• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 26 days ago
cake
Cake day: May 11th, 2026

help-circle
  • It’s rent seeking through regulations. It’s too expensive to make a simple car that also complies with these regulations. The only people who can afford to do it are gigantic established brands with a century of production lines and established infrastructure.

    “Oh no. More car brands failed. We can’t let them fail can we? Allow us to merge more?”

    “Oh no. We’re in trouble financially. If we die you won’t have cars at all any more because we merged everything. Lots and lots of your voters will be pissed if that happens. There’s also no way in hell a new car brand is going to establish itself when it costs so damn much to meet these regulations we lobbied and guided to benefit our established interests”







  • In not a Chinese shill but realistically modern war is a competition of industrialized might. China would whoop the US in a slugfest (i.e. not nuclear exchange. Nobody wins that) because the US can’t produce at the rate the Chinese can.

    China can mass produce sophisticated weapons… The US’ military industrial complex and incentive structures (cost + % billing) has created a giant cancerous tumor of an arm’s industry. It’s currently tooled for bullying and murdering brown people for profit, not fighting a near peer nation and changing that system takes years.

    It won’t change as long as cost + % and corruption continue, which they will. If the US finds itself in a war with China it’ll have entirely the wrong arm’s industry for fighting them and they won’t have the grace of 1939-1941 to scale their domestic arms industry prior to a major conflict… There’s also the fact that the US is heavily deindustrialized now too compared to WWII… China is closer to the industrial heavyweight the US once was in 1941-45, but they have technological sophistication and a knowledge economy now too…

    Patriot interceptor missiles are a decent example of what I mean. They cost millions to produce and take forever to make which is by design. They could be made faster and cheaper but that’s less profit. If the arm’s industry in the US were paid a lump sum and not “pump your costs as high as possible to get the highest cost+% you can” things would be different.



  • A stroke is caused by one of two things:

    1. A blood clot blocking an artery feeding part of your brain

    2. A blood vessel rupturing (aneurysm rupture) that causes pressure to build inside or against your brain, squeezing blood vessels shut like a pressure bandage.

    Both of them cause a lack of oxygenated blood to the brain, and treating one type makes the other worse.

    As an aside: the city I used to live in had an ambulance with a CAT scanner in it that would be dispatched to suspected strokes. They could diagnose whether it was 1 or 2 and treat it right away.

    As to why arterial widening causes lacunar strokes, the article didn’t make it clear how or what small vessel disease is.

    Gas exchange also doesn’t happen in your arteries or veins, but in your capillaries. Your capillaries are small enough to just barely fit a single red blood cell (the RBC often need to bend to fit through) and that close contact of RBC and capillary wall allows fast and near complete gas exchange. The tightness of a capillary is a feature, not a bug. So it could be that you don’t have consistent contact with the same RBC for long, and mostly are in contact with blood plasma?