Western Executives Shaken After Visiting China (futurism.com) 238
mspohr shares a report from Futurism: Western automotive and green energy executives who visit China are returning humbled -- and even terrified. As The Telegraph reports, the executives are warning that the country's heavily automated manufacturing industry could quickly leave Western nations behind, especially when it comes to electric vehicles. "We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs," Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Verge last month. "And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford." Some companies are giving up on new initiatives altogether, with the founder of mining company Fortescue, Andrew Forrest, claiming that his recent trip to China led to him abandoning attempts to produce EV powertrains in-house. "There are no people -- everything is robotic," he told The Telegraph.
Other executives recalled touring "dark factories" that don't even need to keep the lights on, as most work is being done around the clock by robots. "You get this sense of a change, where China's competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad," British energy supplier Octopus CEO Greg Jackson told the newspaper. According to recent figures by the International Federation of Robotics, China has deployed orders of magnitude more industrial robots than Germany, the US, and the UK.
Other executives recalled touring "dark factories" that don't even need to keep the lights on, as most work is being done around the clock by robots. "You get this sense of a change, where China's competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad," British energy supplier Octopus CEO Greg Jackson told the newspaper. According to recent figures by the International Federation of Robotics, China has deployed orders of magnitude more industrial robots than Germany, the US, and the UK.
Ford CEO has been driving chinese EV for months (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just this trip. The Ford CEO bought an EV from a chinese company months back which he used as a daily driver for a while. He was very impressed and quite humbled.
Look the North American market abandoned economy cars a long long time ago now and focuses exclusively on luxury vehicles now. That brought in the money but it didn't really help Americans (or Canadians) who need economy cars still. China produces mostly economy cars and they are very good at it (unlike the soviets). Maybe we need a reasonable tariff on them (say 50%) and start allowing them in since there's nothing here to fill that part of the market anyway. Or even a 100% tariff.
Re:Ford CEO has been driving chinese EV for months (Score:4, Interesting)
Chines manufacturers produce a lot of high end vehicles too. Germany luxury brand quality at half the price. In fact they have some features that the German's don't, like decent massage seats and a built-in fridge.
They are not just cornering one segment of the market, they are all over it and way ahead when it comes to EV technology. We are going to have to work hard to catch up now.
Re:Ford CEO has been driving chinese EV for months (Score:5, Insightful)
All North America can think about is building more pipelines. The oil obsession, in the face of climate change and economics, means we're just going to fall further and further behind. Sure, for a while tariffs will serve to keep EVs and economy cars out, but not even the United States can defy gravity forever, and when it all comes crashing back to Earth, North American automanufacturers, the heart of North America's industrial capacity, will be shattered.
Or the automakers could just ignore the dictates of the White House. But at this point, we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons, with strong encouragement from political leaders in the US and Canada, who lack either the wit or the courage to make the final break.
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I would imagine the people of Taiwan value freedom over wealth, hence their attachment to the US and the protection from Chinese invasion we provide.
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Toyota seems to think that their solid state batteries will get them ahead, but they are already looking not all that impressive on paper due to advances from Chinese manufacturers. The longevity and high charge rates have been matched already, for most practical purposes.
We just need to make decent cars that people want to buy. Renault and Nissan have some good stuff coming out, the new Micra (I think the Renault version is the R5, well reviewed) and the new Leaf. The pricing isn't all that competitive, bu
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MG/SAIC are certainly profitable. BYD are profitable, and their income overtook Tesla. They put a lot back into the business for development.
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Maybe we need a reasonable tariff on them (say 50%) and start allowing them in since there's nothing here to fill that part of the market anyway.
Doesn't seem far off. The EU levies tariffs on Chinese EV makers as high as ~45% based on their calculations of the degree to which the price is unfairly subsidized, plus a preexisting 10% tariff on all car imports.
Re:Ford CEO has been driving chinese EV for months (Score:4, Insightful)
The true issue is the same issue that we saw in the 70s and 80s: The executive class wants to keep what they had instead of inventing new stuff or improving their current stuff.
