The size of BYD's factory | Hacker News Reader

The size of BYD's factory

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370 pointselsewhen615 comments

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 completed.

When you zoom out far enough in ACME mapper, the factory disappears. (I'm guessing that's an older image.)

Yep, pretty common for different zoom levels to be different time points. ACME is using plane photography for its high zoom images. You could try zoom.earth for hourly/12hourly satellite imagery.

Although it is generally true that aerial photography is used to supplant satellite imagery in these sorts of public map services, I'm pretty confident that the image of BYD factory here is actual satellite imagery.

Yeah, China tends to classify aerial survey photos as strategic intelligence assets.

Did a scientific project there. It was a whole thing. The local/city/regional CCP branch was not cooperative with even the most innocuous low altitude drone data gathering from foreigners for ecology studies, despite sponsorship by local & national universities.

There is even a random-geometric-distortion obfuscation layer that you have to apply to maps you're allowed to serve up publicly while doing business in China, like one of those distorted mesh grid paintings. Takes in WGS84 and spits out a nonsense projection a hundred meters away.

Why did you expect local officials to stick their necks out for you?

They don’t make the relevant laws but can be punished by higher authorities for breaking them.

Unless it could be legally guranteed any potential punishment would be transferred to your team’s shoulders, it’s bizarre to expect someone else sitting in some municipal office to take the risk.

Why did you expect a foreigner who is not from China to realize that they'd be inhibited by the local authorities from doing work they were invited to do by those same local authorities? It's bizarre to think that it's bizarre that a foreigner might merely express some surprise by that.

Very common for one branch of a bureaucracy to be at odds with another branch.

not necessarily, it might just depend who is asking. You can get a lot done in general by having the right person/party ask for you.

Which would make sense if it was assumed there were only a few people in the entire bureaucracy… but doesn’t make sense when everyone involved knows, ahead of time, there are millions...

Probably thousands even in some random small city.

I’m guessing no one on the team had ever coordinated even a thousand people before on some complex legal issue. So it’s just bizarre to suddenly expect anyone capable of that would do so on their behalf and reach out with invitations…

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.

They were probably optimistic, incorrectly. It's easy to think everything will work when you have a written guarantee from the government, and have never personally experienced a dysfunctional, authoritarian bureaucracy.

An invitation from a local official can not be a written guarantee of something beyond them?

It’s not even a guarantee of getting the relevant visa in time, that’s true for every big country I know of.

Ohh I didn’t think you could get satellite images at this kind of resolution!

The way Chinese towns are organized is incredible. I'm impressed by this map.

No freight train connection to the factory??

There is. In fact it's called a "land port" for a reason, the park has a huge freight yard connected to 2 rail lines it's just not shown in this picture because it's shared infrastructure of the industrial park.

Yeah I think so. Zhengzhou has perhaps the largest yard in China. The factory is there for a reason.

I don't think there is any railway link to the site, at least in the short term. Both of the two rail lines nearby are passanger only high speed (250 km/h to 350 km/h) lines (references: https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%83%91%E9%98%9C%E9%AB%98%E... , https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%83%91%E6%B8%9D%E9%AB%98%E... ). The train yard ~5 km north of the factory is 郑州南动车所, also a high speed rail depot.

That area is called 郑州港区 (literal translation Zhengzhou "port area", full name: 郑州航空港经济综合实验区) is actually for it's closeness to the airport (ZHCC). English reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhengzhou_Airport_Economy_Zone .

Toggle the layer to "Map" and you can find the railway lines easily, although train in the depot looks like a high speed train (huge, long windscreen).

All that track connected to the depot you are talking about is high speed passenger infrastructure. Just touching the south side of the factory is what looks like an old single track line if you follow it to the west there's a passing loop just the other side of the nearest village. If you switch to back and forth between map view and satellite view this eventually leads to a spur shown in map view that stops at a road. Not sure if the line is under construction or decommissioned or what.

I'm uncertain what to look for, since there's this "land port" which refers to high speed passenger and freight trains being brought together.

https://english.henan.gov.cn/2024/07-02/3016355.html

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.

Though you can see the same alignment as the factory in town further to the west, with newer streets.

I guess it makes sense to align the factory to this grid, and not to the older grid that followed the fields.

The number of construction vehicles doing something versus sitting around waiting for labor in that shot is impressive.

Yeah, I have never seen something like that in America in my life. Always plenty of machines sitting around, and every few weeks some guys will hop on them for the day, but other than that they just sit there. It almost looks AI generated how densely packed those are - though I assume that this is real footage.

With China's real estate sector stagnating (because they've built enough housing for future demand to an excess, broadly speaking), all of that capacity is moving towards clean energy manufacturing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-china-became-the-worlds-...

China scaling and efficiency is really something else. it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism

They’re certainly good at building.

Actually utilizing that capacity is something else entirely; there are factories less than ten years old shuttering due to overcapacity. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/business/china-auto-facto...

And the rush to subsidize more capacity is a big contributor to local government debt burdens in China, which is estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%.

China’s debt load fluctuates if you consider just the central government, local governments, and SOEs owned by either the central or local governments. Then you have private sector debt. SOEs are where a lot of china’s shadow debt comes from (localities ask SOEs they control to fund public projects of their own books), this is what pushes China’s debt load over 100%.

There’s that and the LGFVs financed by land sales which are all off official balance sheets.

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.

You are never going to get exactly the right amount of capacity, so the question is whether you want to err on the side of too much or too little. Too little might often be more efficient, but there are undeniable strategic benefits to having too much. The events of the last few years have taught us all some painful lessons about the hidden costs of JIT and lean. China might have got the balance wrong, but they aren't prima facie wrong.

They are prima facie wrong, their overcapacity is bad and actively harmful, this isn't a sign of it succeeding, its a sign of desperation from it failing.

There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.

Dazzled by the spectacle, this misses that their economy is characterized by deflationary headwinds due to a massive, massive over-investment in property, and this just squeezes the toothpaste (debt taken on to goose GDP) to another side of the tube. (housing to batteries)

> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago

Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?!

There's also a type of western mind that automatically dismisses the odds of a different country succeeding, based on nothing but the fact that they are using a different approach (on the surface). It's a kind if circular reasoning: our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have. To subvert the Simpsons - "the best so far"

Edit: I'm far from a Sinophile, but there's a certain willful blindness, concerning an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west, regardless of all the systemic weaknesses that show up again and again. It would suck for a dictator-for-life leading the biggest economy in the world, but healthy minds would introspect to see how we can do better, like we should, right? I have no doubt out leaders will pick the wrong lessons, like social credit scores and pervasive surveillance

You don’t have to apologize, man. I was on a Pullman train once but it wasn’t quite a bullet train. I also rode a Western train named Orient Express.

People forget that China existed before communism. Hell only Mao's idiotic experiment only lasted a few decades. China has always been capitalist. It's why you can find a store run by Chinese expats in the middle of the Suriname jungle.

that cant possibly be true because capitalism has only existed for a small portion of the thousands of years of chinese history. capitalism doesn't just mean having stores, or having markets

From an East Asian perspective what China is doing really isn't anything new and with the same pitfalls as the former Asian tigers.

>our system is the best because we're the best, because of the system we have.

This isn't what's happening at all. The causes and reasons why infrastructure and Western cities are so bad have been studied for decades and are well known, just as we've been studying what makes Tokyo or Hong Kong work so well. People are constantly critiquing the underlying system of incentives and entangled interests, you can hundreds of popular threads on HN, Reddit, MSM, hell even with Elon Musk's DOGE.

The only time when I see the mythical self-convinced westerner evoked is precisely when critique of other cultures come in, often from cultures that feel a need to constantly defend themselves.

> Where in the US can one find the secret, cross-country high-speed rail built in the roaring twenties?!

Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium.

The reason people think China will crash is that their system isn't unique, has been tried many times before and eventually always fails. That isn't circular reasoning, it's reasoning based on prior experience. China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why. Remember that for much of the history of the USSR people in the west were dazzled by its rapid industrialization and apparent achievements. First country to put a man in space! Many people in that era genuinely wondered if central planning was just a superior way to do things. In hindsight we can say that it wasn't: with enormous focus such economies were able to pull off heavy engineering projects at scale, but at the cost of ignoring consumer goods and with a dysfunctional economy that was brittle to its core.

End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away. He was shaken to his core and cried on the flight home, asking himself what they had done to Russia's poor people. The USSR collapsed just a few years later, Yeltsin became president and moved Russia in the direction of a market economy.

> Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead

Both being impossible to decouple from fossil fuels consumption at current scale, essentially.

> End result: when Yeltsin visited NASA in the 1980s he demanded a surprise inspection of a local supermarket. NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away

I have no idea whether this anecdote is true, but it wouldn't be surprise me one bit for an always-drank dude who made the army shell the parliament of his own country.

> Nowhere because the USA has an excellent internal flight and interstate highway system instead. Railways were already becoming uncompetitive by the 1920s and now live on mostly in parts of the world where they already exist, where land is at a premium.

The fact that railways were becoming uncompetitive in the mid-1900s is why high-speed rail was developed. The Japanese pioneered high-speed rail in the 1960s, dramatically increasing the speed that passenger trains could run. That not only made trains competitive again, but hands-down the best mode of transportation for distances of a few hundred kilometers. The result is that new high-speed rail networks are being built around the world, not just in places where rail is already prominent.

In places where high-speed rail exists, it has taken most of the market share away from short-haul flights. If you want to get from Paris to Brussels (300 km), or from Beijing to Shanghai (1200 km), you take the train. This is despite the fact that Western Europe and China have excellent highway networks (China's highway network is now superior to the US interstate system) and plenty of airports.

> China is still a communist country: we know how that story ends and why.

China is not at all like the USSR.

> NASA didn't impress him, but the 30,000+ products for sale in a mundane shop blew him away.

China has an absolutely crazy abundance of consumer products. These days, Americans turn to Ali Express to get random widgets or knick-knacks of any kind. China is the place where you can pull out your smartphone, order pretty much anything, and have it arrive by courier 15 minutes later (okay, that's a slight exaggeration, but not much of one).

People take HSR sometimes because it's heavily subsidized, especially in China. Without government intervention rail can't compete against airports and roads. China's railway is in a staggering amount of debt due to mass overbuilding of the sort that would have bankrupted any normal company in a market economy long ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/vt7jrz/a_whopping_90...

> China is not at all like the USSR ... China has an absolutely crazy abundance of consumer products

Products for export, yes. It doesn't have a particularly strong consumer economy because its model is to keep Chinese labour poor whilst building up huge foreign reserves and gutting foreign competitors. That's why Chinese consumption is still far below the US:

https://capx.co/xi-jinpings-coercion-is-destroying-his-own-e...

"private consumption accounts for just 39% of the economy – extremely low by world standards (the figure in the US is 68%). But there is no consumer confidence, with 80% of family wealth tied up in property and no meaningful social safety net."

The TGV in France makes a profit. As does the Shinkansen in Japan. Intercity routes in the UK aren't high speed but are all profitable. Rural rail lines are not profitable and commuter lines are about break-even, depending on the fares charged. E.g. the tube in London is break even as it receives no operating subsidy, but it's quite expensive compared to e.g. the Paris / Madrid / Berlin metros. If you want to lubricate congestion in your city an easy way to do it is to encourage people to take a more space efficient form of transport by subsidising this. As a business proposition it probably makes sense for the overall region in the same way that it makes sense for a factory to move stuff around on conveyer belts rather than having everyone carry stuff from one station to the next. Britain has low productivity compared to the western EU average. It is posited that one of the big reasons for this is that our infrastructure is a bit shit.

TGV doesn't make a profit by any normal accounting standards. As far as I know every line except Paris-Lyon has received large subsidies. The Bordeaux-Toulouse line requires a subsidy of 35 EUR per year per passenger for the next 50 years. Nor are tickets even cheap as a consequence. Supposedly it's cheaper to drive the moment you have at least two people in the car (I haven't checked that claim, probably there are routes where it's not true).

Rail in the UK requires subsidies. Once again you can play games with non-standard accounting, like by excluding the cost of track and stations, but those are the bulk of the costs. If rail subsidies were zeroed tomorrow every single railway in the UK would go bankrupt the day after. This is also true for the Tube which certainly isn't break even - where on earth did you read that? They were once able to cover daily operating costs from ticket fares, but Sadiq Khan put an end to that and now they can't even cover operational expenditure without subsidies from central government. Even back when they were able to balance the daily books they only achieved that by starving capital expenditure and not building up any kind of profit margin, meaning that any kind of upgrades or repairs have to come out of additional subsidies.

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-ar...

The Shinkansen has a long history of building unprofitable lines which led to JR's eventual "bankruptcy" in 1987, ending up 28 trillion yen in debt. After being semi-privatized they were given a lot more leeway to shut down their unprofitable lines, but even so, it's viable mostly due to the government ensuring they have access to nearly unlimited risk free and repayment-schedule free money (ZIRP).

Passenger railways are fundamentally not possible to run as ordinary free market companies. They were run that way once, but the railways were built out on the back of huge private sector investments in infrastructure. Governments the world over then nationalized them and redirected funds towards staff/union pay settlements or reducing ticket fares, cutting infrastructure spending to compensate. The result is a massive overhang of tech debt that now can't be paid off without unrealistically high ticket price rises.

British productivity is low because it has cheap labour due to effectively unlimited immigration. Companies invest in productivity improvements when labour becomes expensive, otherwise they don't bother, it's easier to just throw more people at a problem. None of that is really a secret, it just doesn't get talked about much because the British ruling classes don't like to criticize immigration lest they be called racist - however, this is a purely economic issue. Railways hardly matter for productivity and commuting may even harm it for many people, as evidenced by the popularity of working from home.

Citations please. I believe the opposite of much of what you said is true. Here are my references.

SNCF is profitable: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/02/24/sncf-re...

Pre-pandemic the main intercity routes were all private operated. The operators had to pay track access charges to cover maintenance costs but they also had to bid to the government to buy the rights to operate the franchise. I.e they had to say how much profit per train service they were willing to pay to the government for the right to operate. The privatised rail sector collapsed because these companies overbid for these rights not because the routes themselves were fundamentally unprofitable.

TFL operating surplus: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2023/march/...

Japan has never closed a shinkansen route. They have closed many rural branch lines though.

Britain has a low immigration rate compared to Europe. E.g net gain ~750k compared to 1.9m to Germany last year. Germany also has high rates of unemployment for unskilled labour yet they have a sophisticated and highly automated high tech manufacturing economy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration#/media/File%3ANe...

That TFL press release says they rely heavily on subsidies from central government, will continue doing so and that reconfirmation of these central subsidies is a "pressing need". Don't be misled by propaganda from public transport authorities. They always lie about their own economics, unfortunately. It's fundamentally not a form of transport that would exist if it weren't kept alive by governments. The other stuff is all like that too. They are "profitable" if you use a definition of profit that would result in jail time in the private sector.

> The 2023/24 budget has been developed on the assumption that the current funding agreement with Government, which lasts until April 2024, remains in place and is fully honoured, including in relation to adjusting the quantum of support provided to TfL in 2023/24 to reflect latest inflation rates.

While TfL has a current funding agreement with the Government until the end of March 2024, there is also a pressing need for the Government to confirm the £475m that TfL needs in 2024/25 to support the delivery of the committed contracts for rolling stock and signalling on the Piccadilly line and the DLR.

The Government has consistently recognised in the funding settlements that TfL is not expected to fund major capital projects from its operating incomes.

Air travel is also heavily subsidized, and road travel even more so. One of the real reasons for the interstate highway system (not the purported reason -- defense -- that got the bill through Congress) was to break the back of the rail monopolists (and, importantly, the rail unions). The American state chose to literally invent a whole new kind of socialized transport (marketed as a form of consumer individualism) than just nationalize and upgrade the railroads like every other civilized country.

Air travel is taxed not subsidized. As far as I know there are no subsidies to the airline industry, unless you get into very ideological arguments by claiming the US military is a form of subsidy to anything that depends on fossil fuels. Double checking Wikipedia confirms this. After a huge page listing all the taxes, there's one unsourced paragraph claiming that "some" governments subsidise air travel with a "who?" dispute filed against the claim:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_taxation_and_subsidie...

Road travel is usually profitable for the government as fuel taxes cover more than the costs of building and maintaining the roads. Drivers end up subsidizing rail in every country that I know of. It's possible EV cars will start to change this.

US passenger rail is nationalized. Amtrak is majority owned by the federal government, for example.

There's not really a way to have this discussion without being ideological but military contracts, fossil fuel production subsidies (yes there is a tax on the fuel, but also a subsidy to the people pumping and refining it), and municipally-financed airports (including the tax subsidy on muni bonds) all seem to be pretty direct subsidies that the air travel industry would not exist without. Air traffic control is also a 100% governmental function that is necessary for the industry to exist.

On what you would probably term the more ideological side, there is noise pollution, environmental costs (this one is admittedly likely a wash -- it's not as if our airports would be nature reserves if they weren't used for aviation), and presumably a major hit to revenue and quality in major metro areas -- is O'Hare really the best possible use of that extremely extremely valuable piece of Chicago real estate, or could it generate more revenue for the city and happiness for citizens as housing, shops, commercial and industrial space, and parks?

Anyway have a good day. I'm glad you're a fan of motoring and aviation and hope it brings you great joy.

I don't get much joy from long distance travel in any form tbh ;) I keep posting in this thread because people keep making untrue claims about transport economics, and it's important to be realistic here.

So we go unto the breach once more: in the USA the government run parts of the air system are funded by taxes on fliers, not direct subsidies. ATS is a part of the FAA which is funded by such taxes:

https://usafacts.org/articles/who-funds-the-faa-you-whenever...

Airports usually fund themselves via fees charged to airlines, which are then ultimately charged to the flier. You can see them in the fare breakdowns sometimes. I'm sure there are tiny airports in the US that are subsidized because governments love subsidizing uneconomic things for prestige reasons, but it isn't structurally needed.

In the US, fuel taxes and tolls combined only cover about 35% of the cost of building and maintaining roads. The rest of the cost is covered by the federal, state and local governments.

That's because gas taxes are an unusually live wire in US politics, not because roads are fundamentally uneconomic. Until 2008 gas taxes did cover highway spending, and they now require general transfers because gas taxes weren't indexed to inflation. According to this website the taxes weren't increased since 1993, so in practice the US system has been deliberately starved of sustainable revenue.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-highway-trust...

"Congress could pay for projected highway and mass transit spending by simply raising the federal tax rate on gasoline and diesel fuel. Increasing those rates by 15 cents per gallon along with indexing the rates for inflation would increase federal revenues by $240 billion over ten years (CBO 2022)."

Balancing the highway books in the USA would be easy, and it's done already in most other parts of the world.

You've now admitted that most of the cost of maintaining and building roads in the US is borne by government subsidies.

I just looked up how Germany funds its road network. It turns out that 2/3rds of the funding comes from taxes (subsidies, in other words).[0]

0. https://bmdv.bund.de/DE/Themen/Mobilitaet/Infrastrukturplanu...

