This is a very well researched essay regarding the solar panel industry in China and Germany: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoCoPmtNRJo I really recommend watching / reading sober assessments like this.
It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to high end production. Not every industrial environment can produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are too high to overcome the difference.
That is a very popular opinion and I've held it too for a very long time. Until I read an issue [1] of The Economist in 2020 and did some digging afterwards.
Turns out, the real moat of any successful car industry so far wasn't brand recognition, lobbyists, tariffs, or the pleasing sound of a shutting car door. It's the combustion engine itself. Or rather the industry you're embedded in that provides the metallurgy and chemistry to reliably produce high quality engine blocks and seals. Because your engine needs to withstand high pressures and temperatures that go from below freezing all the way up to way over 2000K. And you also need the know how and experience to build all of that together.
None of that can be exfiltrated as a zip file or wished into existence by party officials.
The EV sidesteps all of that in one go. Now it's all down to who has the best batteries and who can do high quality assembly real cheap. Both points go to China.
Why? The same reason: The surrounding industry. It's what you get from doing (even simple) electronics for decades, cultivating a competitive industry for assembly and high quality battery cells.
The only hope for the incumbents was hydrogen instead of batteries because this again is engineering and seals.
The alternative would have been to become really good at batteries themselves. However, Europe's best chance to get there, Bosch, decided in 2018 not to go that way [2].
Once you let all of that sink in, you realise the inevitability of the current situation.
And they knew. All this time they knew. The rest was song and dance for politicians and shareholders.
If the platform, power train, manufacturing is commoditized, shouldn’t that in theory be great news for existing brands with consumer trust and design competence?
That's the current hope. But do you know who also had consumer trust and design competence? Telefunken, AEG, Braun, Grundig, Blaupunkt, Loewe ... How many products of those brands are produced in Europe today, if at all? None of them had a moat as deep as the combustion engine.
I agree with some of your points, they make sense, but China has been building combustion engines too, for a very long time which is why I don't think that sidestepping the technology with EV was the main reason for their success
They had been trying to for decades but were never able to make even remotely competitive combustion engines. Nothing that would get VW, Toyota or Ford in trouble. The article I posted is sadly paywalled, but it's basically about exactly that.
What does it mean "remotely competitive combustion engines"?
China has been building ICEs for decades, that's for sure, and if they had not been anywhere to remotely competitive people wouldn't be buying them and therefore OEMs wouldn't be producing them, no? But they do. And still do.
The last notable example is [1] twin turbo-charged 4.0 V8 from GWM reportedly delivering 450kW and 800Nm of torque. You can't build such an engine without the very deep expertise in materials, mechanics, chemistry, and everything it takes to manufacture such a beast.
GWM builds traditional gasoline and diesel engines too but then you have other similar OEMs like Geely, BYD, MG, Chery which have been doing the same.
And then you find out that China builds their own diesel engines too but for heavy machinery like trucks, vessels, tractors, ... [2]
So, I see no evidence that they are not capable in manufacturing ICEs. Quite the contrary. Reason why we don't see it in European or American markets, or have not so far, is of a different kind and not competitiveness.
Their wikipedia lists many engine models, all of which seem to be either small industrial engines or engines for range extenders only. This does not sound like a portfolio that can compete with the legacy OEMs but it does explain how they ship so many units.
The reasonable approach to EVs becoming economically feasible would have been to cut through the noise and treat it as an add-on to the existing portfolio without compromising the core competence: internal combustion engines.
This they knew.
Dieselgate put them in a hopeless position in the discussion around all encompassing electrification demanded by the governent plus the greedy, short sited pressure from markets.
This led to massive (and forced) investments rushing out electric models nobody asked for by the dozens.
Compromising quality and a sound growth strategy along the way.
The worst possible timing for Dieselgate to hit - steering a whole country and all industry-related countries into an existential crisis.
It is delusional to think german car manufacturers will be anywhere near competitive in the much simpler EV mass(!)market - so thinking to order a whole industry, which is built around a way different technolocal foundation, to just make electric cars from now on without really looking into a viable charging infrastructure is still beyond me.
Plus ICE cars won’t be going away anytime soon and very few have the balls to call this out.
