emergencyfood

They also seem surprised when a non-white country proves to have a better understanding of, well, anything.

i'm convinced that this is one of the bellweathers for ww3

Counterpoint: advanced chips aren't as important geopolitically as people think.

1. Older chips are more than enough for missiles and drones, so there's no military advantage.

2. There is an industrial advantage in things like datacentres and big data analysis, but older chips can do these things if you put enough of them together and give them enough electricity.

Bleeding edge chips shine in consumer electronics, but WW3 isn't going to start over whether Huawei Mate 69 Pro or Samsung S42+ is superior.

What's OC?

isn't France still part of Europe?

It is, it's the UK that left (the EU, not the continent).

The Gelph-Ghibelline conflict was about secular monarchism vs religious authority. Im not sure I see the point you're making.

That the conflict between feudal lords (French aristocrats / Ghibellines) and urban merchants (Guelph burghers / French Girondists) is much older than the French Revolution. The pope and emperor were the figureheads, but the lords and merchants were the power blocs.

The division of political ideologies into left and right derives from the French Parliament which had the monarchists on the right and the liberals on the left.

The names yes, but the basic conflict is much older, Europe itself had the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict.

Have they considered spending less on war and more on education / R&D?

It's memes all the way down.

If you want power over another country, attacking them is a very inefficient path. You will take losses, and you won't be able to take their resources intact. The easier and cheaper method is to just bribe their leaders into selling you whatever you want.

The US starts wars even when it doesn't need to, because there are a handful of companies that stand to make a lot of money selling weapons. No other country has such a large and influential military lobby, so other countries tend not to start wars for private profit.

Counterpoint: 'The Brooks's Law analysis (and the resulting fear of large numbers in development groups) rests on a hidden assummption: that the communications structure of the project is necessarily a complete graph, that everybody talks to everybody else. But on open-source projects, the halo developers work on what are in effect separable parallel subtasks and interact with each other very little; code changes and bug reports stream through the core group, and only within that small core group do we pay the full Brooksian overhead.'

Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s05.html

Because (1) lithium contamination is a much, much, smaller problem than climate change and (2) we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. Of course, if the EU is combining taxes on EV import with an equivalent investment in public transport or cycling / walking infrastructure, I wouldn't be complaining.

Subsidizing production does not … from China anyways (eg. batteries).

I'm asking why the EU isn't subsudising their domestic EV industry and starting a competition in electric propulsion technology. That would benefit everyone, except maybe the oil lobby.

one should disincentivize internal combustion vehicles by adding taxes to them

Why not both? And preferrably better subsidies for public transport / cycles / footpaths, etc.

avoid misusing words like "terrorist" because, when misused this way

If killing a handful of people is terrorism, what would you call trying to kill the entire human race (along with thousands of random other species)? 'Terrorist' is, if anything, too mild a word to describe such filth.

China heavily subsidizes EV manufacturers (and production in general)

And that's a bad thing? Any sensible government is going to subsidise renewable energy and electric vehicles. It makes both economic and environmental sense. Anyone not doing this is an idiot and a climate terrorist.