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The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

marketwatch.com

221–230 of 293 posts

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think I am wrong, then it would be helpful if you explained what you think the truth is.

Self driving cars and rental instead of ownership is at least 15 to 20 years out.

Self driving is big. Like digital photography replacing film, once people see the value they'll switch to it seemingly overnight instead of decades. (Long drives go from painful to trivial.)

Rental is overrated. When I need to drive, there better be a car in my driveway with my gear in it already. Rental may work for urban, but not suburban/rural.

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is unlimited meaningful work available that doesn't generate much real profit. You can easily perform music on the street which others enjoy but you won't make a lot of money. You can easily learn crafts to create things for your friends and family that they will appreciate but not pay for. You can easily get in to competitive sport without having to be part of the very top % who get paid for it. We just need t…

I agree with you. I also feel the same way about people studying a "worthless" degree at a university. I think it should be much more heavily encouraged to let us develop deeper thinkers, artists, and others. We should learn to celebrate that not everything needs to be economically/financially driven. > We just need to realise that life happyness and meaningful work doesn't mean generating profits for some ceo. I bel…

> I think it should be much more heavily encouraged to let us develop deeper thinkers, artists, and others.

Totally agree. I think the combination of emphasizing on STEM for all, along with smaller colleges facing shrinking enrollments, will result in losses to society that won't be obvious/measurable.

Look at the list of notable Hampshire College alumni: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hampshire_College

They range from Ken Burns, to one of the founders of Stonyfield Yogurt, to a Debian contributor, along with many other musicians and other creators.

We need to keep this kind of educational freedom alive.

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#223
post #9

I'm skeptical that the labor differential is as big as this article implies frankly. This strike is pretty straightforward in cause, GM wants to pay less, and wants their employees to cover more of their healthcare costs, the Union isnt okay with this. Working in an auto plant is hard, backbreaking work that will leave you physically broken by retirement - and while the transition to electric cars may slightly reduce…

> and wants their employees to cover more of their healthcare costs Yes, this is important. Expect to see benefit reductions result in more strikes.

Healthcare is so stupidly broken in the U.S.

When will companies start to lobby for single payer in the face of predatory industries cutting into their compensation packages?

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extreme is an entire country unprepared to deal with the end of the emotional meme they’ve spent their lives soaking up. It’s pretty simple: Ownership is unwilling to spend on the mess their wealth relies on. The masses are too incapable of adaptation on their own, having been trained to fit radiators and hub caps, not participate in the political process. Adam Smith’s concern over extreme division of labor makin…

> social welfare work Why require it to be work? Giving out a UBI would be more productive than inventing filler work.

Training people to expect sustenance for nothing is a disaster in the making.

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#225

There are so many parts involved with a traditional engine and transmission. Living in Michigan, there are lots of companies building these individual parts. I know a guy who works at a place that builds springs for transmissions ( https://www.pjws.com/our-products/ ) Valvetrain parts, pistons, rings, crankshafts, starters, heads, oil pumps, exhaust manifolds, mufflers, fuel injectors, sensors...none of this stuff is…

The extreme is an entire country unprepared to deal with the end of the emotional meme they’ve spent their lives soaking up. It’s pretty simple: Ownership is unwilling to spend on the mess their wealth relies on. The masses are too incapable of adaptation on their own, having been trained to fit radiators and hub caps, not participate in the political process. Adam Smith’s concern over extreme division of labor makin…

Industries shift, new jobs appear. It happens. It's normal. Socially engineering on the assumption "the end of work is near" has proven disastrous.

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#226
post #11

As a society we need to make sure we are taking care of people when their industry is destroyed. The whole “learn 2 code” thing that was directed toward coal workers was exactly the wrong thing to do. If we want those coal plants to shut down we should have offered to pay off the workers until they reached retirement age. If you “take away” someone’s job for the sake of progress, then you’ll make enemies of progress…

We should have begun building carbon extraction and deep burial facilities where they mined for coal. That would have replaced blue collar jobs with blue collar jobs. We need a carbon tax and federal funding to build these facilities. Carbon extraction paired with more nuclear is what we need to invest in.

This is a really good point. Not sure I'm in favor of UBI when there is so much work we could be doing to fix the mess we've made.

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#227
post #13

I was watching this Youtube video of Audi electric motor production. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zttC2x9nMEw Pretty crazy how much of the motor construction can be automated. There is just no way around it. Union or not, a lot of jobs will disappear. If GM and Ford don't do it then one of the hundred electric car companies around the world will progress in that direction.

Wow this factory seems highly ... underutilized to me. Is it normal for so much to stand still all the time? I love how detailed this vid is, though.

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#228
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easier to generate hydrogen with thermally driven processes than with electricity. People have certainly proposed thermally driven methods that could use solar heat or the output of high temperature nuclear reactors. But none of them have reached pilot plant scale, and IMO they are going to be hard to make reliable/affordable because they combine high temperatures with chemically aggressive environments.

Again, here[1] a process is demonstrated that generates CO and H directly out of CO2 and H2O with a specialized catalyst using only heat from direct sunlight on a large scale. No electrolysis necessary. [1]: https://www.dlr.de/content/en/articles/news/2019/02/20190613...

That's another research project that hasn't even reached pilot plant scale. Here is the main web site for the project:

https://www.sun-to-liquid.eu/

The preceding EU-project SOLAR-JET has recently demonstrated the first-ever solar thermochemical kerosene production from H2O and CO2 in a laboratory environment (6). A total of 291 stable redox cycles were performed, yielding 700 standard litres of high-quality syngas, which was compressed and further processed via Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to a mixture of naphtha, gasoil, and kerosene (7).

As a follow-up project, SUN-to-LIQUID will design, fabricate, and experimentally validate a more than 12-fold scale-up of the complete solar fuel production plant and will establish a new milestone in reactor efficiency. The field validation will integrate for the first time the whole production chain from sunlight, H2O and CO2 to liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

If they achieved, say, a 13-fold scale-up, that would mean producing 9100 liters of synthesis gas in the course of the project. Based on the synthesis gas composition from the previous project [1], that might yield around 3 liters of diesel. 3 liters of liquid fuel from a multi-year research project.

[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.5b00351

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#229
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EV is a small part of the market today. But it's growing fast. As someone who owns an electric car, my next car will definitely be one and I wouldn't buy anything else. These union deals last 4 years. So the manufacturers have to think about labor and planning long term.

Being optimistic, EVs will never have more than a 30% market share because they're incompatible with a large portion of people's lifestyles. They will find an audience with people exclusively commute and have the facilities to charge at home. At the moment, there's some cachet to having a Tesla but the reality of owning one is represented in the deprecation rate. The energy density of battery technology will never re…

> The energy density of battery technology will never reach that of petroleum.

Not anytime soon at least. But that's besides the point. They don't have to do that, they just have to be good enough.

Re: The GM strike is really about the switch to electric cars

#230
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even coming from a place of no empathy for displaced workers lives, if we hang these people out to dry we will pay the price down the line. If america had invested in a social safety net for the past 30-40 years, we might be in a different place. People would be ok with change because they'd know that society was going to have their back while they find a new career.

I don’t understand the comment “if American had invested in a social safety net”. Half of govt expenditures are for the social safety net. Would be more accurate to say “if America had expanded the social safety net”.

And benefits of the social safety net overwhelmingly go to people who complain about its existence.
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