Hang on. City level officials play an incredibly important role in China. While Nanjing is not in the same tier as Shanghai, Beijing, or Shenzhen, it is in the tier just below them. It is the provincial capital of one of China's most important provinces -- GDP similar to Texas. Many large Chinese companies are often tied to specific cities -- they get grants and subsidies via the city they are located in.
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.
Just one so far and it's not particularly small compared to a more conventional reactor.
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.
I know Microsoft tried it. They had a press release saying it was successful but never did it again. Does anyone know more about that? I agree with you that data centers in the ocean seem a better bet.
I've used this knot for almost 2 decades now since learning about it from this exact website. It looks really nice, easy to take apart on purpose, and has never come undone. I run 4 to 5 times a week and used to run marathons. That's literally 10k+ miles over that timespan and it has never come apart unintentionally.
"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.
Just a dumb estimate. I'm just making an uneducated guess on what the car would cost if it was assembled using American labor with Chinese parts. I honestly don't know what the actual price would be. It's very possible for it to be 33K.
There's a non-zero possibility of that actually happening. It's already happening in Europe. Trump has mentioned the idea of a JV with Chinese companies. It is possible for this to happen in the upcoming Trump-Xi meeting. Chinese companies have started pursuing more foreign investments as a way to avoid "involution" -- fierce and unprofitable domestic competition. Their profit margins when going aboard is considerably better than at home. Maybe it won't be $33k but it might be $45k, which for a car with those kinds of specs, it would be a steal. China's EV advantage doesn't come just from labor costs but also from vertical integration of the entire supply chain. The mining stage is pretty low margin but China does it because it enables the next stage, which is batteries where profits are better, and then you get to even more profitable stage with cars, etc.
I would be OK if we tariff or effectively ban Chinese EVs (as is the case now) for a little while to give our auto industry time to retool and catch up. The current situation with a ban but no long term EV adoption plan in place is just incredibly short sighted. We could end up like certain developing nations that has an indigenous auto industry that are nothing more than glorified assembler of foreign cars or the American consumer continues to buy cars that are more expensive and less performant to use and operate while making all of us vulnerable to oil price shocks.
What I mean is that since the peak of American REE in the 1970s and 1980s(?) a lot of the engineers who have working knowledge are retired. There's nothing theoretical we can't dig up but I think there will need to be a number of years for the US to catch up in terms of craft knowledge or "metis" (as Dan Wang likes to call it) and processing equipment and plants.
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.
I think they do have a moat because they dominate the supply chain not just in the raw material and processing but also in some of the actual technical experience, i.e. the experience of running such processing facilities, and also a monopoly on making the equipment that you need to build such a facility. They put export controls on those equipment and restricted their citizens who work in the rare earths industry from traveling aboard.
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.
Japan is also particularly well positioned because China had used rare earths against them first in 2014. Since then they've created basically a strategic rare earths reserve and done research on how to build some components without them. It's not an absolute solution but between this and future development in friendlier nations, I don't think the rare earth risk is as acute for Japanese automakers.
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.
> People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking.
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.
> A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.
This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?
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.