591–600 of 651 posts
I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but the amount of BYD's I see on the streets of Bangkoks today compared to say two years ago must be an 1000% increase. They are absolutely everywhere.
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Same here in Brazil. Even in the countryside.
I'm curious: Do Chinese cars have the stigma of being crap quality in other countries? Here in Mexico most anecdotes of people buying Chinese cars are that after less than a year something broke and they had to take it to the repair shop, where it stayed for a very long time due to a lack of pieces even by the manufacturer.
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>Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move. 150cm-tall women here in Tokyo have no trouble with all of the above on a bicycle. If they can do it, so can you. They have e-bikes with child seats and cargo baskets, and they wear rain gear when it's raining.
I ride my bike a lot, but in fact need a car where I live if I want to go 10 miles in less than an hour. This is common in most of the US, and we don’t like this lifestyle either. Biking on the street with high speed traffic is not safe here, regardless of your height. Things are changing in the US. Car-centrism is on its way out, and walkable cities designed for humans are in. I’m really inspired by the new developm…
That's fair; I was simply addressing the other objections (weather, cargo, additional people (presumably children)). The women riding on mamachari here aren't riding 16 kilometers AFAICT, but they don't need to because things are generally close together, and for longer trips, people park their bikes at the station and use the train/subway.
>This is common in most of the US, and we don’t like this lifestyle either.
I completely disagree: you might not like it, but my observation is that most Americans prefer their car-centric society just the way it is. The recent election reinforces this.
>Things are changing in the US. Car-centrism is on its way out, and walkable cities designed for humans are in.
Sorry, but this seems like total fantasy. The new administration is not interested in promoting walkability or cycling, nor are the majority of the electorate that voted for them. There's probably a few isolated places like you describe, but to ascribe this to the whole country is terribly naive.
>After covid, many US downtowns permanently shut down car traffic on core interior roads, and it’s made the experience 10x better.
I saw that too, in the affluent blue city I lived in at the time. They reopened the road to car traffic after the worst of the pandemic was over, and things went back to the way they were.
>I agree, Tokyo is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever visited.
Yep, I thought so too, so after the pandemic restrictions were lifted, I decided to find a job and move here because I could see things in America were going downhill, and honestly hadn't enjoyed living in America much in the last 20 years or so, especially since 2016. The recent election proved me right. It's not fun seeing what's going on in America lately, but it's a lot easier and less stressful seeing it from a distance than having to live in it, as I did during the pandemic. Never again.
>If you hate the system you live in, make improvements!
Or instead of tilting at windmills, find a place you like better and just go there, if you can. After all, that's how America itself was built decades and centuries ago. Of course, this isn't the right answer for everyone, but for me it was.
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> 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…
So in your opinion, what hat would be the standout 80s American cars for enthusiasts and collectors? 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”)
Foxbodies are the most accessible especially when it comes to parts availability, community knowledge, and to a lesser extent these days, price. Except for maybe Fieros, and they have the benefit of being cheap too, for the most part. The GNX is absurdly expensive now, for what it is, but Cutlass Supremes and regular Regals aren't - they're popular conversion and modification targets.
And of course, there's the DeLorean. Probably the car with the single largest cult following. They're terrible cars - unreliable, slow, poorly built, but people love them.
If it were me and money were no object, I'd be going for the C4 ZR1. I've driven every other car mentioned above, except the GNX, and the standard TPI C4s making 250HP/LT1 C4s making 300HP are a lot of fun. I don't think you can get much more 80s America than a nearly 400HP Corvette with a top speed of over 180MPH. The Foxbodies are fun, but they definitely feel sketchy once you start making any more power than stock unless you spend a lot of money on suspension work.
Of course if it were really up to me there were no time constraints, I'd own a 1990s Buick Roadmaster with the same LT1 as the standard corvette and a T56 manual conversion (insert something witty about "faux wood that I grew up with"). But I already do, so that's kinda moot ;)
I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but the amount of BYD's I see on the streets of Bangkoks today compared to say two years ago must be an 1000% increase. They are absolutely everywhere.
https://thedriven.io/2024/09/04/the-biggest-electric-school-...
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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 . Th…
The national road agency NZTA in New Zealand is mostly paid for by fuel taxes and car/truck taxes. It is reasonably fair - approximately user-pays. You can find expensive roading upgrades (similar to your examples) but they are mostly paid for by car and truck users.
Local government taxes in New Zealand are dependent on property values, so AFAIK the wealthy generally subsidise the poorer. Low density suburbs are usually high value properties and they pay quite a lot more in taxes. The more rural areas are often in different council areas than Christchurch City Council - I don't think there is cross-subsidy for commuters.
It's 2024, we can do better than blurry horribly blown out pictures these days. Check for example https://mapper.acme.com/?ll=34.39719,113.94792&z=15&t=SL&mar... for cleaner shot of the site (zoom in few notches for extra details). Google Maps annoyingly cuts half-way through the factory site. edit: that ACME mapper image looks to be from mid-2023, in more recent imagery the construction on the east side has been com…
The thing about that image that amuses me the most is that there is a local grid pattern that isn't aligned north-south, and the factory goes "don't care" and instead smashes itself through everything on a straight cardinal direction alignment.
I guess it makes sense to align the factory to this grid, and not to the older grid that followed the fields.
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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?
What PRC does offer countries that want to catch up is access to cheap capital goods and cheap energy infra. Something PRC had to pay premium for while climbing ladder. It will be up to respective countries to arbituage accessible PRC capital and global demand to build up their industrial base... while opportunity lasts. Issue is we're in era where labour saving technology = more difficult to uplift via mass manufacturing employment and potential for export led growth is going to be increasingly limited as surplus importers try to reconfigure their own trade blocks.
But on the other hand 80% of the world , well 60% excluding PRC is consider middle income and poorer. So there is still substantial room to increase global consumption and accomodate new entrants, especially in non strategic / non zero sum sectors, it just won't be easy. Which is ultimately the limitation, a lot of underdeveloped countries don't have much competence in nation building and no ones going to do it for them. In strategic sectors, i.e. sectors where most countries can't support indigenously, or would take generations to build out (like having your own 200k aviation base that need 300 million population bloc to support), what PRC is going to offer is cheaper access relative to western incumbants. Hence PRC and west fighting zero sum in these sectors, with PRC trying to wrestle away western share, and west trying to protect their share. But the result should be more choice, cheaper choice.
IMO that's the cynicism behind PRC strategy, they will sell countries the tools to uplift themselves on the cheap, expecting most can't, while offering those that couldn't fallback/access to unparallely cheap goods, because PRC will simply have stupendous competitive advantage from being able to coordinate a lot of talent and a lot of robots across a lot of sectors linked by a lot of supply chains.
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Not all countries are like China. Other places could have a helpful bureaucracy, or one that ignores the laws, or accepts bribes.
How does this matter when the country is known ahead of time, and the relevant laws, the details, etc., are all widely known to be nowhere near identical? It’s not like someone could accidentally board a flight to China and clear immigration by happenstance, or without being informed that things may be very different from their home country.
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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?
Depends if we keep the CHIPS act and the IRA. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...