Well, they kept it, and they are close to losing everything because of it. Again. As long as money is the focus, everyone whose primary focus isn't money will outrun us every time.
This is why IBM died. GE died. Sears died. etc. Sure, they are still existing concerns technically, it takes a long time to fully blow through what they originally created... but GE used to be the third largest economy behind the USA as a whole and then California. And, look at it now. Greed is gross and disgusting.
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Bailout seeking and other options (Score:3)
Guessing it's one of the regular playbooks here
- Companies who are too big to fail seeking a bailout
- We can't let the domestic company which makes future army tank engines fall behind other countries
- We have an excuse for decades long lackluster sales and profits because of an external competitor
- We need to offload our pension obligations onto the US taxpayer again since it's been 17 years since the 2008 financial crisis
The main takeaway is that the US auto industry is depending on high cost vehicles to
Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Interesting)
Winning is losing.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Informative)
No. There will always be jobs. Stupid jobs that pay nothing, but there will always be jobs. Why? Because having people you control is a kink for the oligarchs.
Thatâ(TM)s it. Itâ(TM)s about slavery. Never expect UBI, as long as billionaires exist. They want to keep you poor, weak, and most importantly *dependent*.
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Never expect UBI, as long as billionaires exist. They want to keep you poor, weak, and most importantly *dependent*.
I believe you have that backwards. UBI is exactly about creating dependence; that's why the B stands for "basic", and not S for "standard". UBI is about creating a new version of welfare, larger and more extensive, that will keep even more of society placated in servitude.
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Actually, it is not. Sure, they need to find new ways of wealth-distribution, but doing things by hand that robots are better at is simply insane.
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Yeah, you just have to convince the rich people who buy the governments and want to own absolutely everything on Earth to give free money to people who provide absolutely nothing of value to them.
That'll work.
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Well then you better stop using any products that come in factory-built packaging like glass bottles and aluminum cans - that is unless the glass is hand blown and someone custom-rolled and welded that aluminum can together for you.
If not, then I guess you're secretly fine with not doing things by hand that robots are better at.
We've automated the manufacture of things before and the economy didn't collapse. Don't be such a chicken little.
It is technosocial inertia. So many people are just fine with what they grew up with. Initial industrial revolution was a horrible thing to people were just fine with subsistence living. Because that's what they grew up with. Yet here we are, with people who grew up with industrialized processes, and are fine with it.
The same with computer technology. When personal computers first became widely available, I'm thinking Commodore 64 times, a lot of people didn't like the idea. More technosocial inertia Now
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Re:Curious catch 22 (Score:4, Funny)
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The problem was that you were part of that chain of obligations to, and the guy above you could grab your wife, or in the case of James II of England (James VI of Scotland), he could grab you.
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That's what happened in agriculture, which used to be the main source of employment (for centuries). During the 20th century in the US, the labor required dropped by more than 90% as industrialization took over. And it was hugely disruptive. The resulting overproduction of goods that people were not making enough money to buy caused the great depression.
I'll bet the last stage hunter gatherers wire pissed at the damned idiots who started actually planting and harvesting food. Initial agriculture dealt with technology. And yes, since growing food allowed more people to exist, there was a boom and bust cycle there as well, crop failures made for mass starvation. The smart leaders knew to save the surplus for the bad times. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
A lot of people seem to believe that depressions are a product of capitalism. They are simply part
no (Score:2)
They are not automating "everything" obviously but there are highly competitive industries like automaking where automation keeps you in business 10 years from now while your competitors fail. For example, watch any video about how computer components are made. A highly manual process and yet nobody can compete with China for a host of reasons. When you are a rich country with a trade surplus there are plenty of ways to keep everyone employed.
That said, due in part to the last several years of the US finall
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The US is only 15% of Chinese exports (pre-tariffs, there's no telling now), they can do without us much better than we can do without them.
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Winning is losing.
Then, and I *hate* to admit this, Trump was right, "It’s too much winning."
Though this premise makes me worried about his intent to force more winning on us. From his campaign:
We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, ‘Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore, Mr. President, it’s too much.’ And I’ll say, ‘No it isn’t. We have to keep winning. We have to win more!’