WHY?! Dieselgate would have been the perfect time for VW to justify abandoning ICE, especially diesel, and shift to fully electric. But no, they just doubled down on ICE and diesel engines. You can't fix stupid.
Of course, in practice, VW couldn't have done that due to it being run by ICE unions who want to keep their jobs at all cost. Maybe they could have spun off the EV business into a new car brand without the shackles of the unions tying them down to dated tech.
My experience is less than two years old. I have the impression that those who defend it have a UI taste that is stuck in the 2000s. The same people who also point at UIs that are barely usable and ugly from a modern perspective like Windows 2000 and say "this was the pinnacle of UI".
Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.
Just a few examples of what makes Windows 2000 barely usable for me (and pretty much anyone who grew up with later UIs):
No central place to search for software, files, or settings. You have to dig through layers of menu trees like an idiot.
No visual preview to find the right open window. You have to alt-tab through a list of windows like an idiot.
No way of separating windows into work spaces / desktops (whatever you might call them). You have to either constantly kill windows or work your way through layers of them. The point above doesn't help with that.
This one has less to do with Windows 2000 but was part of the state of the art of the time for software: Walls of icons and buttons and not even a way to group them. Sometimes the entire window is just one wall of tiles sometimes there's the tool bar of doom at the top.
On top of lacking usability, Windows 2000 is ugly. Mostly because all main UI elements like buttons are visually thrust into your face by faux 3d elevation. This had it's place at the time when most of your users would not have had experience with computer UIs in the first place. With those users UI designers back then felt they needed to overemphasize visual cues from the real world. Nowadays you can show the user just a box or something that looks like a link (because people are used to browsers now). Maybe give a cue by changing the emphasis on hover.
The other reason that comes to mind why Windows 2000 is so ugly is colors. Again, this is due to its time and the capabilities of graphics cards back then that mostly didn't allow more subtle color differences.
I'm just using Windows 2000 as pars pro toto here. Pretty much all graphical UIs back then were lacking modern usability features and UI sensibilities, regardless of OS.
> Perhaps it's that well-known psychological effect where people self-report higher productivity when using an interface they find more visually appealing, whereas studying them proves the opposite is true.
You have your slightly condescending explanation for why we disagree and I have mine. Let me give you a hint quoting Douglas Adams:
"I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
I'm not sure if we should use "gold standard" together with the little piece of garbage that notepad.exe was for most of its existence. It has been the bane for anyone who had to do work on locked down Windows servers and had to, e.g., edit files with modern encodings. They fixed some of it in the meantime, but the bitter taste remains.
You do have a point, because it shows an unfortunate inflation in words. That said, on a fresh windows install, notepad was usually an island of stability in a sea of sorrow. The day I saw AI introduced to it, I knew the end is nigh.
When you have to edit text files on a locked down Windows server that are UTF-8 like everything else in the world and your only tool is notepad.exe, it's the island of pain.
GP and I are apparently from that universe where you remember that YouTube wasn't the only popular video on demand game in town and, e.g., Vimeo is older than YouTube. They only won because they didn't charge you for uploading or watching. They could afford to undercut the competition since they were bought by Google.
They were also somehow the only ones that offered music videos without being shut down.
And right there it is where you will get ads in LLM responses. Or opinion manipulation like we have seen with Cambridge Analytica. Next time ChatGPT might always recommend Amazon.
This is exactly the kind of ignorant chest thumping arrogance that lead to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, destabilised the entire region, lead to the rise of IS, and eventually to streams of refugees heading for Europe. edit: tone
Mexico, Puerto Rico, Samoa, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Panama, and the Philippines?
In the last 100 years the trend has been been for America to invade a country and try to install a friendly government rather than formally annex them - Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria.
So it's not longer 30 years but 100? What the US did pre WW2 was in no way abnormal or worse than that what every other powerful was doing..
Also US never technically invaded Lybia, Yemen or Syria (unless you count their intervention to support the Kurdish and Iraqi governments against ISIS an invasion...)
What happened in Korea was the opposite of the invasion (of course the South Korea regime they were saving was extremely oppressive and arguably not worse at all than the one in the North at the time).
Also are you implying that the majority of military bases US has in other countries (especially in Europe) is involuntary?
Invading countries to annex them is not even that bad if you give full citizen rights to their population. Invading to occupy, destabilise and depredate is much worse.
