If you waited until today to get terrified... Then I guess you're one of today's unlucky 10,000. Congratulations, or something.
Well but they were one of the lucky ones not living in terror for all the days past. Truly lucky, no irony here.
Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
71–80 of 199 posts
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simple story is: If you go to China you will see US brands everywhere. If you go to the US, you will see Chinese brands nowhere.
Really, you will see TCL (and Hisense) nowhere in US? I recommend visiting any store selling TVs. Same goes for Thinkpad/Motorola, but I guess there at could argue these are not original Chinese brands.
Also Tencent, GE, Smithfield Foods, Legendary Pictures, DJI, AMC Theaters…
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#73Some history for context:
In 1999 Swedish Volvo spins out and sells Volvo Cars to Ford (Volvo Sweden continues making trucks and heavy equipment) for 6.45 B USD.
In 2010 Ford sells Volvo Cars to Geely for 1.8 B USD.
iN 2017 Geely spins out Polestar from Volvo Cars. In 2021 Geely IPOes Polestar at NYSE for 20 B USD.
Leonardo DiCaprio-Backed Electric Automaker Polestar Valued At $20 Billion In SPAC Deal
https://deadline.com/2021/09/leonardo-dicaprio-backed-electr...
Polestar, the electric vehicle company backed by Volvo of Sweden and Leonardo DiCaprio was valued at $20 billion in a SPAC deal that will take it public.
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#74The entire article doesn't once stipulate that the grounds for banning a Chinese owned car is having telemetry that phones home to China. Maybe Volvo still does and it's a mystery why they can still sell here. Maybe Volvo doesn't and there is no story here. But if the car talks to China and gets updates from China, the US doesn't care if it's built here.
Do you have an official announcement this is the case or are you just making excuses for this administration?
He's just saying the article does not even discuss this vital distinction, let alone bring evidence either way.
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#75What makes a car ‘made in China’ (therefore over 100% tariffs) vs ‘assembled in the USA’ (therefore no tariffs)? The battery, engine and everything else is absolutely Chinese made. I don’t know how much assembly there is honestly but i feel the Geely, err i mean Polestar was a little close to that line. I will say the laws around this indicate just how ridiculous tariffs can be. There’s always some line to press up a…
the justification given for the ban (provided in other sources) is that Polestar's software stack is made in China. The theoretical spooky thing is China forcing some "evil" software update that stops all the Polestars.
The Volvo distinction is ... I mean maybe the Volvo software stack is in Europe or the US. Maybe it's also in China!
I do not really subscribe to this philosophy but what's going on isn't a "Polestar would be tar riffed" thing. It's an outright "you can't sell em" thing
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about the telephone switches?
Scroll down the list and look how many there are and where they were manufactured. Economic efficiency would mean only a few vendors.
> Economic efficiency would mean only a few vendors.
This is a massive lie monopolists tell you to justify anti-competitive mergers.
Increasing entity size has economies of scale (amortizing fixed costs over more units) and diseconomies of scale (bureaucratic overhead, long-distance transportation costs, etc.)
Economies of scale peter out with increasing entity size. Amortizing a $1000 fixed cost over 100 units instead of 10 saves $90/unit. Amortizing the same $1000 fixed cost over a trillion units instead of a million saves less than one tenth of one cent per unit.
Diseconomies of scale metastasize with increasing entity size. Entity size exceeds Dunbar number, language barriers and timezone asynchrony, corporate politics, independent jurisdictions imposing mutually-incompatible legal requirements, insufficient competition compromises incentives for efficiency as long-term incumbents succumb to Iron Law of Bureaucracy, etc.
By the time you're operating something at the scale of the entire planet, having the benefits of scale still exceed the costs of scale will happen approximately never.
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scroll down the list and look how many there are and where they were manufactured. Economic efficiency would mean only a few vendors.
> Economic efficiency would mean only a few vendors. This is a massive lie monopolists tell you to justify anti-competitive mergers. Increasing entity size has economies of scale (amortizing fixed costs over more units) and diseconomies of scale (bureaucratic overhead, long-distance transportation costs, etc.) Economies of scale peter out with increasing entity size. Amortizing a $1000 fixed cost over 100 units inste…
Maybe.. and "a few" was pulled out of thin air, but these machines were national treasures with immense R&D expense. Think rockets, heavy aircraft, and lithography.. not commodities or software. Having stuff in these categories is kind of "you have to be this tall to ride the ride"
The history is complicated and a side quest to the conversation here, but a free market did play out in the US and became fever pitched after AT&T was hand tied in the 1980s.
A free market means if you can do something better/cheaper/faster, or at least convince other people of the promise, you have a shot. The more that come (think of a gold rush), the potential returns diminish so it will eventually be hard to either acquire revenue/customers or funding for speculative approaches if they are capital intense.
Also, ironic to the conversation, the "best" machine vis a vis when and what, came out of the monopoly: the 5ESS. The Bell System was a reflection of a different culture and values system than what the US has today post leveraged buyout conglomerates and software company monopolies.
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#78Terrify me? Really? There are other, genuinely terrifying things happening right now: climate change, human rights violations, animal rights, the spread of totalitarianism… that’s terrifying.
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
If companies have been "depressing wages for decades" how come they're at an all time high? https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N People make stuff like this abroad because wages are too high here to make a profit, not too low.
real wages in western countries are down because 1. regressive inflation on essential goods like energy is faster than both wages and luxury goods and 2. rent and house prices (= mortgage costs) are up because of corporate lobbying and rich nimby homeowners. that means if employers want to pay workers fairly they need to pay a lot more than in other countries with a cheaper economy. but even the inflated wages are no…
> that means if employers want to pay workers fairly they need to pay a lot more than in other countries with a cheaper economy.
"Pay workers fairly" isn't something that companies in a competitive market can choose whether to do. If labor costs are high, they can either pay them, move operations to somewhere else, or stop operating. If labor costs are low, paying more than that would cause them to have higher prices than competitors.
What this implies is that countries with e.g. inflated housing costs will see operations to move to other countries whenever that's feasible, and indeed this is what we see. This isn't companies choosing to do this -- different companies will do different things, but then the ones doing the thing that requires them to have higher prices will be out-competed.
You can't fix that by admonishing them to "pay workers fairly", you can only fix it by increasing the domestic supply of housing and energy.
Re: Feds Killed Polestar and Spared Volvo
#80[flagged]
Might want to google “pump and dump”. Serious non-sequitur here.
They presumably meant dumping: