the people that can afford those can afford a lower than desirable resale value

You sound unfamiliar with the average American consumer. Americans tend to buy the most car they think they can afford. They also might have been counting on the fact that electric vehicles cost more up front, but return that value and then some the longer you drive it.

it doesn’t really look like the used market for these has taken that hard of a hit either.

If it does, I might go out and buy myself one. As I said before, we don’t want these vehicles to be retired before their time.

At the very least debadge that heap, when I see that I like to think the owner is trying at least.

I would definitely suggest that people do this, but I wouldn’t call it “the least”, at least in regards to owning a Tesla. Removing the badge is probably the most effective thing they can do. That stuff gets noticed and has an impact. If they sell the car, it will just be bought by someone else and continue to be a billboard for Elon. I see a lot of Teslas in my area and have been looking for badge removals or “Elon bad” bumper stickers, and so far have just seen one without badges.

I could see this administration contracting for 100k cybertrucks for the USPS right before shutting down the USPS.

Plenty of Teslas were bought before most people had any idea that Elon was a fascist sociopathic asshole. Not everyone who bought one can afford to just dump a functioning vehicle with shitty resale value. Anyways, we don’t really want to see every Tesla on the road retired at the same time, so somebody will be driving them.

Cybertrucks are a bit different in my estimation. Anyone who bought a Cybertruck should have known who they were buying it from. Those owners bought that car to signal something, and I think it’s fair to let them know that the signal was received.

Adding in cost of ownership, EVs are cheaper than ICE vehicles. Electricity is way cheaper than gas, and electrics require almost zero maintenance. Also, even 200km meets the needs of a whole lot of drivers just fine. Our family’s secondary vehicle is a Gen-1 leaf with 140km of range and I think we’ve used a public charger 4 times in over 10 years.

Best I ever managed was two.

Jesus only used unisex bathrooms.

At over 50 years old, I don’t think I’ve ever seen another man’s dick in a bathroom.

Once again, with Republicans, every accusation is a confession. But yeah, Clinton was shit enough to make it easy for them.

He got out in front of his PR operation on that one, but a lot of leftists had him pegged long before that incident. It was obvious that he was funding an astroturf campaign to deify himself, and he has always been rabidly aggressive to worker’s rights.

That’s not a new war. It’s the war behind all the other wars.

Why ask for examples if your just going to reject them on principle?

On it’s face, the idea that every Republican politician is right of every one of their voters on every issue is ridiculous. Republican voters, like all voters, compromise.

Oh, piss off. You clearly are beyond help of reason. Too bad the rest of us have to live with the consequences of your stubborn stupidity.

I never said Democrats are “good on climate change.”, so why the fuck put it in quotes? They are better than Republicans, and that’s just reality. But no, we get worse so you can take the moral high ground to watch the world burn.

I shouldn’t have to explain that “you” refers to all proponents of the third party strategy, not you personally.

If you want people to do what you say then, yeah, it falls on you to convince them that it makes sense. It doesn’t fall on me to convince people to follow a deeply flawed strategy that I think will only lead to even worse outcomes when it fails yet again.

We both want to put better people in power and remove the people running the Democratic party from power. There is an inside strategy to do that, and an outside strategy to do that. The inside strategy has more of a chance to win, and less of a downside if it fails.

People didn’t vote Democrats this time around, and the world is about to get a whole lot worse. Gaza isn’t the only thing that matters. It isn’t even the worst ongoing genocide. Assuming you didn’t vote for Harris, did you even consider what a Trump win means for those other genocides? What it means for the people of Ukraine? Does it somehow help Gaza that we are about to do ethnic cleansing right here at home? Trump turning back the clock on fighting climate change alone will make Gaza look quaint.

I know who’s implementing the plan for totalitarian disaster. It’s morons who don’t understand politics.

EXACTLY! You do get it! Yes, that is EXACTLY the problem. How do you convince me that if I vote third party that they will too? How do you convince them that I will vote third party?

Here is the brilliant argument you are making put just a bit differently. “If enough people would just vote the way I want them to vote, we could elect who I want to elect!”. Congratulations, on that brilliant observation!

Here is the thing. If you had the power to do that, inside or outside strategy would no longer even matter. You could pick the winning candidates for the Democratic primary then pick them to win the general, or you could pick your third party candidate to win, and it would work fine either way.

But you can’t do that. You actually have to convince people to go your way. I’m still not hearing how you plan to do that for an outside strategy when every attempt to do so has failed miserably. I’ll ask again. How do you plan to run a third party strategy differently in 2028 than in 2024 or prior elections. How do you convince me or anyone else that you have enough people on board? I’m not even convinced that most Democrats even want a third party - nevermind being willing to risk splitting the vote to get there.

What percentage did they get in 1996? 2000? Perot split the conservative vote with Bush and allowed Clinton to win the election with only 43% of the vote. That’s not an outcome I want to replicate on the left.

Compare Perot with Trump who ran a very similar nationalist/populist strategy as a party outsider. Trump ripped the party out of the establishment’s hands and won the Presidency. Perot would have been well advised to run as a Republican.

I didn’t ignore 1996, I just don’t see it as a counter example to what I said. Perot lost by a wide margin, split the vote with his next closest candidate, then dropped to half as many votes in the next election. And that was when third parties could get into the debates.

The last time we got a shake up in the two party system was with the civil war. Even then, we didn’t get three parties, we just replaced one party with another. 1912 was a notable but unrepeatable exception, but not an “upset”. We still elected one of the two major parties, and four years later it was back to Republicans and Democrats. It’s also notable that Taft and Roosevelt were both Republicans, so Roosevelt running as a Progressive meant that they split the vote and Democrats won with only 41.8% of the vote. Republicans were the left party at the time, so the left split the vote and got a conservative. Your exception shows exactly why third party runs are boneheaded.

Any third party that had the means to run a viable third party candidate would easily be capable of running an inside strategy to replace the Democratic establishment. Unlike the fantasy of a third party approach, that strategy has worked in the past. If there aren’t enough Democratic voters who are pissed enough at the Democratic establishment to do a takeover of the party, then there definitely aren’t enough to win a third party strategy.

The independent party got 18.9% of the vote for one office in 1992, and then dropped to 8.4% in 1996, and then didn’t even get a candidate on the ballot in 2000. That’s hardly a record that’s dispositive of anything I have said, and it’s still focusing on just one office that can’t do much of anything without legislative support. A progressive Democrat might get congressional Democrats to cooperate, but a third party president would face solid opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. If your plan doesn’t include taking congress, then it will fail even if you do get a president.

This isn’t a predictive theory,

I’m not asking for a prediction, I’m asking for a strategy. What do you propose to do differently in the 2028 election from what has failed repeatedly? People aren’t going to risk a third party vote en masse unless they think everyone else is going to do it. Also, up to this point we have been largely acting like most Democratic voters would rather be voting third party, but that’s just not true. Democratic party favorability is at a low right now, but is still at 40% of the electorate. How are you going to convince voters who don’t even desire a third party option to risk electing a Republican?

If the left had enough influence over voters to elect a third party candidate, then they could have nominated Bernie in 2020. The media called Bernie a fringe candidate, and voters became fearful that Bernie would lose. If voters wouldn’t take that risk (imaginary as I personally think it was) they are never going to take the much bigger and more real risk of voting 3rd party in the general - not in the numbers you need.

That’s why I’m out here, saying it, over and over again.

Repeating bullshit over and over doesn’t make it not-bullshit. If we had the influence required to pull off a 3rd party victory then we could just as easily take over the Democratic party with a hell of a lot less risk.

Certain Republicans, yes. The Republican party just won the working class for the first time since Reagan.

It is a carefully cherrypicked subset of the game theory.

LOL wat? Referring to the part of game theory that applies to the question at hand isn’t cherry picking. Sorry.

the PRESUMPTION that the rest of the population is already voting one way, which is NOT a guaranteed premise.

No, it’s not. There is no guarantee required. The evidence, based on 50+ previous years of past elections, is that there will be no mass exodus from the two party system. At the very least you should be putting forward some theory of action for why the next time will be different but you don’t, because you can’t.

I’m not being “defeatist”, I’m saying that your particular plan leads to guaranteed defeat. You appear to have lost the ball. Getting a third party into power is not the goal, it’s a spectacularly ineffective path to the goal. There are other paths that are not guaranteed, but are the only paths that have ever achieved anything.

it’s a cognitive bias

No, it’s game theory. If a small number of voters go third party, those voters get a worse outcome. If most voters go third party then (in theory) they all benefit. However, it’s not possible to know what everyone else will do, and past efforts to get enough people on board all at once have always failed. There is also no working theory on how to overcome the gap. Individuals are acting rationally, leading to an irrational outcome for the group. Unless you have a strategy to beat that, your done out of the gate.

Again, I point out that this isn’t new. This has been attempted over and over again with the same results every time. You aren’t proposing anything new.

That’s only the smallest part of the delusion though. What about political infrastructure? How do you get corporate media on board? Third parties rarely even get the presidential candidate on all the state ballots, nevermind getting enough candidates into state and federal legislatures to get things done.

Then there is the problem of corruption that third party proponents think that their parties are somehow immune to. Even if you could just elect a President who would have the ability to overrun a hostile legislature, that candidate will have zero track record prior to election. Maybe they get bought, or maybe they were a plant. How would you even know? If the Republicans and the Democrats can be corrupted, then the greens can be too.

Third party approaches are a high school level simplified fantasy solution, not something worthy of being taken seriously.