Funding is a subsidy only if it comes from tax/borrowing sources that aren't related to the thing being subsidized. If taxes levied on driving fund driving, that's not a subsidy. Also that page seems to be talking about all transport including railways, but we're only interested in roads here.

Germany spends ~16B EUR per year on roads at the federal level:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1293915/federal-expendit...

The amount it gets from motor taxes is vastly in excess of that:

https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Enviro...

That's not surprising because Germany has the highest motor taxes in Europe:

https://www.acea.auto/press-release/motor-vehicle-taxation-b...

The US does subsidize roads but it doesn't have to, hasn't done so in the recent past and arguably shouldn't be doing so.

Germany is highly federal. The federal government only covers a portion of the cost of road construction and maintenance, with state and local governments carrying much (a majority, I think) of costs.

From what I see in your 2nd link, motor taxes do not even cover the federal government's contribution to road construction and maintenance, not to even mention what state and local governments pay.

You're saying the US doesn't have to subsidize roads, but removing that subsidy would require the US to raise fuel taxes and tolls by 200%. Rail can also break even if prices are increased. The reason governments subsidize HSR is because it has positive externalities.

> People take HSR sometimes because it's heavily subsidized, especially in China.

Most forms of transportation are subsidized. Good transportation infrastructure benefits the entire economy, so governments subsidize it. The fact that people can travel between cities easily and quickly facilitates business.

> China's railway is in a staggering amount of debt due to mass overbuilding

HSR is heavily utilized in China. A lot of the continued rail construction is because existing lines are butting up against capacity constraints.

> Products for export, yes.

I'm talking about products in their own shops. Chinese consumers have access to a much wider array of consumer products than Americans have.

> private consumption accounts for just 39% of the economy

Now, you're mixing completely different topics. Lower spending on consumption isn't because there aren't products on the shelves. It has to do with things like Chinese people's propensity to save, China directing more of its GDP into investment, and on the flipside, the United States' trade deficit.

the low consumption as part of GDP also has to do with different ways of reporting GDP. they dont include some government funded services in the consumption share of GDP, when similar services are included in other countries consumption shares.

china consumes 30% of cars, 20% of mobile phones, 40% of televisions, 25% of furniture, etc. in basically every consumer category they exceed 20%. how can that be true and at the same time they have an abnormally low "true" consumption rate?

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-household...

https://asiatimes.com/2023/11/consumption-in-china-is-it-rea...

Most forms of transport aren't subsidized. Air travel and road travel isn't. Cargo shipping isn't.

> The fact that people can travel between cities easily and quickly facilitates business.

Governments like claiming this but dig in and you'll find they have no robust evidence for it. It also just fails a quick reality check: if it were true then passenger railways would be profitable in their own right, as businesses would be happy to buy tickets for employees at their true costs. Yet passenger rail is never profitable and what we see in reality is lots of workers preferring to work from home than take even the subsidized railways into the cities.

You can argue for trains as a lifestyle thing, maybe even an environmental thing although EV are changing that. But you can't argue for them economically.

> HSR is heavily utilized in China.

HSR is famously mostly empty in China. Go read accounts of anyone who has travelled on the newer lines.

> Lower spending on consumption isn't because there aren't products on the shelves

Nobody stacks shelves with products that will never be sold. Lower spending on consumption means the goods are being exported, and Chinese people aren't buying what they make because they don't have enough trust in the system to do so. Hence so much money being ploughed into real estate bubbles (an attempt to save money in something that's hard to confiscate).

> Air travel and road travel isn't. Cargo shipping isn't.

I don't know about cargo shipping, but both air and road travel are subsidized (and I strongly suspect the same is the case for cargo shipping).

> It also just fails a quick reality check: if it were true then passenger railways would be profitable in their own right, as businesses would be happy to buy tickets for employees at their true costs.

What you're effectively arguing is that the only way to measure whether basic infrastructure has positive externalities is to ask whether it turns a profit. By that argument, all government spending on infrastructure is wasteful - a position that I think is obviously wrong.

> HSR is famously mostly empty in China. Go read accounts of anyone who has travelled on the newer lines.

I've traveled on Chinese HSR many times. It is extremely heavily used. Trains are usually packed. I've had to buy first-class tickets before, simply because the regular carriages were completely sold out (luckily, first class is not too expensive on Chinese HSR, and the upgrade is definitely worth it).

What are you basing your impression of HSR being empty on? Are you basing that on newspaper articles in Western press, on first-hand experience, on data, or on something else?

> Nobody stacks shelves with products that will never be sold.

You began by comparing China to the USSR, and talking about Yeltsin was shaken by the abundance of consumer products in the US. This comparison just completely fails when it comes to China. The China of today has a crazy abundance of consumer goods for sale. The malls are full of every type of shop with full shelves. There are packed markets with stalls selling everything. You can buy pretty much any consumer product you can imagine on your smartphone. There are endless numbers of couriers driving on electric scooters throughout every Chinese city, delivering people's online orders. Your image of what China is like is just completely out of date.

Yeltsin was trying to reform the Soviet system. He was a party higher up, surely he knew what he’d find in a supermarket. He’d had a long political career by the. My guy says the supermarket tour was “staged” in the sense that he knew what he was going to find and he knew what reaction would be politically helpful for his project.

This isn’t to say the Soviet Union was, like, a good pleasant place to live. But we shouldn’t accept Soviet propaganda just because it happens to align with our priors.

He didn't according to his biographer, and it definitely wasn't staged. The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop, see the photo on this page:

https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day

Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No comparison.

Censorship is a problem because it affects everyone, especially the higher ups. That's why he'd got into the habit of demanding surprise inspections. As a factory manager he'd accepted that everyone was always hiding the truth from him. In systems like that there isn't any point in the hierarchy where you your boss takes you to one side and says Boris, listen, there's a vault with all our secrets and truths, let me show you. It never happens. The people at the top have to believe in the system the most of all.

> The bafflement of his hosts is well recorded, as were his questions and his expressions as he explored the shop,

This isn’t really evidence that it wasn’t staged by him though. That is, he doesn’t need to tell the host that he’s going to react strongly. He was a political operator, I’m sure he’d be happy to dupe some supermarket owner.

> Soviet supermarkets were drastically more impoverished at that time. No comparison.

> Censorship is a problem because it affects everyone, especially the higher ups. That's why he'd got into the habit of demanding surprise inspections. As a factory manager he'd accepted that everyone was always hiding the truth from him. In systems like that there isn't any point in the hierarchy where you your boss takes you to one side and says Boris, listen, there's a vault with all our secrets and truths, let me show you. It never happens. The people at the top have to believe in the system the most of all.

Sure, but this wasn’t secret information. America was broadcasting information about our wealth around the world. I guess we probably have people on this site who were in the Soviet Union during the 80’s. Maybe they can recall what they thought was going on over here.

> Sure, but this wasn’t secret information

Of course it was! All information about the true state of the west was censored and controlled. Today North Korea does the same thing for the same reason.

"Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_Soviet_Union

"Due to the appearance of foreign radio stations broadcasting in Russian territory and their immunity from censorship, as well as the appearance of a large number of shortwave receivers, massive jamming of these stations was applied in the USSR using high-power radio-electronic equipment. It continued for almost 60 years until the end of the Cold War. The Soviet radio censorship network was the most extensive in the world."

> Censorship in the Soviet Union was pervasive and strictly enforced

Do you suppose Yeltsin didn't have access to the uncensored information before his visit? Or that Soviet spies who sent in hyper-accurate maps of US city infrastructure wouldn't be asked to report on the booming economic success of American retail?

Russian intelligence hiding bad news entirely from Russian leadership is a long standing tradition.

It's how we get three-day special operations in Ukraine.

Case in point: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-war-russia-genera...

I think that is a different issue. There’s an incentive to not report problems upwards if there’s a tradition of shooting the messenger.

Yeltsin was purged from the party because he gave a "secret speech" calling for more aggressive economic reforms, and then placed under so much pressure he tried to commit suicide. The tradition of shooting messengers was alive and well in the USSR.

> Do you suppose Yeltsin didn't have access to the uncensored information before his visit?

That was the case yes. I don't understand this insistence that he was faking anything. Why would he do that? The whole episode just made him and his delegation look stupid to the Americans, would not have been reported in the USSR itself, and he stated clearly that he was shocked by what he saw.

The way all far left regimes work whether the USSR, North Korea, Cuba or China is that due to pervasive censorship information can only flow top down, not organically as it does in societies with freedom of speech. But information is also progressively hidden and distorted as it gets passed up the chain from the underlings who discover it originally. The result is that people at the top aren't really more informed than people at the bottom. They think they are because they have access to secret reports, but they're being fed whatever they want to hear. This is why nobody trusts Chinese GDP numbers.

Yeltsin especially wouldn't have known anything. In the 1980s he wasn't the leader of the USSR, that was Gorbachev. Gorbachev did understand the weakness in abstract terms, but probably didn't realize the true extent of the differences for people on the ground. Yeltsin was a member of the nomenklatura in Moscow in charge of city construction projects, so high ranking but not high enough to be given foreign intelligence. Moreover just a year before his trip to Randalls (the supermarket) he was in a bitter fight with the party and had just been purged. The pressure was so intense he resigned from the Politburo - something nobody had ever done before - and then tried to kill himself.

But Yeltsin recovered and his criticism of the party was popular. In May 1989 he was elected to a seat on the Supreme Soviet, the fake Soviet parliament. He still didn't matter and still wouldn't have had any exemption from censorship, or access to sensitive foreign intelligence. He visited NASA in September 1989, just a few months later. At no point in his career up to that point would he have ever been trusted with sensitive information.

Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his 2000 biography, Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life (St. Martin's Press): "For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. 'What have they done to our poor people?' he said after a long silence." He added, "On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the 'pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments'." He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, "I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans." An aide, Lev Sukhanov, was reported to have said that it was at that moment that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed" inside his boss.[95]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Yeltsin#CPSU_career

Even if the information about our wealth was available; it was likely discounted and ignored; even North Korea can make charade supermarkets as necessary.

There's a difference between hearing something and seeing it everywhere.

North Koreans watch smuggled South Korean videos. These show cars, shops and so on, and the northerners assume the videos are showing the best of South Korea, not normal life.

Warren Buffet (as Berkshire Hathaway) bought Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) for a reason - it is very profitable.

The merger of Canadian Pacific with Kansas City Southern is even larger, and is now a railway that spans North America from Vancouver to Veracruz.

The freight railway system in North America is massive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNSF_Railway

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Pacific_Kansas_City

Yes but we're not talking about freight. HSR is never used for that.

Amtrack mostly runs on freight lines. BNSF actually controls a Metra line in Chicago out of their headquarters.

I agree and see it all the time just the general attitude towards China is disdain when they’re arguably way ahead of us and we just don’t want to admit it. They are full speed EV and we are attempting to roll it back.

For those old enough to remember, we heard it all before in the 1980's about Japan so experience has made us circumspect.

But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have. Everyone decries executives who "only look as far as next quarter's profits", and while admittedly at the margins that can have perverse incentives, in the large it demands that management put capital to work at profitable enterprises selling goods and services the public actually want.

Japan was different in that it never became the world's factory, and then, manufacturing skills hadn't atrophied in the west, so it's a little different now. Even so, past performance is no guarantee for future results.

> But even more so, markets enforce discipline on capital that state directed firms don't have

I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs.

Also, China seems to have deployed a hybrid strategy: the national and regional governments provide incentives to industries, but the individual companies compete against each other. Product-wise, US defense contractors have done surprisingly well under a more extreme version of this regime (cost-plus contracts) for decades.

> I struggle to reconcile this with stock buy-backs.

Would it offend your sensibilities less if they paid dividends with that money?

Buybacks are simply a more tax advantageous means of returning profits to share holders.

Similarly debt financed buybacks are a morally neutral way to change the capital structure of the firm by replacing equity with debt.

This "market discipline" also requires that companies only look for their immediate future and next quarter profits. This makes it hard to do anything long term, which is exactly what China is doing. Even companies like Google, that expressly said to make decisions based on a long term view, are pushed by the markets to consider only their current profits, which reflects in the changes we see in the company.

Most Chinese firms are also very short term focused as the Chinese would regularly lament. But somehow as a system they show persistence. A good example is the solar industry with many bankruptcies of the earlier giants, yet the baton gets passed on and they keep at it. I think because of the sky high savings rate they can afford (or even prefer) to have asset heavy industries. Even with financial failures the hard assets get passed on (as opposed to financial firms). Large projects are funded by loans. Banks prefer hard assets because they have collateral. Equity holders contribute through intangibles, i.e. operating expertise. If they fail banks foreclose and find new operators. US used to be like that. Railroads, airlines, factories etc routinely go through bankruptcies. But the equity markets learned their lessons and now hate hard assets. With heavy asset you need leverage to get decent ROE which makes you vulnerable to the business cycle and puts you in a weak position bargaining with third parties like unions, class action lawyers or debt holders.

Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad in a nation that had most of its airports build out 60 years ago is an excellent pattern match for odd complaints.*

Thinking whether you're a Sinophile is a subject of discussion, and then most damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail" shows there's a lot more going on here than the idea that maybe overcapacity is good. Way more than I expected, so I'll leave it at "overcapacity is bad". :)

* n.b. for future arguments I'd avoid this, a map shows china's is cross country in that you can piece together, exactly one route that is high speed only, requires multiple transfers, and leaves you about 20% short of a full horizontal trip cross country while taking a winding route that wasn't designed for it.

If you're going to disagree, can you do us all a favor by not misrepresenting my words?

> Asking why we don't have a high speed cross country railroad

I asked where the high speed rail is, because parent claimed China is building out infrastructure "we built a 100 years ago" - which is patently untrue. I even quoted parent, so you can't have missed that.

> damningly, your closing thought being whether other people think "the west will prevail"

Bravo! That's a tabloid-worthy recontextualization hit-job - you cut off the part I considered so important I originally added emphasis to it, and added your commentary to give my surviving words an unflattering meaning of your choosing that was never there. I said "...an almost religious belief that the west will prevail because it's the west"

A good day to you.

"cross country" doesn't mean east-west. china doesn't have a straight east-west high speed line that goes across the entire country because the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the east, and there are routes that cross north-south and all through all the major population centers.

china also had many airports before they built the high speed system.

This is a systemic issue with the Western way of thinking. The West always consider itself to be the most evolved culture in history. First, by way of Christianity, later, by way of markets, democracy, and science. This way of thinking is self-deceiving because they cannot understand that other cultures can offer something equal or better. So, when faced with the advance of other cultures they necessarily have to dismiss them as inferior.

This isn't really unique to any particular culture. China spent a good couple millenia referring to anyone outside its borders as 'barbarians.'

Well, they clearly don't have that issue anymore. Maybe that's why they're now where they are.

> There's a type of Western mind that gets distracted by their scale, and getting to build things we built a century ago.

The thing is, overcapacity combined with the 996 week and labor exploitation can be used to outcompete any Western company - especially the old ones, who are spread around the country. Look at the supply chain of the established (i.e. everyone but Tesla) companies... dozens of manufacturing plants, thousands of suppliers, almost zero vertical integration because "manufacturing batteries, ECUs or windshield wipers is not our core competency, let Bosch do that".

The only car manufacturer in the Western world not following that is Tesla. They have only very few, but very large factories that vertically integrate as much as possible on site, which not only gives them the advantage of cutting out the middlemen and their profit margin but also allows for much, much faster iteration cycles when everything is done in-house with no bureaucratic bullshit associated with change requests.

Typically, a car model, its design and parts are fixed for around 2-5 years after the prototype manufacturing run, no changes are possible at all outside of maybe the software, unless the design change is necessary to meet regulatory compliance or if it's something horribly defective. Then the model gets a "rebrush" integrating a few changes, which lives on for another 2-3 years, and then a fully new iteration crops up. Tesla (and SpaceX) in contrast, they do iteration times of weeks.

The disadvantage of that model is of course spare parts logistics and repair training, because holding stock for hundreds of subvariants and iterations is all but impossible, and that shows in every statistic for Tesla's average body shop waiting time.

And to come back to China's automotive sector - they're copying that model of iterative speed just as well. We've seen them come from piles of junk barely roadworthy (or not road-legal in Europe at all) a few years ago to be able to fight heads-on with the European car giants.

Vertical integration, or a company claiming to take ownership of its supply chain, needs the democratic miracle that is exclusive security of supplies and their logistical distribution. No American company is ever going to militarily secure natural resources or a nanostate territory for its profits. And that's why all American companies (or any traditional, humanist company) will fail to achieve profits which ensure business survival.

Don't ever go long on an investment in the democratic military-industrial complex, surely. Elon Musk's Tesla and SpaceX are like baby boomers disguising themselves as healthy young kids of the future. Don't be fooled or tempted by the likely spiked Kool-Aid drink. Partaking in the ideology of techno-commercialist futurism will yield a negative return on investment. As the conceptual dynamics of optimal manufacturing methods' soteriology, looked at through democratic aspirations, is nothing but booby trapped thinking. In other words, much more blunt words, Tesla's theoretical economics and strategy is a wannabe Mark Zuckerberg, especially when there's an impending giant rug pull in the investment arena.

thats a whole bunch of handwaving without any fact nor supported argument

Everything rationally dismissive of ineffective economics and technology always appears negligent in scientific duties. But I'm actually monitoring the situation with great attention and caution. Because this is a global context I'm referring to. Which the soteriological expectations of populist manufacturing science and also optimal operations research have botched, as part of a normally occurring natural selection that wants to purge away all unmotivated and unskilled students of economics at the Malthusian cliff limits that we're presently at.

As long as your side of the discussion hasn't loaded the debate with propaganda-rich religious expectations like the modern implementation of capitalism being on the road to perfection, some sort of leftist-progressive singularity possible with enough faith based endorsement and mere belief, then I'm willing to have an argument founded on facts. Otherwise, your sociopolitically biased school of economics will have to forever deal with me presenting grounds for arguments as thoughtless speculation, due to the skewed perspective your political incentives create. In other words, I have already given basic facts from which tentative socioeconomic engineering arguments can be made. Namely that liberal democracy's military-industrial complex is a poor attempt at satisfying the requirement for both secure and intelligent domestic commerce.

It's actually not rocket science: it's more like a real time strategy game like Command and Conquer. Because what base building ever occurs without an area being violently secured from enemy ganks and such first? And, abstracting from this illustration, unless Elon Musk plans to form a private military company for his Tesla and Space X ventures like a proper cyberpunk megacorporation character, we shouldn't expect actually competent or pure vertical business integration. Instead, we should be expecting a ghetto version of what capitalism truly is. Because the best players, our wealthy and powerful billionaires, are not really wealthy and powerful, if you look closely at what capitalism means and what it means without semantically corrupting political lobbyists like Keynesian economics, supply and demand formulations, and just horribly ineffective fascist socialism high school type proposals.

