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Good analysis, until you got here: > While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway: It's not baseless. This is a golden boy startup, blessed with
by topspin 2y ago
Good analysis, until you got here:
> While this is a baseless comment, let's look at it anyway:
It's not baseless. This is a golden boy startup, blessed with save the Earth kudos and highly subsidized. The DOE spun this outfit up in 2020 with $19M. Michigan and Whitmer have fast tracked the one, modest, token plant, delivered the tax breaks and signed the contracts for a sodium battery power facility in the state. VC money chased after all this as you would expect.
Those are all temporary or one-time goodies. This is heavy industry and at some point all the love goes away: the subsidies go away, the exemptions go away. Then the foreign competitors steal your tech and undercut you.
At that point you have a choice: fail, or build out where labor is cheap, workers are disposable and regulators are just low-cost party agents, and use your position as US company to readily import your foreign made products.
Notice how none this has anything to do with what raw materials are involved or battery chemistry. It's not about those things. It never has been. The fact that the US has large reserves of sodium is not a factor: filling a ship with sodium and sending it to some foreign plant being only the most obvious thing to do.
- some_furry 2y ago> At that point you have a choice: fail, or build out where labor is cheap, workers are disposable and regulators are just low-cost party agents, and use your position as US company to readily import your foreign made products. Why are any of us okay with humans being "disposable" anywhere on Earth?
- chefkd 2y agoI think is just the way of the world. Not saying it's right but it's just reality. I come from a place where people kill and do horrible things for 10 dollars a day to build the same battery with maybe a 10 percent drop in quality. I doubt anyone in the US would be willing to work for that comparative advantage or something at play. How would you ensure that doesn't happen? Making everyone equal via something like Marshall Plan type thing is considered Marxist rhetoric I doubt it would be viable right? Plus there's the issue of competing nations
- some_furry 2y agoUplift labor and human rights movements everywhere so they can retain self-determination but still extinguish the hellscape of exploitation that we have currently. We don't need anything top-down. I understand there would be challenges with doing that, but I like to think a better world is possible and it starts with respecting others' humanity.
- ianai 2y agoThe no further regulation option is people looking for the “made in …” on goods and not buying from certain countries. Then invoke Milton freedman.
- some_furry 2y agoI'm not interest in a "no further regulation" option. I just don't think anyone in our country should dictate what other countries do. That's what I meant by top-down. If other countries want regulations and labor rights, hell yeah.
- protomolecule 2y ago"Uplift labor ... movements " You can't do that if there are no jobs. And 10 dollars a day is hell of a job in those places.
- some_furry 2y agoBut there are jobs there now. So uplifting labor movements now will have an impact. If we do this across the board, shitty companies will eventually run out of humans to exploit.
- protomolecule 2y ago>Why are any of us okay with humans being "disposable" anywhere on Earth? Because being a disposable worker beats being unemployed.
- lazide 2y agoHow do you propose changing any of that, concretely? Not buy anything directly or indirectly from any countries without US style labor protections?
- quitit 2y ago1. Trends in mass production are moving -away- from China. 2. China was not deemed an adversary when it become the prima supplier of Li batteries. 3. The USA is perfectly capable at locking out competition the same way China did, why? Because national security. The assumption that all new battery technology will end up being produced in China is naive, and baseless. Also let's pay attention to the article, since it already outlines a number of reasons that I've merely highlighted.
- topspin 2y agoI never mentioned China. Mexico is at least as likely as China. Tesla is already in Mexico, building out another "gigafactory" battery plant.