Buelldozer

The EV1 was a wildly impractical vehicle with < 100 miles of range that cost $100,000 in 1996 money (over $200,000 today). It was never ever going to be any kind of mass produced consumer vehicle. Without GM subsidizing the ever loving shit out of them the only people who could have afforded them were the ultra wealthy.

Regardless, the only thing political was California's insanely premature ZEV mandate set to take effect in 1998. That was political but not the EV1 itself.

BTW GM never really gave up on ZEV / PZEV even though most people think they did. I had a most excellent Hybrid Tahoe in the late 2000s but at 55k-ish new in 2009 ($82,000 today) it was simply too damn expensive to be a mass market vehicle. Just like the EV1.

I don't remember anything about all their designs being open source but they DID open source(*) the Roadster.

They also open sourced(*) their charging connector which has now become an increasingly used standard called NACS.

I'm putting that asterisks by open source because that's only sorta-kinda what they did. More precisely they made the Roadster and TCC royalty free to use and released all of the engineering documents necessary to use & recreate them.

What you're probably remembering is their Patent Pledge from 2014. At this point Tesla holds nearly 1,200 patents worldwide so that Patent Pledge isn't a small thing. They're surely not going to make all of their vehicle designs open source but they do seem to be holding to their Patent Pledge and its underlying "Open Innovation Framework".

This doesn't mean Musk or his companies are good, it's just a review of the facts.

I’ll never understand how the EV thing became a political issue.

I think at first it was viewed as a threat by both the Domestic Auto Industry including the UAW. Tesla was selling an increasing number of vehicles, which is what the Big 3 cared about, and they weren't a Union Shop, which is what the UAW cared about. So they fought the rise of EVs out of self-protection.

It's really the oil industry fighting it now because it's an existential threat. The United States generates almost zero electricity from oil, to them it's all about fuel. Coal has been in steep decline for two decades and as an industry its nearly done. They were replaced by the Natural Gas folks for electricity generation and you won't find many NG folks who are actually against EVs. When you do it's because their parent company is an Oil Company.

Toss in the rise of China as the current best source for EV batteries and the threat that Chinese companies like BYD present to the Big 3 and its easy to see why things are still all knotted up.

The current Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, was appointed by Harry Reid in 2012. The previous Parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, retired after having held the position twice (once appointed by Democrats and the second time by Republicans).

The last Parliamentarian who was "fired" was Robert Dove and like Alan Frumin he held the position twice. He was fired by Democrats in 1987, then brought back by Republicans in 95 then fired by Republicans in 2001.

Senate Parliamentarians don't get "fired" very often, both parties seem to do it at about the same rate, and even when they are "fired" (demoted really) they tend to boomerang back into the position after a few years. There's only been 6 of them since the role was established in 1935.

I should have known that I needed to make my joke more obvious.

Also, I can't go back to reddit. I've been gone so long that they cancelled my passport.

China imports 1.3 to 1.8 million barrels of oil per day from Iran, roughly 16% of its total. It's not just oil either, China is a heavy importer of other Iranian petrochemicals.

China's EVs give them very little leverage at this point.

Reading these comments seriously makes me wonder how many of y'all read the article. The US doesn't need Iranian oil but China DOES.

A dwindling supply of oil through the Strait and rising oil prices damages China and buoys the United States. If China doesn't want to put any effort into keeping the Strait open it's going to hurt them far more than it will hurt anyone else.

What kind of low rent plebian is still using google? Ewww...

The bot problem has been around since before Sam Altman was old enough to legally drink. For example in the early days the founders of Reddit were running bots to make the site look wayyy busier than it actually was in order to attract new users.

He's a convenient bogey-man, and a huge asshole, but he's the not the source of this problem.

but breaking down what’s different I can’t pin anything concrete down.

One big difference is scale. The 2000s Internet was primarily centered around single(ish) interest forums with relatively low user counts. The entire Lemmy-verse, which is itself quite tiny in 2025, is still WAY larger than nearly any of the 2000s era forums ever were.

Another other big difference is why the user base is online. The majority of them aren't participating to discuss a shared interest anymore, they are doing it for general entertainment or to earn money.

Those two things explain nearly all of the change. Way more users congregated into a handful of websites with many of them, including the sites, attempting to get rich doing it.

The 2000s web was a much smaller number of users spread across a zillion websites / forums with nearly all of the users and site operators doing it without money as a motivator.

MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.

Usenet was Social Media and it had allllll the toxicity.

There isn't a single county in this country that votes 100% in either direction. So saying that "All of whom voted for this." is objectively incorrect.