sorted by: new top controversial old
[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 8 minutes ago

American media loves a pretty dead white girl

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 9 minutes ago

The IDF is just ABAC on steroids.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 10 minutes ago

I have to assume this was written by an Antisemitic troll to deliberately make Israelis look bad, because the alternative is you thinking this was going to convince somebody.

And holy shit, that's some martyrdom behavior.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 15 points 23 hours ago

I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services

The great thing about bots is that they can listen to every song on file, 24/7/365, and you can spin up as many of them as you like. 12 million is nothing.

Fire a bunch of them and you run out sooner. But juicing the Iranian economy with Russian spending isn't going to hurt the Houthis in the slightest. No more than Ukraine clearing Raytheon's shelves will hurt US production capacity. If there are eager buyers, these factories will speed up units produced.

Same way they did it for the Mario live action movie 30 years ago, I imagine. Get Tim Burton on it and I'm sure he'll give you some advice.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Honda increased the size of the civic to meet us consumer wants

That's the line. But they also increased the price. This is an age old business trick. When you're running fat margins, increase the size of the meal to sell more of the product. The Civic has always sold well and I haven't seen anything to suggest sales improved as the chassis size increased.

The crash ratings are the same between the two.

Not against larger vehicles. But its still marginal. If the F-350 plowing into you at 70mph hits a newer model, you'll be just as dead even if the frame suffers less.

Americans don’t want cheap small cars

American businesses don't want to sell cheap small cars and American consumers are given fewer and fewer options, as you illustrate when you note these vehicles all swelling in size. But when the price of gas jumps, people start piling into Priuses and Focuses and Elantras. Meanwhile, car graveyards are full of Hummers that never left the dealership floor.

the civic outsells the fit 10:1

Fit sales peaked back in 2008 when gas prices jumped to $6/gal. But the Fit effectively competes with the Civic at a lower price point. Dealers don't want to sell them when Civics move just as fast and guarantee higher returns.

It sounds like the restrictions are primarily related to supply, as in they aren’t being provided in enough quantity.

The expectation is that Zelensky gets a steady flow of new arms after the first salvo. I'm sure he's afraid of getting cut off. But, again, why have them if you aren't going to use them? Its not like the Russian military can get any more aggressive in Ukrainian territory. And the Ukrainians clearly aren't shy about retributive invasions on the northern side of the front.

I doubt any of these are in a range of Russian indirect fire teams.

Russian drones and missiles have hit as far west as Lviv. And Ukrainians have sent long range artillery all the way into Moscow, abet without significant damage.

They can't just launch strikes indiscriminately. But we've seen a slew of security breaches on both side of the line since the war started. If you're just putting these weapons in a shed somewhere, they're going to be identified eventually. Its use'm or lose'm.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Its genuinely curious to see a guy who is ostensibly head of his country's armed forces have to go hat-in-hand to all the NATO states and ask permission to use the weapons he was granted for the purpose he's ostensibly been set to. I'm beginning to wonder why the US paid through the nose for a British Aerospace product to sit in a Ukrainian storage locker until some Russian artillery sergeant can figure out which warehouse to shell.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Empty Internet Theory but its just the "Recommended For You" stuff that Facebook shoehorns in between the pictures of my nieces that I occasionally drop in to look at.

Its funny. When you go into some of the early Facebook history, Zuckerberg is exploring monitization options. He floats the idea of turning it into the kind of intrusive, obnoxious, ads-everywhere experience that had shown up on local news websites and the worst kinds of forum spaces. He (supposedly) rejects it, in pursuit of a more sophisticated kind of mass marketing. The theory being that this kind of invasive content scares away users, and what we really want is to maximize the user base rather than to maximize the monetary value of each user.

But ten years later, we're right back to a website that's indistinguishable from eye-ball gouging Geocities crap. The "put ads everywhere to maximize revenue" folks won out in the end. Zuckerberg's genius move was to simply hold them back until the website started hitting the post-one-billion user base load. But then this was always the end game. Just clickbait across everything, with a periodic pop-over ad demanding that you give the site money to save it from itself.

