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Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

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Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#161

Post by throwaway27448 »

randusername wrote: post #150
pmg101 wrote: post #106

I'm not sure. Don't underestimate the power of inertia. I bought an EV last year and it's definitely been a "good idea" for me. Luxurious ride, fuel costs a tenth, doesn't stink. Seems such an obvious upgrade it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home.

EV marketing in the US is super dumb. We get these ads emphasizing the luxuriousness, the status, the high-tech, the exclusivity of EVs. Meanwhile... BYD. Surely it can't be entirely conspiracy to bludgeon the public with messaging that EVs are premium goods and ICEVs are for the mass market. Could it be that the maxim should really be something like "bullshit too often and too greedily and you forget how to sell som…

That's not just marketing; that's a reality of the market. A corolla is cheaper than any EV on the market, so why would I even consider them? They might as well be luxury cars.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#162

Post by throwaway27448 »

Schiendelman wrote: post #154
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, it immediately costs more to buy an EV than it does to run my existing car. The monthly payment to buy an EV is more than I spend on fuel. Then I'd be paying roughly ten times as much for insurance, because it's a new and valuable car, and being "keyless" it cannot be secured in any meaningful way without locking it in a garage, which I don't have. Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right…

Those are arguments, not math. Will you share your actual math?

What would the math look like to make an EV cheaper than using an ICE car you already own? It looks an awful lot like you're just dodging the numbers yourself.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#163

Post by [deleted] »

Tade0 wrote: post #158
IshKebab wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home No big mystery: a) most people keep cars for 20 years or more, b) most people don't buy new cars - they're too expensive.

There are very few 20yo+ cars on the road, mostly because the probability of a totalling over the course of this many years is pretty high. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/ag... I know for a fact that the figure for Poland is exaggerated, because plenty of cars which are currently shaving people's beards and have been performing this duty for years now remained in the registry and were purge…

[deleted]

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#164

Post by throwaway27448 »

n4r9 wrote: post #112
IshKebab wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home No big mystery: a) most people keep cars for 20 years or more, b) most people don't buy new cars - they're too expensive.

Is there not a big image factor? Like, people don't want to be seen as the type of person who'd drive an electric.

I'm sure this impacts certain cultures in the US, but I've got to imagine that's a pretty tiny impact compared to pragmatic concerns like "where can I charge this" and "how often do I need to charge this".

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#165

Post by amadeuspagel »

This is also a good reminder that Paul Krugman opposed the Iraq War from the start. The Iraq War is still the most important part of populist narratives about elite untrustworthiness, but populists never ask about exceptions, and if we judge people and institutions by their stand on the Iraq war today, it has to go both ways.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#166

Post by spiderfarmer »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #160

With the current moon mission I'm reminded of how whenever someone from NASA is interviewed they like talking about how the billions spent are justified because of the practical results of the research - Velcro, Tang, etc. It always seemed like a stretch, but I have the unpleasant feeling the US is going to lean the true value of being the research leader when it's gone.

There are so many areas where the US lead, but lost the plot. And what did we learn from them losing that leadership status?

We learned that the average citizen will never accept that as fact. And even if they do: they’ll say it never mattered much anyway.

Like life expectancy, happiness, social mobility, literacy, student performance, global soft power and their overall reputation.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#167

Post by pydry »

asdff wrote: post #76
lmm wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad. Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what order…

> An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. Whatever that limit might be is genuinely terrifying, given how far obedient soldiers have gone and not hit such a limit many times over the past.

It's more that in the past widespread surveillance required a lot of people, many of whom will have a conscience which will end up disrupting your surveillance.

The movie Das Lieben der Anderen makes this point very cogently.

Nowadays you can run a huge surveillance program with far fewer people, all of whom can be conscience free.

Im not sure how the next stasi will crumble but it'll be a lot harder to wrest them from power with the tools they have at their fingertips.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#168

Post by altruios »

convexly wrote: post #58

The flip side is that good ideas with honest framing often lose to bad ideas with better marketing. Being right isn't enough if you can't communicate it and most people don't have the patience to evaluate the honest version.

You are correct that ideas do not compete based on how true they are but how easily they are remembered.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#170

Post by IshKebab »

n4r9 wrote: post #112
IshKebab wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home No big mystery: a) most people keep cars for 20 years or more, b) most people don't buy new cars - they're too expensive.

Is there not a big image factor? Like, people don't want to be seen as the type of person who'd drive an electric.

Maybe in the US. The rest of the world doesn't hate the environment quite so much.
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