> Invading countries to annex them is not even that bad if you give full citizen rights to their population.
How is that relevant to Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Whenever Russia takes territory they're filling mass graves with raped Ukrainian civilians.
American forces too have committed innumerable atrocities, and there is no forgiving that, but it doesn't support the premise above that Russia is in some way cleaner.
No intention to deny individual episodes of war crimes, but the ratio of civilian to military casualties in the conflict is pretty low, despite a drawn out war and massive military casualties: we're talking about 12-15 thousand civilian deaths in almost four years of war. Absolutely tragic but doesn't seem to indicate a genocidal intent. Compare with the widespread massacres of civilians perpetrated by Israel in Palestine.
Ukranian civilians sensibly fleeing for their lives when the front gets close has prevented many deaths, and doesn't change the facts of what happens when they don't escape.
There's 3.5 million people living in the Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine now. The Wikipedia entry about them even lists "forced Russification" as one of the abuses they suffer: "Ukrainians have been coerced into taking Russian passports and becoming Russian citizens". Now, as bad as this is, being forced to become a regular citizen of the occupying state is a far cry from being deported and murdered by that state. Nazi Germany wasn't giving German citizenship to Poles and Jews in occupied territories; Israel is not giving Israeli citizenship to Palestinians in occupied territories. Do you see the difference?
Putin himself has famously claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people: this is the very opposite of the ideological premise to justify a genocide.
From what I understand from friends who still spend a lot of time in Donetsk because their businesses are there, you might be taken to a basement and shot if you say the wrong thing.
It's pretty bad, but sure, if you just go along with it you'll probably be fine.
>this is the very opposite of the ideological premise to justify a genocide.
Genocide is an attempt to kill a group; That does not happen only by murdering people - it's also forced assimilation. In this case, Russia is directly violating article 2) e) of the Genocide Convention*: "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
>citizenship
Citizenship is not relevant to the genocide convention at all.
Putin has famously claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are the same people for the same reasons that Hitler claimed that the Sudetendeutsche are the same people as the Germans - to justify an illegal imperial attack on a neighbor.
Russian imperialism needs Ukraine, since without Ukraine there's no Russian empire. Russia invaded Ukraine out of imperialist delusion, not for humanitarian reasons.
You have thoroughly bought into Russian propagandist lies.
> for the same reasons that Hitler claimed that the Sudetendeutsche are the same people as the Germans
Indeed, but Hitler is not famous for mass-murdering the Sudetendeutsche.
And I never claimed that Russia invaded Ukraine for humanitarian reasons. I think it did because it could not tolerate a Ukraine fully integrated in the West and NATO- but this just means exercising political control over Ukraine, it doesn't imply an ethnic cleansing or genocide of Ukrainians.
We'll see about Venezuela, it's early to say. In Ukraine, a short conflict would have been better than a prolonged one, and in case of annexed territories, the status and civil rights of annexed populations should have been the focus of any peace agreement. The territory doesn't care who owns it, it's the people that suffer.
For example, the Israeli occupation and progressive annexation of Palestine is especially criminal because they have no intention of including the native population in their ethno-state- it's an annexation with ethnic cleansing or, if needed, genocide.
>Invading countries to annex them is not even that bad if you give full citizen rights to their population.
This is soviet bullshit, the Moscowitz did a lot of genocides you can find plenty of sources, so they were and are as bad as Israel because the Rusky/slavs in Ruzzia are indoctrinated to feel superior to the other non slaves in the empire and feel still a bit more superior then the rest of the slavs. You can look at the existing recent data from the Ruzzian stats and how the minorities are more in decline then the Ruskies.
So for uninformed people that might read this soviet guy comment, read a wikipedia summary of what moscowites did and Putin is still doing, I suggest not reading in detail, like reading books or interviews with vitims of this criminal empire you will fill a big amount of pain if you have empath on how this Ruscists treated humans , I will never forget the stuff Ir ead and better if I did not know the details.
Ruzzia, israle , USA all are bad but the situation is multidimensional and is not easy to say that Ruzzia is less bad then Nazis and are better then Israle etc., we cana dmit that criminal are criminals, dictators are dictators, bastardads are bastards and trolls are trolls.
Russia in the last 30 years invaded and occupied Moldova, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria - not to mention the atrocities committed in Africa.
