China Has Whole Towns Focused on Making Electric Cars

This is incorrect, and has not been the case for a very long time, please don't spread FUD.

Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholly_Foreign-Owned_Enterpris...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/jasonyangsha/videos

China does what everyone else does, but usually better in the long game. I both admire it and am terrified by it. We helped make this game. And we can't simply talk about fairness when we're not the benefactors.

That was the case decades ago, but it hasn't been the case for a long time. For several decades, China has been progressively removing ownership restrictions from different sectors of the economy. It removed restrictions on auto parts in 1993. It removed restrictions on automobiles last year. Foreigners can actually own majority stakes in most sectors now.

Tesla is an example of this. They do not operate as a joint venture in China.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/05/24/news/car-auto-tariffs-us-ge...

https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3002533/no-sle...

Some are trying the "996" every other week thing now.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-18/tiktok-br...:

> ...[Bytedance] is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise on Facebook in the hope of luring away more users. Over the past three months, for instance, 13 percent of all the ads seen by users of Facebook’s Android app were for TikTok, says app-analytics firm Apptopia.

That's been their MO in China as well. IIRC, the mainland Chinese version, Douyin, was being heavily and repeatedly promoted with the Chinese equivalent of ads during the Superbowl.

"The towns are typical of China’s command-led approach to its economy."

It takes time to develop engineering expertise, but China has some great engineers who are able to teach the younger generation thus building up a system of being great. I don't know if China is leveraging this internally, but that is lack of personal knowledge. I believe they are going to transform to be another place to get quality products in 20 years.

My guess is India will mostly skip the cheap junk phase of manufacturing: we have been developing their engineering expertise more then their manufacturing.

One could argue that both the Nazi and the Soviet programs had roots in pre-existing system setup up before the totally authoritarian ones took over. For Germany, Imperial Germany + the Weimar Republic (both flawed democracies, but still, democracies) and for the USSR, Imperial Russia, which ok, might have not have been democratic in any modern sense, but was pretty liberal from a scientific and artistic point of view. Way more so than the USSR.

If anything, both the Nazis and Soviets drained their scientific communities so much that by the end of the regimes they almost destroyed them.

During the cold war, little progress has been made engeenering that were not benefiting the wzr effort. Source: my last gf was born on the other side of the wall.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The biggest reasons are the loss of domestic experience curves [1] to other countries when we shifted to a service based economy. The second is the hyper politicized process of even creating a factory, let alone operating one, even when you have the direct backing of the executive branch [2].

The other one (allegedly) is the idea that the local labor workforce won't want to do any of the hard/dirty jobs or can't do them cost effectively, often because 1 and 2 but other reasons. So there are higher initial costs for automation.

But otherwise there are plenty of good reasons to operate production domestically once the technical and political environment supports such a thing. Which might happen in the future, although few mainstream parties seem to actually want that to happen without their idealized or prior worldview being appeased.

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

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-06/inside-wi...

Not saying this strategy is bad, but it will inevitably end up like deserted coal cities if the industry is too mono-cultural.

What does this refer to? The EU has generally been strong on privacy protection.

And yet coal plants are shutting down and production slowing.

Most of that "committed" has been throwing some money at research for political reasons, but I don't think there has been a REAL political effort to push coal for much of it as much as gather some votes with some funding and vocal support .... and just let the chips fall where they may.

I think there's a vast range of possibilities when it comes to "support" from elected officials and "control" of a market or such.

So?

In any democracy government is going to lag the population/private sector when it comes to basically everything because you need more agreement before doing anything than you do in a private cooperation or authoritarian government system so the government winds up deadlocked or going back and fourth on an issue until a strong consensus emerges.

When you have cheap storage in the form of coal or oil barrels, it makes sense to just use energy whenever. But that will change - people will change their behaviors and business processes to adapt to the new conditions. Energy-expensive activities will become asynchronous - programmed to run whenever energy is cheap. Guaranteed energy - knowing you'll have a certain amount of kWh to spend at a specific time - will be expensive, and will be mostly used for prioritizing when the production is low.

Once your real base load drops enough, you won't need much storage to keep up even when production is abnormally low. Keeping a coal plant for the rare situations in which storage isn't enough, simply won't be economical. A natgas plant is more likely.