Tesla may be better than traditional auto companies, however it is not the wonder people talk about. They take years to get a car ready, WHEN they can do it. Think about the Cyber Roadster and the long iterations to the Cyber Truck.

In the US this model is called venture capital - build lots of things knowing lots will fail.

It's a model that creates big winners and lots of losers.

Ironically of course the other alternative is central planning which is a hallmark of communist economic systems.

> estimated to leave Chinese debt to GDP at 117%

Japan is 264%, Singapore 168%, the US 129%, France 112%, Canada is 107%, UK 97%, Germany 66%, Australia 22%, Afghanistan 7.4%, Kuwait 2.1%.

A debt ratio isn't particularly useful to know on it's own.

10-year old ICE car factories idling is a sign of success in their transition to NEV.

> China has more than 100 factories with the capacity to build close to 40 million internal combustion engine cars a year. That is roughly twice as many as people in China want to buy, and sales of these cars are dropping fast as electric vehicles become more popular.

Not a great take - those factories are foreign owned ICE car factories. Hyundai basically underestimated how fast China's EV transition would be.

That's good news for China, full speed domestic EV production.

> it seems they've latched on to something that works better than even democracy and capitalism

Wouldn’t this just be plain old fashioned authoritarianism? America can latch on to this too, and we might based on how the Trump admin turns out.

No. One required component is plain old fashioned oversupply of labor. America doesn't have that because all employable people are too rich. China also has an oversupply of skilled labor like engineers, in part because the threat of poverty is a strong motivator to get rich. America also lacks that which you can see in capable young people doing arts degrees with no thought to their future income because it doesn't matter - they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.

There is an estimation of 11-30 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The biggest difference is that in the US they are working on fast food jobs, house cleaning, babysitting. Different priorities.

That’s an easy enough problem to solve if we had the appetite to solve it, why couldn’t we legitimize the roles illegal immigrants currently do right now with a Singapore style migrant worker program?

To be clear, I think that there is an existing, legal migrant worker programme. They do most of the non-automated farm work in Central Valley California. Also, the Singapore system is a bit ugly if you look closely. I hope the US can do better.

Probably because the average Chinese is far more skilled than your average illegal immigrant.

It's not just raw labor force. It's capable engineers, designers, architects, etc. How is illegal immigration going to solve this?

The amount of skilled people wanting to migrate to the US is almost infinite (unfortunately). If the US decided to open 20million green card spots, they would be filled.

If you bring in 20 million skilled workers, you'd have to bring in 200 million unskilled workers to support them.

    > they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.

You made a few good points until this one. No one in the US is living comfortably on minimum wage.

It's relative. Relative to the rest of the world (and China), you can still live comfortably on minimum wage.

You can still live comfortably on US minimum wage if your cost of living is like in China?

What question is this? With a US minimum wage with China CoL you are rich.

Definitely not in the major cities, like Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

$7.25 minimum wage per hour at fed level. 40 hour per week and 50 working week you have 14,500 USD, or 105K RMB roughly based on exchange rate today.

105K RMB yearly is close to or above average even in the above cities.

for some state the minimum wage can be $15 or higher, this is wayyyy better than China.

It depends on where you are. Metropolitans and provincial capitals are expensive, but some smaller cities are cheaper. But then the public service is worse and you kinda want to live closer to bigger cities. I don't know how much $$ you are talking about, but it's easy to figure that out if you can give me a city in mind and I can check the cost for you.

Not just cost of living is lower, but standard of living is too. I know people in China who had full-time jobs but would recover meat from other people's rubbish to eat, or who lived illegally in a garage. That's homeless-level lifestyle for America and doesn't require any job at all.

Comfortable enough to not be worth undergoing extreme pressure to succeed like people do in China and India. Even a skilled tradesman is a highly paid career in America but it's poverty in China.

It's not that life on minimal wage is comfortable, it's that we have been told for a generation now that 'just get a college degree and it will be fine'. Happily amplified by for-profit education investing a lot of money lying to young people (ads).

Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.

> Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.

The problem of bad choices is orthogonal to the problem you are describing.

In high school the administration specifically stated that just going to college was good enough. They encouraged people to get English, philosophy, history degrees if that’s what they wanted. If you’re 17 and like history class it seems like a logical next step. They didn’t tell you you won’t be able to find work.

still a bad choice. The US is not USSR, one can choose what they want to study or even don't study at all.

Sure, but it’s a choice heavily influenced by authority figures in your life. But yes strictly binary it is a choice. Thankfully the world is more nuanced.

My point is that it's an information problem, leading to (more) bad choices. OPs claim that people live happily enough on minimum wage is actually another example, hopefully no 17 year old reads it and thinks 'ohh so I can live comfortable on minimum wage'. If there is 17 year old reading this thread then I hope to be a counterweight:

'HEY 17 YEAR OLD! Get a sellable skill! English literature is probably not enough! Working for minimum wage sucks!'

If the Trump administration (or the Biden administration) tried to enact an industrial policy like China, I think they would fail. It's not easy, and plenty of authoritarian governments fail at it.

Efficient yes, generates good quality of life for the average citizen? Not as much. Plenty the west can learn from China on how to do large public works though.

Quality of life for average citizen improved must faster in China that in the US during the last 40 years.

The doubts about the size of the investment in that Wikipedia article are funny. It's a bit like "We cannot afford to invest in education", but the Chinese are saying "We cannot afford not to invest in education" (Famous quotes, it's more about R&D here). China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap. It might be the biggest issue on their minds right now. At least I am watching from the sidelines, wondering "Are they gonna make it?".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41664312

Me too! My guess is 2031, but it'll feel hollow

- Definition of this is 12,000 2011 USD, BLS says thats 17,600 2024 USD. Looking like 2024 closes at a little under 13,000 24 USD. If we calculate out the 6% CCP standard GDP growth rate, it'd take 5 years

- GDP is not very likely to grow at the formerly-real 6% per year moving forward. Population peaked, trade is now a tailwind instead of a headwind, GDP per capita at 13,000 is 0.5x Russia and 2.5x India, and we're in year 2 of a deflationary crisis that's barely being held off, if it is, and is characterized by an significant oversupply in housing stock that'll take years to run down. So I'll tack on 2 years, make it 7 years, 2031.

Education has always been important in Chinese culture.

You could say it's central to their culture. Sort of goes for most Asian cultures, the education of children is something Asian parents will sacrifice greatly for.

Curious that education is valued so much, but then there are cycles of uprisings where educated people are targeted (Cambodia, Chairman Mao, ..)

It's a bit more complicated than that though.

As always the revolution starts from the competing elites. The culture revolution happened because CCP couldn't allow any form of alternative power centers.

That's pretty blatantly false. Mao had a very large number of China's teachers executed during the 1960s, which set the entire nation back two generations in education (at least). The teachers - along with many other enlightened peoples - were murdered for being so called Capitalist intellectuals.

Pretending "always" for anything related to China, you can be sure their elaborate history will prove you wrong.

Not democratized education, to my understanding. Rural china has never had the sort of broad access to education that exists there now (and is still rapidly developing).

Pretty sure clean manafacturing is still part of that middle income job.

Those millions of unemployed youth didn't go through the gaokao to work in a BYD factory, it's the "useless" white collar jobs that everyone wants but there is short supply of. And the often unpredictable clampdowns on those industries don't help.

> China's leadership is probably terrified of falling into the middle-income trap

I feel like it's more of a case of how do they get out of it, rather than avoid falling into it, at this point. The demographics are shit and the country isn't particularly attractive to immigrants, nor (unlike, America and Canada, and honestly most of Europe, despite what the right wing say) do they really have room for more immigrants.

The whole "demographics" scare about China is clear nonsense. Even if that becomes true, it will take 25 to 30 years for it to manifest, because China consumption is in a growing curve. The current young working population is more educated and productive than ever. And China still has hundreds of millions of people to be included into its consumer and labor market in the poorest areas. So don't hold your breath about a "demographics" problem for China, it will take decades for this to happen if ever at all.

> The whole "demographics" scare about China is clear nonsense

I mean it's probably fair to call it the consensus opinion, so a claim as extraordinary as calling it "clear nonsense" probably requires extraordinary proof?

One needs to disaggregate data to get a full picture of what happens in China due to the rapid evolution of things. Forty years ago very few people went to college. It's a big bulge of population that are not going to upgrade their skills (mostly retired but things like learning to drive or using the popular apps are still difficult for most who have not already learned). They are also very used to hardship and will consume little even if they come into unexpected wealth (say from housing). The demographic shift will not play out as everywhere else.

“Elderly Chinese people are different from elderly people elsewhere because they’re hardier” doesn’t feel like the extraordinary proof the earlier extraordinary claims required. Are they that different from people in other middle income countries like Thailand?

The point is that old people in US and specially Europe expect to maintain their life standards, which are quite high. That's difficult in the middle of a demographic downturn. But that's not the case for elderly people in China. Even if their numbers do increase over time, the productivity of younger generations is so large compared to them, that they can effectively be supported with little problems for the Chinese government. So in a sense China is lucky that their economic growth is occurring exactly at the point where the demographic change is starting to happen.

To be clear, which of the newly-industrialized countries classically described as being in the middle income trap do you think that's not true of? Like is China going to be different from Mexico here because abuelas are demanding a high-standard of living?

The word "middle class trap" only makes sense for China based on FX rate. Rich Chinese will continue to diversify if not outright emigrate while the middle class is trapped by necessity. Meanwhile the savings/investment rate is so high that the Chinese middle class will enjoy things that middle classes in few other countries have, once normalized for population density. Right now they already lead in industrial robots per worker (behind only South Korea and Singapore). They will lead in service robots per capita one day as well.

For example, Chinese coffee chains are beating Starbucks in China:

"The pace of growth of domestic coffee chains has been impressive in the past year. Luckin’s performance has been especially strong. It has proved sceptics, who once saw its ultra-cheap coffee prices and high costs as a flawed business model, wrong this year. Luckin Coffee’s operating margin hit 15.3 per cent in the latest quarter as net revenues rose more than 40 per cent to $1.5bn, adding to annual sales that nearly doubled last year. It opened 1,400 new stores in the latest quarter, bringing its total to 21,300. Meanwhile, signs of the pressure are showing with same-store sales at Starbucks down 14 per cent in China last quarter."

"Automation, a rapidly growing trend in the local coffee chain industry, is helping margins during a time when costs are rising, especially delivery, sales and marketing expenses. Cotti, which has grown rapidly since it was founded in 2022, is pushing out coffee-making robots. Luckin has fully automated pour-over coffee machines. Luckin’s coffee robots and unmanned coffee shops were key to maintaining growth during the pandemic."

https://www.ft.com/content/5f070e18-3249-4bec-999b-56535cf25...

And you would be hard pressed to find anyone middle aged or older that actually drinks any coffee.

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 80s, economy grew by 2500% relative to KRW... the sauce? Skilling up relative % of workforce to compete on higher end / higher value / higher paid industries. The current limitation with both these countries is they're small, relative to PRC, they've maximized human potential, reaching around 80% skilled workforce, basically the ceiling, they can no longer generate surplus enough talent to compete past limit.

PRC went >2 TFR in 90s, but they have so much people that they're still at 20% skilled workforce, the academic reforms to churn out tertiary only put in place ~10-15 years ago, their headroom is still very high. As in generating OECD+ in skilled talent combined per year. They're on track to add more STEM in the next 25 years (birth cohorts already predetermined) than US will add people (birth and immigration inclusive) - they're on track to have 2-3x more STEM than US total. Meanwhile their catchup in last 10-15 yeras was basically going from fraction of skilled talent to ~parity with US. The TLDR is PRC is in process of undergoing the GREATEST "productive" demographic divident in recorded history, and competitors are not remotely close. Will PRC reach ceiling like JP/SKR with >2 TFR, of course, but not until way past 2050s when they reach 80% highskilled workforce and can't replace at parity. And realisitally that's also a PRC who is multiple times larger than it is now (not 2000% but substantial).

If the full demographic argument is PRC will eventually demographically collapse, likely after most of us are dead, and growing multiple times current size because they generated a workforce larger than west can compete with... then that's going to make people shit bricks.

For reference entire PRC lol demographics narrative was popularized by Zeihan... who keeps forgetting the politics in geopolitics, i.e. US has most deep coasts for ports... except PRC dredges and builds the most productive ports; US has most naturally navigatable waterways, except PRC builds out / maintain their internal waterways with signifiantly more utilitzation. US has immigration... except at PRC scale, even shit TFR properly directed is more talent than US can realistically compete with. 4:2:1 pyrmaid? Yeah kind of PIA... except highest household savings rate in the world, and large regional CoL disparity means you can dump a lot of retirees in nice inland retirement cities one day where they cost fraction to upkeep but still maintain relative good QoL, better than what they grew up with. There's a lot of arbitraging opportunities. And in cases of upper quantiles, that 4:2:1 turns into wealth transfers to the 1 gen to start families.

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?

Not much space TBH AND PRC is unlikely to enable trade deficit with other producers like US/west to support export led growth. And reality is at PRC scale, "only" exporting 20% (i.e not even doubling down on exports) of GDP is enough to satisfy world demand in some sectors. IMO PRC fine with relegating lower end production (already happening) but will be just as protective as US/west on high end / high value (strategic) production.

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.

I agree I think the ai boom has happened at the optimal time for China by the time they hit the problem of higher older population. Automation would solve a lot of their problems. As someone that is not from china or the west I feel it is ironic that how much western citizens talk about Chinese state propaganda but at the same they fall for their own governments propaganda.

> terrified of falling into the middle-income trap

Not really, there's 2 middle income traps:

1) the ACTUAL trap / thesis - countries fail to educate / upgrade workforce enough to move up supply chains to generate high income employment to bring up income, the TRAP is lack of advancement, to which PRC is basically the LEAST trapped country in the world, pursuing industrial development in all high end sectors. Issues is PRC being highly developed in every sector = still not enough high end jobs for 1.4B people.

2) the economic middle income trap, for last few years, PRC consisitly a foreskin (low single %) below world bank definition/revision of upper income, people need to ask why that is? IMO it's because PRC DOESN'T WANT to be definitionally upper income to play up developing status, and lose related perks. It would be absolutely trivial for PRC to revaluate FX by a few % and cross nominal USD high income and take a huge victory lap, but they don't.

The reality is "hiding strength" is going ot be increasingly hard with time - PRC per capita is being brought down by 600m low income. The TLDR is bottom 4-5 quantiles, i.e. 40% very undereducated population who got left behind during modernization and generates about only ~5% of GDP. They skew old and will eventually phase out of stats (die) in next couple decades, and numerator is going to be increasingly high educated new cohorts working high income. Low/high income divide is largely generational, the future educated populations are going to be in disproportionately high income high skill jobs i.e. PRC is replacing 200m subsistent farmers with 200m tertiary workforce. If most of the 2 bottom quantile dies by 2050, PRC per capita will nearly double to medium high income simply doing nothing, with PPP to rival upper-high income if they hold on to production. Short of unforseen catastrophe, it's statistic inevitability.

That's without mentioning FX, i.e. PRC securing enough economic clout = eventually ability to flex the FX lever to multiply nominal GDP faster than actual growth.

600m generating 5% of GDP sounds crazy. Any source to back that up? What % of people are doing manufacturing? The American bull case is that China collapses because these 600m people die off and take their lead in manufacturing with them meanwhile the US is already at the top and continues to absorb the best people in the world hopefully sustaining their growth.

During covid, premier LKQ revealed ~40% of PRC lives on 1000 rmb per month, 12000 rmb per year / 1600 USD per year. Do the napakin math that means 600m people contribute to about 7 trillion (rmb) of 126 trillion gdp or ~5%.

>people die off and take their lead in manufacturing

Unlikely, those 600m are subsistent farmers (something like 200m households), informal workers etc... they are not in manufacturing or anything advanced, where advanced is literally ability to do basic arithmatic, aka this cohort was never in a position to be retrained for manufacturing. To put PRC manufacturing in perspective, I think at height, PRC manufacturing employed "only" 300m. Now they're acquiring RoW combined in automation (industrial robots) and uptraining skilled workforce to hold onto manufacturing / dominate in high end, i.e. that lead is likely set to grow. The bodies problem is basically most new gen wants to degrees and air conditioned office jobs instead of blue collar work. There's plenty of bodies to fill factories (see youth unemployment stats) but incentives/culture not aligned for vocational work.

Those 600m bluntly are just... excess people who don't meaningfully contribute to modern economy i.e. 200m farming households can be replaced by 20m advanced farmers with automation, but PRC agriculture not broadly automated specifically because farming is massive jobs program. Well except construction, hence PRC building spree now, where labour is plentiful and cheap. IMO this is basically PRC's happy accident - many wanted hukou reforms to increase equality, but really what CCP did was create a massive structural class disparity that enables 1) arbituaging very cheap labour for low end work 2) have that low end workforce be easily supported because it doesn't cost very much to provide for them. Also why PRC focuses on production side (industrial capacity)... need to build so much shit to economies of scale than make goods cheap enough for bottom quantiles. Which also happens to translate into global competitiveness for all markets, including emerging / low income ones like bottom PRC 40%.

>US is already at the top and continues to absorb the best people

Remains to be seen, huge % of US S&T talent came (past tense) from PRC, and now education exchanges are being cut off. Which is secondary to the fact that @60% and increasing tertiary that bias STEM, with like 200m new borns in the past 25 years in the pipeline, PRC simply has too much talent for US to meaningfully brain drain. US projected to increase population by 40m in next 30 years. US would have to train every new born, and every immigrant to be STEM to match PRC output, that's not counting the other 80m where percentage will go into some other high skilled field, just not explicitly STEM. Hence the talent generation gap is projected to be absurd in PRC's favour.

That an PRC academic institutions have caught up and increasingly, PRC's cream of the crop stay in PRC. This isn't the 90s where many PRC diasphora were top of their class from a small academic system that trained only a few, where every brain drained hurt. Increasingly, west is a dumping ground for PRC kids who couldn't hack it in tier1 PRC institutions (didn't score enough on Gaokao) but with parents that have enough resources to send them abroad... meanwhile the Chinese B & C teams are still crowding a lot of western labs to drive US/western innovation. The TLDR is PRC's high skilled demographic divident is projected to be so large that it unlikely to be meaningfully constrained. And for strategic competition, that's the demographic trend that's important to consider especially in next 60-70 year time frame, i.e. almost 2100s, since that's how long those new brains will be in the workforce.

The constrain / challenge is on PRCs end to generate enough skilled jobs, which will be difficult. But the side effect of surplus skilled labour is cheap labour, and IMO it's better to have too much talent than not enough for strategic goals, i.e. PRC is only actor projected to not have semi conductor talent shortage in next 10 years.

And what blows my mind is that if I want to rent a tractor with a front loader for some landscaping work it’s hundreds a day. Yet even larger commercial earth moving equipment sits around unused for weeks.

Some of that may be due to the owner transporting it from job to job instead of storing it in their own yard.

