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The size of BYD's factory

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Re: The size of BYD's factory

#341

Post by RugnirViking »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #27

The number of construction vehicles doing something versus sitting around waiting for labor in that shot is impressive.

I'm 100% sure its a photo op. Think about the logistics of the trucks taking spoil away. How can there be one arriving and one leaving at each location at this time: the diggers near instantly fill their entire capacity?

And the narrow access road is way too congested for all those to actually leave or arrive at that rate. Moments after the shot, the trucks will clearly all have to stop and wait.

This being said, there is power in that many machines in the same place at one time. They would cetainly be able to get work done quickly. Just not quite as quickly as it appears in that shot. Waiting is part of the process, you cant have a system where every component works at 100% capacity

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#342

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #182
hackernewds wrote: post #156

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

> it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism Wouldn’t this just be plain old fashioned authoritarianism? America can latch on to this too, and we might based on how the Trump admin turns out.

If the Trump administration (or the Biden administration) tried to enact an industrial policy like China, I think they would fail. It's not easy, and plenty of authoritarian governments fail at it.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#343

Post by malermeister »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #259
malermeister wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they invade Hong Kong? It's a very western viewpoint that invasion is the only way to affect change.

Now do Tibet.

75 years ago? If that's the closest precedent you can find, that kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#344

Post by malermeister »

ceejayoz wrote: post #272
malermeister wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they invade Hong Kong? It's a very western viewpoint that invasion is the only way to affect change.

Hong Kong was leased from China. No invasion necessary. They've squashed the democracy movement there, though.

I'm not saying they're not trying to expand their sphere of influence. I just think they're not quite as gung-ho about it as western powers. They work slower and less aggressively, invasions are a last resort.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#345

Post by ZeroGravitas »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #333
Dalewyn wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This factory is being built by BYD, not the government, and not a state-owned enterprise. It's being built because BYD anticipates massive growth in demand for electric vehicles, not because of some arbitrary mandate. BYD is known for its ruthless price-cutting and drive for efficiency, so they're a very bad example to illustrate government bloat.

There is a mandate, several interconnected mandates actually.

They're not arbitrary though, and many nations have them. China just seems to be translating that into action better.

https://www.globalpolicywatch.com/2021/06/chinas-14th-five-y...

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#346

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #345
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This factory is being built by BYD, not the government, and not a state-owned enterprise. It's being built because BYD anticipates massive growth in demand for electric vehicles, not because of some arbitrary mandate. BYD is known for its ruthless price-cutting and drive for efficiency, so they're a very bad example to illustrate government bloat.

There is a mandate, several interconnected mandates actually. They're not arbitrary though, and many nations have them. China just seems to be translating that into action better. https://www.globalpolicywatch.com/2021/06/chinas-14th-five-y...

There's a mandate for the government to support the development of the EV industry, and there are targets, but this factory is being built because BYD decided it makes economic sense for them, based on anticipated demand.

The Chinese government is doing many things that increase demand, make it easy to scale up production, etc. For example, many Chinese cities are making it difficult to register new internal-combustion-engine vehicles. I'm also sure the local government has rolled out the red carpet for BYD in terms of permits, tax incentives, and so on.

That's different from the government issuing a command, "Build us the largest EV factory in the world, regardless of economic viability!" That's how the previous comment came across.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#347

Post by ZeroGravitas »

robwwilliams wrote: post #212
harrall wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't tell if I'm missing sarcasm here but ...

Intel was paying customers Billions a year not to use their competitors products in the early 2000s. So not complacent about breaking the law to stifle competition but also complacent about actually building competitive chips that could win in the market.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#348

Post by RugnirViking »

nradov wrote: post #271
wbl wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.

Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant…

I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem.

Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance.

We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free.

I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#349

Post by ZeroGravitas »

edhelas wrote: post #25

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…

BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an early sign that China was going to win the EV market:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h...

BYD also have some kind of monorail product!

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#350

Post by RugnirViking »

tsimionescu wrote: post #59
UltraSane wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know it isn't fair. Life isn't fair and neither is climate change.

It's not about fairness. It's about the fact that countries which have huge emissions per capita can't rest on their laurels if they have relatively low total emissions. Instead, they need to take an active role in reducing emissions - both their own, and those of people in the developing world. If Germany or the UK or Norway or France (not to mention Canada or the USA) want to reduce emissions more but can't realist…

look at the trend lines of co2 emissions per capita for countries. You might find it interesting.

heck, even just look at co2 emissions per capita NOW. we arent talking about a high and mighty high emissions population dictating down to countries with low emissions that they should reduce. We're talking about china with more emissions PER CAPITA than europe, and every individual country in europe. Many developing countries are worse than pretty much every european country. Libya, iran, malaysia, all worse than every country in europe.

Europes emissions are going down over time. Chinas are going up - in an exponential curve.

this is the point where people deflect and claim "oh, but those countries manufacture stuff the west uses, it's their fault"

It's really not. A big part of the reason they manufacture those things and the west doesnt is because the west actually bothers to hold up any kind of environmental laws at all, driving companies away

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