301–310 of 651 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can bribe officials in Vietnam/Mexico. So they'll be your country of "final assembly".
I doubt the Americans will let them do that so easily.
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/1197961495/the-trade-fraud-de...
No bribery required though, at least in most cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
- Definition of this is 12,000 2011 USD, BLS says thats 17,600 2024 USD. Looking like 2024 closes at a little under 13,000 24 USD. If we calculate out the 6% CCP standard GDP growth rate, it'd take 5 years
- GDP is not very likely to grow at the formerly-real 6% per year moving forward. Population peaked, trade is now a tailwind instead of a headwind, GDP per capita at 13,000 is 0.5x Russia and 2.5x India, and we're in year 2 of a deflationary crisis that's barely being held off, if it is, and is characterized by an significant oversupply in housing stock that'll take years to run down. So I'll tack on 2 years, make it 7 years, 2031.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I've studied in the area and, as a bit of a night person, often drove past at night when driving to or from parents. A very cool sight, though the smell is often less pleasant :D - presumably nothing toxic, that would be illegal, but it does smell bad. Kind of like burning plastic, but without the harshest components of that smell. Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt the Americans will let them do that so easily.
They already are. Just one tiny well-explained example, although it's utterly rampant: https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/1197961495/the-trade-fraud-de... No bribery required though, at least in most cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They’re certainly good at building. Actually utilizing that capacity is something else entirely; there are factories less than ten years old shuttering due to overcapacity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto... And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.
You are never going to get exactly the right amount of capacity, so the question is whether you want to err on the side of too much or too little. Too little might often be more efficient, but there are undeniable strategic benefits to having too much. The events of the last few years have taught us all some painful lessons about the hidden costs of JIT and lean. China might have got the balance wrong, but they aren'…
There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.
Dazzled by the spectacle, this misses that their economy is characterized by deflationary headwinds due to a massive, massive over-investment in property, and this just squeezes the toothpaste (debt taken on to goose GDP) to another side of the tube. (housing to batteries)
All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures. This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact. I want those kind of factories to produce…
No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are never going to get exactly the right amount of capacity, so the question is whether you want to err on the side of too much or too little. Too little might often be more efficient, but there are undeniable strategic benefits to having too much. The events of the last few years have taught us all some painful lessons about the hidden costs of JIT and lean. China might have got the balance wrong, but they aren'…
They are prima facie wrong, their overcapacity is bad and actively harmful, this isn't a sign of it succeeding, its a sign of desperation from it failing. There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago. Dazzled by the spectacle, this misses that their economy is characterized by deflationary headwinds due to a massive, massive over-investment in…
Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?!
There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface). It's a kind if circular reasoning: our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. To subvert the Simpsons - "the best so far"
Edit: I'm far from a Sinophile, but there's a certain willful blindness, concerning an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west, regardless of all the systemic weaknesses that show up again and again. It would suck for a dictator-for-life leading the biggest economy in the world, but healthy minds would introspect to see how we can do better, like we should, right? I have no doubt out leaders will pick the wrong lessons, like social credit scores and pervasive surveillance
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China scaling and efficiency is really something else. it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism
They’re certainly good at building. Actually utilizing that capacity is something else entirely; there are factories less than ten years old shuttering due to overcapacity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto... And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.
It's a model that creates big winners and lots of losers.
Ironically of course the other alternative is central planning which is a hallmark of communist economic systems.
> estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%
Japan is 264%, Singapore 168%, the US 129%, France 112%, Canada is 107%, UK 97%, Germany 66%, Australia 22%, Afghanistan 7.4%, Kuwait 2.1%.
A debt ratio isn't particularly useful to know on it's own.
Can the west compete?
Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio. I think it is a matter of strategy and it seems China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity…
Considering that latest data shows that China industrial robot density is only lower than SG and SK (surpassing Japan and German recently), then the west doesn't have the upper hand anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage. You made a few good points until this one. No one in the US is living comfortably on minimum wage.
It's relative. Relative to the rest of the world (and China), you can still live comfortably on minimum wage.