Aw shit, its taking hold of me! I'm going to resent its absence.

Personal complaints aside, the new Mario movie was reasonably good for adults and great for kids.

It was mid, until Jack Black's Bowser hit the screen, and then it was top notch. He absolutely carried that film.

1
149
submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world to c/world@lemmy.world

China has positioned itself as the main car supplier in Mexico, with exports reaching $4.6 billion in 2023, according to data from Mexico's Secretariat of Economy.

The Chinese automaker BYD surpassed Honda and Nissan to position itself as the seventh largest automaker in the world by number of units sold during the April to June quarter. This growth was driven by increased demand for its affordable electric vehicles, according to data from automakers and research firm MarkLines.

The company's new vehicle sales rose 40 percent year over year to 980,000 units in the quarter—the same quarter wherein most major automakers, including Toyota and Volkswagen, experienced a decline in sales. Much of BYD's growth is attributed to its overseas sales, which nearly tripled in the past year to 105,000 units. Now BYD is considering locating its new auto plant in three Mexican states: Durango, Jalisco, and Nuevo Leon.

Foreign investment would be an economic boost for Mexico. The company has claimed that a plant there would create about 10,000 jobs. A Tesla competitor, BYD markets its Dolphin Mini model in Mexico for about 398,800 pesos—about $21,300 dollars—a little more than half the price of the cheapest Tesla model.

...

That tariff-free access is part of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (T-MEC), an updated version of the North American Free Trade Agreement that, as of 2018, eliminated tariffs on many products traded between the North American countries. Under the treaty, if a foreign automotive company that manufactures vehicles in Canada or Mexico can demonstrate that the materials used are locally sourced, its products can be exported to the United States virtually duty-free.

MAGA strikes again

1
-18

Deciding the equipment vendor is a dastardly Chinese threat, successive US governments have struck it with multiple sanctions that would have finished off a lesser company. Yet Huawei, after a difficult few years of shapeshifting, looks almost rejuvenated.

Its performance is entirely at odds with that of Ericsson and Nokia, its traditional rivals, and not what anyone would have expected a few years ago, when Donald Trump – orc leader, from Huawei's perspective – landed the first damaging blows. Last week, it reported a 34.3% year-over-year increase in revenues for the first six months of the year, to 417.5 billion Chinese yuan (US$53.1 billion), building on the 9.6% growth it reported for 2023. Defying expectations, profitability has rebounded. Huawei's net profit margin surged from just 5.5% in 2022 to 12.3% last year before hitting 13.2% for the recent first half.

The main purported goal of sanctions was to impede Huawei in the market for 5G network equipment, the stated fear being that its products could include Chinese government malware for surveillance or worse. Yet their main impact was on Huawei's handset business. Generating 54% of Huawei's revenues in 2020, it was cut off by US legislation from both Google software and cutting-edge chips, far more important to smartphones than they are to network products. Revenues halved in 2021 with the sale of Honor, a handicapped smartphone unit, and they fell another 12% in 2022.

But last year they rose 17% and a continued revival probably explains most of Huawei's sales growth so far this year. A new handset called the Mate 60 Pro has proven a big hit in China. Teardowns have horrified US hawks by apparently revealing 7-nanometer chips, presumed to have no longer been available to Huawei. The received wisdom was that a chipmaker would need a technology called extreme ultra-violet (EUV) lithography to produce them. ASML of the Netherlands enjoys an EUV monopoly and Dutch authorities have prohibited sales to Chinese foundries. Nor, thanks to US sanctions, can Huawei buy EUV-made chips from Taiwan's TSMC or South Korea's Samsung.