Nonetheless, there's a lot of idle people/equipment in construction because things have to be done in the right order and sometimes it's more economical to over-provision than risk delaying the whole project because something wasn't available when it was needed.

Those hundreds per day will partly pay for all the sitting around unused in the hiring company's yard! You can see this in the pricing which is usually a lower rate if you hire it for a longer period.

It's about usable time and cost of capital - if it's cheaper to rent the unit, they'll rent one, if it's cheaper to buy one and let it sit idle most of the time, they'll do that.

The rent/buy calculus can be incredibly shunted towards "buy" once you're using it even somewhat. It's even more so when you realize that labor costs is the main issue, and not having a skilled worker waiting around for an item to be delivered (by another slightly less skilled worker, perhaps) is a huge savings in its own part. Five guys on a site might have 15 machines total; even though they obviously can't use all 15 at the same time.

It does seem to have an AI look to it. The resolution is pretty poor.

They're building a large carwash facility near me and have taken over a year to get to the point of putting the roofs onto some steel framed sheds. I constantly think of the time when we were able to build the Empire State Building in 13 months.

The other really impressive part is that they also treated the workers really well during the construction. Cautionary Tales did an episode on this: https://timharford.com/2024/09/cautionary-tales-steel-and-ki...

They paid good wages but also kept a high bar on quality and performance. The workers in turn were incentivized to do a good job and gave feedback like ideas on how to improve efficiency, e.g. build an internal railroad to carry bricks up as they got higher and higher in height.

You can't do something like the Empire State Building in an year without treating your workers well. (And the suppliers, and investing in machines quality, and safety...)

You can build it in a decade or two, and get something close to what you designed. But you can't build it in an year.

They just built a car wash near me, just a few months from start to finish. I don't know what is going on with the one near you, but it isn't a US thing.

Of course car washes are a case where I could see someone building one to keep their crews busy between other better paying jobs. Thus have lots of stops as other projects come in. there isn't much investment sitting and there is value to a contractor to keep their crews busy (read paid!) even when there is no other work. I could see a car wash company agreeing to a build this over 2 years for a discount even though there are only a few months of work - for both it could be financially beneficial.

I have, happens around 6 AM. They get all the generators started up, power tools and full power. All the heavy machinery at full throttle. A cacaphonous 6AM salute to the internal combustion engine. Old Zeke fills his truckbed full of rusty nails and drives aggressively around the neighborhood dropping this way and that. Well, not old Zeke nowadays, more like Senor Ramirez Carloz Gonzalez.

Question is, if it's 6 AM at a construction site, and nobody is around to hear it, do they make any noise?

They don't have time to waste, they have to get as much cheap stuff out as possible before further tariffs.

I'm 100% sure its a photo op. Think about the logistics of the trucks taking spoil away. How can there be one arriving and one leaving at each location at this time: the diggers near instantly fill their entire capacity?

And the narrow access road is way too congested for all those to actually leave or arrive at that rate. Moments after the shot, the trucks will clearly all have to stop and wait.

This being said, there is power in that many machines in the same place at one time. They would cetainly be able to get work done quickly. Just not quite as quickly as it appears in that shot. Waiting is part of the process, you cant have a system where every component works at 100% capacity

A truck like this represents a substantial amount of investment that costs almost the same if its sitting there as it does doing actual work.

Not to mention the opportunity cost of having other similarly well equipped crews having to wait on you finishing the job.

Why would you be surprised that no time and effort is spared in coordinating the work of these machines? Its like being surprised that items are constantly rolling off the factory production line, and its not just the occasional item showing up at irregular intervals.

I mean, I am surprised when my Factorios do that.

firstly, "doing useful work" for these trucks includes sitting still while being filled with spoil, not just driving around looking all fancy

it's not about simply "coordinating". Logistics requires that you have the capacity to absorb unforseen issues and delays. When you have a system with 100% utilisation, the slightest delay at one point ripples out upsetting the balance of everything else and suddenly everything grinds to a halt.

For a more techy example, it is a bad idea to have a server running at 100% CPU usage. If that is your "normal" state, any change in conditions for the worse (more customers want to buy your product because its a weekend) results in degraded experience or total failure for ALL the customers.

And construction (and large machines) just LOVE to throw delays at you.

I'm sure they have people who's job is coordinating. In fact to coordinate such a photo op would be an almighty feat in itself. It's just if those people are in any way good at planning (their job) then they would leave slack in the system, the exact amount is the real trick to avoid waste, but it's never 100% utilisation.

> coordinate such a photo op would be an almighty feat in itself

So why not coordinate the real thing instead of just a photo op. There plenty of idling equipment in the clip. This footage is pretty tame compared to rushed covid hospital construction, for which there were live streams and timelapse of activity greater than what's being shown. I've seen many PRC worksites like this IRL, it's about on par. Wouldn't be hard to launch a drone and flythrough through the busiest looking area for social media.

Everything you wrote applies equally to western countries, and yet the results are different as we all well know. Whatever the reason is why trucks and other equipment stand around doing nothing, a reason clearly exists, and is clearly missing from your argument.

It may be that there is something going on in China that negates the exact reason that exists, and not in other countries, but you said nothing about that.

The fact is this construction site looks different than the way construction sites look usually. Your "trucks are expensive" argument explains nothing and provides no reason for this site to look different than others. Trucks are expensive everywhere, actually I think trucks are more expensive in the west than in China.

US/German manufacturers just do assembly, they don't manufacture parts, so they only need assembly plants. BYD is a vertically integrated manufacturer. They make everything in-house which helps drive down costs. This huge footprint results in having all those different manufacturing lines under one roof. They depend on no one for finished parts, the only supply chain is raw materials.

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?

When Trump ups everything from China by 100% I guess US would be able to make something with profit?

That is not remotely how tariffs work.

Doesn't a tariff drive up prices? (or at least intended for that)

Tariffs are a surcharge on imports added and demanded by the government, paid by the people or entities importing.

As an example, if an American buys a Chinese coffee maker priced at $100 and there is a 50% tariff, there is a $50 tariff that is paid by the importing American to the American government.

The total cost to the importing American is $150. Now, if this price is equal to or higher than an American coffee maker then the importing American is incentivized to purchase the American coffee maker instead.

As another example, if Tesla sells Model 3s for $50,000 and BYD comes in with a similar spec car priced at $25,000, then putting a 100% tariff on it will drive BYD's effective price up to $50,000 allowing Tesla to compete without undercutting or outright selling at a loss.

Essentially, tariffs are a way to ensure that the pricing floor of the domestic market is not driven down unreasonably by international markets at the cost of the importers.

EDIT: Fixed some math. :V

Right, the coffee maker company in China has some options:

  * Figures out how to make it even cheaper (unlikely)
  * Figure out how to avoid the tariff legally: Maybe move the manufacture or assembly to Mexico for the US market. 
  * Claim the product is something else, just enough to avoid the tariff(i.e. claim it's a tea maker, not a coffee maker)
  * Stop selling in the US since they won't get any sales
  * etc.

The middle options are the most likely: avoiding the tariff somehow. Companies do the middle two all the time to varying degrees to get around/avoid tariffs, import fees, etc, even US companies.

Also the other issue: the first thing the American company does is ensure it sells coffee-makers for $149 and not a penny less.

In fact depending on your tarriff regime, this can incentivize a bunch industries to actually raise prices if the new import cost is higher then they would currently sell at.

The incentive to raise prices is pressured down by customers' desire to not spend more money than they have to. If businesses can get away with raising prices that means the price was too low to begin with, tariffs or no tariffs.

That's dependent on the market actually being efficient.

If a consumer walks into a store and sees coffeemakers by ten different brands, but seven are all actually owned by one giant manufacturer and the other three by some American almost-as-giant manufacturer, then a tariff on the former will drive up the price of seven of them and the American manufacturer will almost certainly raise the prices on the remaining three. Otherwise, it's just bad business.

Oops, in "actually owned by one giant manufacturer", I meant to say "actually owned by one giant Chinese manufacturer".

> As another example, if Tesla sells Model 3s for $50,000 and BYD comes in with a similar spec car priced at $25,000, then putting a 100% tariff on it will drive BYD's effective price up to $50,000 allowing Tesla to compete without undercutting or outright selling at a loss.

Doesn't that mean that American will have to pay $50 000 for a car that is worth $25 000? While people in other countries will be able to buy cars cheaper, buy more of them and maybe it somehow improves their life quality.

Yes. Tariffs are bad for consumers. The supposed benefit is to manufacturers, since in that scenario Tesla will be able to sell its cars at a higher price and profit.

It means exactly that. It also means the American company will feel less pressure to improve cost or quality.

The purpose is to prop up local companies.

Which is not always a bad idea, having a local supply and innovation of something can be rather important, local money is less "Gone" than foreign money, think of how healthy small towns are when all of the shops are local vs when they are not.

The problem comes when there is no realistic local competition. If you don't make something locally at all, an import tariff is just a stupid tax.

I doubt it. It's much easier to either launder or manufacture the goods in a third country, that benefits from most of the same incentives that made Chinese manufacturing go through the roof.

Americans will be buying Chinese goods with "made in Vietnam" or "made in Mexico" stamped on it. The American profit will be in setting up those laundering schemes

If the Trump tariffs are based on country of final assembly, then yes, final assembly will just occur somewhere else, but it will take a couple of years to setup, and the inflation shock by that time will have done a lot of damage to the economy (recession likely, depression possible). It makes sense that it took Trump forever to find a treasury secretary willing to go along with this.

Couple of years for a western enterprise maybe, but in the east, things move fast. Really fast.

It depends if Trump tariffs just China or everyone. He promised high tariffs for China, but tariffs on all imports besides.

You can bribe officials in Vietnam/Mexico. So they'll be your country of "final assembly".

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

They already are. Just one tiny well-explained example, although it's utterly rampant:

https://www.npr.org/2024/08/23/1197961495/the-trade-fraud-de...

No bribery required though, at least in most cases.

They tried stockpiling aluminum in Mexico during the Trump ban and that was shutdown quickly. I guess they just have to be more convoluted about it. I wonder if Trump will do something like “tariff China and any country that doesn’t tariff China itself (transitive)”, but it feels like it might be futile to do that.

The alternative is having empty shelves in stores.

So they will have to bribe officials in Vietnam or Mexico and bribe officials in the US.

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.

The Trump tariffs will turn the entire world to China. America may no longer be interested in free trade and go full isolationism but many smaller countries can not. A painful truth is that for Europe the millions of containers with goods from Asia are a lifeline.

The last time he did tariffs against China, he put a tariff on raw materials but not stuff made with that raw material.

It was cheaper to build your excavator outside the country than pay the tariffs on importing the materials to build the excavator here.

It was an objective failure. It also resulted in very smartly targeted payback that caused serious financial distress to a bunch of blue collar American food producers who sell a lot to China because the American market is literally not big enough (my state sells millions of pounds of lobster to China, those lobstermen still vote for Trump).

This is because Trump is objectively a fucking moron, and if you tell him "No, your idea is wrong because you don't know what you are talking about", he gives you the same "You're fired" speech from his damn television show, replaces you with a sycophant, and then does the stupid thing.

Any prediction that starts with "Trump will do the Tariffs in the way that requires second order thinking" is doomed to failure.

Vietnam and Mexico will massively profit.

It doesn't matter much if your shitbox is made in US or made in China when it cost 50k and nobody has the money for it

With what workers?

Basically everyone is already employed.

Depends if we keep the CHIPS act and the IRA. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...

And immigration. China will have severe demographic issues in 10-20 years, but the West doesn't have to because everyone wants to come here, and we still have a culture accepting of immigrants. This century we could have China's working age population halve while America's population grows to 500 million or more. America will win in this scenario, and China will fall off like Japan fell off.

too late for what??

too late relative to what?

too late to dominate in the industry of electric vehicles and thus, control/own large % of the wealth generated.

IMO the US really needs to do some house cleaning before anything real gets done. You can't expect the hand to cut itself out. I'm not sure if Trump could do that, TBH. He didn't have a lot of support in Military-Intelligence.

too many people on the entire political spectrum think that the government exists to create/artificially protect jobs instead of doing government things

Not entirely correct. Boeing, despite all the bad press, actually reversed course on this recently. 787's wing was made by a supplier, but 777X's wing is actually built in-house, right next to the main factory, starting from carbon fiber fabric.

How much can Boeing do this though? My understanding is in the past they used moving some of their production to a country as leverage to win contracts. They are a company that moved their headquarters to DC because management treats the product as secondary as if they make widgets. Until they reverse that they aren't moving in the right direction.

I believe outsourcing can be a symptom of not innovating anymore.

Imagine having to contract out every prototype to a metal working shop — it slows down your ability to iterate because you can’t just go downstairs and try it.

But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.

But if you do it for too long, you kind of lose the ability to quickly iterate. Striking a balance is hard.

> But once you have a design set in stone, outsourcing is cheaper than doing it in-house. These companies specialize in producing parts with economies of scale.

Except you need to ship the parts to your factory and still employ QA people who must check whether you got what you paid for.. If the supplier has a bad defect ratio, you must order more parts. It's not as cut-and-dry as you think.

Every time your assembly-line halts, you're paying people for twiddling their thumbs. The more external suppliers you have, the higher the risk.

Don't the fines for halting a line cover the cost of the halt for the manufacturer?

I'm currently working at a supplier for some companies in mostly the automotive sector and the line halt fines per second seem to all be in the couple grand range so I always assumed it should be enough to cover the halt.

Though the QA part is real. There's so much theatre in tricking clients into believing their QA measurements are wrong when something happens it's kinda funny.

I think its a symptom of economies of scale being able to go too far. Cost per unit seems to keep going down basically infinitely and it is a problem.

Making less than 10,000 of anything just doesn't seem to make economic sense unless you assume there is a chance no one will want any of them.

Except when you've been working with suppliers who have already been iterating on <insert widget> for years in a competitive environment.

The amount of innovation in the automobile industry is staggering when you think of its history more holistically.

So the factory accepts iron ore, crude oil, coal, lithium ore, bauxite, monazite, copper ores, rubber, and soy beans at one end and spits out finished cars at the other?

They don't even outsource their nylon zip ties?

Just like Ford used to do.

Don't forget USA auto companies also outsource their design work, CAD, etc. My understanding is that TATA used to have a whole floor at Chrysler.

the only supply chain is raw materials

Citation needed, this seems exaggerated. Eg. I'm sure they use IC's and I'd be very surprised if the facility includes a fab.

They, BYD, have their own semiconductor R&D and manufacturing subsidiary called BYD semiconductor.

EDIT: Seems like it is a division, so not a spin-off.

Wasn’t always that way. Ford’s River Rouge plant took iron ore in one end, and rolled automobiles out the other end.

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.

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.

They have had that reputation for a long time and it persists. Assuming companies like BYD do things correctly, they'll come from the bottom up and improve quality as they go while working to keep their volume position. Pretty much all the major automakers should be terrified, as China is likely to have two or three juggernaut auto companies, they'll be permanently cash loaded by their gigantic domestic market, and they'll be able to use that to forever assault foreign markets (it's the same thing US tech companies do, using the US as the springboard to conquer the world).

We'll see this pattern repeat with high tier engineering products going forward. Airbus and Boeing will be brutally mauled by China in a similar fashion, as nearly all domestic China planes switch over to being exclusively Chinese planes for nationalistic reasons (it'll cut Airbus and Boeing in half at a minimum). And China will use that scale and capability gain to conquer other markets like India et al.

Other countries, maybe. But China is never gonna conquer or do reasonable business in India for geopolitical reasons.

That's not even realistic. India is part of BRICS, and one of the main goals of this group is to increase trading between members. I agree part of Indian society doesn't like it, but it won't make any difference.

I'm sorry but that's a very naive take. That's like saying OPEC nations are always cooperative because they're part of the same economic organization.

OPEC has nothing to do with economic integration, it is just a group of countries setting oil prices. G7 countries deceive themselves if they think BRICS is just another OPEC. You should think of BRICS as a multilateral Belt and Road initiative.

Not really US is trying to prop India as a counter to China but India is just using US it has no interests in having a bad relationship with China no matter how much the west would like to do that India is not interested. India is just going to use China as bogeyman for the west to get concessions and help from the west but in the end they will do what is best for them and that is not fighting China.

There are still no direct flights between China and India and visas are still basically impossible to get.

There are a lot of them here in NZ. Definitely no reputation for being 'crap'. By all accounts they are quality vehicles. The local car share business has a large fleet.

I'm pretty confident that once the Seagull lands we will see a lot more. I expect it to be the modern equivalent of the late 90s - early 00s Hyundai Excel. That was an entry level car that blew everything else out of the water in Australia due to low prices coupled with a crazy long and generous warranty. It really set Hyundai up in a market as a legitimate mainstream brand.

What I find especially interesting is that at the same time the North American brands have hitched their wagon to the 'bloated vehicle' trend here. They seem to be relying almost entirely on SUVs, and 'trucks'. Recently they are pushing models like the F150 and Ram on the back of their success with big utes like the Ford Ranger. Personally I think this is just going to make them vulnerable to the incoming wave of more sensible Chinese options.

Edit:

It just occurred to me that the idea of car share business using popular North American vehicles seems kind of absurd. Who would want a fleet of oversized SUVs and trucks? I think this says something about the true utility of these vehicles.

It was explained to me that Americans buy SUVs because they feel safer in them than in, e.g., sedans.

I used to believe that this was the reason too. Now I think that this is just a convenient post-hoc explanation. People tell themselves this when the real truth is that they've been manipulated by a bald-faced marketing coup that appealed to some pretty base desires for self image.

Some years ago, yes. But not so much now in Brazil.

In Peru a few years ago they had a mixed reputation but now they are mostly considered good value for money. It reminds me of Korean car reputations in the 1990s. Now you are as likely to buy a Hyundai or Kia as you are a Toyota, VW, or Chevy. Chinese cars are quickly entering a similar market position.

The old gas models, yes. The new EVs seems quite solid; though it'll take a few years to really find out.

Largest EV manufacturer in the world, of course you would see them everywhere.

My point was more in how fast it has gone from 0 to every other car I see in a very short time.

They aren’t everywhere yet here in the United States. The only one I’ve seen so far was a public bus in a rural town.

You won't see them in the US due to punitive tariffs.

They have definitively taken over in Thailand and Malaysia. All new cars are Chinese. I've asked one of the Grab drivers about it and it really boils down to cost. The Dolphin is really cheap and good.

Yep even in Oakland California where they don’t sell BYD cars, they recently replaced all the school busses with BYD electric.

https://thedriven.io/2024/09/04/the-biggest-electric-school-...

The scale is just insane .. hard to comprehend a 3km/2mi wide factory.

To my knowledge the largest factory in the world is BASF Ludwigshafen (Germany) with 10 km². Here is an aerial photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:LudwigshafenBASF2017-0... Followed by Volkswagen Wolfsburg (also Germany) with 6.5 km². Seems the BYD factory is competing with it for rank #2.

