We're still in bubble-period hyper-polarized discourse: "shoehorn AI into absolutely everything and ram it down your throat" vs "all AI is bad and evil and destroying the world."
Pop science guru-ing is a giant flashing red sign for me. I am never even a little surprised when the latest “sense maker” or pop science guru comes out as a complete loon or is consumed by some kind of scandal.
Influencers in general are always suspect. The things that get you an audience fast are trolling or tabloid-ish tactics like conspiracism.
There are good ones but you have to be discerning.
The only two car companies to make any meaningful profit on EVs were founded as EV companies first?
That’s not that surprising. It’s very hard to make elephants dance.
If that remains true it means all these auto companies will be dead in 25 years, or eternally strung along on government support.
If there were no tariffs or other market barriers I get the impression that BYD would bulldoze the entire world and there would be one car maker with >80% of the market.
This video here describes why BYD is so competitive: They have done a splendid job vertically integrating as much as they can to get the price down. This $11,500 EV is an excellent example of how other companies should start to shift their thinking.
Seems like it is sold for around 18,000 Euros. It obviously passed European safety standards, no point in getting homologation certification for the US if it remains tariffed to high hell but if they wanted to I'd assume they can pass US standards as well.
Yeah, the problem is that the tariffs are letting our carmakers just become unproductive, uncompetitive leeches on the American consumer. They're getting lapped by China/BYD.
Once BYD bulldozes the rest of the world, our domestic manufacturers are guaranteed to fail.
100% on BYD ... no one can match their current technology and pricing power. And it's possible they still will do that bulldozing, but much more slowly. Even now I'm seeing strong swapping out of Tesla's for BYD's in London.
When you go shopping and see two items for sale that seem nearly identical, do you buy the cheaper one?
If you have long term savings do you want it to earn interest?
The desire to optimize for profit exists at all levels among all participants in the economy. Everyone does it. We are the system and the system is us.
Regulations are usually the only way to fix these things because there are game theoretic effects in play. If your company spends more to clean up and others don’t, you lose… because people buy cheaper products and invest in firms with higher profit margins. The only way out we’ve found is to simultaneously compel everyone. But that doesn’t remove the incentive.
Yeah I'm aware. Learning about how American capitalism functions is what set me on the path of being an anticapitalist. Reforms and regulations will never be effective here in solving this issue. The system itself is poisonous.
Destruction of the system and building a new fairer one. Similar to how feudalism gave way to capitalism, things can improve. What details are you wanting to know exactly?
An egalitarian society where the means of production are owned (or mostly owned) by the working class. A blend of that and small private industry with heavy regulation would be nice. I like how the Kurds in Rojava are trying to build things but it's impossible to know how successful their ideas could be while they're dodging bullets from Syria and Turkey. The Zapatista movement is another way of doing things I'd consider.
It’s an ideology that’s been consistently and often staggeringly wrong since it first became very popular in the 1970s. Historically it’s been popular on the left, while demographic doomer stuff is more popular on the right.
These ideologies are normally used as “problemist” lead ins to the ideology the author is really pushing. For the left it’s usually Marxism or anarcho-primitivism of some kind. For the right it’s cultural authoritarianism, racism, and anti-feminism.
Because it’s problemism, there can be no solution other than what the author advocates. We can’t engineer our way out of scarcity. Only giving up on tech, or maybe a planned economy, can save us. We can’t prevent demographic decline by importing immigrants, heavens no, or by subsidizing reproduction the way we subsidize other long term needs. No, we have to take away women’s rights and push a return to ultra-orthodox religion. It’s the only way.
It’s much more like dot.com than crypto. Like dot.com there is a “there” there, but nobody knows what to do yet and there’s a ton of speculative fluff. Crypto was more pure fluff, possibly the most vacuous bubble we’ve had in recent memory.
The best AI companies will be founded a year after the crash.
Lol. Rapid “code gen” can slow down the process. Some of the best programmers have negative productivity when joining existing projects if you measure it by lines of code added.
Simplicity is harder than complexity. I want to tattoo this on my forehead.
Huge amounts of poor quality code is technical debt. Before LLMs you frequently saw it from offshore lowest bidder operations or teams of very junior devs with no grey beards involved.
It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past.
Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.
I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.
Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.
Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.
That political sunk cost is why the innovators dilemma happens. It happens in companies too where managers, executives, and top employees will have their careers built around a certain way of doing things. Change threatens that so they will resist change and double down.
Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.
It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.
>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.
You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.
"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"
This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff.
And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.
We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.
We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.
This was reported all over, but certain circles considered it politically incorrect to acknowledge that anything good happened in the years 2020-2024, so perhaps you can be excused for missing it. Some random web hits. Check out the graphs herein the massive investment in factories:
Back then when I would inform the politically cloistered about this massive boom in factory construction and the hope for US manufacturing in strategically important energy tech, the most pointed critique was "yeah there's lots of spending but that doesn't mean that the factories are going to make anything." Turns out the skeptics were right. It was a huge mistake that all this stuff went into areas where it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that clean energy is changing the world. Management was not able to trumpet the new investment and the workers dont want to acknowledge what's driving the new higher wages.
As for the US being the most admired country, I work in science and a bit in entrepreneurship. The US was so far and away the leader in these that there's no comparison at all to any other country. Any visitor is completely blown away when they see what's going on, even when they heard ahead of time how much better science and startups are in the US. It's a bit shocking that you think the US was not one of the most admired countries out there, unless you're posting from China or Russia.
It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great.
It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.
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