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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Solar manufacturing is not destroying China’s environment, fossil fuels are. By a massive margin.

    They need to get off that merry go round as quickly as possible. While the efforts they’ve made are incredible it needs to continue to accelerate.

    I wouldn’t say they’ve achieved these prices through subsidies in the way many people think. government support pushed their entire renewable industry ecosystem, western manufacturing went belly up, and now they are reaping the benefits.


  • There’s a bit more to it than that. But yes EVs are subsidized in China.

    I worked in a business where we had one product that was useful for automakers but especially useful for EVs. About 8 years ago the EVs in China were mostly cheap shitty BYDs.

    Seemingly out of nowhere, the government changed a bunch of rules and regulations for new cars. Within a month design teams were being established at every major automaker in China focusing on EVs. It was a great year for us.

    Key EV components, especially the materials to make batteries, started to come down in price.

    Then the green plates started turning up. Every city has its own rules for car registration, some places like Shanghai, would auction new number plates each month resulting in a low supply and high demand. It was possible to buy a car cheaper than the number plate. Then if you register an EV you can get a green plate for almost nothing.

    About 3 years ago the cities started requiring new taxis and busses to be EV. Places like shenzhen just converted everything to EV. Released licenses for training and testing self driving.

    Charge stations started popping up everywhere. There’s no way a shopping mall or new residential development could avoid having at least a large section for charging. My own home, converted an entire floor to charging parking stations in the underground car park.

    Finally tesla set up Shanghai giga factory. I have no idea how they managed to make that deal but not long after they started shipping model 3s domestically they slashed the prices down to cheaper than a niceish BYD.

    If you go to Shenzhen today about a third of cars are EV and you will see a dozen brands you’ve never heard of before (some are terrible cars, but most are reasonable quality and a handful are bullshit luxury)

    As in tradition in China, the government will now let them go into a price war to push the manufacturers to find cheaper ways to make them. Many will go bust or give up.



  • shrooms can be a bit of a dice room on visuals.

    once boiled up half a shopping bag of shrooms and split the tea with one friend.

    There were infinite moments where the fabric of space time twisted up into the cosmos believably revealing to me a path into the heavens. I had to control my breathing otherwise the torrent of everyday objects flowing past me would move too quickly for me to get enough traction.

    I once had three tiny died shrooms, and a bong hit disconnected my soul from my body and transferring me into an ancient dog sleeping in the sun on a wide open field in the wilderness. the entire thing seemed to go for eons but collapsed back into my living room in and instant when some rang the doorbell.

    Then I’ve had shrooms where the trip was extremely profound and emotional but the only visual was the leaves of the trees just looked a bit brighter and more flappy in wind or some swirly clouds of colors bouncing around my hifi speakers.










  • maybe I misinderstand your meaning but at its heart the real problem is that chip engineers salary has been stuck at ten years ago for about twenty years. Like 50k usd.

    This in and of itself is not a huge problem but with no downstream opportunities there isn’t enough talent considering a career toward the top of the value chain.

    The 1980s and 1990s saw alot of people come back to Taiwan, but the 2010s and 2020s sees it happen in another direction (mainland, the salary is awesome).

    Of course many will say factory workers don’t need to smart enough to do design. but IC production is complicated and needs skilled labor with some understanding of what they’re doing.



  • There’s a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.

    get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?

    7 or 8 right?

    okay let’s go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where’d you’d expect the manufacturing to go to.

    aight… now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let’s include India, and Rotterdam, and LA… just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?

    so, cargo shipping capacity… big difference right? day light.

    Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.

    all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers…

    there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.