Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The size of BYD's factory

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 651 posts

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#581

Post by throwawaymaths »

lordgroff wrote: post #236
throwawaymaths wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a sense in which China has made a sucker of itself, too. China has some serious internal economic structure issues and it remains to be seen how long those issues and the downstream problems it creates are sustainable. For an example, remember the amazing speed of construct demonstrated by the Chinese government building covid quarantine facilities? Hundreds of square miles of em across every province. They'…

I always hear this as a criticism of China but then I watch some footage of the actual place and it looks like it lives in the future (to be fair, it's uneven, but let me tell you I've traveled to the US enough times to be shocked at how uneven it can get). Sure, there's real problems I'm sure, where isn't there, but here in Canada by the time we've built a kilometer of an LRT line massively over budget, China has ad…

Never forget that China somewhat strictly controls what comes out of the country innterns of media and footage. Much contending out of there is paid for. You can see this in influencers who very awkwardly point the camera away from homeless people when they come into frame briefly. And also the plethora of videos by influencers "going out looking for homeless people" and not finding any.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#582

Post by gaoryrt »

Symbiote wrote: post #542
zppln wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My city in Sweden use BYD buses (I think they're pretty much the only option?). My impression is that they've worked pretty well, with more cities buying into them.

Copenhagen has Man, Mercedes and Yutong electric buses, I think.

Same as BYD, YUTONG is from Zhengzhou too.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#583

Post by mldqj »

aguaviva wrote: post #554
digitalsurgeonz wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>China will soon be more aggressive as any other empires. in its entire history it has never invaded outside its traditional borders, and it achieved all this without invading or enslaving people. It will continue this way in future too :)

In its entire history it has never invaded outside its traditional borders Vietnam, 1979. Support for North Korea's invasion of South Korea 1950-1953. Invasion of Indian-held areas in 1962 based on extremely dubious claims. Not an invasion, but its support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in the 1970s (who ended up invading Vietnam with Chinese arms) was quite significant. Its current menacing of the Phillipines. Claims…

> Support for North Korea's invasion of South Korea 1950-1953.

China did not support North Korea's invasion. North Korea did not seek China's support initially and only asked for Stalin's permission. China would not have entered the Korea war at all if MacArthur did not disobey Truman and marched all the way to the Chinese border. He also publicly stated that he planned to bomb China. It was one of the reasons for which he was fired. All this was well documented in the US's own literature.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#584

Post by aguaviva »

mldqj wrote: post #583
aguaviva wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In its entire history it has never invaded outside its traditional borders Vietnam, 1979. Support for North Korea's invasion of South Korea 1950-1953. Invasion of Indian-held areas in 1962 based on extremely dubious claims. Not an invasion, but its support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge in the 1970s (who ended up invading Vietnam with Chinese arms) was quite significant. Its current menacing of the Phillipines. Claims…

> Support for North Korea's invasion of South Korea 1950-1953. China did not support North Korea's invasion. North Korea did not seek China's support initially and only asked for Stalin's permission. China would not have entered the Korea war at all if MacArthur did not disobey Truman and marched all the way to the Chinese border. He also publicly stated that he planned to bomb China. It was one of the reasons for wh…

China did not support North Korea's invasion.

I don't see how to read China's dispatch of 1.5M combat troops, taking on some 110,000 battle deaths (thus saving the invasion from imminent collapse) other than as "support" for the invasion.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#585

Post by coliveira »

bobthepanda wrote: post #566
coliveira wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The existence of overly risky products is something observed in Western banking as well. And a catastrophe caused by the banking system is not unheard of in the USA. So I don't see how this is a problem unique to China. In fact they have much more flexibility to solve issues in this area.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#586

Post by sinuhe69 »

thefounder wrote: post #549

I wonder if China could get into an EV bubble like with the real-estate.

They certain made a big bet, in particular the CCP see it as the single opportunity to surpass Japan and German manufacturers.

On the other hand, the adoption of EV is slower than expected, especially in key markets such as the EU. Charging network, green electricity supply are major headaches, which are not easily to solve in 5-10 years. The adoption in developing countries is however a surprise. Driven by much lower fuel cost compared to a combustion engine, people in developing countries could be swayed by cheap EV-models. They can accept the longer charging time and a bit of inconvenience (like the air-con is not so cold) for a cheap, working car. However, once the adoption of EV is sizable, I’ll expect a significant burden on the national grid of those countries and the tension arise from it is not easily to solve, especially when their nascent industry is already power hungry. Inextinguishable Li-Ion battery fire is another major concern as well.