It will be 50 sq. km by the time the extension is finished [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1859149340897628545

The wording is confusing, but I believe the Zhengzhou International Land Port is 50sqkm, not the factory. That also fits the numbers they're giving [1]: "Zhengzhou International Land Port Project announced ——total area of around 50 square kilometers", and that includes a lot of "open-air warehouse" (parking lot). It's still massive, but not quite as crazy.

1: https://www.zzhkgq.gov.cn/2024/01-28/2944537.html

Agreed, the factories clearly aren't the same size as Manhattan.

But as a comparison of scale, both the airports in Denver and Dallas-Fort Worth are larger than Manhattan (27 mi2 or 70 km2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas_Fort_Worth_Internationa....

While that is a ton of activity (and empty space, if you have ever seen those airports), the Big Apple might not be the best reference for scale.

I don't think BASF really counts, it's more of a factorio district and not one single insanely large building.

I was refering to the size of the factory premises = land + buildings.

It seems we need diffrent categories for a ranking: premises vs. base area of the buildings vs. floor area of the buildings vs. largest building per base area vs. largest building per floor area, etc. And then we would need to clarify what counts in each case ...

Anyway, I live about 20 km from BASF and it is quite an impressive sight, especially at night. Here is a photo: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Fackelschein_des_Steam... However, the red lights are probably an artefact of the camera; typically the lights looks rather bluesh in reality. And the photo was shot with a 400 mm lens: the television tower in the foreground is more than 4 km away from the factory, the house at the left about 3 km.

Like an image ripped from Blade Runner.

Nah, Blade Runner looks better.

I've studied in the area and, as a bit of a night person, often drove past at night when driving to or from parents. A very cool sight, though the smell is often less pleasant :D - presumably nothing toxic, that would be illegal, but it does smell bad. Kind of like burning plastic, but without the harshest components of that smell.

Anyway, cool that Germany still has the biggest of something ~heavy industry.

I would be curious to know what chemical compounds that you are smelling. Germany has incredibly strict environmental protection laws. As an aside, the waterfront of Kawasaki, Japan is pretty similar, but not one single company. It looks straight from Factorio.

I hope you appreciate how nice it is that you can reasonably assume that whatever you're smelling isn't particularly toxic.

I guess it depends on what qualifies as a factory. Azovstal in Mariupol is around 11 km^2 and certainly isn’t the largest in the world.

BYD 900k employees vs Tesla 122k

https://cnevpost.com/2024/09/13/byd-workforce-exceeds-900000...

They make batteries, regular cars and hybrids and the cost of labor is lower

they're also one of the top suppliers for public transit busses.

Doesn't Tesla make batteries and 51% of its cars in China [1]?

[1] https://insideevs.com/news/715427/tesla-ev-production-shangh...

Are they more efficient? Because you only substitute human labor for technology when wages are too high

American EV manufacturers should realize that designing aspirational products erodes their growth, even if it means short-term profits. BYD is building practical EVs at affordable prices, not fashion articles.

If their offer wasn't a good deal, they wouldn't be growing so aggressively in Latin America. They're filling a niche western EVs have ignored for almost a decade.

So you're saying that since they have 24x the size of factory (pre-expansion), with just 5.3x the people, that Chinese workers are 4.52x as effective?

Effectiveness of an employee measured by how much space he needs / occupies? If you send an employee to sit alone in a warehouse, you've increased his effectiveness by orders of magnitude by your logic.

Viewable link: https://nitter.poast.org/taylorogan/status/18591462425191672...

So much roof space, so little PV. I guess in China they don't do rooftop PV as much because the regulations allow for cheaper installations somewhere on a meadow?

China has more distributed/rooftop solar than the US, percentage-wise. It's hardly like every big building in the US has rooftop solar, and Zhengzhou is more to the north of the country where there is less incident light.

That said a battery factory is a good place to put solar. The final stage of battery manufacturing is several priming charge/discharge cycles which build up resilient layers inside the battery. You can push power into/out of the grid (or use discharging batteries to charge other cells) but having a big DC source nearby is still going to be convenient.

China has extremely high installation rate for solar water heaters. Personally I have never observed any grid-tie solar electric installations on residential buildings. My travels are largely confined to Fujian province, so perhaps they have caught on in other regions.

I wonder if (partially) they use discharge current from one batch of batteries to charge the next?

Since most solar panels, charging equipment, inverters and batteries are made in China, I would be very surprised if they did not utilize it on their own buildings, provided that they have sufficient money to fund it.

That being said, China still has very high air pollution levels, especially in the urban areas. As a result, it might not be as economical to build solar power installations in there.

they do a lot of rooftop PV in china. maybe not on this one factory but it's extremely common and even mandatory for all new industrial developments in some chinese cities now

Is there a list of the world's largest factories, in a liberal sense of the word? The ones I'm aware of only consider individual structures [0], which excludes industrial plants that span multiple buildings, like this one.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_buildings

One of the old classics in this genre of largest factories, BASF, https://www.basf.com/jp/en/who-we-are/organization/locations...

Which if this BYD site is 2x2 miles for ~5sq km, BASF is twice as large at 10sq km! Wow

> ~5sq km

I get over 6 km^2.

Point still taken.

2x2 miles is over 10km^2. Barely.

You are right - I intended to say 2 Sq miles, not 4 Sq miles :)

Volkswagen's main factory is also pretty large: "Spanning more than 6.5 km², the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg is now the largest automotive plant in Europe, employing more than 60,000 people."[0]

[0]: https://www.volkswagen.de/de/marke-und-erlebnis/volkswagen-e...

It becomes tricky because what does 'factory' mean? Especially once it's scaled to the size of a small town, you start to see town-like buildings popping up. There's some stuff which is arguably necessary for the factory itself, such as the train station and logistics facilities, a test track, and things which are necessary for the employees directly such as employee car parks and restaurants, but then there are other things like a visitor centres, shops, gardens, monuments, museums, a Ritz-Carlton hotel. Also, are power and water facilities part of the factory? Even if that means that we're counting a reservoir as 'part of the factory'[0]?

How would you come up with an exhaustive list of which buildings contribute to the size of the factory, and which should be excluded?

Otherwise, you're just looking at the land owned or leased by the company, which is obviously a valid measure somehow, but it's hard to say whether it would lead to fair comparisons. I don't have the answers, just throwing it out for debate.

[0]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/wYLiYdHFioyR9Y8b6

Of course, it becomes tricky to decide what belongs to a factory or not if you look closely enough. And comparing factory sizes is something inherently silly. But I think that in a capitalistic society the land area owned by the company is a good first order approximation. If they wouldn't need it, it would be better for them to sell it.

But in the case of the Volkswagen factory the points you mention lead to something interesting: The city of Wolfsburg was created just before WW2 to house the workers of the factory created at the same time to produce the precursor of the VW beetle. Even today the city is dominated by the factory: it has a population of 120,000 and 60,000 work in the factory. So under a loose enough definition of "factory", the whole city of Wolfsburg is part of it.

Wild, fascinating, frightening.

It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.

It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale, and nations that suffered similar disparities in industrial capacity (not to mention energy production) haven't done well in the past.

Western country populations seem to be willfully falling for obvious fossil fuel propaganda over and over again. Future generations will rightfully curse our names. (Including today's children.)

Sadly it comes down to "Show me the money."

I vote for change, but I don't have the money to buy electric. Even running costs don't make the difference when it comes to multiple tens of thousands of dollars in purchase price.

I'd love to "care for our environment by buying an electric car". I can't afford to.

Affordable EVs are a solved problem. China has solved it. The world responded by putting up tariffs.

I already own a car. An affordable EV is a thing I'll buy in like 15 more years when my already 20 year old Toyota finally dies maybe.

If I bought it sooner, then my car would just go into the second hand market and do the same thing.

"Affordable" isn't changing anything: I don't need another car, and I'm not going to prematurely crush mine into a cube.

I drive very little, so having a fossil car sitting in the drive is more carbon efficient than buying a new EV that had to be built and shipped.

Somone who drives a lot may be able to scrap their fossil car, buy a new EV and start saving on carbon emissions in a much shorter time than me.

Of course we can motivate ourselves. But they're acting like we did in the 1800s through the mid 1900s. They just build anywhere no matter what. They have no interest in dealing with environmental concerns. The officially released pollution levels in China are mind-boggling and they still do not represent how bad it really is.

You think US manufacturers wouldn't be delighted to just buy a few hundred acres land and start building stuff? They'd do it in a heartbeat. For better and for worse, it is not a level playing field. Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.

Counterpoint: See the speed with which Colossus has been (is being) assembled in Memphis Tennessee. Yes, on an existing industrial site but this is still one damn impressive accomplishment.

https://www.servethehome.com/inside-100000-nvidia-gpu-xai-co...

A data center is much easier than building an industrial factory

This seems like an apples to oranges comparison. They are completely different. Can you provide some specific examples?

They had to build themselves because third parties gave longer timelines.

Is it your thought that is typical for large-scale development?

No, far from typical. But then Elon involved ;-)

The air quality in China is lot better now than a decade ago. The smog was so bad in 2012 and I remembered the AQI hitting 999 (the max it would go) on more than one occasions during Beijing winter.

Went back again in early 2024 and it was so much better, pollution still noticeable on more days than not but at least half the time I spent had AQI below 100.

I was in Shenzhen in 2017 and again recently. The difference is huge. The air quality walking around the street is very good and you never smell gasoline.

True and good on them, but I suspect you’re not hanging out in a lot of the backwater provinces where industrial development is happening

i've been to a lot of smaller cities, provinces, and rural areas in china over the past decade+ and it really has got a lot better everywhere. it's not fake and not limited to a few developed areas

Fantastic! I happily withdraw my point. Thanks for the correction.

I’d argue that vested interests in oil and coal have done more to damage the US’s ability to invest like this than any regulatory red tape.

Huge parts of America hate EVs. There is endless debate about nuclear vs clean energy vs coal, which prevents any change from happening.

>There is endless debate about nuclear vs clean energy vs coal, which prevents any change from happening.

Meanwhile coal has been on a clearly uneconomical trend for decades, and no amount of bitching by 60k coal miners can prevent that fact, no amount of crying about "woke" policy can prevent other fossil fuels from just being better than coal in every single way.

It's infuriating our country has been strangled by these morons.

They all cry about making America great again, oblivious to the fact that America thrives when it shovels public money into infrastructure like a bad habit. From gifting thousands of square miles of public land to bribe the railroads into building one of the best transportation networks for it's time (also why "america isn't dense enough" is utter horseshit. We connected the coasts before there was anyone living in most of the US), to the interstate which is still unparalleled, to the Postal Service way back in our infancy, to the homesteading project which ensured we have some of the most productive farmland in the world, to the highly educated workforce of the mid 1900s who did the electronics revolution which came about largely because the US navy wanted computers all the way back in WW2, and transistors largely exist so we could have ICBMs, to the millions of electronics experts just set free to build after the war...

America has ALWAYS profited from public investment into infrastructure, both physical and mental, but because a bunch of poorly educated (not a slight, an objective fact) people would rather get black lung like their pappys, we aren't allowed to have nice things.

> Conforming to government regulations over here is stifling for a 100-house development in Arkansas, but it's almost impossible in California, Illinois, or New York. Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years

Reading this (and I completely agree, it's even worse in Europe), sounds like Chinese "management" implemented Agile on a whole new scale.

The upside of a planned economy is that it can work like the internals of a private company, with one drive, "do what needs to be done". The downside is that it can work like the internals of a private company where you bite the bullet or look for another employer. This is much harder with countries, especially because planned economies are more likely to have taller fences around them.

The flipside of this argument is that it enables Chinese industrial interests to operate on strategies with 10+ year time scales, whereas Western markets seem to focus on the next few quarters. This is probably very efficient for some businesses, but not for big industrial corporations with long development timelines.

> Now imagine what it's like to build a huge factory. It is nearly impossible to get permission, and inspections, endangered wildlife concerns, waste removal, etc. handled in under 5-10 years.

This explains why the Tesla gigafactory in Nevada (announced in Sept 2014) still isn't operational...

The bread and butter of progress is competition and I think a lot of American companies “won” like Boeing or Intel in the 90s and no one else could compete.

Unfortunately winning is disastrous because it makes you complacent.

Perhaps the most flagrant and dumbest example is Internet Explorer 6.

I do not approve of raising tariffs on foreign vehicles because it will dull our edge in the long term. Protectionism is a short term bandaid.

Intel was famously not complacent. Perhaps a long lapse starting a decade ago. But even then “complacence” was not the problem. Ditto for Boeing. Managerial focus on just milking the cow has been the fundamental problem: and they milked frantically—not complacently.

One could perhaps say that short-termism is complacency about the future.

I can't tell if I'm missing sarcasm here but ...

Intel was paying customers Billions a year not to use their competitors products in the early 2000s. So not complacent about breaking the law to stifle competition but also complacent about actually building competitive chips that could win in the market.

Tariffs are a good way to ensure you still have a domestic capability. If Germany/korea/japan/China outcompete all US auto makers and they die, along with it goes a ton of jobs, manufacturing knowledge & capacity, cultural influence, an ability to keep capital flowing domestically, downstream suppliers, and ability to change factories from autos to military equipment in wartime. If China just keeps taking industry, then all we have left is an outpouring of all capital and a bunch of “content creators” left. Not a good prospect.

US auto companies already try to compete globally in situations with/without tariffs. That provides plenty of competition too.

I completely agree with you, but it’s still funny how we were ok with the companies moving the jobs out of NA (so, we lost all the things you’ve listed) to save themselves money. But when it comes to saving money for the consumers, suddenly we’re not allowed to do the same thing, because it doesn’t help the bottom line.

Well even with 100% tariffs BYDs new sub 10k vehicles will be far cheapet than anything else the US market has to offer

> our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change

The US and EU are long off-peak carbon emissions (emissions even decreased during the Trump administration I, even using a trendline ignoring COVID). The biggest emitter right now is China, and it's emissions are growing not shrinking, and a considerable amount of that (including 90% of the worlds new coal plants) goes to projects like this.

Kinda, but we’re not really in a position to blame them right? To some extend, sure, but that’s easy to say when you’ve already got yours.

What does blame have to do with anything? Emissions are emissions.

The tone of the message feels kinda like ‘China bad, look at all those emissions’

It’s possible that was not the intent.

Exactly: emissions are emissions. Reducing our own is just as good as other people reducing theirs. Plus then we can credibly badger others about their emissions, show them how to do it, and impose tariffs and sanctions when they don't.

China is building more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. At this point there is no “let’s just reduce our emissions by 30% or so and hope things work out” plan that’s compatible with stopping worst-case outcomes, there is only a “let’s replace every single energy and fuel source with non-emitting ones on a ridiculously short timescale” plan. Insofar as we have a chance of doing that, it’s because of what China is doing right now.

To the extent that they’re using fossil fuels to build the infrastructure for this renewable tech, I’m completely fine with that. That’s much better than using it to build iPhones or consumer nonsense. Insofar as they’re building a renewable grid backed by modern dispatchable coal and they’re also building out massive storage manufacturing capability and their emissions are on track to decline, I’m also fine with that.

ETA: China’s emissions appear to be peaking and entering a structural decline. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2453703-clean-energy-ro...

China's emissions are continuing to climb sharply:

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?country=CHN~USA~IND...

The New Scientist article is terribly misleading. It suggests China's emissions have peaked because of a few months of reported stable numbers. What they don't tell you is that such periods have happened many times before. Between 2014-2016 Chinese emissions were stable or even fell slightly, according to their not very reliable data. Then it started climbing strongly again, even as US emissions dropped by a billion tonnes/year between 2008-2023.

So there's no evidence China is turning anything around or is on track to decline. You can't extrapolate a few months out to decades in the future, and the New Scientist should know that.

The analysis in New Scientist isn't based historical trends. It's a causal analysis based on the rapid deployment of new low-carbon generation on China's grid, which is being deployed at rates higher than expected demand. Of course you could be right -- maybe forward demand will be much higher than anticipated, or maybe all of those solar panels will turn out not to be plugged in or something. But you need to make a stronger argument for this than one that just casually glances at a historical time series.

Yes, but such stories have been pushed for many years. If we look at the period before the 2017+ rampup in emissions we can see the same sorts of talk about China's solar ramp:

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+solar+deployment&sca_e...

"China's Solar Surge Presents Future Opportunity"

"China ramps up renewable energy deployment"

"Why China Is Leading The World In Solar Power"

etc. Solar can't replace fossil fuels so it's not unexpected that Chinese emissions would continue to grow.

The difference during those earlier times was that the amount of generation installed was still relatively small. Those articles use the term “future” because the hypothesis was that if exponential trends persisted, eventually generation would start to rival growth in demand. That appears to be actually happening now.

And solar (and wind and nuclear) absolutely can replace fossil fuels. What they can’t do is replace 100% of fossil fuels until storage is cheap and plentiful. With expanded grid capacity and dispatchable fossil generation, a 90%+ low-carbon grid is entirely feasible.

> To the extent that they’re using fossil fuels to build the infrastructure for this renewable tech, I’m completely fine with that.

Building renewable tech is such a small percentage of chinese output. And besides, at a very small ~10-20% premium you can get far more efficient and durable solar panels from South Korea. And by doing so, you can buy your solar panels from a country that is past carbon peak.

EU supports China economy by donting their products from EU citizen taxes. As EU citizen, you can ask donations for your new photovoltaic panels or EV up to 8000€.

> It's terrifying because we (in the West) can't seem to motivate ourselves to do anything like this on the same timescale

The sad thing is, we still can if we want to. When Russia throttled down the natural gas pipelines into the EU, it took them mere weeks until the first new floating natural gas terminal was put into operation. And they've collectively dumped an astonishing number of new terminals into the North Sea since then, all at the same time. Germany alone spent $6B in infrastructure investments before that first winter without Russian gas.

We could if we wanted to. But by and large, we don't want to.

> It's great news in the sense that this new energy storage and EV production capacity is (part of) our best chance to avoid catastrophic outcomes from climate change.

How so ?

There are 1.4b vehicles on earth, petrol or batteries it just doesn't work out, especially if we keep using 2000-3000kg metal boxes to move 80kg meat bags 1hr a day and let them rot in a parking for the remaining 23 hours.

Not even talking about the fact that cars are but a fraction of the problem anyways

Frightening?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_Wor...

We Americans have more to fear from economic and technological dominance than we do from military invasion.

As a budding superpower ready to unseat the US from it's throan. All China has to do is wait for progress and time to run it's coarse and emerge the victor. If anything, the US is the tigger happy country as we watch the inevitable, looking for any excuse to use to stop them.

Remember, why the hell does China give two shits about war if China can surpass the US simply through economic progress. They don't care, in fact they want to avoid war.

why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.