IDK, maybe the winners and losers aren't the same people in all this ...
Re:Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Insightful)
I found your problem in understanding his statement: you are missing the very important context of the word "we".
Hint: "we" doesn't include you or me.
Now read it again and you'll understand perfectly.
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If you automate everything then you break the social contract. Millions of unemployed people lead to unrest in the land. Winning is losing.
Over 100 million dead citizens lay at the feet of Communist Socialism.
Let me know why you think they give a shit.
Re:Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Informative)
If you automate everything then you break the social contract. Millions of unemployed people lead to unrest in the land. Winning is losing.
Over 100 million dead citizens lay at the feet of Communist Socialism.
Let me know why you think they give a shit.
A shocking fact. And those are the ones weknow about.
While all pure 'isms except pragmatism eventually fail because they don't take human nature into account, I am amazed that people still agitate for communist style government. If people take a shit-fit over Elmo Musk and Billybob Gates because of how much money they make, while they are living better than kings used to live, they might be surprised about the gulf between the haves and have-nots in China and Russia and North Korea over the years.
I was watching some stuff about China's great famine, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] whereMao and his cadre lived luxurious lifestyle while purposely allowing peasants to die. And then there is Uncle Josef's holodomor in Ukraine, a purposeful starvation of Ukraine citizens. Among all of his other expressions of communism.
Yeah, miss the world with that. In irony, China's present better situation was not based on application of communist ideals, it was from adopting western capitalism aspects into their gestalt.
Re:Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Interesting)
Pre-revolution an acquaintance grew up the child of missionaries in western China. In a single year in their area 3,000,000 died of famine. It was a good harvest that year, but it was worth more to the upper class to export the food than to allow the poor to buy it.
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If you automate everything then you break the social contract. Millions of unemployed people lead to unrest in the land.
Winning is losing.
Luckily for the Chinese, they're allegedly communists.
"From each according to his ability" - that would be the robots.
"To each according to his need" - those millions of people.
We'll see whether it pans out.
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If you automate everything then you break the social contract. Millions of unemployed people lead to unrest in the land.
Winning is losing.
Easy, automate repression too.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:3)
China's "Communist", right?
At least that's what slashdot wisdom says.
They'll redistribute the profits and live like Lenin promised in 1917.
On a serious note, why were these CEOs paid the compensation they don't deserve if the West has fallen so far behind?
Shouldn't they be returning some of it?
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China is no longer communist. Just like Russia isn't.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:2)
Sure, Jan.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Insightful)
China's "Communist", right?
At least that's what slashdot wisdom says.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] They call themselves Communist, so I will too.
What China has done, is to incorporate some amount of Western capitalist mores into their system.
Just like the USA incorporates some socialist concepts into their system. It is being pragmatic. Any pure 'ism other than pragmatism will fail, because pure 'isms always make bad assumptions about human nature.
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What social contract? I sure as hell don't recall signing one. The only thing I recall is the Pledge of Allegiance, which says nothing about an obligation to provide jobs. That's not to say I don't care, I'm saying I'm not obligated .. there's a difference.
Tax the profits of automation to provide a safety net to the public, but don't slow down progress by requiring human labor to do that which can be automated.
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If they import one hundred million foreigners driving up competition for housing (housing costs rising) and employment (wages stagnating or decreasing), they also break the social contract.
And if they bribe up all the politicians to further this and buy out all the media to make this palatable to the masses, then they are doing what they have been doing for 3000 years in every society they've ever lived in. And for some reason it's illegal in many places to say that.
Re:Curious catch 22 (Score:4, Insightful)
China isn't automating everything - we don't have the technology for that. AI was sold as such but we know how that is turning out. They're automating manufacturing which has already been highly automated in technologically advanced countries which China certainly is now. Unemployment in China is apparently just over 5%, which is slightly on the high side but nothing drastic. Youth unemployment is quite high but that's happening in a lot of places now.
