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The US is trying to keep these tiny ones out because they want you you buy their big gas vehicles or larger, more expensive electrics. Larger vehicles consume more resources, take more to produce, and even large electric vehicles draw more from the dirty grid than a small personal conveyance like these designed to move you and your groceries.
And that’s a strawman to infer that our self-destruction hinges on this single point. This is yet another example on the heap of the larger problem. “it might hurt short term PROFITS for our greed mongers, so we won’t allow something that might begin to mitigate the scale of the problem.”
That said, it sounds like you agree with them, and if that’s the case, I have good news, they’ll continue to get their way in every economic sector, and yes, cumulatively, our species is paying and will pay an even greater price for allowing blind, insatiable greed to make every decision.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/mexico-central-america-us-heatwave
If we cared about having a future for the species at all, Humanity’s only mission right now would be to END the global economy’s jihad of growth/metastasis, every major nation would institute child limits, and we would work to end consumerism and find homeostasis/equilibrium instead for the sake of our very survival, because this reverse terraforming we’ve done in decades will take millions of years for the earth to heal from. That’s nothing to Earth’s 3.8 billion year old story of life, but it might as well be eternity to our short term monkey brains. Our reality, our world will continue to heat, and if we stopped tomorrow entirely, would take many times longer to go back to normal than our species has existed for.
But as common economic decisions like this demonstrate, we have decided to burn the future so as not to disrupt the reckless party of avarice and gluttony for our owners today. Is what it is.
"But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never gonna get any better. Don’t look for it. Be happy with what you got.
Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the senate, the congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want: They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests. Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers.
Obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you, sooner or later, 'cause they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club. And by the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head in their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks. The game is rigged, and nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people – white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on – good honest hard-working people continue – these are people of modest means – continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all – at all – at all.
And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on; the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday. Because the owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”
―George Carlin, 20 years ago