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Former GM Executive: BYD cars are good in terms of design, features, price, quality. If we let BYD into the U.S. market, it could end up destroying american manufacturers

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  • After 25 years of other brands I finally went Honda and I can't believe how happy I am with it. I never have problems.

    Over the years I think Honda and Toyota are the two brands I most commonly see an old guy managing to keep running well for 30+ years and hyper focused on wanting to break 500k miles or dreaming of hitting 1 million miles someday

  • Tariffs be damned, I will not buy an American brand car. They've been mediocre my whole life and it's always been easier to source parts for Hondas and Toyotas. I'm not sure how repairable any EV is, but I doubt American brands will top the charts of value in repairability in my lifetime

    Got a subaru as my first non-american car. The old CVT torque converter is wearing out after 120k miles, but she survived being lightly t-boned with just a door repair

  • Good, let's do it. I'm tired of our tax money keeping shitty car companies floating.

    And no competition. I'm pretty sure that they can shave some of the price off from that massive jump that came with COVID due to [checks list] "supply chain issues" and yet never went back down after...

  • Yes, there may not be child labor. But in places we cannot see, there are still black industry chains. A brick factory was exposed some time ago. They let some people with low IQ or disabilities work. They were not given masks, and the air was full of dust. They may work more than ten hours a day or even more. What is the difference between this and slavery? I just want to give this example to illustrate that there are still many black-hearted factories in society, and there is also the possibility of employing child labor. In China, young people who have not studied will choose to work in factories, but they must be at least 16 years old. If they are younger, they will not be hired. Back to the issue of BYD, although we are proud that it can be recognized by the world as a Chinese brand, and many people in China also buy it. But recently there have been some news that they blindly work overtime within the company, and have meetings after get off work, etc. Someone exposed the chat records within the company. We are all ordinary people. We just want to fight for our rights. Even if it is a big company, as long as it exploits people, we must oppose it.

    But recently there have been some news that they blindly work overtime within the company, and have meetings after get off work, etc.

    Lol, managers are Tesla are contracted for 80hr work weeks...

    Even if it is a big company, as long as it exploits people, we must oppose it.

    Agreed! Fuck em all!

  • How do you like it? It's on my short list for my next car.

    Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we've put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it's parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.

    As for performance, it moves well enough. It's a mini-van, so you're not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I'll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I've been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I'd also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.

    We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I'd take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.

    So ya, we've been happy with it and I'd give it a recommendation.

  • Got a subaru as my first non-american car. The old CVT torque converter is wearing out after 120k miles, but she survived being lightly t-boned with just a door repair

    Manual swap time

  • Bill Gates has entered the chat.

    Bill Gates doesn’t sell cars

  • <Page Not Found> on your link. But yeah it would be great if competition were about improvements.

    Sorry, fixed

  • I'd argue that a critical piece of competition for all nations has always been stealing knowledge and technology.

    What technologies Germany, Poland, Singapore or Norway stole since the fall of USSR if that’s the case? I can name many technologies that China stole, that the US stole, but definitely don’t see it as a critical piece for all nations. Most countries don’t even have hackers nor network of spies capable of stealing other countries’ valuable trade secrets

  • How do you like it? It's on my short list for my next car.

    I have a 20+ year old 2004 rx330 its basically a sienna with a smaller shell (sienna highlander and the v6 camry all share the same subframe and engine/ powertrain components with some exceptions its the same platform) its great, i have 223,000 miles on it and it needs some work but I’m poor so i do it all myself

  • What technologies Germany, Poland, Singapore or Norway stole since the fall of USSR if that’s the case? I can name many technologies that China stole, that the US stole, but definitely don’t see it as a critical piece for all nations. Most countries don’t even have hackers nor network of spies capable of stealing other countries’ valuable trade secrets

  • Yep, the vast majority of the teams mentioned are used exclusively for private companies and public institutions to report cyberattacks, taking down phishing sites and issuing guidance on things like the minimum password length. Or protecting military against cyber threats - would suck if you had, let’s say, drones, that during the wartime turn out to be compromised by the enemy army and sabotage your operations. That’s perfectly understandable and different than stealing trade secrets via cyberattacks. Therefore I’ve asked for actual reports of actual hacks conducted by any of the countries I’ve mentioned

  • I have a 20+ year old 2004 rx330 its basically a sienna with a smaller shell (sienna highlander and the v6 camry all share the same subframe and engine/ powertrain components with some exceptions its the same platform) its great, i have 223,000 miles on it and it needs some work but I’m poor so i do it all myself

    Oh, that's really handy to know. Thanks!

  • Overall, love it. We had a hybrid RAV 4 and wanted to move to a larger vehicle. When we discovered that Toyota was releasing a hybrid Sienna for 2021, we jumped at it. We get ~35mpg on average. And we've put just a bit over 55k miles on it since we got it. Maintenance has mostly been routine, though we did have an odd issue with one of the sliding doors filling up with water. According to the tech at the service center, there is a drain which was clogged and needed to be cleared. This was likely exacerbated by the fact that it's parked outside, in a wooded area. So, it sees a lot of leaf litter. And that is one down side, the back hatch can accumulate leaves and crap in the space between the top of the door and the body of the vehicle. Annoying, but you just have to clean it out on the regular. The adjustment rails for the rear seats are also hard to clean, if anything gets in them. So, that can be annoying.

