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The size of BYD's factory

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Re: The size of BYD's factory

#561

Post by coliveira »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #187
bobthepanda wrote: post #173

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%.

China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.

Debt in China is not a big issue, because Chinese banks are mostly owned by the Government. They can rearrange debt to deal with problems much more freely than Western governments.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#562

Post by makerdiety »

slt2021 wrote: post #513
makerdiety wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vertical integration, or a company claiming to take ownership of its supply chain, needs the democratic miracle that is exclusive security of supplies and their logistical distribution. No American company is ever going to militarily secure natural resources or a nanostate territory for its profits. And that's why all American companies (or any traditional, humanist company) will fail to achieve profits which ensure…

thats a whole bunch of handwaving without any fact nor supported argument

Everything rationally dismissive of ineffective economics and technology always appears negligent in scientific duties. But I'm actually monitoring the situation with great attention and caution. Because this is a global context I'm referring to. Which the soteriological expectations of populist manufacturing science and also optimal operations research have botched, as part of a normally occurring natural selection that wants to purge away all unmotivated and unskilled students of economics at the Malthusian cliff limits that we're presently at.

As long as your side of the discussion hasn't loaded the debate with propaganda-rich religious expectations like the modern implementation of capitalism being on the road to perfection, some sort of leftist-progressive singularity possible with enough faith based endorsement and mere belief, then I'm willing to have an argument founded on facts. Otherwise, your sociopolitically biased school of economics will have to forever deal with me presenting grounds for arguments as thoughtless speculation, due to the skewed perspective your political incentives create. In other words, I have already given basic facts from which tentative socioeconomic engineering arguments can be made. Namely that liberal democracy's military-industrial complex is a poor attempt at satisfying the requirement for both secure and intelligent domestic commerce.

It's actually not rocket science: it's more like a real time strategy game like Command and Conquer. Because what base building ever occurs without an area being violently secured from enemy ganks and such first? And, abstracting from this illustration, unless Elon Musk plans to form a private military company for his Tesla and Space X ventures like a proper cyberpunk megacorporation character, we shouldn't expect actually competent or pure vertical business integration. Instead, we should be expecting a ghetto version of what capitalism truly is. Because the best players, our wealthy and powerful billionaires, are not really wealthy and powerful, if you look closely at what capitalism means and what it means without semantically corrupting political lobbyists like Keynesian economics, supply and demand formulations, and just horribly ineffective fascist socialism high school type proposals.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#563

Post by robwwilliams »

tomcam wrote: post #263
robwwilliams wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: See the speed with which Colossus has been (is being) assembled in Memphis Tennessee. Yes, on an existing industrial site but this is still one damn impressive accomplishment. https://www.servethehome.com/inside-100000-nvidia-gpu-xai-co...

Is it your thought that is typical for large-scale development?

No, far from typical. But then Elon involved ;-)

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#564

Post by petesergeant »

coliveira wrote: post #558
petesergeant wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Elderly Chinese people are different from elderly people elsewhere because they’re hardier” doesn’t feel like the extraordinary proof the earlier extraordinary claims required. Are they that different from people in other middle income countries like Thailand?

The point is that old people in US and specially Europe expect to maintain their life standards, which are quite high. That's difficult in the middle of a demographic downturn. But that's not the case for elderly people in China. Even if their numbers do increase over time, the productivity of younger generations is so large compared to them, that they can effectively be supported with little problems for the Chinese…

To be clear, which of the newly-industrialized countries classically described as being in the middle income trap do you think that's not true of? Like is China going to be different from Mexico here because abuelas are demanding a high-standard of living?

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#565

Post by Symbiote »

hackernewds wrote: post #169
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…

Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies

There is a downside.

You need to show your identity card to buy a ticket.

(or use an app which does this for you.)

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#566

Post by bobthepanda »

coliveira wrote: post #561
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.

Debt in China is not a big issue, because Chinese banks are mostly owned by the Government. They can rearrange debt to deal with problems much more freely than Western governments.

while this is true, they also have to do a lot more management of capital than most and it's a very delicate balancing act. Already, you have issues with bank confidence and normal people getting fleeced by fradulent or overly risky financial products because of the government's interventions in banking.

Japan used to be activist towards in its banks too, and it was very good until it was catastrophic one day.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#567

Post by maxglute »

petesergeant wrote: post #529
coliveira wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole "demographics" scare about China is clear nonsense. Even if that becomes true, it will take 25 to 30 years for it to manifest, because China consumption is in a growing curve. The current young working population is more educated and productive than ever. And China still has hundreds of millions of people to be included into its consumer and labor market in the poorest areas. So don't hold your breath about…

> The whole "demographics" scare about China is clear nonsense I mean it's probably fair to call it the consensus opinion, so a claim as extraordinary as calling it "clear nonsense" probably requires extraordinary proof?

Western pop consensus on PRC is reliably frequently (almost deliberately) wrong that that the consensus _is_ the extraordinary proof, because these narratives are designed to be cope propaganda.

