site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25525 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Okay, I'll go.

The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".

The mainstream media, which we're assured rarely tells outright lies, decided to find the exact dividing line between an outright lie and "still technically the truth". You can be the judge of whether they succeeded. For just one of many examples, Joe Scarborough ran a segment where the words "Trump warns of a bloodbath for America if he loses" were emblazoned on the bottom of the screen.

Of course, if any of this surprises you in the slightest, you haven't been paying attention. It's slightly boring at this point and would be funny except so many boomers still watch that dross.

What I want to focus on is the actual substance of Trump's claim. I think that, this time, Trump is on to something. The Detroit auto industry is about to have a head-on collision with China and get absolutely wrecked.

Already, Detroit is not in good shape. The Big 3's share of U.S. auto sales has fallen from 90% in 1965 to just 44% by 2018. (I'm sure it's much lower now). It gets worse. The only reason that Detroit has done this well is a 25% tariff on foreign light trucks that was passed by LBJ in retaliation for European tariffs against U.S. chicken.

In terms of small cars, Japanese automakers have been beating Detroit for decades. For luxury vehicles, Germany has worldwide dominance. That leaves only light trucks and SUV's, where Detroit still performs well only due to tarriffs. We've sort of forgotten about Detroit since 2008. The perception is that things were bad for awhile, but then the automakers got bailed out and they're okay now, especially #girlboss CEO Mary Barra.

This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.

Enter China.

China is already, by far, the world's largest producer of automobiles, producing about 3x as many as the U.S. Also, China can sell an EV for $10,000. While I'm sure there would need to be changes for the U.S. market, it would not be too expensive at scale. Get ready for hordes of these "shitty but good enough" cars to enter the market.

"No one will ever buy a Chinese car" you laugh, nearly dropping your monocle into your glass of cognac. I don't think this opinion can withstand serious scrutiny. Japanese cars once had a similar reputation. Nowadays, choosing to buy an American car over a Japanese one is seen as either extremely patriotic or moronic. Even if quality never improves, people still buy plenty of Kias and Hyundais. How many more would they buy if the price was reduced by 30-50%?

So let's say all of this is true. A wave of Chinese imports are coming which will cripple the U.S. auto industry. How will voting for Trump help? My gut feeling is that Trump can't save Detroit but that, unlike Biden, he'll at least try.

For most of the period of the 1980s-present, the world has been a huge beneficiary of free trade. The rich in the U.S. have grown much richer, obscenely so. But the biggest gains have been won by the working class in developing nations, especially China. Despite all that there have been losers. The biggest losers are the working class in rich nations, especially in areas that compete with China.

The traditional government solution to manufacturing being outsourced has been to offer job retraining and lots of government benefits to the affected class. But this just doesn't work. The places that have been affected by blue collar job loss are now hollowed-out shells of their former selves.

Trump will probably at least try to ban or tax Chinese cars. Is this the right thing to do? Maybe, maybe not. It will cost American consumers a lot of money, and it will depress wages in China. In aggregate, the tariffs will probably make the world a worse place. But they will help the group that has lost so much and which has been ignored and scorned for decades. The group Biden pretends to care about but which Trump actually does.

Edit: Just saw this retweeted by Crémieux:

America's most affluent metro areas in 1949: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1769891112095740274/photo/1

You'll never guess who's #1.

I am skeptical if protectionism is a good idea for the US car industry.

Protectionism can be a good choice to allow your industry to catch up to the global market, if you do it right.

However, I have every confidence that the US would not do it right. The situation of carmakers in the US is very different from the situation of carmakers in Korea 1973. US carmakers are not hopelessly behind because they lack know-how. I would wager that the primary reason they are behind is because labor is way more expensive in the US than in China.

Valid reasons to engage in protectionism would be to offset China's advantage due to lax environmental and safety standards, or to offset anti-competitive subsidiaries by the Chinese state. In some sectors, there can be an argument made to protect industries which are non-profitable, but strategically important: even if tanks sold by China offered similar performance at a much lower price compared to NATO-produced tanks, it would not be in the interest of NATO countries to rely on foreign supply chains. Similarly, German coal subsidiaries were excused by the need for energy autonomy. I have a hard time seeing the strategic value of lower end cars though.

Won’t the dollar’s strength vs the Euro and Yen mean that manufacturing is just more likely to move to Europe and Japan than to stay in the US?

In the long term, the problem in the US and the wider developed world is that people no longer move to where the economic growth is. The welfare state, large numbers of government jobs and state-supported jobs in education and healthcare mean that there’s just enough money to make life in hollowed-out places passable, and minimal real pressure to leave for the unambitious. Trump tells people they don’t have to leave, that he’ll deploy the full resources of the American state to ‘bring the jobs back’. He probably can’t, but if he could, would it be a good thing?

Thatcher could have been right about ‘managed decline’ of post-industrial areas being necessary. A lot of these places were barely populated before the brief 1860-1950 industrial boom, and they could easily go back to being barely populated today. Their existence is artificial, a contrivance because in a democracy they have enough representation to keep the situation from total collapse by demanding the rest of the country do whatever is necessary (like import tariffs, bailing out the big three, whatever) to prop them up.

Protectionism isn’t a bad word. It’s what turned South Korea into one of the world’s richest countries after all. But there are far more examples of it failing (see Brazil) than it succeeding. Forcing the population to buy $50,000 Detroit cars instead of $10,000 Chinese cars is unlikely to yield major new investment in technological advances or R&D that might sustainably increase long-term prosperity. It doesn’t seem like it will be worth it in the long haul.

Calling a 90-year period historically "brief" is a bit of a stretch. Also, I somehow doubt that those English regions were "barely populated" before 1860.

In the long term, the problem in the US and the wider developed world is that people no longer move to where the economic growth is.

But the entire population of the USA can't live in New York. I get fed-up of seeing this touted as the answer: just move to where the jobs are! We have that in my own country, which means that Dublin (though tiny by international standards) is bloated by Irish standards, attracting away all investment to the capital, and the concurrent vicious circle which means that the jobs are there because everything is there so when new businesses start they want to go where everything is so they go to Dublin which is where the jobs are.

There's rent crisis, housing crisis, etc. because there isn't enough housing for people and yes that is an entire problem of its own which the government would have been better off addressing rather than wasting time on "sexist language in the Constitution".

But people in my country are moving to where the jobs are, only to find when they get there that there's nowhere to live, or if there is, what the job pays them won't cover that. So they move to another country altogether.

"Jest move to where duh jerbs are" is not a solution.

The entire reason their great grandparents moved to Detroit is Detroit was where the growth was. I'm not really sure I understand the argument here.

But the entire population of the USA can't live in New York.

The number of people who currently live in NYC is more than double the entire population of the country at independence. I don't mean to be flippant, but every major city now was once tiny. The process of urbanization is centuries old. The US is lucky in that unlike Ireland (or the UK, or France) economic growth is pretty dispersed between several major urban areas, all of which could attract new internal migrants. Obviously there are big policy challenges (see the issues discussed in the infrastructure comment today elsewhere), but sure, I don't see the issue with NYC becoming as populous as, say, Tokyo.

Building more homes where the economic activity is tends to be more viable than trying to artificially disperse economic activity to where the homes are, which as far as I know has mostly been a huge failure historically.

SK's protectionism worked because it was done with a spear pointed at the ass of the local companies who were always told it was going to be time limited and would be wound down gradually and so they had 15-20 years to become internationally competitive or they were going to die out anyways. Most crucially this threat was believable to the point that the local companies shaped up and actually became competitive on the world stage.

Unfortunately you can't replicate it in the modern day US because their culture of lagresse and gibs mean that tacitly the companies know that even if the current government says the tariffs/support will end in 15 years political considerations near expiry time will lead to it being probably extended because who wants headlines like "poor salt of the earth car factory workers left destitute after government pulls funding to cut the taxes of the wealthy"? As such the car companies have zero real incentive to modernize and can just coast off of government subsidies and having a captive market. The ultimate loser of all this is going to be the taxpayer who now gets his hard earned money given to these relicts and just to add insult to injury is forced to buy worse products at higher prices.

SK's protectionism worked because it was done with a spear pointed at the ass of the local companies who were always told it was going to be time limited and would be wound down gradually and so they had 15-20 years to become internationally competitive or they were going to die out anyways.

I'm not qualified to comment on that, but I can think of 3 other reasons as well.

  1. Large-scale US federal capital loans after 1953 designed specifically to allow the build-up industrial capacity, so that the country can develop and prosper through exports to the US, in exchange for surrendering its sovereignty in a practical sense. Basically the same process as in Japan and Taiwan.

