There was a shell game with aluminum a number of years back where truckload ofbit just…moved around…to raise stock prices. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same things happened with oil.

Source.

Oh, I agree, it wasn’t much worse than average for the time, pretty typical for a movie targeted towards men. And still better than the first 15 minutes of Sausage Party.

In retrospect, the womanizing is a bit cringe-worthy and over the top, the rest holds up well.

So gas costs about $4.90/gal local currency where I live, and electricity costs about $0.096. Assuming everything you calculated is correct, and we ignore environmental impact differences (which is substantial here since electricity where I live is almost completely renewable), your setup would cost a quarter as much while electric vs. gas here.

Based on local prices, your two numbers for comparison are 31.7 miles per electricity dollar vs. 7.6 miles per local gasoline dollar.

I will certainly get dinged for cold weather which, based on the commonly accepted metric for older electric vehicles, is about half the range, so it will only be twice as cost-effective during those periods.

Meanwhile, any question I ask that has a simple answer is ignored. Why was it commonly believed that China was a civilian dictatorship in 1988, more than a few years after Mao and Dengs time? Why is the one-party state of China not considered a dictatorship when one-party states are?

This entire conversation has been moving goalposts, and every time I defined the goalposts clearly enough to not be moved, you simply ran in another direction. I may not have gotten a university degree, but you’ve still done an amazingly poor job of defending your thesis.

I will give you points on the checks and balances applied after Mao reducing the risks of harm from the dictatorship of China, but the definition of a dictatorship doesn’t rely on the benevolence of the leadership, merely the lack of power of the people to change it, which was not negated by dividing the powers of government between different levels.

My first link has the following quote:

Dictatorships are authoritarian or totalitarian,[1] and they can be classified as military dictatorships, one-party dictatorships, personalist dictatorships, or absolute monarchies. (emphasis mine)

China has been a one-party state for the last 75 years, so the only question is whether or not it was also a dictatorship.

My second link has an infographic labeling China as a civilian dictatorship in 1988, which is prior to Xi putting himself in absolute authority, so how does it have nothing to do with the era prior to Xi taking absolute authority?

As for the handy little link you provided, that only talks about Xi, and we’re agreed that he is a dictator running a dictatorship, so, while it’s interesting, I’m not sure of the relevance unless your proposal is the the only thing that qualifies as a dictatorship is if it’s run by a single individual. In which case, it seems there are a number of people in your purported field who disagree with that stance.

Do you mean like the summary in Wikipedia? Or how about the Democracy-Dictatorship Index? It seems a lot of people in political circles have been calling China a civilian dictatorship for at least 36 years, just based on the cute little pictures.

Feel free to read a definition that’s more than one sentence long if you want an explanation for something as nuanced as political systems.

You’re right, words do have meaning. Just because there is a transition from one dictator to another without bloodshed or death doesn’t mean it isn’t a dictatorship. Just because the dictator of the week is chosen by a committee doesn’t mean it isn’t a dictatorship. One-party systems are commonly accepted to be dictatorships because of the lack of ability by the people to choose their leader, rather it is chosen by the party (usually the party elites).

In this case, China is coming into its own as a regional hegemon, assuming their relatively new status as an outright dictatorship doesn’t fuck that up.

China has been an outright dictatorship for a while now, it’s just the lifetime leader that was recent.