You can't buy them in the US. You could buy one in Mexico and drive it across the border, but you wouldn't be able to register it in the US. It is probably possible to legally import one but it would be very expensive and time-consuming, and you'd need to know a lot about import law.
AFAIK if its registered in Mexico it can be driven in US under temporary import permit. I've seen the odd Hilux or other new rarity that way. Quite common to see Mexico plates here in AZ in all number of cars not available for sale.
The OP was drawing a connection between how the West has become less energy independent (not producing nuclear, importing energy) and how it’s become less labor independent (not producing people, importing them instead). The two are related because they are both caused by complacency, and they’re both destabilizing to the West.
He is also the real danger. He is an adult responsible for his own decisions and capable of saying no. Treating him and his supporters like easily manipulated children is not helpful.
They have spent immense effort blocking huge amounts of domestic solar and wind production, even paying off developers to simply not build planned power plants.
Didn’t know there were significant domestic supply chains for wind, solar, and battery tech. Thought a lions share of that was ultimately coming from China.
There aren't, and there certainly won't be if we keep blocking the industry at every turn. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your point but I don't see how this is relevant. Blocking a developer that wants to buy wind turbines from another country and install them in the US does not make domestic energy cheaper or make domestic supply chains more resilient. It's a one-time import, once it's installed the wind is domestic and free, the most reliable possible supply chain, much more than domestic oil or gas.
> Blocking a developer that wants to buy wind turbines from another country and install them in the US does not make domestic energy cheaper or make domestic supply chains more resilient.
On the other hand, there are, what, approximately zero examples of where wind / solar market penetration is worth writing about and electricity has gotten cheaper.
Australian households will be able to access free electricity for three hours every day, in an effort to encourage energy use when excess solar power is being fed into the grid.
The federal government scheme will require retailers to offer free electricity to households for at least three hours in the middle of the day, when there is often more electricity generated than is being used, leading to very cheap or even negative wholesale prices.
Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the scheme would share around the benefits of solar panels, including to those without panels or who rented their homes.
Which claims: This could save families up to $300 per year off their energy bills, and up to $1,070 if they have solar panels and batteries. Victoria’s Midday Power Saver offer will be available from 1 October 2026.
Oh look, you may save more if you already have solar and batteries. Yet another wealth transfer from the have-nots to the haves. Typical.
If you’re poor you could save up to less than a dollar a day.
I'm also confused, I thought the US was the leader in basically everything, so much so that they were constantly accusing other countries of stealing technology. now, basic manufacturing is a mysterious unknowable box for which we'd need to depend on foreign suppliers.
Seems fairly measured to say that it’s not in the interest of the U.S. to build its economic foundation (energy production) on top of a technology it’s incapable of producing without the assistance of a country that’s been fairly open about its plans to take kinetic action against the US sometime in the next 48 months.
Really a couple of key points. The first is that the US isn't "incapable" of producing renewable energy infrastructure, we've just largely chosen not to for various reasons and are certainly capable of doing so if there was a good reason to.
But the second and more important point is that relying on another country to produce renewable energy technology is not analogous to relying on another country to supply your actual energy. If I bought solar panels from China and tomorrow a US-China war started, my solar panels keep producing energy just fine. I might have imported the panels from China, but that's not where the actual energy is coming from. Sure, eventually I'll need to replace them, but that's not for decades. Assuming a conflict with China lasts long enough to prevent me from ever buying Chinese solar panels again, that's plenty of time to develop US capacity to produce them. And in the meantime, my solar panels keep importing energy from the Sun, which I'm told is very hard to blockade, embargo, or tariff.
Renewable energy tech actually has another major advantage over fossil fuels in a conflict situation. As the current Middle Eastern unpleasantness has demonstrated, fossil fuels are a global commodity and their price everywhere is impacted by restriction on their trade anywhere. Sufficient domestic production of fossil fuels may prevent a country from literally running out in a war, but that's unlikely to actually keep the country's economy healthy. China obviously isn't sitting on top of a fossil fuel producing region the way Iran is, but it seems pretty obvious a US-China war will dramatically impact fossil fuel energy prices given that blockading fossil fuel trade will be an obvious weapon in such a conflict.
When it comes to the impact conflicts have on the price of your energy, you might be better off relying on your Chinese solar panels than American oil. Especially if you can replace them with American solar panels when the time comes. China clearly understands the strategic value of renewable energy, which is why they've invested so much in becoming the major source of that technology.
Just wanted to say thanks for this. You connected two trains of thought I had never put together.
Don’t have a rebuttal.
I’m long on last mile energy production. Solar/battery for domestic, nuclear for industrial, etc. It creates resilience through decentralization. It also is likely to happen organically (no central planning necessary, markets will likely naturally converge here as they drive down prices).
Haven’t spent much time reconciling that with my stance _against_ centralized wind/solar/battery in critical infrastructure in the U.S.
> their price everywhere is impacted by restriction on their trade anywhere.
That’s entirely a human fabrication.
Any country can decide at any time to simple give their fossil fuel reserves away.
Australia does, so I don’t see why any other country can’t do the same.
Also, your plan relies on the power electronics and industrial control systems used in solar / wind deployments not being backdoored, which isn’t a bet I’d be willing to make.
Giving their fossil fuel reserves away isn't exactly solving anything is it though?
They happen to be giving the reserves away to foreign investors and thus driving domestic prices significantly higher then they aught to be.
I saw an amusing analysis which said that Trump will go down in history as the clean energy president. No administration will ever do so much to prove the necessity of having renewable energy.
When one leader can cause a global energy crisis, seems obvious the world will go running towards any solution which can mitigate this in the future.
Did Saudi Arabia wait until it could manufacture oil drills before it started exploiting its oil?
Solar panels are oil drills. The oil is in the sky. If your supplier stops selling you oil drills you have several years to find another supplier or start building your own.
So if something goes wrong between the US and China, the US has 10 years to develop it's own supply. It's not like existing panels and batteries are going to suddenly stop working.
That's fair: as a 3rd party it seems like there's miscommunication leading to impasse, help me understand:
> skeptical of the U.S. being able to develop domestic supply chains for this under current conditions
Right, but, the presupposition there is war, and we have to build it ourselves, presupposes differing conditions. Then there are ameliorations that bridge to your desired conditions mentioned by your interlocutors (stuff still works, 10 year head start)
> “Kinetic action” does imply large swaths of U.S. infrastructure will in fact “suddenly stop working” and need to be rebuilt to maintain capacity
This relies on a maximal reading of the already-maximal "[They have open] plans to take kinetic action against the US [in next 4 years].". I assume they is China, and you are referring to a Taiwan scenario. I haven't seen anyone claim China is going to attack the US in the next 4 years. It is extremely unlikely China ends up knocking out tons of stateside power infrastructure over Taiwan.
If you install solar panels, you have 10 years or more of lifetime to develop your domestic supply chain for replacements. This doesn't sound like a problem.
The IRA had enormous incentives to develop on shore renewable manufacturing. All of that was gutted in the BBB. Many of those burgeoning companies may have died in the interim as they saw that funding dry up, and realized they were working in an uphill regulatory environment.
I thought a lot of manufactured goods come from China. Including many of the tools and equipment for drilling oil. Is oil not a secure energy supply either then?
The incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act greatly increased US domestic battery production capacity. It went from 7 GWh per year in 2023 to 70 GWh per year in early 2026 and is expected to reach 1400 GWh per year by the end of the decade.
Domestic solar cell manufacturing was also growing rapidly, although I believe that may have slowed due to Trump.
I don't know about wind turbine production because I can't convince the !@#$%&?ing search engine to tell me about manufacturing rather than installation.
The sector has also seen its share of oversupply and price drops this year, with surprising reports of a fall below $50/kWh for two-hour battery systems made in China. Nameplate battery manufacturing capacity in China alone reached 2.2 TWh at the end of 2023, almost double the 1.2 TWh of global demand that analyst BloombergNEF (BNEF) is expecting for 2024.
This is a pretty weird article. I know the author doesn't choose the headline but "police" is obviously the wrong word, the pope is just offering advice. Then this section:
> The push has fueled speculation — especially online — that the Vatican could build a kind of "truth engine," a system to authenticate information or arbitrate reality.
There are no sources, I've never heard this, it doesn't make any sense, and after a quick search I can't find any other reference to this idea. Did the author just completely make it up?
> the Vatican is emerging as a moral and institutional counterweight to AI-driven misinformation
> The Vatican can't control AI, but it's trying to shape who controls truth in an AI-driven world.
I don't think any of this is true and it doesn't even follow from the rest of the article.
I find that this is fairly normal for Axios: mechanically, an article will look like a kind of executive summary of a phenomenon or event but editorially it has a very confrontational argumentative style. It's been getting worse in the last year and I have to assume it's because the editorial org, like that of many other outlets is pushing for LLM use by its writers.
Axios style and LLM style are sort of indistinguishable so it's hard to tell, but yeah it does kind of look like this guy fed some links and quotes into an LLM and it made up a narrative to fit.
His workplace is a public governmental building, so that seems like standard journalistic practice. It is also normal and appropriate to visit his house to seek a comment when he didn't respond through other channels. It would have been irresponsible and unethical to not put in an effort to speak with him before publishing this article. And taking a photo of a government official in public is again very normal, and it's good that they confirmed the vehicle is actually used by the guy they're naming.
For investigative journalism, if it even qualifies as that, this is pretty shallow. It's good work but it's just some public data and a couple hours of work, not a deep invasive investigation. It also is not freelance, this is a staff reporter for a decades-old publication.
> Tim Heidecker, one of the comedians behind “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, has been hired to serve as “creative director of Infowars.” He said he initially plans to parody Mr. Jones’s “whole modus operandi.”
> Mr. Heidecker has been working on his impression of Mr. Jones. But eventually, when that joke gets old, Mr. Heidecker said that he hoped to turn Infowars into a destination for independent and experimental comedy.
> “I just thought it would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity,” Mr. Heidecker said in an interview.
His brand of comedy is very hit-or-miss for me (the best way I can describe it is "smug"), but context drives me to wish him luck in his presumed efforts to turn InfoWars into a literal joke instead of just a figurative one.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Neutral third party Gemini T. Google, what say you?
Tim and Eric's Title Explained
By calling the show "Awesome" and "Great" before the viewer has even seen it, Tim and Eric lean into a persona of unearned confidence.
I can see that - kind of like Will Ferrell has reflected on playing dumb people who are extremely confident. So I feel smug does slot in there but I don't feel like it defines it.
My favorite recent thing from Tim Heidecker was him interviewing Fred Armisen in the style of Bill Maher. The parody is uncanny. I could see him doing a really good Alex Jones.
I think it's better if they keep all the URLs as they are right now, but then add misinformation into each page and put a big banner saying that this site is parody. Then search and AI will index this and then it will another lawsuit from Alex Jones to get the information removed from those alternate sources.
Does the rest of the world really pay attention to internal political details like that? I can't imagine the average non-American thinking "well I know they have a legislative election this year that may impact Trump's ability to enact his agenda, I'll reserve judgement until then." I assume it's more like "America is dropping bombs for no reason and destroying the global economy, why are they doing that".
Even as an insider it's hard to understand how a country could re-elect the worst person on earth and then two years later vote the opposition into power, so it's hard to believe that outsiders are taking such a nuanced view.
Worse than that, friend. We have the flaring confirmation that in fact capitalism does and will always lead to the shittiest outcome for the vast majority bar a one percent of the population.
And to be honest the fact that this president is not impeached over a sex abuse scandal and starting a war nobody wanted says a lot about how detached and uninterested the population of the US is from its government.
The important point is that he was paid to write the argument against them. In theory it would be great to have a sort of team of rivals where intellectual opponents of regulations consult with the agency and push back on excessive or ineffective rules, but this guy doesn't have a principled philosophical objection, he just writes for whoever pays him the most money. We can be pretty certain that the federal government is not the highest bidder for his services, so why is he working at the EPA?
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