  2. by the end of the Second World War the Japanese were already running for more than half a century a centralized, authoritarian, repressive, tried and tested elaborate governing apparatus to administer the entire Korean Peninsula, most of which survived the war intact. The Americans just needed to take it over and keep it running for their own ends.

  3. Before Japanese rule, Korea already existed as a polity governed according to its own Konfucian traditions for centuries.

In other words, only a dictatorship can turn a third world country into a first world one- see also Franco, Lee Kwan Yew.

Didn't Franco really cock up the Spanish economy for the first 30ish years? Yeah, they got their economic miracle, but it took a few decades of Franco screwing things up to get there.

Not that literal communists would have run a better economy.

I mean, the original South Korean dictatorship was also pretty bad at managing the economy. Right wing authoritarianism is high variance at economic growth- sometimes you get Lee Kwan Yew or Paul Kagame, sometimes you get Syngman Rhee or Ngo Dinh Diem, sometimes you get a Franco who goes back and forth, occasionally you get a mediocrity like Salazar or Pinochet(whose miracle of Chile was really returning it to a pre-socialism growth trajectory).

As far as I know, the story with Spain’s economy under Franco was that as the fascist ideologues started getting replaced with conservative Catholic technocrats the economy started improving until it turned into the Spanish economic miracle. This was a predictable long term process at the end of WWII, maybe not in specifics but at least generally- everyone in 1945 knew that fascism wasn’t expanding and everyone who watched Spain knew the conservative Catholics were going to replace them eventually, even if they might not have been betting on Opus Dei(which is still happy to provide technocrats and economists to developing countries), and while the catch up economic growth might have been a curve ball it didn’t surprise anyone that they were better at managing an economy and less obsessed with autarky than fascist ideologues.

Left wing authoritarianism seems predictably very bad at managing and economy, with the rare exceptions like Deng being exceptions because they backed away from the left wing nature of their rule. Democracies seem to do OK generally unexceptionally at delivering rising standards of living, although I’ll acknowledge that there’s a few countries which have experienced extraordinary economic growth while being democracies- Poland and Japan among them. I will, however, maintain that democracies cannot go from mud huts to skyscrapers- Poland and Japan were already decent middle income countries.

I will, however, maintain that democracies cannot go from mud huts to skyscrapers

Except one clearly did. Or at least log cabins to skyscrapers.

Sure, but it was at the vanguard of that transition, very close (with the exception of some stagnation during the civil war) to England and Germany. Within 25 years of the civil war ending the US was arguably the richest country in the world, maybe except for Australia which had its first resource boom in the late 19th century. The odds were much tougher for countries that didn’t industrialize in the first wave.

In other words, only a dictatorship can turn a third world country into a first world one

Plato ranked monarchy as the most powerful government for national improvement for a good reason. Romans Americans and their provincial allies don't like saying "king" for that reason, even though kings and Caesars dictators aren't meaningfully distinct.

One aspect worth considering is the extent to which Chinese companies want to compete in the US (and other Western car markets).

And by "compete" I mean really go for the jugular and sell their 10k electric car for 10k (+ the extra you probably have to pay to dealers and the like compared to third-world markets).

I buy a lot of Chinese tech, because their extremely lax attitude towards copyright means you'll generally get all the bells and whistles of the good Western stuff but at a fraction of the cost. Except that this is only true if you buy in China or ship through AliExpress. As soon as Chinese manufacturers enter into Western markets directly, they immediately slap a big premium onto their products, far more than could be explained by local regulation or supply chain costs. BYD have started selling cars in Europe, and when I saw I immediately went to their website to see how competitive their cars would be... and the prices aren't competitive at all, coming in 2-3x the local Chinese price and offering little over Western EV prices.

As long as Chinese producers see the West as just a cash cow rather than a market to really dominate, Western manufacturers will be ok.

That might be the goal. Make a good profit, but don’t damage/humiliate western car makers to the extent that they kick you out or slap on tariffs.

I vaguely remember a period in the 80s and 90s when cars were a culture war. "Assholes drive imports" was a slogan for a certain sort, who were patriotic enough to buy American cars even when the foreign imports were clearly superior. It was mostly working classs rightwing types doing that.

If we get a big wave of cheap, good-enough, electric cars made in China... how do the culture war lines break down? The right is more pro-American, but these days the left is more foreign-interventionist and might care more about opposing China. The left likes electric cars, but the right has more broke people who just want to save money. And Elon Musk doesn't fit clearly on either side.

On the other hand, does this even matter? Once upon a time the auto industry was a huge deal, both to create jobs and for the military-industrial complex. Nowadays, like you said, the big car companies are tiny compared to... gaming graphics card manufacturer. And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer. So maybe it's OK to just let China take over the car industry, just like we let them take over every other kind of manufacturing.

And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer. So maybe it's OK to just let China take over the car industry, just like we let them take over every other kind of manufacturing.

Trucks are really important for logistics. Soldiers need offroader vehicles - a humvee or something like it.

Furthermore, the broader learning in how to make factories, production chains, engines, working steel all helps military industry. If you've got a big car industry, you'll have a big robotics and machine tools industry too. You'll have lots of experienced engineers who can help make weapons. If you have a big electric car industry, you'll have a big battery industry and batteries have all kinds of military applications in lasers, drones and so on. Everything connects to everything else.

Converting factories to war production, that will be much harder these days. But the pools of knowledge, capital goods and experienced workers are still quite important.

I'm not an expert so I don't want to argue this too much. But what I heard was that, basically, modern military stuff is more like a custom bespoke piece, where each individual tank/ship/airplane/whatever requires tons of individual workers to pore over it and custom assemble it. They all need security clearance and experience with this very specific military technology that has no other application. Factories are more about scale, building up as big and cheap as possible, so they use totally different tools and ways of thinking.

I'm sure that\ you could take automative factory workers and engineers and re-train them as military workers, but you also do that with, say, software engineers.

Aerospace engineers are easier to retrain as a different kind of aerospace engineer than software engineers are as aerospace engineers. I think that’s just a truism.

I also think a lot of that is just the inefficiency of the modern west- in an emergency you could just use f-150’s instead of humvees.

modern military stuff is more like a custom bespoke piece, where each individual tank/ship/airplane/whatever requires tons of individual workers to pore over it and custom assemble it

"Bespoke crafting" sounds true, that is how the hardware has been ordered for past few decades, but at the same time, it looks like such mode of production is not working very well when put into a test of a large-scale war (Ukraine). What seems to count is the ability to mass-produce hundred to thousands of missiles, thousands of cheap drones, and millions of artillery shells. Nobody seems to able to produce hundreds or thousands of tanks and airplanes, but if either side possessed such ability, it might decide the war.

That isn’t because America is fundamentally incapable of making more weapons. It’s because US strategy for decades has been that the only conflicts America will fight will either be against vastly inferior conventional forces in places like the Middle East or in a great power conflict against Russia or China which would either go nuclear or be over Taiwan and therefore resolved pretty quickly (the Chinese landing would fail or succeed in likely fewer than 72 hours).

The Ukraine situation is an extreme anomaly.

In great power politics, the wars are sufficiently rare that anomalies also count. (The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were anomalous in their scale. WW1 was, again, anomalous.)

Predicting the outcomes of wars is unpredictable business. Before the 1st Gulf War, very few people knew for certain it was going to be a quick, decisive victory against inferior conventional force. If American strategy calls for small wars in the Middle East or quick decisive naval wars in Asia, what Washington is going to do when faced with an adversary who is perfectly aware of the American strategy and thus presents something that is neither?

And anyway, the current nuclear stockpiles are a fraction of what it was in the 1980s. During the Cold War, the end-of-the-world thought stopping does-not-compute aspect was heavily colored by fiction and propaganda. After the nuclear exchange, a world will end, but the world will not.

Despite being 2% the market cap of NVDA, GM has 5 times as many employees.

Let's say that we always spam "let China have the crappy businesses" without limit. Solve for equilibrium as X (time) approaches infinity. Eventually, China will have every business except one. A single American person will have a net worth of $100 trillion making memecoins or something. His tax dollars will support what's left of the American economy. All other Americans will work crappy retail jobs. China will control the rest of the value chain. Mercantilism is not great for the victims.

I think this book is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

So, do we go back to 19th century mercantilism? Use the government to subsidize our own, inferior industries, while the navy tries to forcibly stop them from shipping cars to us?

The alternative is to specialize in what we're best at: Pizza Delivery and MicroCode

Mercantilism never left and is in fact in use today in many sectors, with distorting effects on the market. The various more upmarket civilizational stacks existed on top of it, not displacing it entirely.

I'm not a hardcore libertarian or staunch believer in the free market, but it's trivial to understand that countries will naturally protect their own market when they believe they are noncompetitive.