But with the exception of Syria, Russia always had genocidal intent - deny cultures, erase them, and make those countries as unstable as possible while remaining occupied.
I'm not saying what the US did was good, or right, but there's a big difference.
The US never denied the existence of cultures, languages, etc.
Right, so what's the scope of time we're talking about here? Are we talking about the world post WW2, or are we going back to the Roman Empire?
Because if you want to "win" arguments by randomly swinging hundreds of years to make a point, then it's pointless, because anyone can pick a point in thousands of years of History to show "look - they were bad here".
I think discussions about modern history are sufficient for the post-WW2 period, as there was a global consensus on international law and the Charter of the UN.
If you hold grievances about events hundreds of years old to make points about current events, then it's pointless.
If you believe the US that colonized part of North America is the same as post-ww2 US, then I can understand.
I don't think they're the same, so many institutions were established that over the years that I don't see them as the former colony of the British crown.
But hey, if you want to discuss semantics, go for it.
Yeah, when you draw arbitrary limits (30 years for you it seems), it's easy to paint one side as the better one. Once you start to think a bit bigger, you start to realize most big nations act as the others, and it's just different flavors of "bad", yet they're all as bad as the others.
What about segregation then, is that recent enough for you? Or that wasn't about culture/language, so that too isn't applicable? I'm afraid that with rose-tinted glasses, everything has an explanation why your favorite is different than their favorite.
Why is the founding of the UN, at the end of WW2, and the signature of the UN Charter, considered an arbitrary event in modern History for you?
It's the biggest geopolitical event in modern History to prevent the death of millions, by attempting to stop the expansion of borders through military force and making countries recognize the borders of each of its members.
> What about segregation then, is that recent enough for you?
What about segregation? Where? In different European countries? USA? South Africa? India?
Was there a global consensus to end segregation? Or were different events at different points in time, achieved in different manners? Is there still segregation happening in some societies?
So all the countries Russia interfered with are neighbours, with hundreds of years of ethnic, cultural and religious disputes, while basically all the countries the US interfered with are across one or more oceans, with no historical disputes with the US, and happen to be resource rich.
Thanks for explaining why Russia is less unreasonable than the US.
"Historical disputes" is the most unreasonable claim to violate international law and the UN Charter lmao
You're basically saying that one countries interpretation of events is enough to annex another. That's the old logic of pre WW2 lol
Especially Russia that has revised their history so many times they even have a saying that "Russia's past is uncertain".
So to have that interpretation of what I said shows that you have a very poor understanding of History and current events, or it's just a deficient provocation.
So they invaded their own internationally recognized territory. Wonderful. By that standard Ukraine invaded Donbass after they declared themselves independent of Ukraine.
>Syria
Even more outlandish claim, considering they were invited by the government. Whether the west considered the government illegitimate or not didn't matter.
>Moldova
>Georgia
in both conflicts in protection of a minority, on whose territory a larger state laid claim using Soviet drawn borders and dissolution of the USSR. Since the Ukrainian conflict started I observed lots of enthusiasm for Soviet borders on the side of Russia's detractors, which were often drawn with territories assigned as a form of favoritism, simply because communist leadership in Moscow had better a relationship with the communist leaders of one of the ethnicities in question. That way historic Armenian land of Artsakh was assigned to Azerbaijan for example -- the recent ethnic cleansing outcome of that is well known.
The US just stole every good ever. The Maine. Union Fruit/Banana Company.
If the US tried to survive by just fair economics it would crumble into dust in less than a decade. Yet they use Latin America as their own backyard in order to avoid this.
And, well, as an European I have to say that France does the same with Africa in order to be semi on par with Germany. If not, their GDP would just be slightly better than Spain, if not worse because centralisation it's hell for modern times.
Some states in the US would do fine, OFC. But in order to support the whole USA, that's unfeasible. You can't have a country where a few powerhouses have to carry up the rest in a really innefective way, such as oil dependant transportation.
Meanwhile, the Chinese and Europe will just build non-polluting railways everywhere.
This is the strategic decision that was the last nail in the coffin for European battery cell manufacturing: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/bosch-shuns-battery...
It is a rational assessment of realities when it comes to high end production. Not every industrial environment can produce every kind of industry. At some point the costs are too high to overcome the difference.
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