Then there is a third variable: the hydro full cells cars and trucks. When the extraction of hydrogen from newly discovered deposits is efficient enough, full cells technology could experience a big boom and of course, they would displace EV tech.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#587

Post by sinuhe69 »

mrtksn wrote: post #17

I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs. Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into comm…

Do you deliberately ignore the fact that China has a mounting problem, not just in economy? And then please point out any other big government economy that works well for the long-run!?

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#588

Post by jodrellblank »

robocat wrote: post #76
wbl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that expensive to put down a bike lane.

It is outrageously expensive. "Building 101km of cycleways across Christchurch to cost $301m", population 405000, So that is $750 per person, which is about 1% of median earnings for a year. That is paid for mostly by car owners (via petrol tax and car tax) and a bit by home owners. And the new infrastructure is visibly under-utilised - at best a few % of traffic. You could force people to bike using laws and economi…

> There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere

Roads pre-date cars. Cars muscled in and took over, forced humans off the roads onto sidewalks. Now car drivers say it cannot be economically justified for people to move around outside cars? This is "car-brain" thinking. If the cars were banned, people could walk and cycle and wheelchair and skate on the roads their taxes are already paying for. They aren't "car roads", they are just roads - cycles are allowed on them. Car drivers don't want to share, don't want to slow down, keep hitting and killing people, can't control their vehicles safely, so demand cyclists be moved somewhere else - then complain about the cost of doing that! People say cars have taken over, they want somewhere safe from the dangers of cars, car drivers say no it's too expensive to make yourself safe from me commuting through the places you live and work!

It's crazy land. As if the only reason Christchurch exists at all is for cars to drive through.

Can you point to a report that has a cost/beneift analysis of each individual road in Christchurch? Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities[2] they found that the dense urban centers ("poor") were the parts of a city with enough tax revenue to cover their infrastructure costs, and the sparse suburbs ("rich") were being subsidised by them. The people in city center apartments, possibly without cars, possibly transit riders, pay for the sprawling suburbs which need long roads and infrastructure serving relatively few houses and businesses, which don't generate enough revenue to pay for those roads, sewers, water pipes, storm drains, electricity supply, etc.

New Zealand $301M is about £139M in UK pounds. Wikipedia has a list of road projects in the UK[1],including:

- Black Cat to Caxton Gibbet. 16 km, £507 million.

- Morpeth and Felton, 12.9Km, £260M. (Morpeth population: 14k)

- M54 to M6 motorway link road, 2.5km, £200M.

- Shrewsbury North West Relief Road, 6km, estimated £120M (population: 77k).

- Arundel bypass, cost £320M (population: 3.5k).

- Newark-upon-Trent bypass, 6.5Km, cost £400-£500M (population: 30k).

Building more roads doesn't reduce traffic. It makes driving easier, quicker, more convenient, which increases the temptation to drive, increases the number of journeys, incentivises and encourages driving, makes traffic worse. Can you point me to a cost/benefit analysis of spending half a billion pounds on one of these road schemes to "reduce traffic" by doing something that doesn't reduce traffic, something that makes traffic worse? Spending 2-10x the cost of rail per km, while moving 1/20th the amount of people compared to rail, polluting more than rail?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_road_projects_in_the_U...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#589

Post by seanmcdirmid »

flyingpenguin wrote: post #422
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt the Americans will let them do that so easily.

A quick google search of "BYD Mexico" tells me it is already starting.

BYD can build cars in Mexico, they already build buses in SoCal, that’s not an issue. The question is if tariffs are going to apply just to final assembly and will they be easy to avoid by assembling elsewhere.

Re: The size of BYD's factory

#590

Post by seanmcdirmid »

mrtksn wrote: post #17

I still see memes about how the large government is preventing progress and causing de-industrialisation being pushed on Twitter, usually putting some European countries graphs next to USA graphs and showing how EU performed worse than USA after 2008(I guess that's the year the regulations kicked in), however they never compare China and the USA on these graphs. Because then the libertarian propaganda turns into comm…

I’m really surprised that there are people who still think China is really communist, and that the private companies that are succeeding are just stealth communist projects in disguise.
Post reply on HN