My experience with gardening is that you also get bitten and stung all the time by a range of bugs and plants so you get resistance training, too ;) British false widow spiders have nothing on me at this point...

I do agree that Lambert's coverage of Tesla appears to be pretty one-sided, and that the company has provided significant benefits to the world, but I also think there's a reasonable case to be made that Musk himself is a uniquely deleterious figure, even if the harm he brings isn't with his bare hands.

That may be true, but I feel that is a separate conversation (whether Elon Musk and his companies, taken whole, have had net good or net bad contributions to the world) from Lambert's coverage, which seems to pick any single _event_ and select the most heinous, corrupt, version full of malicious intent when often unwarranted, extremely bad faith and never adds informational value to that larger debate.

I can't speak for everything the author has written about Tesla, but I don't see any intent stated or implied in this particular article. Instead it seems to mostly be accurately describing an action taken by Tesla that doesn't cast the company in an especially good light. That's not bad journalism just because some people might like Tesla or Musk and want to give them the benefit of the doubt or downplay anything negative they might do.

It's there via omission. Others have said in these threads that the concept of an HVAC company or others investing in a particular manufacturer, does cost them money, and that can change over time. It's not unique to Tesla, but the writing, by way of omitting this.

"That is the bind Tesla’s certified installers are in: dependent on a brand that just walked away from a product line they built a business around, while still needing to sell its remaining hardware."

there is _nothing_ unique about that situation. That could happen with any company.

It's the cost of doing business. training your workforce, etc. Clearly these companies are happy to sell other Tesla products to the point where they don't want to jeopardize those relationships.

In Chinese the use of 西 (western) often really means from the West compared to China so India/Central Asia/Middle East, which can be a little confusing at first if you are used to the word meaning "Western World".

For instance, watermelons come from Sudan/Egypt and thus arrived in China from the West long before Europeans visited.

Another example is The Journey to the West (Monkey King) novel which is also about travelling to India.

We are not mere states of a federal country but sovereign countries despite the narrative some would like you to believe.

France has only one citizenship, everyone holds the same French passport so everyone has the same freedom of movement within the EU.

It's not in Schengen, like most overseas territories in the EU, to limit illegal immigration into the EU (see Ceuta as well).

I don't thing the term "colony" holds. It is anachronic and refers to a system that no longer exists.

A better comparison is with Hawaii.

And Russia launches some rockets from Plesetsk, in Europe.

I must depend on the country because the trend is that some countries, the UK for instance, are receiving more rain as climate warms, but it is becoming more seasonal. This year winter was extremely wet then indeed summer has been a record dry, so not sure how the year will look like overall (plus it's a strong El Niño year).

I expect future summers to be drier and future winters to be wetter. Our gardens are going to look very different. Already I see more people (myself included) rewilding their gardens. I've had a lot more wildlife as a result, but may be due to hotter weather as well.

In the park behind my house a large Goat Willow tree has just mostly toppled over. Completely dry summer, then a week of rain has caused the tree to just collapse.

Yes, we really need big investment in infrastructure. At the moment parks and gardens don't have automatic watering as we expect rain to do its job, and we suffer from hosepipe bans because infrastructure to store water is not fit for purpose.

I just came back to CA from the UK, and the two places looked surprisingly alike: yellow fields everywhere

Ok, summer has been a record dry, as said... not the first time it looks like that but perhaps the longest and driest.

I think the idea of continuing as an independent country is a bit naive for a country with no army and a population of 400k in a neighborhood full of newly imperial ambitions.

It's either join democratically into a slowly federalizing EU or be eaten up by American imperial ambitions at this point - and I have my doubts the latter option will include the same right to self-determination, considering the Puerto Rico precedent.

The Greenland campaign shows these concerns aren't hyperbole - they're just next in line.

This looks like the usual "plan": frightening people (either because of Russia or Trump) will make them see the "correct path". In fact this is standard EU rhetoric: in today's world there is no choice. This is ironic because in effect this is saying that surrendering sovereignty is the only way to face threats to your sovereignty...

But in reality Iceland is no more at risk of invasion now than it was during the Cold War and is doing extremely well on its own so why give up? I must say I don't follow Icelandic politics but from here it is not clear what they would gain by joining the EU, especially considering that fishing is one of their main industries.

Iceland went basically bankrupt less than 20 years ago, saying they're doing "extremely well" is either misinformed or disingenuous. They do ok on some parameters, bad on others, and their small size makes them fundamentally weak to global economic winds. EU (and particularly Euro) membership would not magically solve all problems, but could make some things a bit clearer and more reliable.

Sadly, the voters have spoken and so they'll have to continue doing what they do now.

Iceland is the only nation that punished its bankers for their misdeeds, and it’s bounced back from 2008 in very good shape. They still have a strong industrial base thanks to massive hydropower investments, and their people (who are fairly well educated) retain control over their government, which seems more democratically responsive than other European governments. Their strategic location (GIUK gap) also gives them a lot of negotiation leverage. I’d say they are doing pretty well.

