to OpenAI's, and seemingly o1 Pro Mode is still the best out there, albeit slow obviously. But probably the model I've got furthest with on difficult problems, and even the "simpler" models from OpenAI are still better than Gemma 2.5.
It does seem that Google has better tooling available for their models though, so a combination of the tooling of Google with the models of OpenAI would probably be optimal, but unlikely we'll see that happen.
Many still have the kitchens, but the two in my hometown rarely cook from scratch anymore. I live in a small 5k person town in North Carolina, and recently got involved with the school PTO. And the cafeteria is basically just heating up premade meals these days.
Well now that the Donald is running the US and is about to cut subsidies for electric vehicles, add tariffs to aluminum and steel, now maybe the markets may see the light, I am not holding my breath though.
If all cars are more expensive, and all manufacturers have lower margins Tesla will have lower margins too. For the stock price the competition won't be other car manufacturers but other industries.
It would be a "subsiding tide lowers all boats" kind of thing.
I've been thinking, when I younger and living in the UK, all sorts of things (including some with the word "tax" in them) were denounced by the local right wing as "stealth taxes".
Trump is talking about tariffs as if they're a tax on non-Americans, but they're paid for by Americans who import stuff, which is basically all Americans given where your oil, aluminium, and steel come from.
Just because costs are higher for its competition doesn't mean that people are going to be buying more Teslas. Last I checked, Tesla was already down 40-60% in sales at its major European markets. They're getting absolutely slaughtered by BYD in China.
I mean as long as people are still buying cars, Tesla becomes more cost competitive. But in the short run it's not for consumers as much as it is for investors.
You may be right that Tesla will struggle internationally and the car market as a whole will struggle in USA
My family's last name was probably Schaefer in Germany. The earliest graves in America show them as Scheffert instead but shortly after they became "Shuford" which I guess they thought sounded more English (they were here pre-Revolution).
I always find it funny they did such a bad job of anglicizing it. Shuford doesn't really sound any more English to my ears.
A lot of old nicknames don't really make a lot of sense at first glance. The short answer is rhyming slang, and the long answer is there simply used to be a lot less names in English that were acceptable and commonly used. So, for instance, Richard being shortened to "Rick" is pretty straightforward, but you probably knew several Richards and Ricks, and you want to call them different names. So instead of Rick, you call them by a rhyming nickname, in this case "Dick." The same is true of "Rob" being short for "Robert," but "Bob" was too. Because "Bob" rhymes with "Rob".
One of the oddest in this vein is Peggy, which is short for Margaret. Because Margaret would get shortened to Meg, and then rhymed with Peg, and then somehow lengthened back again to Peggy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In Slavic languages, it’s not uncommon to do doubled diminutives, so Pavel ⇢ Pavlik ⇢ Pavliček. (Or my ex-wife who didn’t like the shortness of my name “Don” but liked the Czech vocative of it, Doničku¹ which she then abbreviated to Ičku, then she hispanicized that by adding a new diminutive to it, becoming Ičquito.
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1. I’m named after my father and this is how his Czech-speaking great-grandmother who lived with his family until her death called him. On one occasion not long after we were married, the three of us were driving and I made some slightly tasteless joke and my ex-wife from the backseat said in a scolding tone, Doničku which made my dead whip his head around in surprise/shock.
I'd take Peggy over "Gretchen", which is similarly a nickname for Margaret ("-gret" / Greta + "-chen", the German diminutive suffix, thus meaning "little Margaret").
It might work in German, but to the English ear it sounds horrible for a little girl's name.
> Where are the Democrats on all this? There is hardly any opposition. Are they not interrupting their enemy while he is making mistakes? That would be the only explanation.
This is the kind of thing that someone who's on TikTok a lot says. The line being fed to people by the Chinese government to make the Democrats look bad as well. But the truth is the Democrats have no power. None. They can't do anything to stop this. Elizabeth Warren and AOC have just as much power as I do to stop Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