But... why are we uncompetitive? Usually when you see mercantilism, it's to protect a new industry in a developing country, which is how Japan and Korea developed their automotive industries. And maybe China did/does too, so we could do a little to even the score. But if it's just "we cannot allow the auto industry to fail, ever" then it's a recipe for absolute stagnation, like India's domestic auto industry did for the entire cold war.

It's weird that the US auto industry, the oldest, most-developed auto industry on earth, just can't compete with these young upstarts unless the government gives it bailouts.

The reason why is irrelevant. There could be any number of reasons, from cheaper labor to less regulations to quality differences to productivity reasons. But governments are made up of people, and people who are incentivized not to let things fail are obviously going to work in service of those claims.

The Chinese factory example is apt. If you are a western nation, can you compete with that workforce, notoriously selective regulation and an ability to simply make as much as the market can absorb? Well, sure, you could. What's stopping you, aside from, well - the people in your country? (Cf. American Factory)

The other side of the Bretton Woods financial coin making money fungible across national boundaries: if you don't have some sort of protectionism in place, your economy will see significant cash outflows to foreign countries. This is hugely beneficial to countries that are primarily export based, as the US was post-WW2... and not so much in the other direction.

Why not? All "specialization" seems to have brought is cheap consumer gadgets to fudge inflation statistics with, and cost disease everywhere that's important to people.

You mean cost disease in housing, education, and healthcare? The domestic industries for those are extremely healthy and have not been hurt one iota by imports. In fact, where we can import, we are better off.

Plus cheaper food, cheaper clothes, cheaper flights, cheaper cars and longer lives.

Housing is getting more expensive due to regulation & immigration rather than cost disease, and healthcare spending is going up because the developed world has a larger proportion of older people who are living longer (partly due to better healthcare). In countries with good housing regulation and immigration control, house prices go down over time.

Free trade and specialisation are the forces pushing prices down. If you abandon them for mercantilism, you get expensive essentials and expensive consumer goods.

Plus cheaper food, cheaper clothes,

Nope, and nope. This is a "do you believe me or your lying eyes" situation. Clothes used to be much better quality than they are now, and food used to be better quality and cheaper (if seasonally unavailable). I can concede the rest, but of the things you listed cars might be the only things worth the squeeze, and even then I'm not sure.

Then we have a whole bunch of second order effects on employment, but I'll also grant they're hard to disentangle, and you might think they have different causes.

Free trade and specialisation are the forces pushing prices down. If you abandon them for mercantilism, you get expensive essentials and expensive consumer goods.

I'm not an autarchist, there's obviously a balance to be struck, but I also see no reason to believe why maximum free trade would make any more sense than maximum immigration.

If you buy quality clothes today for the inflation-adjusted amount they cost in 1950 you can certainly still get high quality, possibly even made-in-America clothes. They’re just a niche market since 98% of the population prefers the cheap stuff made in Bangladesh.

The same goes for food. In 1950, Americans spent 24% of their disposable income on food, in 2010 they spent 9.5% of it on food. If they increased their spending on food by 250%, even the average American could afford the premium organic local farmers market stuff that still has a lot of flavor.

Testing the hypothesis would be somewhat hard and require a lot of time. I'm not even talking about the 1950's, my opinion is based on the 80's. Our family in America would send us packages with clothes and whatever else might be useful that they could grab on a sale. These clothes would then make the following rounds: my oldest cousin -> my older brother -> my younger cousin -> me -> my youngest cousin -> my mother, for some of the clothes that looked ok on her -> rag for cleaning floors, where they would serve faithfully for many years, and survive in a state that, if push came to shove, you could still throw into a washing machine and wear them.

If something approaching this quality is still available, please send me a link.

For food, I'm not talking about America, I'm talking about eastern Europe. "Premium organic" food does not approach the quality of what was available back when I was a kid, and the fact that I'd have to go and find a goddamn farmer's market to get what was right there in the local grocery store is itself a drop in quality of life. Again - hard to disentangle - maybe it's all the BS European regulations that are slowly killing farmers throughout the continent, and not free trade, but don't tell me there was nothing lost.

More comments

And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer.

Well, perhaps aside from armored vehicles and firearms. WWII suggests that industrial capacity is fungible in some specific contexts.

Indeed. If you can make a computer, you can make a gun.

If you can make a sewing machine, you can make a gun.

yeah. Naive calculation: Suppose Alice has a factory that produces tens of hi-tech bespoke post-Cold war optimized tanks during one year, say 50 units in year. Suppose Bob has several dozens of factories that can produce 500,000 of civilian vehicles each year. Bob needs only engineers to redesign the civilian car production line into something useful in military use -- perhaps, integrate anti-tank guided missile launcher and drone platform and minimal armor against small arms fire -- and then Bob can produce 10,000 modern anti-tank vehicles for each Alice's hi-tech bespoke tank. After the first couple of months, if both realize their current designs are not performing adequately in the field, assuming it takes equal time to come up with a redesign, after the resign and couple of months of production Bob has produced 80,000 upgraded vehicles against 8 Alice's upgraded bespoke units. But frankly, I presume if you have factories producing hundreds of thousands units for civilian consumption, your engineers are much better at setting up production lines, adapting and rolling out new redesigns than if your experience is producing hundreds of bespoke units to a contract.

I think the difference is that modern car factories can’t be retooled to build modern weapons the way WW2 factories could. So retooling the GM or Tesla factory to make modern missiles probably isn’t much easier than just taking over an Amazon warehouse and doing the same there.

To echo the other replies to this comment, a modern military will need drones, but will also still need 4x4 vehicles (whether Humvees, JLTVs, or even just modified pickup trucks), transport trucks (so you still need GMC and International Harvester and the like), and men with rifles (which will be some flavor of AR-15, traditionally-milled or possibly even 3D-printed).

But at WWII levels of mobilization, we’d probably be looking at revamped civilian vehicles in heavy military use. The GM line can easily produce technicals.

Not the bespoke weapons, no. But evidently a modern civilian drone factory can make drones that are effective for military use. I believe a protracted total war, the side with more "Gigafactories" and difficult-to-predict quality of innovativeness and engineering that comes from running the factory will be better equipped to churn out useful equipment. In a massive war, you need massive amount of weapons, and wih current production numbers, it looks possible the West would run out of the bespoke weapons.

If the decisionmakers Alice and Bob realize it, it will affect their calculations of outcomes of protracted total war, such calculations will affect their diplomatic strategies. If either side don't realize it, they will walk into it blindly into the next protracted total war, and it will affect the outcome.

But that’s kind of the thing, there can be no protracted direct total war between great powers because of nuclear weapons. There can only be proxy conflicts or MAD. The unique thing about Ukraine is that it’s a moderate to large sized country with a zealous and relatively high IQ population backed by Western countries fighting a former superpower (with a poorly trained but large military and high manufacturing capacity) in conventional warfare.

The US doesn’t need huge volumes of conventional weaponry outside of this niche scenario of supporting Ukraine. No enemy will ever military invade the American homeland, only nuke it if it comes to it. The main scenarios for a hot conflict with China over Taiwan would either spiral very quickly into nuclear exchange or resolve themselves rapidly otherwise (eg very successful Chinese blitzkrieg and amphibious landing in 48h before US can decide on strategic response). The main scenario for a hot conflict with Russia involves some kind of Russian invasion of the baltics, and even there NATO forces in Europe outnumber the Russians, have better equipment and could easily repel the post-Ukraine remnants of the more skilled professional soldiers left, likely pressing into Russia and again leading to a question of nuclear exchange.

The only reason Ukraine is even happening is because it doesn’t have nukes and it’s considered taboo post-1945 to use nuclear weapons offensively against a country that doesn’t have them, even for Russians, especially against your supposed co-ethnic brothers.

"Need" is a strong word. There are plenty of people willing argue that the US really didn't need to intervene in WW1 or WW2 or Korea or Vietnam or station Elvis and other assorted troops in Germany or doesn't need to defend NATO either. Generally, superpowerdom has been considered a prize worth the costs. Perhaps stakeholders in Washington decided it is longer worth it. But that is secondary to my argument.

I think it is mistake to infer that Ukraine is a niche scenario. It used to be a niche scenario (for couple of decades) partly because the US was the uncontested superpower. Starting a large-scale war that the US might notice was considered a bad idea. Ukraine is what a contested hegemony looks like. Putin made a calculated move presuming that the West overplayed their hand supporting the west-aligned Ukrainians and would not / can't supply Ukraine. And perhaps the Washington stakeholders decide, they won't. Same goes for Taiwan, and any other piece of territory previously under their hegemonic protection. It would imply the US will fight only unaligned small countries, not other great powers. The implication for any Middle Eastern or other small country is to quickly align themselves with any of other ascendant great powers so that they are not unaligned small country no longer. Probably the US would be fine. Isolation worked okay for China for a quite long time. But it is an admission of making an exit from the great power politics.

