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Even in this article, it repeatedly refers to building out infrastructure in advance of an obviously approaching future need as "oversupply". This is almost a

Even in this article, it repeatedly refers to building out infrastructure in advance of an obviously approaching future need as "oversupply". This is almost a cliche in reporting on China that seems to reflect a serious blindpsot in western media and/or business attitudes. You can find plenty of articles complaining about "overcapacity" of battery factories in China even as they double in capacity and output each year. Chinese electricity generation went from 4,000 TWh (the same as the US) in 2010 to double that in 2020. The US was basically the same after 10 years. So a 100% "oversupply" in 2010 would be a zero percent oversupply within a decade given China's growth. Most telling to me is that decarbonisation and electrification of transport and heating has long been known to require a doubling(!) of electricity production for developed nations (and a similar increase in developing nations where it gets hidden by other growth). Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers.

plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
> Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers. I wonder if this is more of a cultural thing, meaning Western cultures being more aligned to short-term gains instead of long-term gains. I mean, look at the Dujiangyan irrigation system that was build 2500 years ago and is still maintained until today. This isn't something the Western world would even consider.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  The structure of the United States government is a compromise balancing large vs. small states interests and slavery. The core defect in the design is the Senate and the way states were admitted. We have a territory/colony with limited political rights that has a population greater than the bottom four states. Those small states exert enormous influence and essentially ensure a weird conservative dynamic that anchors a lot of social issues. Not because of the politics of the day - because resource extraction is always conservative by nature as the core aspect of the business is minimizing overhead cost. Agriculture flipped into a purely extractive business as people have been removed from it.
  - richwater 1y ago
    > Those small states exert enormous influence It's called the United States for a reason, not the United People. What you're obviously desiring would result in a series of vassal states (large cites governing themselves) with most of the country (rural) acting as feudal serfs.
    - lunar-whitey 1y ago
      Rural voters are not most of the country unless you believe geographic area is more important than people. There are better ways to address the concerns of rural interests than enshrining gerrymandering along state lines.
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      I said nothing of the sort. All things have ups and downs. Many entities, both historically and globally have managed similar problems with varying methodologies. If you think the current governance scenario in the United States represents the apex of republican democracy, your patriotism is clouding your judgement. The current trends as they are have been devastating to rural people. I live in a county that had 500 dairy farms in 1970, 80 in 1990 and 2 today. Just that industry represented probably about 10k good paying jobs. Most rural areas are the economic equivalent of inner cities with more space. But of course, if you don't care about people, just the sacred abstraction of "states", so I suppose that's ok.
- dkiebd 1y ago
  Sanitation and road infrastructure built during the Roman Empire is still in use today.
- roenxi 1y ago
  The West have been executing a long-range plan for 30 years on this one, the lack of power plants is intentional. There have been any number of roadblocks and people working hard to prevent the West doing specifically what the Chinese have done with the goal of maintaining the high air quality that Western countries tend to enjoy. If anything the West's culture has been doing more long term planning. It is quite difficult to force an economy not to produce something.
  - exe34 1y ago
    Any idea who's been doing this long term planning to kneecap the West? What do they get out of it?
    - roenxi 1y ago
      The environmentalist movement. There is a clear trade off between environmental and industrial success, humans don't know how to do both. https://aqicn.org/map/world https://aqicn.org/map/world - US is generally green and yellow, China tends to dip into the oranges and reds, especially in the industrial zone. It is tightly linked to the fact that China has a powerful electricity grid.
      - exe34 1y ago
        is a powerful electricity grid bad for the environment? is the environment worth sacrificing to make the numbers go up? do you want oxygen bottles to be a subscription service?
        roenxi 1y ago
        Yes, yes, no. Nobody has figured out how to run a powerful grid without eating a lot of environmental damage. That is a significant factor in the article headline of "The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over".
- BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
  In the USA, any non-private government investment is considered to be foolish and doomed at best, and an existential threat to business at worst. The best we can do is “public-private partnership” where all the profits get absorbed by middle men, preventing virtuous cycles and still leaving a cap on risk and future planning.
- el_jay 1y ago
  While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period. Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.
  - plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
    Good point!
  - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
    For an even closer example, the US interstate system was a monumental long term focused project.
- snowwrestler 1y ago
  I think it’s likely you are just not familiar with examples of U.S. long-term planning if you’re citing water movement as an area where China is doing better.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  The main public reasons for preventing expansion of power infrastructure were environmental. That's at least nominally very forward looking. Ironically if we had taken China's "burn everything today and figure tomorrow out when it comes" approach we'd actually be better prepared for this.
roenxi 1y ago
The simplest explanation is this is political language. People in politics use something close to doublespeak with they have two words for the same act, one good and one bad (terrorist/freedom fighter for example). The word used is chosen based on whether they think the situation is good or bad for their personal interests. So in this case the pair is something like oversupply/abundance. Same thing, but one word for when it favours the speaker and one when it doesn't. I think he just means the Chinese are willing to build whatever if it makes commercial sense.
- dluan 1y ago
  I'm old enough to have seen this shift happen first hand. I remember the language being used in the early 90s when US-China relations were great, with evening news clips of smiling Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin yukking it up as hundreds of thousands of jobs were offshored to China to American politicians and industrialists delight.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Did people in America and the rest of the developed world not delight in lower priced goods? Surely businesses were incentivized to reduce their costs without regard to what politicians want, because it is a business. And consumers are incentivized to reduce their costs, because they want to consume.
energy123 1y ago
You either want a plan like China or an absence of planning like Texas. Either help like China or get out of the way like Texas. Two places that can actually build energy. Don't be like California where the government doesn't help while also getting in the way.
- tw04 1y ago
  The same Texas that has statewide power outages every time it gets below freezing (despite knowing for 25+ years it’s a problem) because of their lack of regulation and central planning? Let’s not be anything like Texas.
  - huhkerrf 1y ago
    This just shows how you know only the talking points. The power outages are not due to lack of central planning, it's very explicitly the reverse. If Texas were hooked up to the rest of the country, those outages would not be a thing. It's the purposeful regulation that has caused those problems.
    - Calavar 1y ago
      So you're saying when the Texas grid fails, it's because of over overegulation. But the solution to those failures is to tap into the national grid, a grid that follows stricter FERC regulations. This argument doesn't make any sense.
      - huhkerrf 1y ago
        No, I'm saying it's because of _poor_ overegulation.
    - tw04 1y ago
      > The power outages are not due to lack of central planning It is 100% due to lack of central planning. The outages were caused by a lack of winterizarion of natural gas pumps which was a known issue in Texas but the lack of regulation meant companies could just ignore the problem. Why invest in winterizing when you can just jack up prices and make even more money when they freeze and there’s not enough power to meet demand? There’s a reason the power doesn’t go out in the winter anywhere else in the country when it gets below freezing and it’s not “a lack of regulation”.
corimaith 1y ago
There's nothing "obvious" in hindsight about the explosion in LLMs in 2023 and thus the increased energy demand, and the China certainly wasn't building for that. It very much was overcapacity as a way to keep the construction and manufacturing employed even when most profitable opportunities have been realized. Of course, the long cost of that is involution and lack of nicer jobs as capital is malinvested into diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that idea of overcapacity itself is acknowledged by the CCP in their calls to end price wars and involution I do think there’s is a very interesting dynamic in this meta argument; over the past 5 years or so, the “debunkers” have taken issue with “whistleblowers” arguments towards first zero covid, then local government debt, and now overcapacity and lack of consumer demand and “debunked” these as all being not an issue, only for the central government to turn around and end Zero Covid, rein in LGFV lending, and now the current crackdown on “disorderly competition” and mass dispersal of consumption vouchers. English Pro-China commentators don't appear to be well aligned with the actual views in China!
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  I have a feeling that this kind of efficiency/capacity analysis is similar to that joke about economist designing a human, instead of having two kidneys you have 5 people sharing one. I am a pro market guy for a lot of things, but what happens when you let the market operate something like basic infrastructure is everyone is shipping their shit/sewage in trucks and running a diesel power generator in their back yard.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    Well first of all, that's not happening in America. The basic gist of this topic is that there suddenly a massive upsurge in energy demand, and existing networks trouble accommodating for it. Big deal, just build more power plants. The inability to build is the opposite of pro-market, it's literally NIMBYISM and government regulations causing that. Second of all, when we talk about malinvestment, it's about opportunity cost. Right now, the job market is pretty bad in China, consumption is weak, and businesses are killing themselves in deflationary price wars. Chinese Gen Z don't want to work factory jobs either, but white collar jobs like the West, but many of the industries related to those were suppressed. And this is all because the government chose to overinvest in propping up their manufacturing and construction rather than increasing consumption and fostering their services. For you as a rich American you can admire their cheap goods and cities, but you're also not exposed to the reality of the extreme competition in that society.

plastic-enjoyer 1y ago

> Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers. I wonder if this is more of a cultural thing, meaning Western cultures being more aligned to short-term gains instead of long-term gains. I mean, look at the Dujiangyan irrigation system that was build 2500 years ago and is still maintained until today. This isn't something the Western world would even consider.