Besides, China is very big on impressing foreigners and showing Chinese stuff in best possible light. These CEOs have probably been taken to the most cutting edge, state of the art factories - most of their auto industry is probably not quite as automated. It does look however that Chinese auto industry is pulling ahead, certainly in EVs.
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Which will not prevent automation. Look at the history of technological advancement, from the Paleolithic to today. Each major innovation has disrupted labor in some form or another, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, in a proximal sense, but in the long run societies adapt. You cannot block innovation, and if you do, you simply surrender the field to the nation that is willing to throw out the status quo.
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When will China show western execs and politicos how they deal with surplus labor?
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:3)
Just sayin' those non robotic people might get poor, then unhappy. That strikes fear into the heart of power.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Insightful)
Factories do not have to be the main source of employment today - like agriculture did not have to be the main source of employment after the 19th century.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, they can all become Youtube Influencers influencing each other for money.
Oh, heck. AI just took over that job too.
Maybe gladiators?
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The world needs people to operate ditch witches. Maybe they can influence some fiber up the hill past my place.
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My brother has a Ditch Witch - he gets plenty of work from people needing trenches dug. Maybe you're onto something.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:4, Insightful)
Its not though. If automation makes it economical to produce things for sale that are not economically viable today, overall employment could increase. The problem is we would need orders of magnitude more engineers, and its just not going to happen when entry level mechanical engineers in the US make less than the median income.
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when entry level mechanical engineers in the US make less than the median income
Do entry level mechanical engineers make less than the median income of entry level employees? It seems to me that should be the right test, not of median income of all employees?
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:4, Insightful)
If 10 engineers and 10 mechanics are needed to automate a factory that employed 100 people, that's a net reduction in jobs.
Many many years ago right after high school I worked a factory job. Most of the people, including the old ladies and downs syndrome workers there would never be able to be rehired in another job. It was evenly split between "This is my first job/need some temporary money while I look for another job" vs "I cannot work anyplace else and never will be able to".
It was a 'low skill' factory, not like car assembly line that requires some basic mechanical abilities even with robots doing most of the work - it was more like "take product, take instructions, shove them in bag" or "take bag, put it in box" etc. I'm sure that job was outsourced to asia, and eventually automated, and finally went away. I wonder what those people are doing now. Janitorial work? Dish washers? Stuff that requires a lot more physical labor but doesn't pay any better, since the factory job was sit on your chair and move your hands. And the mentally disabled workers there might not find another job at all.
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I worked for a few months is an assembly plant in Florida (no AC). Consisted of soldering components to boards. The kinda stuff robots do now, or rather, 3D printers.
But yeah, there were the older folk there, some who had been pickers in the groves and fields.
Re: Curious catch 22 (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps with loss of employment it motivated them to increase their skill set.
I'd normally ignore such a bone-headed comment, but as my career is focused on improving the lives of people with a specific disability, I find I cannot sit idly by.
People in positions like the ones described are not the part of society that can increase their skill set. As a segment, they typically have very, very high unemployment. The particular demographic I work with currently has 75% unemployment in the US. Their disability fundamentally precludes an increasing of their skill sets.
So, instead of assuming that every person can be trained to the New Reality, please seek out products created by or with people who are disabled in one way or another. In doing so, you are improving the lives of people whom the rest of society has quietly forgotten about.
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Entry level anything makes less than the median income unless you enter a market that was in a dire situation overpaying at the time you entered it. I saw this play out over many years. Friends became electricians and HVAC installers and were laughing at me when they learned of my engineering paycheck out of uni. Fast forward a decade and I'm easily earning twice they are while their pay has been largely stagnant.
An engineer straight out of uni is about as useful as a teenager who dropped out of highschool.
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China's population decline, as standards of living increase, will largely take care of the problem. China, like every nation that is now on the other side of the economic growth-population growth curve, will have to figure out how to deal with the next half century. But nothing is going to make factories less automated, and between population decline and foreign tariffs, they are only going to push automation further to fill the gap.
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Shaken, but probably not stirred ... (Score:4, Funny)
... into action.