Second, it seems unwise to think only terms how Taiwanese or any other military situation would develop today or in 5 years' time while making decisions about having manufacturing base (development timescales counted in decades). Concerning Taiwan: Who knows what the future of naval combat looks like? Everyone thinks so when they enter a conflict. Afterwards, someone has always been surprised. (Nobody plans to start a long protracted shooting war. Usually everyone plans for a decisive victory.) No matter the specifics, or if the US sits out, it is not a good look for the US power projection capability if it so happens that during the first months of mid-to-large-sized regional war in Asia everyone, including China, both shoots up and shoots down more equipment than the US produces in one year. Perhaps again, the US will be fine after the first such war. But when there has been a couple of such wars, and China has learnt how to improvise and develop and learn?

Third, to make nuclear red lines believable you need to draw conventional lines much earlier. To draw a conventional lines, you need conventional forces and the support organization for them. If you have fewer conventional forces, then the lines you draw need to be proportional to forces you have. Suppose given points one and two, Washington decides to forgo both the superpower hegemony and large conventional forces to keep it. Do you still wish to keep Monroe doctrine? Perhaps, Mexico and Canada?

When Argentina tried to take Falklands, everyone knew the UK wouldn't waste nukes to keep the islands, and they didn't. Suppose they never responded conventionally, either ("Royal Navy was too costly, PM Hacker kept only the Trident"). Couple of decades later, someone is prone to have a bright idea to take yet another inconsequential far-off nominally British island territory ("let's conquer Bermuda for tax reasons, they won't nuke us for that like they didn't nuke Argentina"). The other islands would seek another overlord if they can help it. Perhaps the UK probably would still defend the Isle of Man or the Hebrides, because it is closer to home, but who will be sure? And if their general readiness to fight appears to be nil, and nobody thinks they would start shooting back, how much their threat of nuclear Armageddon is? Nuclear strike doctrines were developed during are when the Cold war belligerents had a large standing armies ready to shoot, and nuclear strike was yet another escalation beyond that. But if you won't fight conventionally? Psychological threat of nuclear annihilation looks more credible after you occasionally demonstrate willingness and capability to go to war in the first place.

and it’s considered taboo post-1945 to use nuclear weapons offensively against a country that doesn’t have them, even for Russians, especially against your supposed co-ethnic brothers.

Russia didn't even try to destroy an electric plant (as opposed to transformers) or kill Zelensky. Why nuke?

As far as I'm aware they certainly have tried to kill Zelensky on a number of occasions. But typically decapitation is a poor military strategy anyway, because it opens up the possibility of vengeance (including by the US) and because the people standing behind Zelensky seem to be more hardcore anti-Russian partisans than he is, so no change in policy would be likely. As for destroying power plants, their goal (unlike, say, the US' in WW2 or Iraq) is a permanent annexation of much of Ukraine so radicalizing the population against them is undesirable.

More comments

It would be one thing if the auto industry was dying a natural death and Trump wanted to prolong it with tariffs. But that's not all that's going on, the Biden administration is actively trying to kill the industry by effectively outlawing gas cars. The EPA issued regulations that would force 60% of new car sales to be electric by 2030*. That's billions of dollars in capital investment not just for the Big 3 but also for their suppliers and for foreign brands with facilities in the US that will all go up in smoke based on a whim of the EPA. One advantage they have over China is experience in working with gas cars and with their existing capital. They aren't losing in a fair competition where consumers decided they want electric cars, they're losing because of regulations that target US manufacturers but not their Chinese competitors.

So it's not just about Trump passing tariffs to protect Detroit. Biden is shutting down one of America's largest industries by fiat and Trump can stop that from happening, at least temporarily.

*There are rumors that the EPA is going to push that target back a little bit but while it's easy to rewrite the regulations every few months it's not easy to reverse decisions to invest in factories that take years to build.

This is a good point, but to echo VoxelVexillologist's comment below, I think pretty much the only reasonable response left is sink-or-swim: either Detroit manages to shape up and make the transition before they get the rug pulled out from under them, or the American auto industry will simply be forced to leave the Rust Belt and look elsewhere.

This would be disastrous if this was still the era of Who Killed The Electric Car?, but thankfully, we have something of an actual industry for EVs in the US thanks to one very-outspoken and intense tech CEO.

Yes, this is a great point.

If you look at the balance sheet of GM you will see $51 billion of "Property, plant, and equipment". Almost all of this is factories and tooling geared towards making ICE cars. Not only that, but almost all the engineers on their payroll are trained to make ICE cars.

This is a huge body of expertise that is about to be discarded wholesale (and very prematurely) in favor of EV's. And when it comes to making EV's, China will have a huge advantage.

Biden's rules will drown Detroit in a bathtub. Once the market share is gone, it's gone. There is zero chance of recovery. There is no market for American EV's made with Chinese batteries at American wages.

I'm sure they'll provide lots of government handouts to the affected communities.

EVs share a lot of the parts with ICE cars. Structure, doors, windows, seats, trim, suspension, wheels. If you consider hybrid ICEs, which most car manufactures already have a lot of experience with, this grows even more: batteries, electric engines, regen breaking. Moving to EV only does not require starting anew: you just ditch the drivetrain, and replace it with beefed up version of what you already do for hybrids. None of this is easy, but it’s not $51B of assets going down the drain.

This is just wrong. GM hasn't sold a hybrid (outside of a wacky Corvette model) in five years. The Volt was wildly successful, but it uses a now-dated central traction inverter and electrified transaxle design, which isn't a great choice for a full EV compared to per-motor or per-axle in-wheel or in-board hub motors. They might as well be starting anew. Ford at least has modern hybrid models, but they too are all central traction inverters. Meanwhile, SiC traction inverter tech has gone from impractical experiment to just about the only game in town in the last five years, which has completely rewritten the rules on the size, weight, and power tradeoffs required for hub motors. For these US automakers, modern EV tech might as well have fallen out the back of an alien spaceship, and they're clearly blowing billions on R&D trying to play catch-up on problems their competitors have already spent a decade solving and optimizing - just go look at how the F-150 Lightning was priced.

On a different note, most of the last ten years of hybrid battery development has used NiMH for its high reliability and large total cycle count, and this is yet another thing the US domestic auto industry is going to have to discard as they transition to Li-Ion.

Look at what Tesla is doing for an idea of the scale of changes needed. There is a reason they call their cell assembly plant a "gigafactory": the goal for Giga Nevada was to produce more capacity in 2020 than the entire world produced in 2014 (and on paper, this was achieved, though actual utilization fell short by around 30% for a variety of reasons). These guys crunched the numbers a decade before anyone at Ford or GM made so much as a whisper about fully electric vehicles, and determined they needed to have tens of GWh of vertically-integrated domestic battery production to get cell costs remotely close to viable at a run rate of a few hundred thousand cars a year (an order of magnitude below Ford/GM EV fleet annual expectations). In ten years, starting from nothing, Tesla's up to around 40 GWh total annual production capacity across every plant (more if you factor in grid storage capacity, which is a separate but thoroughly understated can of worms), with another 100 GWh coming online in the next few years. Ford is basically all-in on some CATL LFP partnership, having secured at least 60 GWh for through 2025 (on paper) and several other long-term deals for later; personally I think this is going to go poorly for them, reminiscent of the Foxconn debacle a few years back, but I leave room to be pleasantly surprised. GM appears to be working with LG Chem for high-nickel cathodes but on a significantly delayed schedule from their original plans. In neither case is it clear where the precursor materials are being extracted or refined, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it's mostly China. Best I can tell is these guys each expect around 120-150 GWh of annual production capacity sometime in the next few years. For reference, CATL makes around 30% of global Li-Ion supply and today has about 250 GWh of annual production capacity. I remain deeply skeptical of the US automakers' ability to execute on such lofty goals, particularly if they keep pumping out overpriced stinkers and falling behind on innovation, when their combined expectations for the next few years are to go from practically nothing to double-digit percentages of the global lithium battery supply, and all while buying their precursor materials at no-doubt strategically inflated prices from their primary competitor nation.

I'd estimate this EV investment is something like $35B in capital costs between the two of them. China is selling low-cost EVs to every other low-cost market on Earth, so once the US GHG rules kick in, it's not like Ford/GM can really continue selling ICEs at scale any more - they will be drawing down most of their existing propulsion facilities, which is something like 20% of each of their balance sheets (it's more like 25%, but some ICEs for heavy industry applications will still be required - that capacity will stay mostly unaffected). Sure, it's not $50B down the drain, but $10B and most of your ICE expertise down the drain is nothing to take lightly, let alone on top of another $15-20B in industry-redefining novel (at least to them) technology investment. And the massive capital investment, vertically-integrated manufacturing, and on-shore in-house production of battery components is exactly the opposite direction from where Ford and GM have been headed for the last 40 years.