The workaround, say experts, has been an older technology called deep ultraviolet (DUV) lithography combined with a technique called multiple patterning. It is thought to be inefficient, even unprofitable, producing much lower yields, the percentage of functional chips derived from a single wafer. When SMIC, the Chinese foundry used by Huawei, saw its gross margin shrivel 6.4 percentage points for the recent second quarter, to 13.9%, and its cost of sales spike 31.5%, to more than $1.6 billion, some analysts blamed efforts to produce 7-nanometer chips with DUV technology. Profitable or not, it seems to have worked.

1
99

The Secretary General of Israel's national workers union, the Histadrut, announced a general strike to protest against the Netanyahu government and called for an immediate hostage-release and ceasefire in Gaza deal. The strike will begin on Monday morning.

...

The workers union decision came several hours after the IDF announced it recovered the bodies of six hostages from Rafah in southern Gaza.

  • The Israeli National Forensic Institute examined the bodies and said in a statement that the hostages were murdered in the last 48 to 72 hours and were shot from close range.
  • Israeli officials said at least three of the hostages who were killed were supposed to be released in the first phase of the hostage-release and ceasefire deal that is currently being negotiated, if an agreement would have been reached.
  • The general strike will begin on Monday at 6:00 a.m. local time and Ben Gurion International Airport will shut down at 8:00 a.m. local time.
  • Many of the country's largest private sector companies announced they will join the strike.
42

The Africa Center is an academic institution within the U.S. Department of Defense

143

Hunger and desperation were palpable Friday in the tent camp along the Deir al-Balah beachfront, after a month of successive evacuation orders that have pressed thousands of Palestinians into the area that the Israeli military calls a “humanitarian zone.”

The zone has long been crowded by Palestinians seeking refuge from bombardment, but the situation grows more dire by the day, as waves of evacuees arrive and food and water grow scarce. Over the last month, the Israeli military has issued evacuation orders for southern Gaza at an unprecedented pace.

At least 84% of Gaza now falls within the evacuation zone, according to the U.N., which also estimates that 90% of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents have been displaced over the course of the war.

...

Water has been another casualty of the evacuations. The U.N. says the water supply in Deir al-Balah has decreased by at least 70% since the recent wave of evacuations began, as pumps and desalination plants are caught within evacuation zones.

The lack of clean water is causing skin diseases and other outbreaks. The U.N.'s main health agency has confirmed Gaza’s first case of polio in a 10-month-old baby in Deir al-Balah who is now paralyzed in the lower left leg.

Meanwhile, aid groups say it is only growing more difficult to offer help. U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Thursday that the World Food Program lost access to its warehouse in central Deir al-Balah because of a recent evacuation order.

143

As the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas has stretched into its 11th month, Israel has increased its military activity against what it terms suspected terrorism in the occupied West Bank, and violent settler attacks have surged at the same time.

Far-right ministers in Mr. Netanyahu’s government — particularly Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, who are both West Bank settlers — have espoused divisive rhetoric and advanced policies to expand Israel’s hold on the territory.

The West Bank is home to about 2.7 million Palestinians and more than 500,000 settlers. Israel seized control of the territory from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states, and Israelis have since settled there with both tacit and explicit government approval. The international community largely considers settlements illegal, and many outposts also violate Israeli laws.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which tracks violent incidents in the West Bank, said in its latest update on Wednesday that Israeli settlers had carried out 25 attacks against Palestinians in the previous week. Since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 that set off the war in Gaza, the agency has recorded around 1,250 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property.

“There has been an uptick in vigilante attacks by a minority of settlers,” David Makovsky, director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel relations at the Washington Institute, said in an interview. “The West Bank is a tinderbox.”

Few attacks, however, have generated the kind of immediate reprobation from Israeli officials that followed the storming of Jit.

1
1

It's not true, folks. The lying liberal media wants you to think he'd shag a settee. That he'd bone a book stand. That he's creamied on the credenza.

Don't trust them. My beautiful boy JD, he'd never do it! He's chaste with the chaises. He's never loved a loveseat.

My VP would never fuck furniture.

1
view more: next ›

UnderpantsWeevil

joined 1 year ago