But the TLDR is it's the quality of workforce not the demographics that drives productivity and growth. JP TFR went below 2 in mid 70s, their economy has grown by 2000% relative to Yen. Same with SKR, TFR went below 2 in mid 80s, economy grew by 2500% relative to KRW... the sauce? Skilling up relative % of workforce to compete on higher end / higher value / higher paid industries. The current limitation with both these countries is they're small, relative to PRC, they've maximized human potential, reaching around 80% skilled workforce, basically the ceiling, they can no longer generate surplus enough talent to compete past limit.

PRC went >2 TFR in 90s, but they have so much people that they're still at 20% skilled workforce, the academic reforms to churn out tertiary only put in place ~10-15 years ago, their headroom is still very high. As in generating OECD+ in skilled talent combined per year. They're on track to add more STEM in the next 25 years (birth cohorts already predetermined) than US will add people (birth and immigration inclusive) - they're on track to have 2-3x more STEM than US total. Meanwhile their catchup in last 10-15 yeras was basically going from fraction of skilled talent to ~parity with US. The TLDR is PRC is in process of undergoing the GREATEST "productive" demographic divident in recorded history, and competitors are not remotely close. Will PRC reach ceiling like JP/SKR with >2 TFR, of course, but not until way past 2050s when they reach 80% highskilled workforce and can't replace at parity. And realisitally that's also a PRC who is multiple times larger than it is now (not 2000% but substantial).

If the full demographic argument is PRC will eventually demographically collapse, likely after most of us are dead, and growing multiple times current size because they generated a workforce larger than west can compete with... then that's going to make people shit bricks.

For reference entire PRC lol demographics narrative was popularized by Zeihan... who keeps forgetting the politics in geopolitics, i.e. US has most deep coasts for ports... except PRC dredges and builds the most productive ports; US has most naturally navigatable waterways, except PRC builds out / maintain their internal waterways with signifiantly more utilitzation. US has immigration... except at PRC scale, even shit TFR properly directed is more talent than US can realistically compete with. 4:2:1 pyrmaid? Yeah kind of PIA... except highest household savings rate in the world, and large regional CoL disparity means you can dump a lot of retirees in nice inland retirement cities one day where they cost fraction to upkeep but still maintain relative good QoL, better than what they grew up with. There's a lot of arbitraging opportunities. And in cases of upper quantiles, that 4:2:1 turns into wealth transfers to the 1 gen to start families.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#568

Post by fspeech »

petesergeant wrote: post #564
coliveira wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is that old people in US and specially Europe expect to maintain their life standards, which are quite high. That's difficult in the middle of a demographic downturn. But that's not the case for elderly people in China. Even if their numbers do increase over time, the productivity of younger generations is so large compared to them, that they can effectively be supported with little problems for the Chinese…

To be clear, which of the newly-industrialized countries classically described as being in the middle income trap do you think that's not true of? Like is China going to be different from Mexico here because abuelas are demanding a high-standard of living?

The word "middle class trap" only makes sense for China based on FX rate. Rich Chinese will continue to diversify if not outright emigrate while the middle class is trapped by necessity. Meanwhile the savings/investment rate is so high that the Chinese middle class will enjoy things that middle classes in few other countries have, once normalized for population density. Right now they already lead in industrial robots per worker (behind only South Korea and Singapore). They will lead in service robots per capita one day as well.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#569

Post by corimaith »

maxglute wrote: post #567
petesergeant wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole "demographics" scare about China is clear nonsense I mean it's probably fair to call it the consensus opinion, so a claim as extraordinary as calling it "clear nonsense" probably requires extraordinary proof?

Western pop consensus on PRC is reliably frequently (almost deliberately) wrong that that the consensus _is_ the extraordinary proof, because these narratives are designed to be cope propaganda. But the TLDR is it's the quality of workforce not the demographics that drives productivity and growth. JP TFR went below 2 in mid 70s, their economy has grown by 2000% relative to Yen. Same with SKR, TFR went below 2 in mid…

If you double down on export capacity, and let's your hypothetical is true and China now completely dominates the global supply chain, where does that leave other emerging economies like India or Nigeria in the future that would also seek to climb up the economic ladder?

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#570

Post by shiroiushi »

jajko wrote: post #77
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…

For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high. Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars,…

>Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.

It sounds like Switzerland is very poorly managed then. Here in Tokyo, we have absolutely the best rail network in the world, and no, people aren't buying more cars and making the roads more crowded at all. The key here is that owning a car in the city is extremely inconvenient: the roads are frequently very narrow and slow, there's no convenient place to park, the few parking lots available are expensive (and likely not near your destination anyway, unless you're going to some large building (like a mall), and you're not even allowed to own a car in the city unless you have a place to park it, and can prove this to the police. There's almost no street parking. So trying to use a car to get around the city is just not very convenient at all, except for certain trips (e.g., going to a mall that has a parking garage, from your apartment where you're spending a huge extra amount every month for the privilege of a parking space). Taxis are a different matter, though: they exist and are somewhat popular, but they're pretty expensive.

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