    As for performance, it moves well enough. It's a mini-van, so you're not going to beat a small car off the line, but you do get up to speed at a good clip. The turning radius is surprisingly narrow for such a large vehicle. At speed, the vehicle feels stable and handles ok. I'll also say that the adaptive cruise control is insanely addictive. I've been driving in traffic this week and I can go a long time without touching the pedals. I'd also recommend getting to the trim level where you get the backup camera with the false overview of the vehicle, makes parking super simple.

    We mostly use it for routine tasks like getting groceries or taking the kids places. We also go camping regularly and we can pack all our stuff into the back and put the kayaks on top. Its not a vehicle I'd take off road on anything challenging, but it handles unpaved roads ok.

    So ya, we've been happy with it and I'd give it a recommendation.

    Thanks for the review; I'm glad it's working out well for you. Time for me to meander out for a test drive.

  • Sienna's are great! I've owned 4 of them (because I tend to total cars), and been happy with all of them. Gets decent mileage for a van, and they hold value better than just about any other mini van. Never felt safer when ramming into the back of a semi while going 70mph! The van was totaled, but me and the kids were perfectly fine.

    That is a surprisingly strong recommendation. I'm glad everyone was safe, keep it shiny side up.

  • Sucks to suck, our car companies suck and they absolutely should loose and be forced to fire people if they can't compete. Give me my cheap and decent Chinese cars please. I live in a capitalist country so lets act like it instead of being fucking pussys

    It the country wasn't so hostile, also pretty racist when talking about Chinese (99% of the time people say Chinese not CCP as an insult to anything about creativity, invention, culture, whatever), to Chinese consumer big ticket goods, I'd imagine BYD and other would build manufacturing plants in the US. If things weren't so hostile, the Chinese battery companies like CATL may be willing to build batteries in the US without major concern of a hostile nation stealing their battery tech

    It isn't even a truly political idealism conflict that causes the split. Americans were fine with South Korean and Taiwanese products when those countries were military dictatorships. Vietnam has the company VinFast selling cars in the US and it's political structure is a lot closer to China than the US. Americans have never shown appetite for reigning in how American companies treat labor in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Really not even domestically like in makeshift housing that American farmers pack migrant workers into or meatpacking plants. So it's really just rich/powerful people not liking to see non-European descendants take the leading role in global trade of high margin goods and services that are often cutting edge technology

    If China was still primarily a labor country, damn near no one would care about Chinese domestic issues like famines. In my mind the inevitability will be another wave of xenophobia that will eventually target India and the Indian diaspora as their military and domestic military and technology companies develop

  • That is a surprisingly strong recommendation. I'm glad everyone was safe, keep it shiny side up.

    I'm not sure your location, but I highly advise spending the extra money on AWD. If you have hills plus rain or snow, it's the difference between peeling out from a stop and just going.

    My first Sienna was FWD. We live on the side of a hill - steep enough that a family pass time is watching cars struggle in the winter. Had to park at the bottom several times with the FWD. Never had a problem with the AWDs.

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    Imagine if the US gets saved by the fucking Mexican cartels that'd be crazy. Please let it happen
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    On the one hand, this is possibly dubious in that things that aren't generally considered to be part of defence will be used to inflate our defence spending numbers without actually spending more than previous (i.e. it's just a PR move) But on the other hand, this could be immensely useful in telling the NIMBYs to fuck right off. What's that, you're opposing infrastructure improvements, new housing, or wind turbines? Aw, diddums, that's too bad. This is deemed critical for national security, and thus the government can give it approval regardless. Sorry Bernard, sorry Mary, your petition against any change in the area is going nowhere.
  • Palantir hits new highs amid Israel-Iran conflict

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    I think both peace and war are profitable. But those that profit from war may be more pushy than those that profit from peace, and so may get their way even as an unpopular minority . Unless, the left (usually more pro peace) learns a few lessons from the right and places good outcomes above the holier than thou moral purity. "I've never made anyone uncomfortable" is not the merit badge that some think it is. Of course the left can never be a mirror copy of the right because the left cannot afford to give as few fucks about anything as the right (who represent the already-haves economic incumbents; it's not called the "fuck you money" for nothing). But the left can be way tougher and nuancedly uncompromising and even calculatingly and carefully millitant. Might does not make right but might DOES make POLICY. You need both right and might to live under a good policy. Lotta good it does anyone to be right and insightful on all the issues and have zero impact anywhere.
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    I think it would be best if that's a user setting, like dark mode. It would obviously be a popular setting to adjust. If they don't do that, there will doubtless be grease monkey and other scripts to hide it.
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    I remember an Arthur Clarke novel where a space ship needs water from the planet below. The easiest thing is to lower cables from space and then lift some ice bergs.
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    Eh, I kinda like the ephemeral nature of most tiktoks, having things go viral within a group of like 10,000 people, to the extent that if you're tangentially connected to the group, you and everyone you know has seen it, but nobody outside that group ever sees and it vanishes into the ether like a month later makes it a little more personal.
  • Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages

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    Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation. Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process. Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition. Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot. Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine. Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image. Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution. MS = Microsoft OSS = Open Source Software Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control. Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows. Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.) Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry