Well, doing the most immoral and reprehensible thing on the edge of what’s lawful is a guaranteed “blue ocean” strategy so it’s inevitable that the most sociopathic will take the opportunity

Don’t expect anything to be decided by this cabinet. Springtime elections are pretty certain IMHO

Hopefully we get much better renewables support (and with it lower public transit fares...), fixes for the insane box 3 rules due to come in to effect, yimby reforms to let people actually build homes in cities, and the right to air conditioning enshrined in law...

Sure, depends for whom.

“Rules for thee, not for me”

Yes, that's definitely a valid complained you might have.

There's also what you might call 'economics of scale in compliance'. Ie in absolute terms, the big guys suffer under the rules just as much as you do, but they can amortise the necessarily effort and billable lawyer hours over a bigger business.

“No one out there is just eating spoons of sugar because of its addictive properties.”

Says who?

Go check how much sugar is dissolved in soda, it’s more that a spoonful and ask yourself why? .

> Go check how much sugar is dissolved in soda

Your “counterargument” supports the argument that you quoted though. People can't eat spoonfuls of sugar, but they can drink it when dissolved in flavorful, acidic water.

It’s the second of third year in a row that this happens.

At some point it will be the new normal.

Yeah, but go tell that to the judge who’s just about to slap you with a sentence.

Unless you want to fight that all the way up the judicial food chain

Absolutely. It's not worth it unless you're more principled than anyone I know at least. Instead you're left with a minor punishment and most of your faith in the justice system left behind.

Well, that was the whole point of the 2A: effective preparedness.

But gun manufacturers ragebaited this exceptionally effective marketing campaign around their products and here’s where you folks stand

No; editing a post to meet the site's style expectations is not moderation, and I was not a moderator, just like 99.9% of everyone described anonymously and incorrectly as "a mod" in discussions of Stack Overflow on the Internet.

It's really annoying to see people insist that they should be the ones who get to decide how Stack Overflow either did, or should have, worked, when they can't even be bothered to understand who the mods were.

Semantics

There are other forces besides market prices... regulatory compliance comes to mind..

Or the fact that China is the primary source of lithium and if Chinese car brands start exporting their cars worldwide, there is no reason for them give the raw resources to western car manufacturers, forcing them to buy the whole battery pack from China.

Fact? <cough>

Australia will sell the raw resource ( hard-rock spodumene ) to anyone that wants a X-year contract - it's on them to process the concentrate (although we are currently building out spodumene processing).

  Australia has one of the biggest lithium reserves, and is the biggest producer of lithium by weight, with most of its production coming from mines in Western Australia.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_mining_in_Australia

There's also Chile:

  Lithium mining in Chile is the second largest in the world in terms of extraction after it was surpassed by Australia in 2012. Chile, like Argentina and Bolivia, is located within the Lithium Triangle, an area of South America that houses the largest known reserves of lithium on the planet. 

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_mining_in_Chile

It might pay to brush up on mineral resources, processing, and global trade patterns before over confidently launching into faux-facts.

the [somehow] is pretty clear: exploitative working conditions.