My point is, don't underestimate the complexity or the expense of the challenges ahead for US automakers.

As an aside: The global readily available lithium supply is sorely inadequate for something as ambitious as the entire US automotive market going full electric by 2030 anyway. The WEF is projecting sixfold increase in lithium demand over 2020 figures, and even with optimistic projections on political and environmental mining and refining operation approvals, we're still talking like 6-8 years for operations to go from "we think there's lithium here" to mining and refining it at any kind of scale. And again that's with everything going right, which it very frequently doesn't: market conditions can delay financing, detailed surveys of lithium deposits can determine midway through that the deposit is economically nonviable to refine, governments can and do regularly inject arbitrary and capricious environmental demands. In practice, it can take over a decade for mining and refining operations to come fully online. Plenty are in-work right now, but it's just nowhere near enough. This fuels a lot of my skepticism regarding the ambitious annual production capacities discussed above.

Meanwhile: China is the recipient of something like 90% of Australian lithium, and between Australia, Chile, and domestic mines, China is consuming something like two-thirds of all lithium extracted on Earth. They follow it up with another 60% of the world's lithium refining capacity. Their domestic battery manufacturing companies are functionally unrivaled - CATL is routinely years ahead of everyone else on the market in metrics like gravimetric energy density, cost per cell, total throughout... China is the 800-pound gorilla of the EV industry, and since most of their cost for EVs is tied up in the battery, as long as China can keep producing better, cheaper batteries than the rest of the world, they'll trivially outcompete an unserious, labor-depleted, heavily outsourced, geriatric American automotive industry. From where I stand, at least, it looks like it will take a radical transformation of all major industry players just to survive the next decade, and without significant assistance from USG in tipping global trade scales to secure strategically valuable lithium assets and construct refineries in friendly jurisdictions, I can't see the US being globally competitive in manufacturing anything that needs a Li-Ion battery in it 20 years from now.

Seems like you know a lot about this stuff. Do you work in the EV industry?

Without getting too specific, I'm in a critical part of the EV supply chain. That said, I'm offering personal speculation based on publicly available information and some napkin math - there's some other stuff that informs my opinion which I can't really talk about, but it doesn't take an insider to see which way the wind is blowing.

Biden's rules will drown Detroit in a bathtub.

No, it will be a bathtub of blood. A bath of blood. A bloodbath.

It's going to be a bloodbath.

Good info. Another factor that exacerbates this problem is exchange rates. If you look at the GDP of China, it is 17.7 trillion nominal, but 33 trillion measured in PPP (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China). That is to say, if you take the total output of the Chinese economy in yuan, and convert the yuan to dollars at market exchange rates (a guy grows a bag of oranges and sells them to his neighbor for 15 yuan = 2.1 dollars), you'd get 17.7 trillion dollars -- but if you take the actual stuff that they make, and sold it in the US for dollars (guy grows the same bag of oranges and sells it to you for 4.2 dollars), you'd get 33 trillion. Why the difference? because the dollar is, still for now, the world's preferred reserve currency; ergo, people want dollars more than they want yuan; dollars have a sole source (the US Govt), and so a dollar buys a lot of oranges, and a lot of everything else, on the world market.

This is great for people in the US who buy imported manufactured goods -- but is not so great for people who work manufacturing jobs in the US. If it costs a US auto worker $500 a month to feed his family, it only costs the competing Chinese laborer $268 (dollar equivalent) to buy the same amount of food. The same goes for other necessities across the board, so the Chinese worker can comfortably work for just over half of what the American worker does (in dollars) and enjoy the same standard of living. Pretty hard for American car companies to compete under those conditions.

The mainstream media, which we're assured rarely tells [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies](outright lies), decided to find the exact dividing line between an outright lie and "still technically the truth". You can be the judge of whether they succeeded. For just one of many examples, Joe Scarborough ran a segment where the words "Trump warns of a bloodbath for America if he loses" were emblazoned on the bottom of the screen.

I find it amusing that every time someone snarkily invokes Scott's post, they provide an example that perfectly makes his point. Trump did warn of a bloodbath, so Joe didn't make it up. The media is very, very, misleading but they indeed rarely lie.

I think that Zvi did a much better job at explaining the complexities of media literacy than Scott in his "On Bounded Distrust": https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-bounded-distrust

Personally I think that this example lends an impression so different from the truth that calling it a lie is obviously correct. Or, if you want to pedantic about "technically correct," you could just call it "complete bullshit."

I fully understand Scott's argument.

I think you might have missed my point, which is that (in this case) they are trying to find the exact point that a lack of context becomes so egregious that it is equivalent to an outright lie.

It seems to me that this is pretty squarely within the "technically the truth" category. It follows the same logic as the other examples of misleading headlines: If you had more context, you would interpret it completely differently.

Where is the line? Let's say you rephrase "I have never beaten my wife" to "I have ... beaten my wife".

There is clearly a spectrum between selective reporting and pants-on-fire lie. In this case, the media was closer to the outright lie end of the spectrum. I mean, yeah, Trump said the word "bloodbath". That's about the only honest thing in their headlines.

That would be a lie because he didn't say that he has beaten his wife. It would not be a lie if it was "I have beaten my wife (in a video game)". But yeah, I would agree that at this level of "obscuration of the truth" there is little difference in the consequences between simply lying and being grossly misleading. Though we should not completely disregard the possibility that Joe actually thinks that Trump meant a real bloodbath (cf. dog whistling).

Here is an excerpt of what he said:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/joe-scarborough-spots-trump-line-115751035.html

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Monday insisted Donald Trump meant his warning about a “bloodbath” in America if he’s not elected, despite the Trump campaign’s claims to the contrary he was only talking about the auto industry.

“It was a distinction without a difference,” said Scarborough.

What made it clear what GOP nominee Trump was intending to say, Scarborough continued, was when he added afterward that a “bloodbath” would “be the least of it.”

Scarborough explained, “If you think there’s going to be a bloodbath in the auto industry, even if you take that argument at face value, which, again, given the tone of the rest of the speech, ‘bloodbath’? I’m not sure he’s talking about the niceties of international trade. But let’s just take that argument as is. Then he goes on and he says, ‘That’s going to be the least of it,’ and repeats it. ‘It’s gonna be the least of it.’”

“Obviously, he’s talking about a bloodbath for America,” he added.

“It’s just bullshit,” Scarborough said of the Trump campaign’s spin that was parroted by other Republicans.

“I’ll say that at 6:15 a.m. It was bullshit,” he added.

Trump “knew what he was doing. We’re not stupid. Americans aren’t stupid,” Scarborough said. “He was talking about a bloodbath. Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath. And when he finishes by saying, ‘And that’s just going to be the least of it.’ Seriously? These people may be stupid, we’re not.”

This actually sounds like pretty genuine TDS. This is another thing I find amusing. The only people who seem to hear "dog whistles" are the ones who aren't supposed to her them.

The people who aren't supposed to hear dog whistles, according to the dog whistle theory, are the moderates who vote for the dog whistler. The opponents don't factor in, they weren't about to vote for you anyway.

A wave of Chinese imports are coming which will cripple the U.S. auto industry.

They can't pass safety regulations. Chinese (and Mexicans, and Brazilians) are happy just to have a car and really don't care so much that they're guaranteed to die even in a single-vehicle accident at highway speeds; in a car that passes American/Euro standards, even vehicular suicide attempts (cliffs and head-ons with semis) are survivable in most cases.

Fortunately, since safety regulations are just protectionism by another name the Chinese cars that can pass safety are probably going to be price-competitive with Kia and Hyundai and still have their teething "lol the engine exploded, hope you're still in warranty" years to go; I'm not sure there's a market for that.

Maybe they can defend the US market but they can't defend all markets. Tesla doesn't seem to be price-competitive with what's coming out of China, they're losing market share globally.

Everyone seems to be focused on the US car market but the US does have exports. If you lose in world markets that's also quite bad!

Some figures pulled from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita):

US: 12.9 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2021, $80412 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023.

Mexico: 12.8 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $13804 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023.

Brazil: 16.0 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $10413 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023.

These figures may be inaccurate for various reasons, for example less accurate reporting in poorer countries. However, I think they still would not suggest that the correlation between personal wealth and traffic fatalities is not necessarily as drastic as you are suggesting.

There is some data in favor of your argument. For example, the Dominican Republic's figures are 64.6 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $11249 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023. But as you see, given the Mexican and Brazilian figures, that does not establish a strong connection.

