Lmao you're acting like the press in Russia is free. It isn't. Nuke threats on state TV, large government-backed papers, government staff, and Putin-allied ex-presidents are government sanctioned.
What obligates the UK to defend its allies? Oh I dunno, promises made, morals, and the cold-hearted pragmatist view that losing Taiwan could be a complete disaster for the UK and the world in general. Semiconductors are kind of a big deal. There's this new invention called the microprocessor - they're pretty neat, and used practically everywhere!
I don't know why I'm bothering talking to a tankie. No matter what I say you'll never shift from your position that Russia/China good, west bad.
The reason why Audi is having low demand is because of the Audi options.
the e-Tron is shit. The interior is worse than you'd expect, and the cameras for mirrors system is the worst implementation I've ever seen. I don't actually think the idea is inherently bad, it's implemented well on the Honda e, but everybody who's tried Audi's says it's dreadful. The whole car just feels amateurish.
the e-Tron GT is a genuinely good car, and the design is lovely too. But it has a major problem - it shares the same platform as the Porsche Taycan, and only costs £1-2k less. When people are given the choice between an Audi and a Porsche for basically the same price, they'll choose the Porsche almost every single time.
And why they haven't made anything more affordable based on the MEB platform is beyond me. It's not like they don't have ICE cars that share the platforms that the likes of the Skoda Fabia and VW Golf use. It must've been a conscious choice to have their EVs be more upmarket. That's failed.
You're joking, right? Russia regularly threatens to nuke the UK, has done several misinformation campaigns in our political system, and even carried out an assassination using fucking chemical weapons on British soil. Sounds pretty hostile to me.
China has spoken at length about intending to take back Taiwan, an ally, and the west can't let that happen, it would be disastrous. They also had a violent crackdown on Hong Kong which the UK has a unique vested interest in for obvious reasons, state-sponsored Chinese hackers have on multiple occasions targeted UK institutions, including hospitals and the Ministry of Defence.
And yes, various other countries. What, you think nowhere is hostile? There's active battle against Houthis who are attacking merchant and military vessels right now, for example.
If you think countries don't need defensive capabilities, you are wrong. You'd think that would be plainly obvious right now, considering a country in Europe is being fucking invaded right now.
Got the ball rolling on this, junior doctor strikes, and planning system reform on day one.
The manifesto was fairly unradical and didn't seek to rock the boat too much, but tbh I'm glad it wasn't just filled with unworkable populist stuff that they probably couldn't achieve (cough, Tory, Green, and Reform, cough).
It did actually do that. The UK wasn't even the most Eurosceptic country around the time of 2015/2016. (I.e. the aftermath of the refugee crisis where the EU took a severe hit in popularity across the union).
Anti-EU sentiment was huge around that time particularly in the UK, Latvia, Hungary, France, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands. Averaged across all members of the union, less than 50% looked at the EU favourably after removing "don't know" answers (Eurobarometer survey).
The UK (or rather more specifically, David Cameron), was just the only one stupid enough to pull that kind of reckless political brinkmanship.
He thought that by calling the referendum and having Remain win (which is what polling indicated, plus he probably didn't think Tory media would love Brexit so much considering he, the PM, was massively against it), UKIP would fall apart, anti-EU sentiment would subside, and the emergence of a competing right-wing party would be halted.
Logical, but a ridiculously high-risk game. He gambled the UK's international standing on political games to help his own party.
By 2019, after seeing the ensuing shitshow that the Tories handling Brexit was, as well as the refugee crisis becoming a memory not an ongoing event, the EU had rebounded and hit its highest approval rating since 1983.
Unfortunately there are all kinds of caveats in the law. E.g. phone batteries over a certain capacity are exempt, you can be exempted if you provide a battery warranty of (iirc) 3 years, etc.
Look, I don't expect the back to be trivial to pop off and have a battery that I can yank out and replace within 5 seconds.
The need for high capacity batteries in phones pretty much necessitates thinner-walled (and therefore more easy to damage) batteries, and phones being all-screen pretty much necessitates phones being reasonably thin, so protective cases can be used without making the phones ridiculously cumbersome.
But if it does indeed require special tools, heatguns, and a skilled technician to do this, then I will be pissed off. There is zero reason Apple and the other industry shitheads can't design a phone with a battery that can be replaced without much chance of damage, or specialised tooling, by a normal person in under 10 minutes.
I'd also like to see them be forced to publish open schematics for their batteries so alternate companies can sell batteries if the OEM decides to be a shithead and charge you £160 for a new one.
Who on Earth refers to electric vehicles as "e-cars"? Lol
EVs or BEVs is the terminology I've always heard.
That aside, I don't really see how European companies can compete at the low end without slapping tariffs on Chinese goods. Europe doesn't have the benefit of things like forced labour.
Also, I think it's unwise to allow our reliance on China to grow even further. We've seen from Russia that making a hostile nation integral to our economies not only makes us reluctant to hold them to account properly, but it also causes us tremendous disruption if we do go about severing ties.