1) the ability of the internet to extract value overseas while untaxed in the client country 2) The H1B visa which funnels the best talent from struggling countries 3) strong institutions and financial and education centers and 4) military industrial complex that thrives on basically manufacturing conflicts with other countries

#4 is what is scary. not the dominance of any other country itself

> why does they have to be a winner and loser. everyone can thrive? except the United States is being buoyed by two main elements.

Why can’t there be a winner and a loser and both the winner and the loser cooperate and thrive with loser having the humility to admit he’s a loser? Isn’t this the same peaceful consequence? Just say China is better and admit inferiority for the everlasting peace. Why can’t you do it?

Because competition and cooperation are intrinsic parts of natural selection and therefore evolutionary biology and therefore human nature. Don’t pretend to be above your own nature.

Or do pretend. We can all act according to our ideals and deny our basest instincts, but don’t expect the mob to act the same way in aggregate.

I don’t think anyone disputes that China can out-manufacture us. Does that make them “better”, they the winner and the West the loser? Obviously not; things don’t end, history continues and things can go in different directions in the future. Not to mention that there are other dimensions that matter besides manufacturing prowess, namely quality of life, individual freedom, etc.

In the dimension of quality of life, technological prowess and economic GDP, China is likely going to match the US in western cities. Think about it. Manufacturing lies at the heart of everything. Do you think there's some universe where the US is good at designing things and then submits the design to China to manufacture and then suddenly China remains in the dark on how to design things?

Don't be deluded on the whole individual freedom or quality of life thing. 99% of Americans don't even exercise the right to protest. China doesn't let you protest and this fact doesn't really affect anyones life.

China does have kangaroo courts and this fact does actually affect some relatives of mine

So that I can afford cheap shit from poorer countries, if they stay poor they contribute less to climate change, less competition for finite rare resources

When your natural resources shrinking, you need to expand if your entire economy depending on that sources.

China will soon be more aggressive as any other empires.

Let’s pray renewables become standard before any empire becomes thirsty for this.

>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 :)

> Slavery in China has taken various forms throughout history. Slavery was nominally abolished in 1910,[1][2][3] although the practice continued until at least 1949.[4] The Chinese term for slave (nuli) can also be roughly translated into 'debtor', 'dependent', or 'subject'. Despite a few attempts to ban it, slavery existed continuously throughout pre-modern China, sometimes serving a key role in politics, economics, and historical events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_disputes_of_the_Pe...

> it has never invaded outside its traditional borders

Your notion of "traditional borders" is where this becomes nonsense. With a little bit of revisionist history you can justify all sorts of invasions, such as the 1959 invasion of Tibet, or the desire to retake Taiwan. In reality, China is an empire, with several of its regions very unhappy to part of it (Tibet, Xinjiang, and probably more if you could only ask its people).

Only empire which exists right now is the western empire lead by US, its days are numbered, then when the propaganda curtain falls, it will be a shock. I had people of Xinjiang as my class mates, they laugh at your propaganda.

What kind of propaganda? Because we do no find their propaganda funny.

I am not taking your word for it at all, but if they "laugh" at this, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

You know what?

Most of you don't even know a single Uigur in your whole life, everything you learnt about Xinjiang/Uigur is from western media(ofc, wikipedia, The "Free" Encyclopedia, and from some random "Xinjiang experts" who funded by some Hawkish think tanks which backed by the US gov.

But I do know many westerners like you in HN, Twitter, etc. And, since I have the more reliable information and experience, just like the one you replied, I know you more than you know Xinjiang/Uigurs, so, my oponion about you is way more reliable than your oponions about Xinjiang/Uigurs. I can easily judge you are ignorant due to credulousness and misinformation.

Now, do you understand why there's "laugh"? They/We are not laughing at "this", we are laughing at people like you.

TBH, I do enjoy browsing China-related comments in HN, it's like watching a comedy, you guys may never get this, untill you take a flight to China/Xinjiang, if you did, you'd find the funny part

How your knowing westerns from HN and Twitter makes your opinion more reliable than westerners that know about you from wiki?

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 about "traditional borders" are almost invariably nonsense.

> 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.

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.

By the time China entered the war, the invasion was already over. China entered the war for two reasons: 1) to make sure China was not invaded as MacArthur intended 2) to keep North Korea alive as a buffer, not to help invade South Korea. There was nothing to gain for China if the North unified Korea. Their relationship wasn't that good in the first place.

By the time China entered the war, the invasion was already over.

I don't see any substance the point you're trying to make here. One could try to say, "China was only trying to preserve North Korea's borders prior to the invasion". But once it pushed further south, into South Korea proper -- it was joining the invasion. There's nothing to debate here.

1) to make sure China was not invaded as MacArthur intended

And this just makes no sense at all.

MacArthur never intended to invade China, and didn't even start making noises about bombing China until after the it joined the war effort.

frightening? yeah you should be

The first thing that came to mind with the word "frightening" was a battery fire there.

Automation is transforming industries, and in marketing, tools like W3rocks can streamline lead generation, similar to how robots enhance coffee production.

For a tech website HN has very little about the Chinese insane scale projects. There is so much wildly amusing and inspiring footage online.

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.

LA purchased a few BYD e-Buses a few years ago and BYD is still trying to make a bus with a lifespan longer than about 1 month. While L.A. is trying to make the purchase work, most of their other U.S. transportation agency clients have simply demanded refunds.

BYD succeeds in places where quality and safety doesn't matter. It's why they've taken off in Asia but have made minimal inroads in countries with strong automobile safety regulations.

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.

Albuquerque had a contract with BYD for buses. The first one arrived late and had tons of problems - the range was 1/3 less than contracted, there were broken welds, leaking axles, malfunctioning doors and wheelchair lifts, and brake problems. The second bus wasn't much better. They eventually canceled the contract and bought diesel buses from New Flyer, which was a step backwards, as most (if not all) of our other buses run on natural gas.

The most frustrating part was that these were for a new dedicated bus lane which required the passenger door on the opposite side of the bus, so the city couldn't just use buses they already had in the meanwhile. Instead the lane went unused for nearly two years after it was built, in which we lost a lane of car traffic but were still having to share the remaining lanes with buses.

If you search Zhengzhou many of the results from mainstream media were about ghost cities

The rest are about Foxconn's factory.

This BYD factory were build further down south of downtown.

"western" mainstream media

The ghost cities are more likely to be cities previously built for mining and other activities that were gradually abandoned by young generations throughout the years. Zhengzhou should be (relatively) fine as a provincial capital as well as a railway center but I'm sure there might be a few high rising abandoned buildings here and there.

This feels very paperclip maximization

Twitter links no longer load at all on my iPhone. Can someone post an archive link or something?

You can replace all twitter.com (or x.com) links with xcancel.com:

https://xcancel.com/taylorogan/status/1859146242519167249

Thanks, that worked great. Crazy photos.

Can the west compete?

I don't believe so anymore - at least not in California.

https://www.hoover.org/research/californias-businesses-stop-...

"Between January 2022 and June 2024, employment in US private businesses increased by about 7.32 million jobs. Of these 7.32 million jobs, about 5,400 were jobs created in California businesses—representing about .07 percent of the US figure. Put differently, if California private-sector jobs grew at the same rate as in the rest of the country, they would have increased by over 970,000 during that period, about 180 times greater than the actual increase."

Didn't California shut down surfboard blank production? You can't even make traditional surfboards in California anymore. They don't want jobs that produce environmental waste. Not all states are like that.

west can compete. unlike byd’s, which get bricked all the time without infrastructure to maintain and repair them, west (and japan even more so) build cars that last. this is china we are talking about, the last thing I want is a car made by them… :)

Do you have any data about that? I have only heard the opposite from owners and it sounds a lot like the things Americans used to say about Japanese cars prior to getting stomped by them in the 80s.

two friends in russia, traveled to mexico twice this year, boss from australia… story after story after story always the same, amazeballs for X number of days and then get bricked, interior issues, steering …

This can't be a serious take, right? Chinese consumers don't expect much less when it comes to maintenance and repair. And given their 3M+/year vehicle production output, they're not a small player.

reach out to countries that sell these cars, find people on social media and/or if you have them in real life or travel… these cars are absolute garbage

not sure what your perspective is based on. gi your persistence, it seems it's likely not rooted in actually talking to these people, but perhaps some slight unconscious bias?

most of the things you use in your kitchen and also your device. you're typing this on were manufactured in China

I had the pleasure of seeing one in Mexico recently. If this car is garbage, sign me up! But alas, it's impossible because we decided that since we can't compete we'll just make them essentially illegal.

I got a chance to ride in several Chinese EVs recently and was incredibly impressed. They looked great, were comfortable to ride in and felt well made. And the drivers all seemed very happy with them. I would definitely consider buying one if they were available in my country.

There were many terrible electric cars out of China for years. Every province had its own little EV manufacturers. China's car industry is less concentrated than the US, but the big players are winning.

BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3. SAIC and Changan are state-owned, but Geeley is private, as is BYD. SAIC makes about 5 million vehicles a year. General Motors, over 6 million. BYD, around 3 million. Tesla, a little less than BYD.

Reviews of newer BYD cars are quite favorable. It's not like five years ago, when China's electric cars were not very good.

BYD has a simplified design for electric cars. The main component is the "e-axle", with motor, axle, differential, and wheels in one unit. There's a power electronics box which controls battery, motor, and charging. And, of course, the battery, made of BYD lithium-iron-phosphate prismatic cells. Talks CANbus to the dashboard and driver controls. BYD offers this setup in a range of sizes, up to box truck scale.

BYD and CATL are spending huge amounts of money to get to solid state batteries. The consensus seems to be that they work fine but are very hard to make. The manufacturing problems will probably get solved.

(Somebody should buy Jeep from Stellantis and put Jeep bodies on BYD E-axles. Stellantis is pushing a terrible "mild hybrid" power train with 21 miles of electric range, and an insanely overpriced all-electric power train. Stellantis prices went through the roof under the previous (fired) CEO, and sales went through the floor. Jeep sales are way down, despite customers who want them.)

it will take years before they can prove that their cars are made to last. I won’t be lining up to buy them but in 5-10 years perhaps

Kia/hyundai went through that phase already, and just got through it with absurd 10 year warranties when they first came out. China could do the same in the states, although I think they will have enough traction in SEA/Africa/Russia//Australia by then that they won’t have to.

Mine comes with a 5 year warranty, and a 7 year battery replacement warranty. I'm fine with not waiting.

Well, not sure how enforceable will it be, time will tell.

There are some not so good portents:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ducsx9jbsgc

does it also say it is OK to wait 8 months for warranty replacement or 11 months for battery replacement? :)

Chinese cars used to have lots of quality problems because they didn’t embrace automation, afraid that would take away jobs (Toyotas made in China 12-15 years ago were notoriously bad compared to ones made in Japan/usa). But in the last ten years, they’ve gone full speed ahead on it, as aggressive as the Japanese, and the quality increases are really noticeable. It’s not just a tech upgrade, they’ve really changed the way they are thinking about manufacturing (not just a jobs program).

> BYD is only the 9th largest carmaker in China. SAIC, Changan, and Geeley are the top 3

Protip: when you calc Chinese numbers, be sure to lookup the latest data. 1 year or 2 means landslide difference.

SAIC sales dropped > 11% and profit down by 27% in the first two quaters 2024. Think about that for a second.

BYD sold over 500k cars last month:

https://cnevpost.com/2024/11/01/byd-sales-oct-2024/

That's up over 60% year on year. If they are not already the largest carmaker in China they will be very soon.

As someone from Australia, which hasn't shut its self off from the China EV market. I drive a BYD Dolphin. You should be worried. They are cheaper, and more full-featured than European equivalent. They aren't junk.

Also, they aren't the only big player from China. Australia is soon getting GAC/Aion, Geely, Jaecoo, Leapmotor, Deepal, Xpeng.

Here is an article if interested. https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/which-chinese-car-bran...

Does Australia ask manufacturers to setup factories locally? I always think it's a good idea for employment and perhaps technology transfer. I don't know why Canada is not doing that. Getting a couple of big car factories could be huge for the locals. That's thousands and thousands of employment.

Australia had a domestic car manufacturing by Ford and GM - popular V8 rear wheel drive sedans on their own platforms but the govt decide to stop protecting the industry and Ford and GM was also not willing to invest money in manufacturing is such a low volume market and little export potential.

People used to say the same things about things made in Taiwan, then Japan, and then China, for things like electronics and white goods. It was true - until suddenly it wasn't.

In engineering you ultimately have to build stuff. Over, and over, and over again. You'll mess it up a lot at first, and then one day you'll realize that you haven't.

China is not stuck in 1965 trying to make an EV out of a saucepan and a backyard forge. They learn, and they keep trying. They have a domestic market that their government allows to be used as a test bed for everything they are doing, which sounds more coercive than it really is, especially given the fierce Sino-centric patriotism they have.

If Xi can last another 20 years without a palace coup, or manage a smooth transition of power that does not whipsaw policy, the West is in serious trouble.

Yeah but Japan has long had a cultural obsession with delivering high quality products. I don't know if China ever did, but if it did, much of it was wiped out during cultural revolution and replaced with succeed at all costs.

And there is a difference between success and excellence.

For example there have been zero bullet train fatalities in its entire history, and several Chinese HSR fatal accidents already. For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years.

Japanese-American here. This is revisionism. Japan was absolutely known for low quality products in the past. Probably the best "pop-culture" reference to this is "Back to the Future" when Marty travels back in time to 1955 and shows Doc a Made in Japan product (camera, I think?) Doc says its junk because its Made in Japan, but Marty sees it as high quality because its from the 80s.

Thats correct but it's hard to argue that it isn't a postwar blip in Japanese history as many companies of renown have lineages spanning both sides of the war, producing high quality product, anyways it feels like more than your median country.

Obviously quite literally survivorship bias, but since that's literal, it counts.

Japanese cameras became popular with pros during the Korean War precisely because they used high-quality materials and had great quality control. A good Leica was still better at the time, but you were much more likely to get a good Nikon.

Please show the news of several Chinese HSR fatal accidents, except the 2011 wenzhou hsr accident which happened during the early days of operation that everyone knows about, and it has been a decade since.

"For political reasons the quality of the HSR wheels in China took a sharp downturn so expect more accidents in the coming two years." if this doesn't happen, are you going to apologize for your lies, propaganda, defamation?

There was one as recently as 2022 in rongjiang. And yes it was a natural disaster, but do remember that the bullet train operated during the tohoku earthquake with a derailment but no fatality.

IIRC there were three derailments in 2020, I'm not certain any of them caused fatalities.

> except the 2011 wenzhou hsr accident.

Reminder. Bullet train: zero fatalities. Even during the "early days". No excuses. How to be safe is a solved problem since the last century.

> wheel issues

There are leaked videos of HSR in china shaking.

your iPhone is manufactured in China :). your view is very outdated, or maybe even willfully. I'm sure they're plenty capable

I have a chinese EV (GMW, not BYD.) I am a very happy owner; huge features for the price. I am not sure i can see buying of a "mainstream" manafacturer again. (My country has no tarrifs/no domestic car building.)

Define "the west". There was an interesting article here in HN the other day [0] "Almost 10% of South Korea's Workforce Is Now a Robot". China now surpasses all the west-aligned nations in terms of total industrial robots [1], however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.

I think it is a matter of strategy and it seems China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42225091

1 - https://www.statista.com/chart/31337/new-installations-of-in...

Depends if the Chinese need a market to export to.

The main issue with china is a reliance on exports and a declining population...

All work and productivity is ultimately an enabler of consumption.

I think another axis is an underlying cultural difference: balance of collectivism vs individualism. China can say “there will be a factory here” because it’s overall good to have one, even if a few noses are out of joint. In California it’s decades of fights to get a train. The trick to competing is to find the right balance for the next decades. China used to be all-central-planning, which was sluggish and not agile. Now it’s guided by central planning (great for overall alignment) over many years rather than jerky 4 year stints, combined with massively distributed efforts to generate high levels of competition and agility. What is the optimal balance for your country or state?

> China's strategy is innovation, science and productivity. We on the west seem to like consumption before everything else and IMHO we are doing it wrong.

What is this even supposed to mean? You can't have productivity without consumption - who are you producing things for? Well, consumers - duh.

China is the beneficiary of having relatively low marginal costs, but it's worth noting that's been changing and production has been moving out of China and into other cheaper regions - i.e. Vietnam.

> however the west still has the upper-hand in terms of robot to population density ratio.

Considering that latest data shows that China industrial robot density is only lower than SG and SK (surpassing Japan and German recently), then the west doesn't have the upper hand anymore.

Isn't robot density per 10,000 workers the standard metric used by the International Federation of Robotics?

https://x.com/orikron/status/1859657159338025418?t=9J4ASQP_M...

The problem with the west is that it’s already developed. Everything in the west is a bit like the European automobile industry, it’s highly refined for what it is and we expect to milk it for some time to come.

Same thing happened with the financial institutions and internet infrastructure - those who had the early versions of it established early ended up lagging behind once the technology was superseded.

The poorest countries in Europe had the best internet for a while because the richest countries wanted to milk the copper wires they invested on.

The US for long had much worse payments systems than Europe and Africa because they were at advanced stage on adopting the early technology.

strongly disagree. the West has almost no manufacturing capability or labor force (at an affordable rate) at the moment. it's almost unsustainable even for a small business to be paying $20 an hour in some cities let alone run large factories

Is it maybe because centering divs was much better career choice than dealing with machines and chemicals for more than a decade now? If that’s changing and manufacturing becomes a need, it should correct by itself.

The west, especially the USA invested gargantuan money into high margin high scale businesses and the Chinese worked their way up in dealing with atoms with help of the west. Now they too can do many of the high margin stuff and the west will have to re-learn how to deal with atoms. It happened because the west’s rich were simply shittier than Chinese bureaucrats and invested badly by choosing wrong KPI or ideas. Wonder what happens if the AI thing doesn’t pan out after pouring enormous money on it(instead of on something strategically important but not as potentially lucrative).

IMHO things are reversible, especially for the USA. Europe is in a worse place as its demographics and energy situation is less favorable.

> correct by itself

As a mechanist there’s more tax on my work now than when I was centering Divs because it was considered "research and development", which comes with tax exemptions. I won’t share the salary difference but you can bet it’s inversely proportional to the tax.

This is in France but I’m sure other Europeans countries have found ways to favor IT startups over usefull industries.

This is a ridiculous statement. The west has absolutely staggering manufacturing capacity.

China has more. And the trends are in the wrong direction, to be sure. But Germany and the US, among many others, have tremendous capacity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_assembly_pl...

Any big grouping can compete if there’s enough will. Look at how eg Russia has rejigged much of its war machine during the Ukraine war. Look at how Ukraine has turned themselves inside out to compete. At some level of pressure, countries transform. How much will it take? Is simple economic pressure enough? Can eg Europe gather enough of its massive educated population to transform?

In economic competition, as with poker, if you don’t know who the sucker is…you’re it. China has been making suckers of many countries and they are slowly waking up.

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're all gone now.

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 added a new high speed rail line.