China's figure is 17.4 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $12541 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023. So despite driving obviously a lot more Chinese cars than Americans do, Chinese seem to be dying in traffic incidents only about 4/3 times as much.

I think what you’re ignoring is that Mexico, Brazil, China, and the Dominican Republic drive far fewer miles on average per inhabitant, so similar or higher rates of death from traffic accidents per inhabitant speaks to a much more dangerous driving experience.

Now in the case of Mexico specifically I would point to the poor behavior of Mexican drivers, especially Mexican bus drivers, as a bigger reason than the lack of safety features on Mexican cars. And for all of these countries there’s probably a higher percentage of motorcycle use, which is extremely dangerous. But those numbers aren’t actually evidence for middle income countries having the same approach to vehicular safety as the USA; rather the opposite in fact.

Hmm, yeah that's a good point that they probably drive far fewer miles in Mexico, Brazil, and China. I didn't think of that.

However, I think they still would not suggest that the correlation between personal wealth and traffic fatalities is not necessarily as drastic as you are suggesting.

I'm not even suggesting that; what I am suggesting is that countries that have less personal wealth are likely to see traffic deaths or serious injuries as an acceptable cost. (China's official figures are 17.4/100000, but note that none of those figures are accounting for persistent injury after the fact.)

It is probably worth noting that most of the safety regulations have diminishing returns; really, a mid-2000s car is 90% as safe as a mid-2020s car is (outside of the fact that most 2020s "cars" are SUVs). So objectively, maybe the new breed of Chinese cars are safe from a mid-2000s standpoint and that is all you need if you're not infected with a terminal case of safetyism, but that's not how Western governments (even the ones that don't have socialized medicine) will see it.

(And that's ignoring that the safer cars are more dangerous for those around them; personally, I'd rather die in a rollover than hit a pedestrian my rollover protection forced me to be blind to, but that's just me.)

Fortunately, since safety regulations are just protectionism by another name

This is how tariffs will happen in practice, most likely.

With the correct regulation, U.S. automakers may be able to survive in the U.S. I'd say their overseas operations (already money-losing) are doomed. Oddly, it may be the Japanese and South Korean makers who suffer the most as they will lose the third world market.

Sadly, the Islamist guerillas of the 2030s will be riding in Chinese pickups, not Toyotas.

Sadly, the Islamist guerillas of the 2030s will be riding in Chinese pickups, not Toyotas.

Maybe then I'll finally be able to get a decent hi-lux

Sadly, the Islamist guerillas of the 2030s will be riding in Chinese pickups, not Toyotas.

Even better, they're already in the business of decreasing the number of Toyota trucks in the world.
Create the trucks, then create the weapons that blow up the trucks, create demand for more trucks. Brilliant.

In terms of small cars, Japanese automakers have been beating Detroit for decades. For luxury vehicles, Germany has worldwide dominance. That leaves only light trucks and SUV's, where Detroit still performs well only due to tariffs. We've sort of forgotten about Detroit since 2008. The perception is that things were bad for awhile, but then the automakers got bailed out and they're okay now, especially #girlboss CEO Mary Barra.

I don't think that is the perception, but I guess it must be yours, because it misses a yuge number of developments since then.

Detroit won't be competing with any $10,000 import hatchback, because they don't even make anything small anymore. Ford literally makes nothing in a sedan or coupe except the Mustang. GM still makes the Malibu, for some bizarre reason, and a couple Cadillac also-rans. Ford, GM, and Chrysler spent decades trying to make a family sedan to compete with the Camry and the Accord, and failed completely. They never managed to produce a car that matched the Camry and Accord in quality, reliability, or features. Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.

At the same time, Ford and GM poured billions into Lincoln and Cadillac over the years, trying to develop luxury brands that would go blow-for-blow with the Germans. They failed, spectacularly, over and over, then landed ass-backwards on a successful luxury branding with the top trim six figure pickup truck. The only American car company to successfully build a luxury sedan to compete with the Germans is Tesla.

Luckily, fat American tastes run towards unnecessarily large pickups and SUVs. But for the $10k import hatchback, the question quickly becomes: what used car are you competing against for $10k? Prior recent efforts at bottom-tier economy cars have largely failed in the USA because of the increasingly quality and survival of used cars, which for various reasons are less of an issue in other markets. The average car on the road is entering its second year of middle school. Will people purchase a Chinese car new over an older Escape or Rav4? Time will tell.

Tesla's success can largely be attributed to building EVs as status symbols, EVs that were functionally superior to every ICE car on the road, looking great and blowing them out of the water on acceleration, silent and potent. Tiny EV penalty boxes have failed over and over, because they deliver a worse experience than an equivalent ICE car. Maybe Chinese manufacturing will solve that problem.

the question quickly becomes: what used car are you competing against for $10k?

Putting on my bureaucrat's "needlessly interfering with the economy while setting tax dollars on fire" hat, I see they'll be implementing another wasteful Cash for Clunkers program to handle the ""problem"" of people driving old ICE cars.

Which will no doubt be restricted to UAW produced cars, eliminating both the $10k Chinese import and the most interesting American car companies.

I've often felt that a significant part of the defeat of the Big 3 was just mind-share. I daily a Buick from the 2010s, and it has met my needs in every way. I've never had to put it in the shop beyond tires, fluid changes etc. It's a great car in general. But by the 2010s, the battle was already lost - there was no car that Americans could put out that would displace Toyota and Honda in the minds of the American public.

On Reddit, if cars are mentioned in any thread, you will never see a recommendation other than Toyota or Honda. It is 100% lockstep. Even if you could get 90% of the reliability from an old Ford Taurus at 50% of the cost, the hive mind has decided. I do get that - I've ridden in a Pontiac Le Mans. I've driven a Plymouth Volare. They fucked up for decades. But I hated it when the Big 3 bailed out of the sedan space, just because there are far fewer options now; and by the end, the cars were quite good.

Weren't they losing money on every sedan sale? They didn't quit so much as fail.

I will have to research that. I know Chrysler was at the end, but I'd be surprised with regards to Ford. They sold many millions of sedans in the 90s and 2000s.

They sold many millions of sedans in the 90s and 2000s.

Honestly, the same was true of Chevrolet; they were making six-digit (as in, 100-200 thousand) sales of their compact sedans at the time.

They aren't actually bad cars, it's just that the early-90s through mid-00s Hondas and Toyotas were objectively the best cars ever made and that bought them customers for life, even though Civics and Corollas now cost twice what they used to (and are 1.5x as large).
Meanwhile, Gen Z buys Korean, and they're even more unreliable than mid-00s Big Three cars because their engines go before 100,000 miles due due to incompetence (machining chips not cleared properly kills the normal engines) and premature cost-cutting (undersized rods flying through the blocks of turbocharged engines). Detroit-designed cars might not be as solid as Toyota's, but their engineering was/is still good enough that, just like the Japanese cars, the main reason they stop working is because they rusted out.

https://thenewswheel.com/ford-killing-value-destroying-sedans-because-they-lose-money-every-year/

UBS analyst Colin Langan told Auto News that Ford loses approximately $800 million a year selling small cars in the United States, which stands in stark contrast to Ford’s estimated $3 billion first-quarter profit on truck and utility sales.

Taking this at face value, Ford lost money selling sedans the year before they simply stopped making them.

There is a much more in-depth answer, I've been following the American auto-industry in-depth as a hobbyist since long before I could drive, but it cashes out in a sentence to: they never made a mid-size family sedan that could beat out the Camry and the Accord. The story of Detroit goes back to how the big companies formed by buying out other brands, the antiquated dealership laws that leave them beholden to local middleman businesses with serious lobbying power, and to the decline and resulting deal with the devil that saddled them with a raft of poor choices after the bailout.

The Detroit Big 3 occasionally made great cars, but couldn't put together a consistent record. I've been reading my dad's car magazines since I was maybe 12, and I've read more comparison tests than I could possibly remember. American cars occasionally won against Japanese and German competition, but they also occasionally finished last. The class standards, the Camry and Accord and 3-Series, tended to avoid last place, even if they didn't win. Detroit products were hit or miss. Or if they got a hit, like the PT Cruiser (people LOVED that thing when it came out and there were waiting lists to buy it), they would let it go entirely too long without real updates. As a result, even winning products when released would ultimately drag down and get bad reputations. Then they'd get discontinued, removing any brand loyalty, a shocking number of people keep buying the same car every time theirs breaks down and they couldn't do that with the Big 3 in too many cases.