What's the big deal? (Score:2)
remove health care from jobs in the usa the work p (Score:2)
remove health care from jobs in the usa the work place should be providing health care other then workers comp
Re:remove health care from jobs in the usa the wor (Score:4, Insightful)
No what we need is single payer healthcare. We pay enough in goddamn taxes it needs to happen.
Re:remove health care from jobs in the usa the wor (Score:5, Informative)
Here's what really tightens my jaws: if you take the average health care premium that you pay for employer-provided health care insurance and add that to the medicare / medicaid taxes, it probably comes out pretty even with what the medicare cost would be for single-payer healthcare.
It's not like private health insurance somehow gets massive discounts or something - Medicare sets reimbursement rates for procedures, so the care costs what the care costs. Hospitals love Medicare billing because they know what they're going to get, and they know they'll get it.
Private health insurance is a fucking leech attached to the money artery. How can anyone every expect an efficient health care system when you have profit-seeking entities in the middle of it, extracting money out of it while adding the only "value" of bureaucratic runaround and trying to dodge paying due to an "out of network" radiologist that you didn't choose and were not informed of looking at your x-ray in an in-network facility as listed on their own damn web site.
Their business model is to extract the most premiums they can, while paying out as little claims as they can. They exist to create inefficiency, and profit wildly for themselves. And we're all paying for it, for no reason at all.
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These are old now, but interesting reading. I bet things haven't improved in the US, especially with the administrative overheads.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/... [nejm.org]
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
Re:remove health care from jobs in the usa the wor (Score:5, Insightful)
The US spends more than twice the amount on health care as any other country yet leaves millions without access to care and the rest of the population with the worst health indicators of the developed world.
Where does that money go? Profits for the medical industry. Insurance companies, pharma, hospitals, etc.
Re:remove health care from jobs in the usa the wor (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't pay enough goddamn taxes, at least if you are upper middle class and above. The rich certainly do not. We've been cutting taxes since Reagan and do we have Utopia yet? No, and the reason is that the rich and upper middle class have made off with the majority of those tax breaks figuring they do not owe the rest of society anything. And the upper middle class and rich are predominately white.
This has metastasized into Conservatives blaming all their problems on those naughty brown people "stealing" their wealth because the naughty brown people do not populate the white social circles in which they run. They then turn around and feed that rot to poor white people giving them a convenient scapegoat as to why they are not rich. They ignore the fact that those naughty brown people keep the economy running. See the leaked Telegram chats on just how racist the young Republicans are. They got that way because it first became acceptable and then their social circles rewarded them for saying such things. Each wanted to make themselves accepted by always going a bit further in their racist language, and getting warm fuzzies from their ilk for being racist.
And now there is an article in the NYT about how the alleged administration is wants to tilt the refugee system into favoring white people. The culture war is just a euphemism for a race war. Talk to a white Evangelical about the southern border and suggest we put Christ down there and he can decide who gets let in. I did. The Evangelical's response: even I wouldn't go for that.
Capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
When China does capitalism harder than you.
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That is very much correct, but with a caveat - all the high tech must be ideologically correct. Cybernetics (what is called computer science in the USA) was considered a false and reactionary capitalist science at first.
Fine. Who needs EVs? (Score:4, Funny)
"We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs," Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Verge last month.
Wait until the U.S. starts making vehicles that run on "beautiful, clean coal". ... wait, what?
China can't compete with that, they don't even have coal
I can remember ... (Score:5, Funny)
You can shake Western executives pretty hard. And all you hear is something loose rattling between their ears.
Re:I can remember ... (Score:4, Insightful)
https://www.boeing.com/content... [boeing.com]
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I believe I remember Boeing never wanted to give the wings to Japan... until they did. Now Japan makes the composite structures (wing boxes) that connect the wings to the plane on the 787 Dreamliner too. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is basically a defense contractor.
https://www.mhi.com/products/a... [mhi.com]
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Boeing is at the very least a complete joke when it comes to quality/safety these days, so that's clearly a lesson that could have been learned and wasn't. I'd sooner fly on a decommissioned Tupolev.
time to lower the full time hours? and make OT cos (Score:2)
time to lower the full time hours? and make OT cost more with the salary bar to not pay OT being alot higher.
