I wouldn’t be surprised if the US suddely remembered where the 9/11 perpetrators were from if this is true.

Good for them. The point is not that they are doing “bad things”. “Dumping” is not a curse word, it’s an economic strategy, one that’s practised by a whole bunch of companies, and not just Chinese ones. When Auchan is selling watermelons at a rate where they barely make any money over a single sale - but make a ton of money on other stuff you get while shopping for watermelons, it destroys farmer’s markets, for example.

All I’m saying is that the choice before the EU leadership was either letting Chinese EVs into the market and risk getting into a position where Chinese companies - and by extension the Chinese government - can pull the levers on the EU car market, in exchange for us getting to buy cheaper EVs right now.

The EU - and you can fill in the blank whether they did it because they wanted to protect EU carmakers’ business, or they wanted to prevent another situation similar to the one with Russian gas - decided that the risk is not worth it. My guess is that some voted as they did because of the former, others because of the latter. That said, you can’t really say that the EU would be “crooked” for either of these things, as fighting for the EU car industry against other countries’ car industries is well within their mandate, as is protecting the EU’s strategic political autonomy.

It’s just how things are, like with the great firewall. If someone wants to sell software services to China, they have to conform to their standards. You can say it’s good or bad, but that’s just how things work. As a European, I don’t care about this specific issue either way, we should be buying fewer cars, electric or otherwise. People who live in places in the EU where you need cars because there’s no good public transport also tend to be living in places where you can’t afford to buy new anyway, not even at BYD prices.

Selling EVs below the profitable rate to corner a market and destroy competition. You know, the economic term “dumping”.

I think that there was just no good choice in this matter. I mean, look at how great it turned out for Europe to bond together with Russia over cheap gas. I know that cheap gas and electric cars are not the same thing, by far, but still, if we got dumped by electric cars in China, we’d be wide open for economic attacks like it happened just a few years ago.

That said, I’d love if we compensated for this by finally shifting subsidies from flights to rail, or by shifting from 100LL to 100UL in general aviation, or cracking down on ships using bunker fuel.

Or put the screws on BMW and VW to pull their heads out their asses and start being competitive.

Yeah, Iran sucks and everything, but didn’t Israel start this by bombing their embassy in Syria? If Israel had been held to account for that, maybe we wouldn’t be looking at yet another flashpoint involving a nuclear armed state.

I don’t know what anyone expected Iran to do here.

Stupid question, couldn’t instances just say they don’t allow scraping specifically from Facebook in their ToS and then report them for GDPR violations if they do?

As in say that have the ToS says that “we’ll give your data to other instances because that’s how the Fediverse works, we won’t give your data to Facebook” and also “Facebook is not allowed to federate, and is not allowed to pull data”.

Then just say that your data subjects don’t consent to any data pulling by Facebook, and Facebook scraping your system even through ActivityPub is a violation of GDPR.