The knock on effect of this was that Detroit automakers were constantly reworking their model line-up. They were eliminating cars that had acquired bad reputations, and replacing them with new nameplates. The car that a Cadillac dealer wanted to stack against a Three Series went from the Deville to the DTS to the CTS to the ATS to the CT4. In that whole time, the Three Series stayed the Three Series (even if I have some complaints about the direction it is going). The car Ford wanted to run up against the Camry was the Taurus, then the Taurus was canceled and replaced with the Fusion (globally Mondeo), then the Taurus was brought back as a bigger car to replace the Five Hundred, then both were cancelled again. The Camaro never recovered from its hiatus. That kind of lineup churn reduces consumer faith.

That lead Detroit into the bailout era, which left the corporations as permanent government pawns. The gov forced GM to axe Pontiac and Hummer. Pontiac was probably a good idea, Hummer definitely wasn't, that was Obama Admin ideological meddling Hummer would be a great brand to have around today we'd have an H4 crossover getting 30mpg and the H3 would be a huge seller. This weakened the ability to negotiate with two important constituencies: the UAW and the Dealerships. Both lobby for bad marketing choices, bad corporate choices, both have the ears of their representatives in congress.

In the long run, Detroit was stuck with a lot of poor choices for badge engineering reasons because of UAW and Dealership lobbying efforts. Half the brands they run shouldn't exist; but the dealership structure made it difficult or impossible to shutter Lincoln, Buick, GMC, etc. Pontiac and Saturn and Hummer and Mercury could only be killed safely because of the bailout. Zombie brands selling badge engineered junk sucked the life out of real efforts at running a modern car company.

Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.

This is true of the Detroit motor companies, but I'm not completely comfortable calling that "Japanese automakers defeating American manufacturers": I've known lots of friends and family that drive "import" brands that were wholly built in America. And looking at the job postings for Honda and Toyota, it looks like there are no shortage of design engineering positions around the US either. At one point 30 years ago, it may have seemed imminent that American auto manufacturing would have gone extinct, but looking at it from a 2024 perspective, that conflict seems to fall on different lines: Detroit and its largely rust-belt, union factories versus more recent construction sunbelt at-will manufacturing funded by globalized brands.

I think some of this relates to the economics (and international trade politics) of transporting assembled cars versus franchising a new factories elsewhere, but while there would be some egg-in-the-face for Detroit if BYD, JAC, or Geely start selling lots of cars onto American roads, but if those cars are largely built by American hands and at least partly designed by American engineers, it's conceivably not that different from where we are today. The economics of Chinese Communism probably complicate this somewhat, but, as the kids say, it's complicated and it's not completely unfair to point out that the US government owned a decent chunk of GM for a while. I think it's plausible it could get horse traded by political leaders into a victory for globalism (similar to how the "Japan takes over the world" trope has been negotiated down to seemingly nation-less multinational corporations and occasional infusions of pop-culture), but I wouldn't bet heavily on that outcome today.

Ford literally makes nothing in a sedan or coupe except the Mustang.

The Focus is even a class smaller than the Accord.

But the Focus is not sold in North America, and hasn't been for 6 years now.

Crazy, didn't know that.

Every American automaker threw in the towel on compact cars around '18, around the time the market really got used to real interest rates being in the negatives. And sure, the Civic and Corolla survive, but they're much larger than they used to be and a far cry from what they were in the early 1990s (partially because people in the position to own cars are richer now and expect more, and partially because it's functionally illegal to make small cars as the work required to get them to pass crash testing isn't worth it for a market that small).

Discontinued, already in the USA, after 2025 in Europe.

Really, they're getting rid of them even in Europe?

Fascinating; I seem to see quite a lot of small Ford Focuses, Fiestas, and Mondeos here in the UK.

I still see plenty of them over here too still on the road. But they're deader than disco.

unnecessarily large pickups

This is also regulation at work.

Previous generations of Americans loved light compact pickups like the Chevy LUV, Datsun 620, Isuzu Hombre, etc.

Not really, the American compact pickups largely died natural deaths as the Big 3 couldn't crunch the numbers to deliver a ranger that was much cheaper than an f150. As the full size have grown more expensive, we're seeing the little guys return.

"Thanks Obama era fuel standards for forcing cars to greatly grow in size."

But once one of these obviously bad policies is implemented we are inexplicably stuck with it forever. So I suppose Trump and Biden share equal blame.

But once one of these obviously bad policies is implemented we are inexplicably stuck with it forever.

There's an old quip about the liberals job being to make the mistakes and the conservatives jobs being to make sure no one can fix them.

Tiny EV penalty boxes

Oh, you don't think the 2013 Leaf (that goes 40 miles, then the battery's dead) is a good commuter car, or that trying to cargo-cult Tesla's "just put screens literally everywhere" is a solid business strategy? That's something not even the German or Japanese brands have figured out (given the Leaf is a Nissan product, though maybe they don't count?).

Will people purchase a Chinese car new over an older Escape or Rav4? Time will tell.

Note that even Mitsubishi discontinued the Mirage, which is a better product than the Chinese will be able to offer and it still barely broke 30K units a year in the largest auto market in the world. I don't think people would buy them even if they were 10,000 dollars because like-new examples already are.

I do agree that it's impossible to make a nice EV simply because every product is still an alpha-quality product, and of the 3 companies that are releasing solid beta-quality products only one is expanding (Lucid is state-owned so money's no object for them; Rivian by contrast is scaling back significantly).

even Mitsubishi discontinued the Mirage

It's only a rumor that Mitsubishi plans to discontinue the Mirage in the US by 2025. Mitsubishi has not actually confirmed the news reports.

Huh, my news must have been out of date (I thought they were going to be done after 2021). Still, though, ~30,000 units a year isn't exactly a success story given the Big Three have axed more successful cars (to say nothing of every other Japanese maker)- it is a market, but wouldn't they rather sell an SUV on an 8 year loan at 15% APR?

30,000 units a year

Only 13,000 Mirages were sold in the US in 2023, vs. 43,000 non-hybrid Outlanders.

Huh, and now I can't even get my sources right.

It's actually shocking that- unless Google failed me again- even the Miata moves about that many units a year (in the US). No wonder they're always the answer.

Detroit still wins at light trucks because of the 25% tariff. Mid-size SUV's aren't considered light trucks and so don't have the tariff. Those will be next on the chopping block as Detroit will be swamped by Chinese imports (as well as continued erosion from superior Japanese vehicles).

But I wouldn't say that trucks are fully safe either. Even with the tariff, Chinese vehicles will be cheap enough to dominate. One thing to keep in mind that many cars are not purchased directly by consumers, but by fleets.

China is in a good position here because they can leapfrog directly to EV's. The Toyota hybrid drivechain is a miracle of modern engineering. Fortunately, China doesn't have to compete with that directly. They can just skip directly to EV's. EV's have fewer moving parts and are much simpler to make. China already dominates the battery market, producing 10x more than the U.S. and about 80x more than the U.S. when we exclude the Nevada gigafactory. Most likely, they will use industrial policy to ensure favorable battery prices to local champions, making the Big 3 pay much higher prices and making them even more uncompetitive.

Detroit still wins at light trucks because of the 25% tariff.

Detroit does well at full-sized pickups because a ford F-series or a Ram is a status symbol to a certain crowd. Except for the ford maverick, Detroit mostly loses on compact trucks to Toyota and Nissan, tariff or no.

What of the usual economic arguments against this sort of thing?

That is: why keep investing national resources in a less profitable (as the markets tell us) industry rather than better ones?

Even from a purely economic viewpoint, international trade is great only as long as there are no supply chain disruptions.

Having at least some industry at home makes sense from a strategic viewpoint. Not only are you better able to handle supply chain disruptions in the short term, you also keep the necessary expertise around. As long as you are making cars, you are also teaching people to make cars, to run the factories and so on.

If the US stops manufacturing cars, and in 20 years' time it turns out the US can't import cars anymore for whatever reason, perhaps a war or something, they will have to restart from scratch. Scaling up is one thing, but if nobody remembers how to make a car anymore and has to dig up old books, and if there are no working factories around, it will take a very long time before anything is produced again, let alone anything of acceptable quality.

You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.

You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.

Indeed. I think the question is, if we decide to pay for it, who should pay for it and how should that cost be assessed.

For example, in order to prop up the US shipping industry, the Jones Act creates certain mandates that are moderately inefficient. Opinions can differ on whether the benefits to preparedness are worth it, but there is a separate stream of opinions on whether that cost should be passed disproportionately to HI, PR and to a lesser extent the LA metro area.

Note that I am not endorsing a high-tariff world view. In general low tariffs are a win-win-lose and thus positive sum.

I am pointing out that Trump is right about Chinese cars and seems to tap into the (fully justified) American working-class resentment pretty well. American factory workers got the short end of the stick. Almost everyone benefits (hey, cool cheap cars!) while they get broken communities and welfare.

I guess what I don't see in this resentment is that the UAW was ultimately let down not by free trade, but by Detroit's perpetual inability to produce a competitive product. If the UAW had been assembling prettier cars with better reliability, we wouldn't be here. I don't see why we'd give the engineers in Detroit another chance to make another fucking Buick?