Or do you want heavily automated manufacturing with 1-2 people being on call 24/7 with NO added pay being on call just the LUCKY to still have an job perk.
Re:time to lower the full time hours? and make OT (Score:4, Interesting)
Good. (Score:2)
These assholes have been dragging there feet and putting off transitioning to building EVs for waaaaay too long. They need a kick in the teeth so they will get their ass in gear and actually do something. However, knowing that they are assholes, they are more likely to simply ask to block EV imports.
Wait a moment (Score:4, Insightful)
Didn't we had the same song back in the 80s about the japanese robot factories?
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Yes and they didn't catch up then either. All they did was work towards consolidating their wealth while everybody else suffers. Now they will just do it even harder.
Re:Wait a moment (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes and look at what happened. Some European and US brands failed and were replaced by Japanese ones. Then again with Korean brands. The Chinese are going to take another slice of the pie now too.
The Japanese manufacturers are in a difficult spot too. They invested heavily in hybrid tech and want to keep using that, but the world is clearly moving towards BEV instead. Despite some early gains e.g. from Nissan, they have failed to match the pace of the Chinese manufacturers.
At least some of the European manufacturers have decent EVs on the market, even if they are using a lot of Chinese parts. The Koreans are probably in the best position, as they have good cars, good drivetrains, and decent domestic battery production.
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Huawei (Score:2)
Huawei have had dark factories and placing them on the sanctioned list of companies only spurred them to "get good" even more. Even before they came under fire they were already scaling back their workforce at the factories as they had already started to see the benefits of dark factories. What other dark factories other industries may have is hard to tell but this is an evolution of manufacturing technology.
We're going to need them! (Score:3)
Everyone here in the US is fully committed to doing all their work with AI, which means we're going to need people to pick components up and connect them together to make anything with real-world utility.
Is this a tech or business problem? (Score:3)
China is ahead in robots used for manufacturing. What are the challenges to the US catching up? Is it a matter of technology that is nonobvious and presents a moat that will take many years or decades to overcome? Or is it a matter of financing and business decisions, where the technology is known but the business decisions are difficult to make? For example, are automaker unions an insurmountable challenge to automation, so that even if the same robots were available today in the US, American car companies still would be unable to use those robots? That's probably not the case since Tesla is non-union and still not mostly automated.
As others have noted, if US car maker CEOs are full of fear and yet do nothing different, then the real problem is CEO stupidity.
Clueless executives, desperately seeking... (Score:5, Insightful)
...short term profits outsourced manufacturing to China.
They believed the fiction that US design was impossible to match, and that Imaginary Property laws would protect them. They also believed that Chinese engineers and scientists couldn't match those in the US. Chinese engineers and scientists rose to the challenge. If you read most scientific papers, you see a lot of Chinese names. There was once a time that the US attracted the best and the brightest. Those days are over.
In hindsight, this is obviously one of the worst mistakes in history
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History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Then they ate Detroit for lunch.
There is no reason other countries can't pull off the same, and then some.
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Just remember: Japanese cars and electronics used to be a joke too, until they weren't. Then they ate Detroit for lunch. There is no reason other countries can't pull off the same, and then some.
Well there is a reason. Our western economies are so geared up towards rentier type income that you have to be a sadist to do the sort of businesses China is doing. Where I live, the floor space cost of the workshop area (uninsulated tin shed in a faceless industrial park that is clogged with traffic) required to place a 3-axis CNC machine is worth about the same as the machine itself. Basically the cost issue is no longer the machine, it's the space to put the machine.
The machine also depreciates in value and requires skilled labour to generate a return. Yet any idiot can get a loan to buy the workshop, sit on it doing nothing but collecting rent from the losers who try to run a business out of it, and wait for prices to appreciate so they can flog it off for a profit that is taxed less than the loser's profit who is trying to run a business.
I could also go work on the sort of automation stuff that the Chinese are doing. I'd love to. But the pay for those jobs is atrocious. It would be roughly what I'd pay in tax working for a finance shop writing some internal benchmarking application. Doing automation/robotics work is hard and the salaries being offered will not pay for the people who can do it well.
