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> The auto companies are strategically significant. Not really, they're more politically significant than economically critical. I've certainly never owned an

> The auto companies are strategically significant. Not really, they're more politically significant than economically critical. I've certainly never owned an american car and never plan to. We'll be fine continuing to rely on foreign companies to produce our vehicles. Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, i guess?). None of this is true for the plane market, or at least not until boeing acquired its current popular reputation of not being very good at making planes (deserved or not) The fact we bailed out the companies but refused to take ownership should be considered treason. Same for the banks, the car companies, the airline industry we bailed out for more than its entire value, etc etc. completely corrupt and incompetent governance

bombcar 2y ago
The auto companies are strategically significant because war footing America will turn those F150 lines into tank lines in a matter of months instead of the years it would take to spin them up from scratch. IBM made machine guns on typewriter lines in WW2.
- mulmen 2y ago
  Exactly correct. Good time to skim https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run. Years of startup problems but when it finally started humming they were building a B-24 every 63 minutes! In the meantime existing factories were winning the war. As Americans we tend to glorify the industrial feats of WWII but the US government used a very heavy hand to pull that off. Public-private partnership is the preferred euphemism today but essentially we were a socialist economy.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    At its peak, the US had 40% of GDP going into the war. Forty percent! Today the US military budget is 3.4% of GDP. Can you imagine it being ten times as much?
- newsclues 2y ago
  If America goes to war it will need many f-150s for the war itself.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  No it won't, because only about 30% of F150 parts are made in the US. The rest are made elsewhere - mostly China. This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the strategic industrial base it used to. Off-shoring made some people a lot of money and lowered consumer costs (while simultaneously cutting consumer pay.) But it was economically and strategically unwise. The US is set up to run small-scale wars against technologically inferior opponents. It has no ability to sustain a prolonged multi-year slug-fest against an opponent with a superior manufacturing base.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    Considering the US hasn't won a single war against technologically and numerically inferior opponents since the turn of the century, I think we have even more fundamental problems than just a rusty war machine dependent on Chinese blue jeans. Now granted I might be unfair to the US here; the Middle East is known as the graveyard of empires for a reason.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The US clearly choose to lose all wars lost though. The military was doing just fine, but the people back home got sick of the efforts.
      - vundercind 2y ago
        1) That’s still losing. 2) I’m not sure the military was doing just fine in all of those. Vietnam comes to mind, but also Afghanistan—reading the Afghanistan papers, the brass seems to have given up on any kind of actual goals or accountability in favor of a system that let them continually cycle officers through and let them claim they succeeded at their mission (funny, they all keep achieving their mission, but facts on the ground remain exactly the same or worse!), for years and years. Fighting fitness may have been OK throughout, but military leadership in the military itself was absolutely not committed to any kind of winnable mission, let alone to actually winning it. That may have been driven (I’m sure it was) largely by civilian leadership, but the entire upper echelon of military leadership betrayed their commands and the soldiers counting on them, to keep up a convenient (to their careers, and a bunch of junior and mid-tier officers who got a big boost to their careers…) political fiction at the cost of any hope of something resembling actual success, and all it took was shitting all over their soldiers and the trust of the American people. I bet Iraq (part 2) was similar. I have some grave concerns about the state of our more-politicized-and-static professional officer corps since roughly Vietnam.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- darby_nine 2y ago
  Seems like a terribly irrational and inefficient way to run an economy but I'm sure russia will invade any day now. Or is it china these days?
  - themaninthedark 2y ago
    I agree. We should also stop subsidizing agriculture, there is enough food grown around the world for everyone. All this waste is very inefficient! In fact, we dump our cheap overproduced food on third world countries and collapse their ag. sector. If we stopped producing and switched to importing we would boost their economies. Since food can be grown in almost any country on earth, we would have a diverse supply chain. I'm sure nothing would go wrong with this plan./s
jampekka 2y ago
Major industries are economically critical for trade balance. Even if foreigners don't buy US cars, domestic buying means there's less import. There's a limit to how long USA can print petrodollars to make up for the trade deficit. And the limit doesn't seem that far off.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  Good, let's learn to get along with people without trying to dominate them for the first time in living memory
mulmen 2y ago
The auto bailouts saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and turned a profit for the US government.
- darby_nine 2y ago
  Cool, i don't care about either of these things. Jobs are a poor index of economic health for americans and we should really be guaranteed one as a fundamental human right if we also refuse to implement modern welfare.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    You don’t care about saving jobs but you think we should be guaranteed jobs? How do you imagine guaranteed jobs work?
kwhitefoot 2y ago
> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, The Nordics are not all the same, Norway is far ahead (20% of private cars already full EVs) of the rest with Denmark a distant second when it comes to electrification of transport. But also the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car in the WORLD in the last twelve months, not just Norway. Of course quite a few of those were built outside the US so perhaps they don't count as US cars.
- teytra 2y ago
  Norway is special. 94.3% of new cars sold last month were electric cars. Actually, in the private marked it was 96.7% ! Links to info (in Norwegian) - https://elbil.no/vi-kan-klare-hundre-prosent/ https://elbil.no/vi-kan-klare-hundre-prosent/ - https://ofv.no/aktuelt/2024/nybilsalget-i-august-h%C3%B8yeste-elbilandel-noensinne https://ofv.no/aktuelt/2024/nybilsalget-i-august-h%C3%B8yest...
  - kwhitefoot 2y ago
    > Norway is special I know, I live there. Been driving electric since 2017.
- janalsncm 2y ago
  China is the biggest auto market in the world and also produces the Teslas they buy domestically.
throwaway2037 2y ago
> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars FYI: Tesla sold 600,000 cars in China last year. It is a huge market for them. They also sold more than 200,000 cars in Europe last year.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars Then why are they always bitching about their neighbors who buy large American vehicles that are too wide for their streets?