The UAW was really bad though. It doesn't matter how well you design a car if the workers hide bottles in the door panels as a joke. Management and engineering had plenty of flaws but the UAW also deserves some of the blame.

In fairness to Detroit, all the competition comes from countries that ruthlessly excluded American cars, raised high tariffs so local industries could build strength, or stole all the engineering secrets and profit.

Ok, what does that have to do with the consummate inability for Ford to build a Camry competitor between 2003-2018?

To be fair, some of that is regulatory and/or government policy based- US legal environs definitely pushed towards a more adversarial relationship between the UAW and management than was strictly necessary, for one example, while Japanese competitors mostly didn’t have to deal with that.

The electric F-250 idiocy ford is pursuing is also hard to see with a non-US based company.

I liked the Focus and wanted one as my first car after graduating, but they stopped selling it before it came time to get a new car, alas.

I think what happened is Detroit got disrupted by foreign automakers. Clayton Christensen's model of "Disruption" is probably too broad and contains too many predictions for me to get into here. But, basically, Japan came in and dominated the lowest end of the market Detroit was happy to concede, then the Japanese got better and came for better markets. Broadly, now, Detroit has fled to the most elaborate high-end markets, and they're stuck making cars according to a failed model that can only continue to die out.

Tariffs alone probably won't save Detroit, but Trump is probably right that a bloodbath is coming for the American auto market.

Tariff market shortfall should quite honestly be a defense budget line item and it's strange to think that nobody really considers it like that; if not from ensuring a war with external powers can be effectively prosecuted without external supply chains and expertise, then from ensuring a war with internal ones does not start due to economic inequality.

As a car consumer: sounds great! I've been thinking about trading mine in for a while now. Excited to see what's on offer. Hell, GM already sells a truck I'd like to buy, but only in China. Maybe Chinese competition can get them to bring it over here?

Why should I, and every other car buyer, pay more money for cars so that Mary Barra can keep pulling down $30M/year?

That truck is never going to be sold in the US because, outside of you and possibly a few other people, no one is going to buy it. As much as you and other people may complain about the lack of a small, basic truck with a five speed transmission, and 2-wheel drive, there isn't much of a market for one. Most people I know who own trucks they don't need don't own whatever the current versions of the Ranger and S-10 are, they own F-150s and Siverados and Rams and Tundras. Few people actually need a truck, and those who are buying ones they don't need want big penis trucks with huge engines and high towing capacity and 4-wheel drive and and interior like a Cadillac, not some 90 hp puttmobile. They'd sell about as well as those old VW Rabbit trucks that had their fans but didn't exactly take the country by storm.

Except frontiers and tacomas sell like hotcakes, and so do ford mavericks. That little Honda truck kinda does but it definitely does enough business to keep in business. Ford rangers and dodge Dakotas have a flourishing used market.

Japs have no difficulty selling compact trucks, nor do used car dealers more generally. And point of fact when American auto manufacturers introduce compact trucks they sell very well indeed.

For some reason- probably the regulatory one avocadopanic is gesturing at- there’s simply not a lot of compact trucks being produced.

Now owning a full sized pickup truck is a status symbol, that’s true, and it’s one of the few things Detroit stays competitive at(japmobile full sized trucks don’t have quite the same cache), but I see more Nissan frontiers on the road than any other model of truck and I live in one of the top-10 wealthiest red tribe areas in the country.

I was partially being facetious, but I don't think that size is the main problem. 90 hp is going to be a tough sell, considering that there aren't many cars on the American market anymore that get less than 100. Even a base model Corolla gets nearly twice the HP. Rear wheel drive is basically a nonstarter. The only people I know who have 2wd trucks are contractors. I know people who have been looking for used small trucks for a long time, and when I worked for the Boy Scouts we'd occasionally have a work truck we were getting rid of. I remember one was available, it needed a flywheel but they'd have let it go for $200. Everyone lost interest when I told them it was 2wd, because there's nothing fun about a 2wd Ranger. And while I have no real basis for this, I'd be willing to bet that the interior is chintzy as hell. I don't think it's that people don't want smaller trucks, it's that they don't want that specific small truck.

Ah, I see. You’re correct- Americans don’t want the kinds of base model cars that are commonplace in other countries, those base model Nissan frontiers that sell so well are still a lot more luxurious than Chinese or Mexican model cars. Heck, commercial vehicles tend to be more luxurious than the average car on the street in China.

Americans don’t want the kinds of base model cars that are commonplace in other countries

Americans aren't really given the choice.

Many of the trucks I see in use commercially are much larger than they need to be for their role. Larger more expensive trucks then add to the overhead of many businesses that rely on them. You have to mow many more lawns at higher rates to move your equipment with a current year truck than a compact truck from the 1980's. Unless you needed the towing capacity the s-10 1/4 ton pickup adequate for many roles and were ubiquitous on job sites when I was a teen. We were still using 1970's Datsuns.

The interiors were spartan, I miss bench seats.

Most people I know who own trucks they don't need don't own whatever the current versions of the Ranger and S-10 are, they own F-150s and Siverados and Rams and Tundras.

There is no modern version of the Ranger and the S-10, and the used market for Rangers and S-10s is an obscenity that shows just how much Americans do want small basic trucks. A 2010 Ranger with 150,000 miles on it will easily go for $15,000. A similar Ranger with less than 100,000 miles on it can break $20,000. I saw one 2011 with 50,000 miles listed for $28,000 - and I have no doubt it has already sold.

You can buy a pretty basic Nissan frontier if you want, and in fact lots of people do.

I second @AvocadoPanic, I think that the economic incentives via CAFE standards on automakers have made superhuge trucks artificially competitive in the market.

I think you may be underestimating the degree CAFE standards have made trucks giant in the US.

All the more galling when you realize that the heads of the Japanese carmakers producing superior cars make a fraction as much money.

That's probably down to culture in the Japanese business world.

Domestic brands are not thriving, but not doing that badly either . I think the post-2013 era big, luxury trucks and SUVs, which have high markups and became especially popular post-Covid, saved them from certain demise in the early to mid 2000s. Japanese brands cannot compete on size.

This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.

A lot of this can be explained by valuation, which is not the same as earnings. Tech companies tend to trade at higher valuations/multiples compared to auto.

The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".

This is smart rhetoric by Trump to help win those swing voters , like Michigan. Similar to wall and other promises, not much will come of it should he win though.

Domestic brands are not thriving, but not doing that badly either .

What do you mean? They lose market share every year and their stock prices trail the S&P by huge margins. I just checked the stock price of GM and it's the same price today as it was in 2014. While it's true that the Big 3 are still making money on paper, we haven't had a recession in 15 years.

A lot of this can be explained by valuation, which is not the same as earnings. Tech companies tend to trade at higher valuations/multiples compared to auto.

There is a reason for this.

Here is what tech earnings look like: 10,12,15,19,25,...

Here is what automaker earnings look like: 7,3,(-1),4,11,(-50)

When valuing a cyclical you have to take into account full-cycle earnings. Do this and the carmakers are more than fairly valued. They are just not a good businesses and haven't been for decades. Detroit is dying.

This is smart rhetoric by Trump to help win those swing voters , like Michigan. Similar to wall and other promises, not much will come of it should he win though.

Probably right. But didn't he build some of the wall though?

They lose market share every year and their stock prices trail the S&P by huge margins. I just checked the stock price of GM and it's the same price today as it was in 2014.

These stocks have been paying 5% dividends for the last 10 years. They have single-digit P/E ratios. People aren't going to stop wanting cars anytime soon unless the singularity happens, at which point it doesn't really matter what your portfolio allocation is. EVs aren't going to take off as expected. They're too inconvenient. You can't buy-low/sell-high without buying low, and right now automakers are low.

I couldn't disagree more with your investment thesis. On a cyclical, buying low looks like $BTU for $2/share in 2020. The cycle always goes down further than you expect (Hofstadler: even when you take this into account)

But I definitely agree with your assessment of EV's. There are massive problems and externalities that need to be dealt with before mass adoption. I fear the government is going to force it down our throats anyway. The Biden administration has certainly been pushing in that direction, especially when the "I did that" stickers start showing up at gas stations.

See, electric cars do have use cases- commuter mobiles and mildly sporty luxury cars. Both of which Tesla is doing quite well in.

The government’s unwillingness to promote hybrids to nearly the same extent is inexplicable, considering that technology is ready for prime time.

The government’s unwillingness to promote hybrids to nearly the same extent is inexplicable, considering that technology is ready for prime time.

Sure it's explainable. They don't want to promote hybrids. They just want to ban cars.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats