241–250 of 651 posts
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People are waking up, and to be fair, Tesla really led the way in the US for the last few years because they had no choice(no one would take them seriously). The question is can the West turn the ship around before its too late?
too late for what?? too late relative to what?
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Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.
With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...
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Relative numbers are what matters realistically when comparing countries. The comfort and buying power of 1.4 billion Chinese people counts as much as that of all of the citizens of the EU and USA together. It is not in any way moral or acceptable to imagine that China or India should have lower total emissions than the EU or the USA, despite having many, many more citizens. And this is not even discussing total hist…
I know it isn't fair. Life isn't fair and neither is climate change.
BYD 900k employees vs Tesla 122k https://cnevpost.com/2024/09/13/byd-workforce-exceeds-900000...
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It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change. It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the pas…
The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete. Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent. Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6. I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a s…
US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.
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I think there’s a little bit more to the golden age story. The “malaise era” started in the early 70s as a perfect storm of fuel economy restrictions and more widespread US economic woes. This lead to decades of low quality cars being made. US automakers not only lost out on consumers looking for simple appliances to drive, but ALSO the enthusiasts that liked driving and cars. The car guys that came of age in this er…
> This lead to decades of low quality cars being made. Really, it was only a bit over one decade. Taking GM as an example, their last great cars were produced for the 1973 model year, after which point the economy, emissions, and efficiency requirements resulted in drastic (bad) changes. It only took until the late 1980s for them to make some genuinely good vehicles though. For instance, the Buick Regal/Oldsmobile Cu…
Off the top of my head, there’s:
- fox body mustang
- fiero
- gnx
- bronco
Anything else would be selected primarily for idiosyncratic nostalgia reasons (eg “this is the faux-wood station wagon I grew up with”)
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I doubt it. It's much easier to either launder or manufacture the goods in a third country, that benefits from most of the same incentives that made Chinese manufacturing go through the roof. Americans will be buying Chinese goods with "made in Vietnam" or "made in Mexico" stamped on it. The American profit will be in setting up those laundering schemes
If the Trump tariffs are based on country of final assembly, then yes, final assembly will just occur somewhere else, but it will take a couple of years to setup, and the inflation shock by that time will have done a lot of damage to the economy (recession likely, depression possible). It makes sense that it took Trump forever to find a treasury secretary willing to go along with this.
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I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.
I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings. It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ... Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially…
Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.
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With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...
The doubts about the size of the investment in that Wikipedia article are funny. It's a bit like "We cannot afford to invest in education", but the Chinese are saying "We cannot afford not to invest in education" (Famous quotes, it's more about R&D here). China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap. It might be the biggest issue on their minds right now. At least I am watching from…
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The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete. Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent. Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6. I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a s…
Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.