How do you think Iceland would have fared in 2008 under the ECB's iron whip or within euro? Legitimately curious.

Everyone went basically bankrupt 20 years ago and while they were hit they also recovered. The Euro can be a big impediment, too, as we have seen.

Iceland ranks 5th globally in nominal GDP per capita, 1st in Europe for average wage, 1st globally for HDI. I think it is a fair assessment to say that they are doing extremely well..

> either misinformed or disingenuous

That was uncalled for...

> It is logical if indeed sovereignty was a main issue in the debate

It is kind of hard to take countries without standing armies talking about sovereignty seriously.

Iceland is one of few countries that can actually afford to have no military. They live on an island. Closest landmass to them is Greenland that's certainly not plotting to annex them and its 300km away.

There's no natutal resources, no anything other than fish and 400,000 human population.

They have a strategic location in the north Atlantic, if the US did not have defacto military control of iceland several other countries have historically been interested in annexing them (germany under WW2, soviet union after that). They also only got their independence from Denmark after WW2.

And yet they've done fine for 1000+ years.

Moreover, this whole narrative of defense is so childlish and asinine, generally spread by people of countries that are always on the attacking side like Americans.

It reminds me of the elementary kids in a local school that started to bring knifes to school because others had knifes too.

You have a country where there is people still alive who remembers their country getting independence, don’t you think that independence matters to them?

I think over the past year or so the calculus has changed dramatically. There was credible threat by the US of invasion of another NATO member in the same neighborhood. It's intellectually dishonest to say things are the same as in the 90s, when the US was defending the sovereignty of these places.

> And yet they've done fine for 1000+ years.

They got their independence after WW2, they have been either annexed or colonized by other powers since 1262.

The complaint in that article is that "instead of creating a single European system, the PPWR preserves a fragmented national model. A business selling directly to customers across the EU must register and fulfil its obligations separately in every Member State where its packaging becomes waste. For large companies, this is part of the cost of doing business; for micro-businesses selling only a handful of products into each country, the cost and administrative burden can be wildly disproportionate to the amount of packaging involved."

That is not the EU passing bad laws that members are forced to adopt, it's every member state individually deciding that they don't care about microbusinesses that can't even afford the registration fee for their national packaging waste disposal system.

Generally, the EU is a platform for coordination and negotiation between member state governments. So the danger for Icelanders wouldn't be that the Icelandic government is overpowered by the rest of the EU, but that they voluntarily sign up to a deal that benefits some constituencies at the expense of others, and that can't be changed easily anymore because it's now part of an international agreement. That the referendum was rejected is also an indication that Icelanders don't trust their government to negotiate on their behalf.

But that's exactly how it is supposed to work. Primacy of EU law, currency, monetary policy, borders, trade, defence (under way), etc. It is not micromanagement, it is the aim to transfer sovereignty to a federal EU.

There is no way to sugarcoat it. It is no longer the 70s or even 90s when you could claim that this wasn't the situation and aim. So whether people are in favour or opposed to that it has the merit of being clear.

In the EU Iceland would lose sovereignty because the EU is going federal, and the people of Iceland would lose sovereignty, too as a consequence. You are trying to clutch at straws because you are insisting on denying a fact that is not even controversial. I understand that you think it is worth it but not you should deny it is the case.

Iceland is in the EEA (and indeed that's already a loss of sovereignty) not in the EU and a key reason is indeed to maintain sovereignty on key issues and industries (especially fishing, which is excluded from EEA), which they would lose by joining. So again it is very unclear to me what they would gain by joining.

Why would they lose sovereignty? You haven't established that at all.

If we read Rousseau's Social Contract, we see that the sovereign is the people, not the executive power at their service.

The people wouldn't stop being the sovereign just because they change the administrative details of executing their sovereign will.

You haven't made a successful case to counter this point, instead you've gone to attacking me personally with loaded language ("clutching at straws") to defend your insularism.

Sovereignty, noun: the power of a country to control its own government. [Cambridge]

A country, EU member, Euro, Schengen, etc. does not control its foreign trade, has no currency, does not control its monetary policy, does not control its borders (Iceland is a remore island so possibly less of a practical issue and indeed they are in Schengen), does not control its laws. That's the way it is. This includes the people as citizens of that country.

I think you are trying to say that they are still "sovereign" at EU level but obviously that's fallaciously ignoring the whole actual issue of national sovereignty vs. the EU, which isn't just a "change of administrative details", obviously...

Interestingly, with your argument they could equally join the US and as long as they have full voting rights they would still be "sovereign", which I don't think many would agree they would be because the whole point is obviously being sovereign as Iceland and Icelandic, not as citizens of whatever other country.

That's the issue with discussing the EU within Europe at this point, it has become a religion and it is not possible to discuss religion with religious people.

The Icelandic people are fortunate to have this discussion and debate now because, in 2026 and seeing what the EU is, it is very clear what the choice is: being an independent country or being a 'state' of a federal EU.

It is for them only to decide and they have clarity so they can make an informed decision.