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.

No. Nixon et al handed us to CCP whole. But hey, cheap TVs, clothes and what not.

Not with NEPA (and CEQA and friends). The current environmental movements will have to be dismantled since they are extractive rent-seekers on production. Fortunately, a new administration will soon be power so there is an opportunity to remove the roadblocks to America’s future success.

A world with a Chinese hegemony is not going to be pretty, as online DoorDash hammer and sickle communists are about to discover.

What does "the west" even means ? You can't find two countries that agree on half of the topics of the day, no matter how small or meaningless the topic is

Nope, we're too busy talking about our tiny little problems now (which flavor of politician will get to pillage the gold chest for themselves and their little friends for the next X years, ecology, genders, migration, &c.), and we already sold/moved all our heavy industries to... well... China. We're left with services but guess what, you don't build an healthy/sustainable economy on uber eats, airbnb and a crumbling public service system on the verge of dying due to demographic issues

Meanwhile China's totalitarian regime allows them to do things 10-100x times more efficiently than we could, mixed in with a bit of state capitalism, add the fact that they became our factories for pretty much everything, that they have access to most raw materials needed for pretty much anything. Sprinkle with a bit of spirit of revenge for the century of humiliation and you got a pretty good cocktail.

They have a long term vision, no counter powers, a fraction of our regulations and the will we lost sometimes in the last 50 years

Temu and Shein are 25% of packages transiting in France for example, they'll do the same things with their car, until they destroyed local companies, then they'll buy them for scraps. Can't blame them, we're letting them do it

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexandre-Monnin/public...

Looks like a picture of a motherboard

Folks, those buildings can be empty, either as a mind!@#% or just crazy future capacity forecasts that may not be real.

Watching a bunch of arm-chair experts guess that this building means more than it is is a wastes of time. (Approx) 3% of comments here make sense, are enlightening, 97% are just self-assured "Dunning Kruger effect" amateurs guessing they can deduct real info from this is weird. Good waste of 10 minutes for me though.

Why bother discussing anything with this sort of attitude? Just shut the site down.

The power of centralized planning.

All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average) and maintain/develop car dependency infrastructures.

This is the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy and reducing massively our climate and biodiversity impact.

I want those kind of factories to produce trains, bicycles... everything that can move people in a more efficient way than those "cars".

> the worst way of improving our efficiency and progress toward a more optimized, efficient economy

The worst except the others. Like sure, retooling our metropolises might be nice. But it’s also not only expensive but incredibly carbon intensive, to say nothing of not wanted by most of the world.

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

> not that expensive to put down a bike lane

Scale-wise insufficient. We aren’t going to get to net zero with bike lanes.

Who said net zero? Perfect is the enemy of good.

Comments like these need to be included in almost any discussion about transport or in fact any discussion about any change. Most people (or both sides) dismiss ideas because they are not 100% perfect. And ignore the fact that nothing can be perfect

If we only do a little bit, we'll only accomplish a little bit.

Yes, we'd better not do a little bit. Surely then, we'll accomplish a lot.

Perhaps we could spend the billions on electric cars rather than on unused bicycle lanes.

> Who said net zero?

OP is expressing dismay at EVs and suggesting building bike lanes instead. (Not in addition to.) The latter doesn’t solve the problem the former is being built to address. More bikes is nice. More EVs are necessary.

Suggesting more bikes as an alternative to EVs isn’t perfect versus good, it’s fielding rubber ducks against battleships.

> Not in addition to

Interesting. I didn't read that at all, but now this conversation makes a little more sense.

But suggesting bike lanes, not positioned as an replacement to cars, is a great idea.

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 economics I guess... I would be interested to see a per-trip cost analysis for cyclists.

There is just no way to economically justify bikelanes everywhere - bikes are great for some trips and some demographics.

Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...

> It is outrageously expensive.

Quite the opposite.

> Can you point me to a report that has a cost/benefit analysis of adding bike lanes for a city? A city that isn't "ideal" for cyclists...

https://www.benelux.int/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Report_Cy...

The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong. Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.

Two ignored real costs of bicycling are lack of optionality (planning ahead for weather changes, locked into transport mode) and carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera). And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.

About the quality I expected.

> The paper suggests biking only 118 days per year. The car ownership costs are not "saved" - the projected savings are wrong.

Were does it suggests that? The number 118 doesn't appear anywhere in that document.

> Ownership car costs are 0.167/km and savings by riding a bicycle are 0.349/km.

Where do you get these numbers from?

> carrying capacity (groceries, children, sports equipment, etcetera)

I do all grocery shopping for a family of four with a cargo bike. I pick up and drop off children in the cargo bike. You can think up objections all day if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that some people succeed in living car-free.

Nobody is forcing you to take a bicycle. Even if you personally don't like cycling, you should still encourage others to: every cyclist you see riding around is one less car stuck in traffic with you.

> And I'd like to see other costs of cycling (wet weather gear, helmets, locks) included.

Then you're in luck. On page 24, they include a budget of 117 EUR for gear and accessories.

I'm really sorry, my comment was meant to respond to nehal3m (a link to a thesis), not your comment.

I understand that biking can work and there are people that benefit greatly. Having a cargo-bike suggests you are an outlier. I've used biking and bussing as my main mode of transport in the past.

I just prefer we are truthful and admit that it is expensive to put down a bike lane. The paper you linked mentions the expense.

That paper is strongly biased towards cycling - hardly a fair analysis. It notes the same argument as the other paper "Total costs of ownership for a bicycle range between 16 and 28 eurocents per kilometre, while an average passenger car costs easily 32 eurocents per kilometre. Bicycles can play a key role in inclusive mobility policies.".

Comparisons need to be between trips not per km since a bicycle usually cannot fully substitute for a car.

And it is just a true that cars play a key role in inclusive mobility policies; however they don't mention that eh. I had a disabled parent so I do see both sides.

301 million dollars for 101km of infrastructure is cheap compared to building highways [0]. The price of the usual infrastructure is a burden on everyone as well, not just car owners.

You shouldn't have to force anyone to choose any particular mode of transport. I think people choose what is most convenient and that happens to be cycling in urban areas where there is safe infrastructure for it.

Your question reads pretty weird to me; building cycling infrastructure makes a city more ideal for cyclists, that's exactly the point. I didn't read it yet, but I found a paper that seems interesting and in the direction of your question. [1]

[0]https://www.worldhighways.com/news/european-highway-construc... [1]https://economics.acadiau.ca/tl_files/sites/economics/resour...

> is cheap compared to building highways

How about cycleways are cheap compared to building airports?

Cycle lanes are not substitutes for highways nor airports.

Nor the other way round, though.

This seems to be the source of that quote: https://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/124611551/building-10...

Note that this is NZ dollars, and that spend is over ~16 years. I.e. ~NZ$46/year/person ≈ US$27/year/person at current rates. The article compares the costs to road and motorway costs in Christchurch.

Bike lane construction tends to be lumped in with regular road maintenance, which makes it look expensive, but the really expensive part is doing repairs on the existing roads. "Building bike lanes" for 300M is more palatable than "fixing potholes and repainting" for 300M

Depends on where you live I guess. "Fixing potholes" would be far more palatable than "bike lanes" over here.

> 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

> Because when Urban3 set out to find out that kind of thing in USA and Canadian cities

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.

Bike lanes and bikes aren't alternatives to most of what motorized transport is providing.

Most car trips are very short, and commuting to a CBD is easily served by transit.

That still doesn't solve last mile supply of stores and offices, nor does it solve construction, policing, emergency services, etc.

Each of those likely has possible alternatives to motorized transport, but they're all different alternatives. Meanwhile, today, they all share the same road network with regular civilian commute, sharing costs and mutually improving efficiency.

Put differently: instead of imagining all passenger cars replaced by bikes, imagine all roads replaced by bike lanes, then extrapolate from that.

Most middle-class people, especially parents of small children, aren't going straight back and forth between home and work. They're making other stops for day care, school, shopping, after-school activities, gym, etc. Often there are tight time constraints which make public transit unusable. Like it would be impossible to use transit to pick my daughter up from school and get her to practice on time. It's a constant juggle and the childless young urbanites who dominate HN seem to be ignorant of how regular people live.

I find it so weird that people constantly speak as though public transport is this hypothetical maybe like a moon base or something. I use exclusively public transport, bikes, and walking. My whole family (with children) does. It's just not a problem.

Children walk or cycle to and from school. By themselves. When they're very young their parents did go and pick them up sure, but then its a small school within walking distance.

We rented a car and a trailer for a couple hours recently to move a double bed. It posed no problem, and was dramatically cheaper than owning a car for a month would be even if the car itself was free.

I got a nice cabinet for my friend recently. We are going to take the drawers out and move it to his place on a bus. I don't think it would fit in your car.

Replacing most of car traffic in a city with public transport (and bikes and such) is possible, and it can work - after it stabilizes. The transition seems extremely disruptive, which might be why people speak of it as if it couldn't work.

I'm a parent with small children. We have a car, but we only use it for inter-city commute. Everything within city bounds, we handle by public transit or walking (or electric scooters). It works because we live close to the kindergarten, and close to multiple public transit hubs, and I work remotely. It works, because we planned for it in advance.

Now, take a typical car-commuting, office-working parent of today. Like most, the place they live in is frozen in some balance between their and their spouses' jobs. Changing it would upend someone's schedule, and possibly involve kids changing schools/neighbourhoods (which isn't good for them). At that stage in life, one's combination of home, workplace, kids schools and after-school activities, is pretty much frozen in place. If they made it work with car commute, it probably can't work with public transit, and thus if you suggest the change, they'll look at you as if you came from Mars or something.

At least 80% of urban car trips could be replaced since the invention of the e-cargo bike. That doesn’t mean it works everywhere, of course, but there are millions and millions of people driving a single digit number of miles, usually at slower than bicycle doors-to-door speeds, and are never carrying 3+ kids and hundreds of pounds of cargo.

Think roads, not cars.

I am. Most of our road costs are for suburban car commuters and for subsidized car storage. If it was business usage and transit we’d need far fewer lanes, especially since businesses would use rail transportation more if the roads weren’t so heavily subsidized.

30% of the US can’t drive, whether because of disability, age, financial hardship, immigration status, or any number of other reasons. Why don't you hold the current system of "motorized transport" to the same impossible standard of solving all transportation needs as you expect of bikes?

Because your groceries are delivered by truck. Your houses are built with materials delivered by truck. In fact your entire lifestyle and the existence of the services which support those people, is provisioned and delivered by local road transport.

The problem with car-dependent cities is that they are very spread out. Why does public transit suck and why don't many people use the bike lanes? Because everything is far away.

We've built our cities this way. Our tax system encourages it (by not taxing land value directly and exempting development from taxation), and our zoning requires it (my city is almost entirely zoned exclusively for single-family detached housing). Bike lanes are nice, but they don't make a 25-km ride through endless suburbia any shorter.

You can't just copy the superficial traits of bikeable European cities and hope to get the same results. We need to fundamentally rethink the way our cities are allowed and encouraged to grow.

I don't use the bike lanes because most of the places I go don't have secure bike parking. I'm worried my bike will be stolen, and the local police don't take bike theft seriously. Some of the local dedicated bike trails have been essentially taken over as homeless camps, which are ironically full of stolen bike parts.

Your concern of theft is a dominent reason cited for not using bikes in wester countries. Interestingly, bike theft per capita is higher in bike paradise like NL and Copenhagen while ranking in the least concerns of those users.

That’s the x thing is higher in higher population areas problem. You have to calculate the probability of your bike being stolen if you have a bike. So not bike thefts per capita but bike thefts per bike owner.

No, the initial goal of this factory is to achieve dominance over the global automotive industry but the ultimate goal is to convert it into a machine that can spit out drones to invade Taiwain, South Korea, and Japan.

Source? Zhengzhou doesn’t seem like where you’d put a factory you want to protect from the combined forces of Japan, Korea and America.

You build the drones in advance of the conflict.

Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?

Why do you think the Chinese will invade their neighbors?

Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.

They abhor liberal democracies and seek to extend their domineering control over as many people as they can.

The CCP is an absolutely tyrannical organization that denies their own citizens the rights that you and I take for granted. Why would they ever desire their neighbours to have what they deny their own people?

Look no further than Hong Kong and North Korea to see what China wants for their neighbours.

South Korea only exists as it does today because Western forces repelled Chinese supported North Koreans from conquering it.

Japan only exists today because of American rebuilding after the destruction of Imperial Japan during World War 2.

Taiwan only exists as it is today because of American support.

China would have subjugated these entities and destroyed any chance of prosperity and independence that they had if not for the efforts of people who believe in individual autonomy and liberal democratic values.

China only has the power that they do to day because of authoritarians in the west who tricked the world into thinking that globalism means that we should engage in trade with undemocratic societies.

Because that's what authoritarians invariably do.

Did they invade Hong Kong? It's a very western viewpoint that invasion is the only way to affect change.

Now do Tibet.

75 years ago? If that's the closest precedent you can find, that kinda speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Can you name a single country that China has brought democracy to?

Now we're shifting topics. We're talking about invasions, not bringing democracy.

I also don't think that "bringing democracy" is a universal good, if you look at the US' exploits in the Middle East.

Hong Kong was leased from China. No invasion necessary.

They've squashed the democracy movement there, though.

I'm not saying they're not trying to expand their sphere of influence. I just think they're not quite as gung-ho about it as western powers. They work slower and less aggressively, invasions are a last resort.

It's so funny to read stuff like this and compare it to the united states which during my lifetime has invaded so many different countries and killed countless people across the world. Not saying China is great, but come on man if you had to pick one country that is invasion happy it's not china...

If you had to pick one country that is invasion happy it's not China.

Its regime is somewhat conservative in this regard, but happily orders of invasions of other countries when it sees the need.

Can you think of another country that actually does more invasions all the time in recent history?

You can ask all the rhetorical questions you want.

I just don't see a need for pretensions that China does not cynically invade countries on occasion, or similar nonsense.

The death toll on two of the interventions above (2M+ each for Korea/Cambodia), BTW.

> Where do you think the Chinese will build the factories that spit out drones en masse to invade their neighbours?

Where they're currently building drones.

In times of war factories will be retooled to best serve the needs of the military.

I anticipate that in a regional war China will need more aircraft than land vehicles, especially given that the regional adversaries they are facing are mostly island nations.

It's very questionable if America will play a role there. It's 50/50 that Xi will be able to do a personal favour to Trump or Musk that will keep America out of it.

When the times comes to defend Taiwan (or Japan/Korea) it will be life or death for the US to react and win. If they fail, the whole house of cards will collapse for the US. Trump as stupid as he is had gotten the ball rolling in the correct direction in his first term and I don't see how he will deviate this term.

Keep in mind that he is now surrounded by a completely different people than during his first term.

Are you a Russian bot account?

Why can’t both be done? Bicycles are already cheap, and an electric bike can be purchased under $1000. Not everyone is capable of limiting their commute to the ~10 mile radius an e-bike easily permits. Some of us still need cars, unfortunately. Sometimes the weather is bad, or we have things to haul around, or multiple people to move.

Is there some technology that enables high-speed travel and weighs less than a human, which seems to be an important criteria to you?

In Japan electric bikes were relatively cheap as you say but in Canada, a bike to carry my family costs more than 5-6k, closer to 10k.

I can't even import those electric mama charis because of unwarranted concern about batteries.

Hard to support bike infrastructure when safetyism means bike routes are only for singles and the rich.

Not sure about the weights-less-than-human part, but definitely bikes in trains

>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 developments in my area. After covid, many US downtowns permanently shut down car traffic on core interior roads, and it’s made the experience 10x better.

I agree, Tokyo is one of the most incredible places I’ve ever visited. I’ve tried to retain some of the sensibilities I observed there, and incorporate them into my lifestyle. Amsterdam similarly inspired me to revisit my lifestyle. If you hate the system you live in, make improvements!

>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.

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.

Sorry to hear all that, and glad you found peace elsewhere.

Sounds swell. But people like cars. Not realistic.

Unfortunately the only places in the world that I know of building new cities are UAE, Saudi, Egypt, China. I don’t think any of those are building for car-less.

Saudi Arabia's "The Line" is car-free.

And reality-free.

A bicycle is not suitable for the 100km trip to see my parents, and the only country that can operate trains at a satisfactory level is Japan (and maybe China, but I don't trust their data).

So no, its either this or a gas car. Both are real solutions that work, today. Changing society from the bottom up is not.

or a bus.

But then again it's amazing how we ignore the infrastructure costs of building and maintaining the roads to run the cars everywhere.

For the 1000th time here, even extremely well developed public transport by US standards and various financial punishments for owning cars is simply not enough for people to drop them, the convenience is simply too high.

Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.

Maybe some AI driven community (or even private fleet) of shared cars to be hailed in Uber style on demand would work, reducing number of cars overall and the need to own personal one(s). Not there yet.

I don't think anyone envisions having no cars; public transportation make it so we don't need cars, and other nudges make it so we have fewer cars than we would otherwise have.

>Look at Switzerland, it has all you want - one of the best rail networks in the world, its tiny, rest of public transport is as good as western Europe can get yet... folks still keep buying new cars, highways are getting fuller every year.

It sounds like Switzerland is very poorly managed then. Here in Tokyo, we have absolutely the best rail network in the world, and no, people aren't buying more cars and making the roads more crowded at all. The key here is that owning a car in the city is extremely inconvenient: the roads are frequently very narrow and slow, there's no convenient place to park, the few parking lots available are expensive (and likely not near your destination anyway, unless you're going to some large building (like a mall), and you're not even allowed to own a car in the city unless you have a place to park it, and can prove this to the police. There's almost no street parking. So trying to use a car to get around the city is just not very convenient at all, except for certain trips (e.g., going to a mall that has a parking garage, from your apartment where you're spending a huge extra amount every month for the privilege of a parking space). Taxis are a different matter, though: they exist and are somewhat popular, but they're pretty expensive.

> All this to produce machines of 2T to displace 80kg of human on average (think about it, the battery weight more than what it actually need to move on average)

Actually, if you pay attention to scales and sizes, it's so very little to achieve so much. What you're seeing is tremendous efficiencies concentrated on a small piece of land, affecting transportation on a vast scale.

I agree that cars are at least double the mass they need to be. The size of cars needed for a school run or to drive to work are generally quite small, but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.

> but most people seem to have giant trucks for the occasional times they go camping or carry something large.

This is the reality in United States, but not in most of the world.

Sadly though, other countries are trending the same way.

I’m a bike commuter, all on board for transit, etc. but too much of the world – especially North America – is built around cars exclusively and that’s not changing any time soon because doing so would require things like massive rezoning to avoid people needing to travel such long distances just to function.

If we are going to have cars, I’d prefer they be smaller, safer EVs contributing ⅓ the carbon footprint of the status quo. Every bit of savings buys years to make further changes, and it directly saves lives and improves quality of life for a billion people. Even if climate change was not happening, it’d be worth doing for the improvements in cardiovascular health, disruption of sleep patterns and other consequences of engine noise, local water and soil pollution, etc.