When I was in my 20s and starting a business, older people would always say to me 'oh starting a business is hard and risky'. I didn't really understand why they were stating the obvious - I always though, 'yeah sure, but how else do you make money?'. Twenty years later, I now realise that they were just all sitting around on a couple of property investments and raking in the tax sheltered gains while doing stuff all. None of this is going to change because the alternative - building actual productive businesses - is damn hard work, and enough people are still benefitting from the easy money of rentierism that why would they want to stop the party?
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When your culture, legal system and tax structure makes it easier to make money on rent-seeking than it is to make money by useful production, don't be surprised when your whole economy arranges itself around extracting rent instead of generating production. Only suckers will pay 25% marginal rates on their labor, when they could pay 15% "capital" gains tax on a rent-generating asset (or more commonly, nothing at all by taking a $1 salary or creative a
Asleep at the wheel. (Score:2)
At least US carmakers are scared. German carmakers are still stuck in the steam age because "luxury". Although they are getting a clobbering as we speak. And of course they're demanding a bailout which the new "conservative" government is willing to provide because they've been in bed with carmakers since the dawn of time.
Well, not "quickly" leave behind. (Score:2)
It has take diligent efforts over many decades by western executives to not update machinery, not train new workers, not research new materials and methods etc.
It has taken generations of single-minded focus, for which the generations of executives have quite deservedly paid themselves hundreds of billions.
Have they considered making cars we want? (Score:3)
Just wondering... i might be in need of buying a car in the not too distant future. Looking at western brands, it seems a race to the bottom not in price, but in how badly can we fuck over our customers before we lose them all? Everything obviously has to be cloud connected, with paying extra (preferably monthly) for every feature they think they can get away with. That nice on board computer is perfect for adding ads to. And if some enterprising customer makes a library for the owners to use all these smart systems with a custom app or home assistant or so, we'll DMCA the project so they won't ever dare to do that again.+
Why the fuck would anyone visiting this site even dare to buy a western car again? It goes against everything we would ever want in a piece of technology.... (because, let's face it, that's what a modern car has become!)
IQ is everything (Score:2)
We already have a problem: What do you do with people on the left side of the bell curve? You only need so many agricultural harvesters, and even that is increasingly automated.
Factories everywhere are increasingly automated - this is a trend that has been going on for decades. Eliminate factory jobs, and you only need so many baristas and Amazon delivery drivers. So what do you do with people in the middle of the bell curve?
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What do you mean? (Score:2, Insightful)
Could? (Score:3)
Think of it as a fire under our asse (Score:2)
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Have you _read_ the story? Like, at all?
Re:Why do I have to compete with china? (Score:4, Insightful)
We have to compete with China because in the 90s the 'elite' decided to ship all the West's productive wealth to China, then move to China and take over. Telling us that we'd get cheap plastic crap if we just shipped all our factories to China was an easy way to loot the West without having to actually fight to steal our wealth by force.
But after they'd shipped all the wealth to China, Xi told them he wasn't going to let them take over after all.
So now most of the things that used to be produced in the West are produced in China and we can't even make them ourselves without materials from China. So we can't even cut ourselves off from them. At best we can follow Trump's policy of imposing tariffs to encourage companies to move back while trying to minimize the short-term harm.
Re:Why do I have to compete with china? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Regardless of all of that, to simply say that poor people are poor because they are lazy is a stupid generalization that seems to come from a lazy mind who is not interested in solving challenges. Everybody is valuable, and the challenge in this case is to show a person who is poor how they can express their value in this society.
There are many reasons a person might be poor. They might have a handicap or mental issue that stands between them and becoming well off. These people deserve sympathy rather than contempt.
They might have simply had bad luck. You know, the person who gets laid off at 60, without salable skills. Some sympathy is due there.
They might have made bad life decisions. Here it is a mixed bag. I worked with some people who foolishly invested during the dot.com and subprime eras, who were pretty wealthy for a whil
Re: More "The West is failing" clickbait. (Score:3)
Erm...detroit is still here? Where?