A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that’s at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren’t going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.

The problem is that they did not build battery factories quick enough, they sat on their hands waiting for massive hand outs to pay for the factories rather than investing. All while profiting off existing investment in ICE that is high return at this point in its life cycle. So they ended up making more profitable per unit halo models like the F150 that they do not need to sell in high volumes to get a return on.

Batteries are about half the raw cost of an EV, if you paying somebody else to make it for you its going to be more expensive as they will want to make a profit and you are stuck being able to buy ever how many they want to sell you. In practice they have ended up funding a competitor to develop battery tech as well.

Lowering battery cost is the secret to cheap prices, you cannot truly compete until you make your own batteries in high volumes.

The latter every time. It’s made much worse as it’s almost always achieved via a leveraged buy out, saddling the business with huge debt and absolving the vulture from most of the risk. It’s used as a one way ticket to stripping the company of any value.

So this is obviously McDonald’s but manufacturing suffers a similar path:

1. Make high quality and respected product onshore
2. Get purchased by vulture capitalist
3. Lower standards to increase profit
4. Product is offshored to cover up falling sales
5. Quality nosedives
6. Once the customer base catches on sales nosedives
7. Lower quality even more and brand becomes a joke
8. Get purchased by mega conglomerate who collects brands like Pokémon
9. Rival product gets made onshore by a small team who used to work for you

See Doc Martin and Solvair or Hunter Wellingtons or any other of a large number of former halo brands. Filson is one going through this right now

Yet Lib Dems gained a ton of seats with over 70, and Reform only 4 at the time of me writing my message. Lib Dem wasn’t that far behind total percentage of the vote vs. Reform, 12% vs, 14%, which considering they are almost opposite platforms means we shouldn’t be talking about Reform in isolation.

Labours total vote percentage is down from 2017 and only a few percent up from 2019, so the Tories collapsed losing about 20% of the vote from 2019. Labour following the center right meant they lost more moderate votes to Lib Dems and were not trusted on right wing issues as Reform picked up those votes.

Using the UK numbers, around 80k people die of smoking per year, costing the NHS alone £2.6bn, their full state pension cost is around £900m, so there is a sizeable gap between just the NHS cost and the amount on their pension as the pension saving has to be significantly more than the remaining years on their state pension as there is another set of costs next year, and the year after and so on… Total cost per year is estimates at about £12bn, but direct government cost is a bit over £4bn. This doesn’t include the fact that it ties up beds for other people who do not smoke, which means worse outcomes fro them, and this has knock on costs.

They just aren’t killing them fast enough.

It’s worse than that as it’s short term tax gains now but increased public health spending later from those same taxes when they start getting cancer in a decade or two.

Not everywhere has this, for example regional France does not, not does regional Japan. Also it’s completely unhelpful to get people out of cars and into public transport without realising that people need to take baby steps towards this. Dictating the end state without having sensible steps to bring people along with the process is just beyond dumb, especially when a lot of countries e.g., the UK have absolutely shit public transport that requires decades of investment.

Ideally with the ability to transport cars and lorrys like LeShuttle.