bombcar 2y ago

The auto companies are strategically significant because war footing America will turn those F150 lines into tank lines in a matter of months instead of the years it would take to spin them up from scratch. IBM made machine guns on typewriter lines in WW2.

mulmen 2y ago
Exactly correct. Good time to skim https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Run. Years of startup problems but when it finally started humming they were building a B-24 every 63 minutes! In the meantime existing factories were winning the war. As Americans we tend to glorify the industrial feats of WWII but the US government used a very heavy hand to pull that off. Public-private partnership is the preferred euphemism today but essentially we were a socialist economy.
- bombcar 2y ago
  At its peak, the US had 40% of GDP going into the war. Forty percent! Today the US military budget is 3.4% of GDP. Can you imagine it being ten times as much?
newsclues 2y ago
If America goes to war it will need many f-150s for the war itself.
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
No it won't, because only about 30% of F150 parts are made in the US. The rest are made elsewhere - mostly China. This is not 1940, and the US simply doesn't have the strategic industrial base it used to. Off-shoring made some people a lot of money and lowered consumer costs (while simultaneously cutting consumer pay.) But it was economically and strategically unwise. The US is set up to run small-scale wars against technologically inferior opponents. It has no ability to sustain a prolonged multi-year slug-fest against an opponent with a superior manufacturing base.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  Considering the US hasn't won a single war against technologically and numerically inferior opponents since the turn of the century, I think we have even more fundamental problems than just a rusty war machine dependent on Chinese blue jeans. Now granted I might be unfair to the US here; the Middle East is known as the graveyard of empires for a reason.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The US clearly choose to lose all wars lost though. The military was doing just fine, but the people back home got sick of the efforts.
    - vundercind 2y ago
      1) That’s still losing. 2) I’m not sure the military was doing just fine in all of those. Vietnam comes to mind, but also Afghanistan—reading the Afghanistan papers, the brass seems to have given up on any kind of actual goals or accountability in favor of a system that let them continually cycle officers through and let them claim they succeeded at their mission (funny, they all keep achieving their mission, but facts on the ground remain exactly the same or worse!), for years and years. Fighting fitness may have been OK throughout, but military leadership in the military itself was absolutely not committed to any kind of winnable mission, let alone to actually winning it. That may have been driven (I’m sure it was) largely by civilian leadership, but the entire upper echelon of military leadership betrayed their commands and the soldiers counting on them, to keep up a convenient (to their careers, and a bunch of junior and mid-tier officers who got a big boost to their careers…) political fiction at the cost of any hope of something resembling actual success, and all it took was shitting all over their soldiers and the trust of the American people. I bet Iraq (part 2) was similar. I have some grave concerns about the state of our more-politicized-and-static professional officer corps since roughly Vietnam.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
darby_nine 2y ago
Seems like a terribly irrational and inefficient way to run an economy but I'm sure russia will invade any day now. Or is it china these days?
- themaninthedark 2y ago
  I agree. We should also stop subsidizing agriculture, there is enough food grown around the world for everyone. All this waste is very inefficient! In fact, we dump our cheap overproduced food on third world countries and collapse their ag. sector. If we stopped producing and switched to importing we would boost their economies. Since food can be grown in almost any country on earth, we would have a diverse supply chain. I'm sure nothing would go wrong with this plan./s

jampekka 2y ago

Major industries are economically critical for trade balance. Even if foreigners don't buy US cars, domestic buying means there's less import. There's a limit to how long USA can print petrodollars to make up for the trade deficit. And the limit doesn't seem that far off.

darby_nine 2y ago
Good, let's learn to get along with people without trying to dominate them for the first time in living memory

mulmen 2y ago

The auto bailouts saved hundreds of thousands of jobs and turned a profit for the US government.

darby_nine 2y ago
Cool, i don't care about either of these things. Jobs are a poor index of economic health for americans and we should really be guaranteed one as a fundamental human right if we also refuse to implement modern welfare.
- mulmen 2y ago
  You don’t care about saving jobs but you think we should be guaranteed jobs? How do you imagine guaranteed jobs work?

kwhitefoot 2y ago

> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars (outside of maybe tesla in the nordics, The Nordics are not all the same, Norway is far ahead (20% of private cars already full EVs) of the rest with Denmark a distant second when it comes to electrification of transport. But also the Tesla Model Y was the best selling car in the WORLD in the last twelve months, not just Norway. Of course quite a few of those were built outside the US so perhaps they don't count as US cars.

teytra 2y ago
Norway is special. 94.3% of new cars sold last month were electric cars. Actually, in the private marked it was 96.7% ! Links to info (in Norwegian) - https://elbil.no/vi-kan-klare-hundre-prosent/ https://elbil.no/vi-kan-klare-hundre-prosent/ - https://ofv.no/aktuelt/2024/nybilsalget-i-august-h%C3%B8yeste-elbilandel-noensinne https://ofv.no/aktuelt/2024/nybilsalget-i-august-h%C3%B8yest...
- kwhitefoot 2y ago
  > Norway is special I know, I live there. Been driving electric since 2017.
janalsncm 2y ago
China is the biggest auto market in the world and also produces the Teslas they buy domestically.

throwaway2037 2y ago

> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars FYI: Tesla sold 600,000 cars in China last year. It is a huge market for them. They also sold more than 200,000 cars in Europe last year.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

> Foreigners certainly don't want our cars Then why are they always bitching about their neighbors who buy large American vehicles that are too wide for their streets?