There is a clear reason why such factories are being built in China and if you are a USA or German citizen, you wouldn't like it.

In a BBC article from a couple of days ago [0], they hinted that China intends to take the lead into transitioning developing countries from fossil fuels to green tech. They produce batteries, EVs and solar panels. Just this year alone Pakistan of all the countries, imported 13 gigawatts (GW) of solar panels. For context - the UK has 17GW of installed solar in total.

China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.

0 - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rx2drd8x8o

How is the power being generated for all this manufacturing capacity?

60% coal, some baseload nuclear (5%), renewables (30%). They have massive dams (14% of electricity IIRC).

Coal share is shrinking, a lot.

Today, capacity factor of coal plants is below 50% (that's why you always see China builds coal plants... that stand idle) and their coal consumption has been more or less flat for a decade. The plan is to use coal plans when wind doesn't blow and sun doesn't shine. Natural gas is a national security risk due to imports, but they do have a lot of coal.

Out west coal drops a lot and green energy is more available. They are still limited by grid in getting green energy from west to east. They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.

> They should probably be building more factories in the west, but I’m guessing water resources might limit that.

There are also other reasons. The name of western province is Xinjiang. They did have a plan to turn it into manufacturing hub, and it's one of the reasons why you see stuff you see.

I actually went to changji before, and visited my friend’s brother furniture factory, so they have manufacturing in Xinjiang. They have more potential for it than any other western province if we go by culture since Uighurs are just as industrious and educated as Han (economic competition is where a lot of the conflict stems from, if they could fix that the autonomous region would boom).

Pakistan has better geography for solar.

>China is aiming to take place #1 as top world economy and it is near perfect how they plan to frame it - as a climate change friendly initiative.

it is classic case of new dominant players emergence when paradigm shift happens. PC vs. mainframe, GPU vs. CPU, clean energy economy vs. fossil fuel based.

World's response to the climate crisis is already dangerously delayed, and we're at a point where we need anything ASAP. We've ran out of time to massively overhaul infrastructure everywhere.

The US and UK apparently can't even build a single high speed rail line any more.

Car dependency sucks, but we won't be able to fix that in the short term, but at least we can fix its oil dependence.

Cleaner grid will also need a lot of battery storage, and EV demand helps scale that up.

I don't think it's a particularly different timescale to swap from ICE to EV than to drastically reduce car dependence. What makes you think there's a big difference to where swapping to electric cars is easier than avoiding cars?

Credible reduction in car dependence needs well connected fast passenger rail networks, and changing urban sprawl to something denser with more local amenities.

The first one is a major infrastructure project, the latter is largely unpopular with the people already living there (and Republicans react to the concept of 15-minute cities like it was a gulag).

Infrastructure is still built as if it was business as usual, so can easily get blocked and delayed by decades on budgeting, bidding, consultations, NIMBYs, environmental surveys, etc.

OTOH we've already got EVs, we have already been building infrastructure for them, and it's a smaller change more acceptable to people.

You might as well wish that the factories produced teleporters. You're putting the cart before the horse. You have to fix the demand side first. I know there's an online demand for public transportation and bikes and if you are in that bubble it can feel like the whole world is with you, but in the real world, most people (obvs not everyone) prefers to have their own car.

I think there's hope since the only thing people like more than their cars is being glued to their phones, and public transport enables you to do that during your commute.

Believe it or not, but the buses and trains are also being manufactured in China. if you'd visit, you'd see that they have excellent public infrastructure, with multiple redundancies

There is a downside.

You need to show your identity card to buy a ticket.

(or use an app which does this for you.)

Next weigh up your house, get ashamed, tear it down and live in a tent.

BYD make busses. They have something like a 20% market share in the EU and the number of EV busses in China is mind boggling and was an early sign that China was going to win the EV market:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231206-climate-change-h...

BYD also have some kind of monorail product!

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 communist propaganda.

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!?

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.

I just got rickrolled into X.

Just wait till Trump hits 'em with tariffs. That'll fix 'em --- NOT!

China is rapidly de-carbonizing and leaving the West behind.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-07-16/chinas-renewa...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-has-more-than-...

For reference, England consumed 1 billion tons of coal during it's peak coal consumption decade.

So please stop with the "China is decarbonizing" crap, because they are not. A more accurate statement is "China understands the importance of energy and is applying an as-much-of-everything-approach to achieve its industrial goals"

Also please stop comparing absolute numbers between countries with more than an order of magnitude population difference.

cool now compare the population difference.

In order to build renewable infrastructure, you do need to expend a lot of energy: mining, processing, transporting. China is using coal to build up that infrastructure and converting that dirty energy into clean.

Its not just about population. The UK was the world's foremost manufacturing nation at the time, just as China is now. It was the centre of manufacturing of an empire so the relevant comparison is with the population of the empire. There were no real alternative sources of energy - no nuclear, no solar, no wind (in a form suitable for most industry).

The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.

And if you want to count the population consuming industrial goods as the population that "causes" those emissions, then China looks even better, because they are producing goods consumed by literally billions of people.

> The British Isles were not providing food, heating, cooling, electric light, raw materials etc for the population of the British Empire.

Most of those did not use coal in most of the empire in the year of peak consumption: 1913.

It was providing a lot of raw materials.

So when GHG absorbs energy from the sun, it's on a per capita basis?

No, but when talking about whether a country is emitting more than its "fair" share of GHG for any reasonable definition of "fair" per capita is what matters, unless someone can make a convincing argument that some people have some kind of natural or divine right to contribute more to GHG emissions than others.

More details are in this comment [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42229636

Why didn't you include England's total historical contributions to GHG emissions and technologies in your comparison then?

You are comparing a country that was probably less than 5% of China's current population during that peak. And not only is China 17.5% of the world's population, it is also the major manufacturing hub for the majority of the world. 10 times as much coal as the UK's peak is still a tiny number.

The reality is that China is emitting much less CO2 per capita than the US or Canada, and just a bit more than the more industrious EU countries like Germany. And this is territorial emissions: if you take into account what percentage of those emissions is going into goods produced in China but bought by those very countries, it's probably around the EU average if not lower.

Is China anywhere near a net 0 goal? No, not even close. But among industrial powers, it is one of the ones that went by far the most into green power.

Yes, China still uses a metric fuckton of a coal, but they are decarbonizing: every year, the % of energy generated by coal goes down 1%, and renewables go up 1%.

https://ember-energy.org/countries-and-regions/china/

Just to underline, this is not notional capacity (which inflates solar/wind), but actual power generation. This is all the more impressive because China's total consumption is simultaneously increasing rapidly.

https://globalenergymonitor.org/report/china-continues-to-le...

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/climate/climate-china-solar-w...

They're making insane progress and they are decarbonizing in terms of their energy mix. Can you and others please stop with never letting china receive any praise for anything? it's so annoying when people seem incapable of pointing to ANYTHING in china and being like "nice". Is there anything positive you'll credit china with in this space or just nitpick?

The 100% tariffs are already in place under the Biden administration. Trump only needs to prevent a Mexico manufacturing loophole.

However, BYD still has the entire rest of the world to sell to. They will be fine.

Yes, BYD will be fine.

And they know this is --- hence they are doubling the size of their already massive factory.

Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers. They won't be able to compete anywhere other than the USA. And China loves it.

US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s. My hypothesis is that their heyday was 50s and 60s “greaser” culture and they kinda got their heads stuck in that era. “Golden ages” are incredibly dangerous.

When people started wanting just practical small reliable affordable cars as the price of gas increased and cars became just an appliance they didn’t respond to that market and the Japanese did. It’s been either sideways or downhill since. The only thing keeping them alive now is unnecessarily large status symbol trucks and that is a limited market that will be trashed if oil spikes again. There’s got to be a limit somewhere to how much people will pay to show off or own the libs or whatever motivates one to buy an F-5000 Super Chungus.

They are still mostly missing the EV boat. First Tesla caught them asleep and now China. Culturally they still are not crazy about EVs because they do not go vroom vroom.

Trump might string them along a bit longer with protectionism and a pull back on EVs to push more vroom vroom but meanwhile BYD will eat the entire world.

The US consumer does not buy small new cars.

As has been pointed out, they sure did in the 70's when there was a huge financial incentive.

I expect that acting like all American's want are $60K+ luxury cars is what is going to take the US auto industry into the next massive downward spiral.

I.m.o. consumer weight on safety has dramatically increased since the 70s. Frugality has decreased. Of course it is an arms race with all the other giant cars already on the road. Consequently GM etc. are trying to appease US consumers with giant EVs.

I agree. But there's a tipping point too (I think). Another depression and we'll no doubt tip over.

I agree with you. I.m.o. consumer preference is the root cause of the issue.

The 2008 bailout had some strings attached to modernize. I believe the Chevrolet Spark was one of these strings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Spark#Third_generati.... It was eventually discontinued.

I think there’s a little bit more to the golden age story.

The “malaise era” started in the early 70s as a perfect storm of fuel economy restrictions and more widespread US economic woes. This lead to decades of low quality cars being made.

US automakers not only lost out on consumers looking for simple appliances to drive, but ALSO the enthusiasts that liked driving and cars. The car guys that came of age in this era have two choices: chase after the same American muscle cars your dad liked, or switch over to imported hot hatches and the JDM tuner scene

> 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 Cutlass/Pontiac Grand Prix from 1988 were well built, comfortable, handled (relatively) well, and were very reliable - especially from 1990 with the introduction of the 3.8L V6, what is likely GM’s most reliable engine ever built (second possibly only to the small block V8). The same was tru for their sports cars (while not making much power out of the displacement, the TPI V8 firebird and corvette were similarly efficient to European sports cars at the time). Many GM cars from that era (late 1980s until early 2000s) are some of the most reliable American cars ever built.

The same is true for Ford; for example, the 1988 Probe, while not the most popular vehicle, was very reliable, comfortable, efficient, and well-built, likely in part due to their partnership with Mazda. It could reasonably be argued that as early as 1980, Ford was making pretty good vehicles, with the Mercury Grand Marquis/LTD Crown Victoria being well-built and reliable, if very down on power with questionable efficiency.

Not worth talking about Chrysler because they didn’t know how to make good/reliable cars before the fuel crisis and they certainly didn’t figure out how to afterwards.

I know this isn’t your main point but it’s worth considering that the US did actually figure out how to build really good cars again, and it didn’t take them that long. Mid-90s to early-00s American cars were, in my opinion, at the perfect point of technological advancement: CAD and high-precision/low-tolerance manufacturing resulting in engines that last well over 300k miles without major servicing; enough computer advancement to have high precision per-cylinder fuel and spark control with accurate air metering leading to better power, efficiency, and reliability; and enough material advancement to have interior and exterior build quality that makes the car look like it wasn’t built in a shed. But most importantly, they hadn’t figured out how or where to cheap out on components, so you end up with the “unreliable” components (like the 4L60e and 4T60e transmissions) “only” lasting 200k miles before requiring a rebuild - which in today’s money is still less than $1000, let alone 20-30 years ago.

From the birth of the US auto industry until about 2010, the only period where there wasn’t a single American car worth buying brand new was probably 1974-1981. The “malaise era” itself was by the loosest definitions only about 13 years, from 1974-1987.

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”)

GM F-bodies (Firebird, Camaro) and the Corvette are good contenders as well. Barely counts but the C4 ZR1 Corvette (launched in 1989 for the 1990 model year) that made 375HP and was partially designed by Lotus would be up there as well. Taurus SHOs are quite popular now too. The Merkur XR4Ti was also a very cool car, and very cheap these days (mostly due to lack of parts availability without creativity); stock they only made a max of 175HP, but (speaking from experience) the fuel injected and intercooled versions of those engines can make over 300HP with little more than "turning up the boost." (The 2.3 turbo was also available in the Fox platform in the Thunderbird Turbo Coupe, Mustang Turbo GT and SVO, and a few others.)

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 ;)

> US auto makers have been on the ropes since the 1980s.

Without a doubt.

In about 2000 the US automakers sued the EPA because their proposed clean air regulations for about 2009 were "impossible".

They were actually more lax than what Japanese automakers were already selling cars for in the year 2000.

So the automakers sued the US government to admit that in 2009 they couldn't build cars that were as clean as cars Japan was already making in 2000. That says a lot.

They were right about those regulations. The CAFE is why we now have the proliferation of huge trucks and SUVs instead of sedans.

Cars from Japan, 2000 or current that are clean aren't street legal here because they don't meet the safety standards. Those safety features add weight, which in turn drive down the efficiency.

> Cars from Japan, 2000 or current that are clean aren't street legal here because they don't meet the safety standards

I've seen this repeated for 25 years now, and to be honest I think it's simply not true.

Can you list one safety standard they don't meet?

The GT-R is identical as sold in Japan and the USA (well, actually, the US version has wider seats - true story).

Even when that one guy homologated the R32 Skyline into the USA he barely modified the front bumper at all and it met crash safety standards as it was.

I am not familiar with the NHTSA and EPA regulations to point you to one specfic place in the code but here is a citation. Also a lot of the Japanese vehicles that people point to as being more efficient are Kei class, these vehicles don't meet NHTSA code as they would not survive the crash tests.

https://gearshifters.org/nissan/how-to-import-a-nissan-silvi...

>Beginning in January 2024, the 1999 Nissan Silvia S15 will turn 25 years old. It will no longer be subject to NHTSA regulations after it turns 25 and can be legally imported into the USA.

>Because it did not adhere to federal safety and environmental regulations and featured a right-hand steering column, like cars in England, this particular vehicle was deemed unlawful in the United States. However, some Silvia vehicles have been registered in the US after being modified to comply with US laws.

Their downfall was earlier than that. Post WW2 everyone was looking to buy a new car (people kept their old one during the war because production was going to the war effort). The car companies had such demand they moved to a 'car salesman' sales structure to milk every customer as much as possible because demand was so much higher than production. They got hooked on the easy money and entrenched a lot of bad business practices/policies as a result.

GM for all intents and purposes died (remember we funded a whole new GM, a completely new business entity, during the 2008 financial crisis timeframe) and yet new GM just 'invested' 6 billion dollars in stock buybacks, millions in management bonuses while conducting employee layoffs. But they will have no problem coming and asking the government for billions 'to remain competitive' soon. F'm.

Source for manufacturers making everyone go to dealers, wiki says the opposite. With the NADA lobbying to make it illegal for mfg to sell direct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealerships_in_the_United_... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_dealership https://caredge.com/guides/how-did-car-dealerships-become-so...

Sorry for the confusions, but I didn't talk about dealers I talked about the 'car salesman' model.

> Guess who won't be fine? US auto manufacturers.

The US is trying to do industrial policy (like now in China, and previously in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, and in Germany before that), but without the key aspect -- export discipline -- that makes industrial policy work. I'm thinking about Joe Studwell's How Asia Works. Everything I'm seeing in the US reminds me more of the failures in Indonesia and India than of the successes in Japan and Korea. With the exceptions of -- "say what you will about Elon, but" -- Tesla and SpaceX. Bidenonics will take time to bear fruit, though, and could yet yield some successes.

Point is, using tariffs to protect "infant industry" is the opposite of export discipline.

(As a side note, most of those countries also had major land reform, whereas property rights -- sorry, "rule of law" -- are pretty sacred in the US )

The US government bailed out GM under Obama. Do you know what GM did this month? They spent billions on stock buybacks and millions on bonuses while firing a ton of people. F'em. They aren't a car company, they are a stock company that happens to make cars, a route most large American companies seem to be taking (see also Boeing, whose management cares so much about/is detached from their product that they relocated their management away from the business and to Washington DC).

China is a 30 million a year car market and up until 2 years ago,GM used to sell more cars in China than in the US . It was an incredible cash cow .

GM sales has cratered there - a wrong product mix for a market that wants 36% EV's or hybrids hence them focusing on new EV platform and doing the new Bolt.

It was so weird going to China backing in the early 2010's and seeing everyone driving Buicks. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn't a sea of Buicks.

Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and many other countries turned sour on importing chinese EVs in favour of some kind of protectionism. Most developing countries dont have the infrastucture for EVs. Europe hit BYD with a 17 % tariff (10% being the standard)

BYD has factories in Brazil: https://valorinternational.globo.com/business/news/2024/09/0... https://en.byd.com/news/byd-company-announces-first-factory-...

why does that matter?! :)

When they're locally built, tariffs don't apply. Like Japanese, Korean and European car manufacturers, BYD will do the same in Mexico and eventually the US if necessary.

Why do I read most tweets as if they are trying to sell me on something extremely urgent that I must know about? As if the thing they are telling me must be known or else I will be left behind? Something about the sentence structure? Anyone else have this feeling? It's why I had to uninstall Twitter in the end, I hate it.

Thanks, I hate it.

What is BYD?

Chinese car manufacturer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Auto

Factory square footage is the new crowd sizes. Tell your friends.

Most of this is land being dug up, we don't know what it will be used for. Could just be holding area for stock, which is not a good thing. Premature to comment on the scale of BYD's factory.

I wonder if they built that factory to be resistant to bombing and how much air defense they plan to put around it when they take Taiwan.

I also wonder how fast it can be converted to spit out drones.

EVs on the battlefield are as of yet untested. That makes the BYD factory at best possible dual use. A bad target for Taiwan and its allies for a host of reasons.

Drones seem to be quite an important facet of the current war in Ukraine and Russia.

I wonder how fast this factory could be converted produce drones and how fast it could spit them out.

Imagine a circular loop of larger carrier aircraft that load up FPV drones from this factory and fly to their destination to drop them off only to fly back to do it again.

The FPV drones could have object recognition to target people, artillery, infrastructure so they could operate autonomously.

I wonder if they will put the landing pads on the factory roof or next to the factory.

DJI is already the worlds largest drone maker, better to let them continue then rebuild a car factory.

In past wars factories making steel pots made helmets. I can definitely imagine an ev plant making drones.

They won’t be able to take Taiwan. Taiwan has enough missiles to wipe out China’s navy 10x over before the US steps in with our navy

Equally, China has enough missiles to blockade Taiwan permanently. There's no reason for them to attempt an amphibious landing or anything insane like that. It's unclear to me what the US response would be in a blockade situation, but Chinese hypersonic missiles do pose a threat to carriers.

This isn't Desert Storm we're talking about here, China is a real threat.

Look at a map of Taiwan. Or better, look at it in Google Earth. Taiwan is a narrow island with a mountain range running north-south down the middle. The developed areas are west of the mountains, facing China, in a strip 15 to 30km wide.

There's no defensive depth. And nowhere for all the people to go in an attack. It's not like Ukraine, where the current fighting is like battling over Iowa, one farm at a time. It's more like Gaza, with too many people crammed into too little land. But bigger.

China has a large number of truck-mounted anti-ship missiles. Bringing US Navy ships in the Taiwan strait means losing many of them. The PLAN has more ships than the US Navy, and is building more at a high rate.

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