4,929 karma · joined October 22, 2013
The idea is a bit hard for me to comprehend because there are definitely occasions that I would tap my brake kind of hard and then immediately speed up again. Perhaps my mental model is still very much ICE engine and torque converter oriented and that's holding me back from understanding this. From an abstract point of view, it seems there is only one variable I'm controlling for, which is acceleration, so having two pedals is just doing the same thing with more steps (literally). One pedal should give me everything I need.
Boy did I learn that the hard way. I found an ASRock server motherboard that fit my needs for a NAS perfectly. I just assumed all ECC memory were registered so I didn't even bother to check. I had already put everything together minus the memory. I had actually purchased the memory and had to return them because they were RDIMMs and get the ECC UDIMMs for quite a bit more. Luckily this was just before the AI induced price spike.
This guy did it over 30 years so it is feasible.
Scapegoat isn't the right term but I think it is very possible he is being executed to essentially send a message. I think your bigger point that there are way more corrupt officials than just this guy involved seems very plausible.
Russia actually does have a smallish SMR but it wasn't terribly cheap to build nor operate. IIRC it is in the form of a ship and used to power a city somewhere in the north.
SMR has a place for sure but no one has demonstrated the unit costs savings of making a lot of them yet.
You can actually get some, if not most, of the economy of scale by doing a fleet build of one specific design. The US seems to be working on that and picked the Westinghouse AP-1000. I think that initiative has a decent chance of succeeding. The first few will be slow and expensive to build (even China has had delays with their nuclear roll out) but the subsequent ones will get cheaper and faster to build. This is how some countries did it during the first nuclear power expansion era.
It's also just so simple to learn.
This really gave it away:
"So can you stop a hypersonic? Sometimes, the wrong ones. Probably not the right ones, yet. The one defense working against the right ones today is a politician’s restraint, not a kill chain.
The worst one is still in its silo. And we are running out of interceptors against the second-worst ones."
It sounds like ChatGPT talking to me.
It's weird reading articles written by AI or helped by AI because it's a lot of words but no overarching narrative. It's almost like an expanded and fluffed up outline. It's very exhausting to read and I lose interest partway through. AI written text has a low "ROI".
AI code is similar. The individual parts are OK but even after reading the entire codebase it's hard to understand how it all fits together or what the over arching structure is.
(BTW, I don't mind what you're doing at all -- as long as you're honest and upfront about it. I love how you're exploring this way of working. I also love the widgets you embedded. It's cute but doesn't add a ton to understanding of the ideas in the article but it's the type of thing AI can really enable for writers.)
Charging was what stopped me from getting an EV when I was a renter. In a world where I can recharge in 7 to 10 minutes, it becomes a lot more feasible for a renter to get an EV without at home charging capabilities. A renter can just pull up to a recharging station. Wait 7 to 10 minutes or (maybe 5 if they don't mind a half charge) and be off.
Maybe I'm wrong. I gained my knowledge second-hand/third-hand from books and podcasts so I would defer to you to your actual experience and observations about Chinese REE. What is your estimate on how long it would take the West to catch to at least supply some of the rare earth components and what the real barriers might be? Would love to hear your take on this.
Thanks for sharing your observations. I had no idea about the minutiae of that industry, i.e. the ecological control and its effects on the industry.
Basically, if we want to replicate what they did, we will have to do it mostly from scratch -- Japan and Australia has done some of the work already so it's not totally from scratch. It's obviously not impossible but it could take almost a decade for us to do that.
That said, I don't think this should be enough for Japan to stop investing in EVs. If Japanese car makers are really worried about this then they can build their plants in the US and leverage any deal the US has with China on real earths. They've already starting importing Japanese cars made in India and the US back to Japan so that's an established practice. Then once they've secured their own supplies they can make the EVs in Japan too. I think OP's point about the suppliers have more merit as a reason why Japan might not want to develop EVs.
I do think the original point about lower complexity vehicles being a threat to the suppliers has some merits though. Germany faces a very similar dilemma and made similar decisions.
I would add that despite joint ventures, China's domestic internal combustion engine industry never really caught up. In fact their best engines were made by wholly domestic companies but those were not nearly as good as those made by Western and Japanese companies.
As Warren Buffet noted over a decade ago, BEV is an opportunity for China to simply skip over all of that and just leapfrog everyone else. So it's even better than greenfield. It's green field for them while allowing them to completely disrupt existing foreign competitors.