Spooky23 1y ago
The structure of the United States government is a compromise balancing large vs. small states interests and slavery. The core defect in the design is the Senate and the way states were admitted. We have a territory/colony with limited political rights that has a population greater than the bottom four states. Those small states exert enormous influence and essentially ensure a weird conservative dynamic that anchors a lot of social issues. Not because of the politics of the day - because resource extraction is always conservative by nature as the core aspect of the business is minimizing overhead cost. Agriculture flipped into a purely extractive business as people have been removed from it.
- richwater 1y ago
  > Those small states exert enormous influence It's called the United States for a reason, not the United People. What you're obviously desiring would result in a series of vassal states (large cites governing themselves) with most of the country (rural) acting as feudal serfs.
  - lunar-whitey 1y ago
    Rural voters are not most of the country unless you believe geographic area is more important than people. There are better ways to address the concerns of rural interests than enshrining gerrymandering along state lines.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    I said nothing of the sort. All things have ups and downs. Many entities, both historically and globally have managed similar problems with varying methodologies. If you think the current governance scenario in the United States represents the apex of republican democracy, your patriotism is clouding your judgement. The current trends as they are have been devastating to rural people. I live in a county that had 500 dairy farms in 1970, 80 in 1990 and 2 today. Just that industry represented probably about 10k good paying jobs. Most rural areas are the economic equivalent of inner cities with more space. But of course, if you don't care about people, just the sacred abstraction of "states", so I suppose that's ok.
dkiebd 1y ago
Sanitation and road infrastructure built during the Roman Empire is still in use today.
roenxi 1y ago
The West have been executing a long-range plan for 30 years on this one, the lack of power plants is intentional. There have been any number of roadblocks and people working hard to prevent the West doing specifically what the Chinese have done with the goal of maintaining the high air quality that Western countries tend to enjoy. If anything the West's culture has been doing more long term planning. It is quite difficult to force an economy not to produce something.
- exe34 1y ago
  Any idea who's been doing this long term planning to kneecap the West? What do they get out of it?
  - roenxi 1y ago
    The environmentalist movement. There is a clear trade off between environmental and industrial success, humans don't know how to do both. https://aqicn.org/map/world https://aqicn.org/map/world - US is generally green and yellow, China tends to dip into the oranges and reds, especially in the industrial zone. It is tightly linked to the fact that China has a powerful electricity grid.
    - exe34 1y ago
      is a powerful electricity grid bad for the environment? is the environment worth sacrificing to make the numbers go up? do you want oxygen bottles to be a subscription service?
      - roenxi 1y ago
        Yes, yes, no. Nobody has figured out how to run a powerful grid without eating a lot of environmental damage. That is a significant factor in the article headline of "The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over".
BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
In the USA, any non-private government investment is considered to be foolish and doomed at best, and an existential threat to business at worst. The best we can do is “public-private partnership” where all the profits get absorbed by middle men, preventing virtuous cycles and still leaving a cap on risk and future planning.
el_jay 1y ago
While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period. Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.
- plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
  Good point!
- grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
  For an even closer example, the US interstate system was a monumental long term focused project.
snowwrestler 1y ago
I think it’s likely you are just not familiar with examples of U.S. long-term planning if you’re citing water movement as an area where China is doing better.
mathiaspoint 1y ago
The main public reasons for preventing expansion of power infrastructure were environmental. That's at least nominally very forward looking. Ironically if we had taken China's "burn everything today and figure tomorrow out when it comes" approach we'd actually be better prepared for this.

roenxi 1y ago

The simplest explanation is this is political language. People in politics use something close to doublespeak with they have two words for the same act, one good and one bad (terrorist/freedom fighter for example). The word used is chosen based on whether they think the situation is good or bad for their personal interests. So in this case the pair is something like oversupply/abundance. Same thing, but one word for when it favours the speaker and one when it doesn't. I think he just means the Chinese are willing to build whatever if it makes commercial sense.

dluan 1y ago
I'm old enough to have seen this shift happen first hand. I remember the language being used in the early 90s when US-China relations were great, with evening news clips of smiling Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin yukking it up as hundreds of thousands of jobs were offshored to China to American politicians and industrialists delight.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Did people in America and the rest of the developed world not delight in lower priced goods? Surely businesses were incentivized to reduce their costs without regard to what politicians want, because it is a business. And consumers are incentivized to reduce their costs, because they want to consume.

energy123 1y ago

You either want a plan like China or an absence of planning like Texas. Either help like China or get out of the way like Texas. Two places that can actually build energy. Don't be like California where the government doesn't help while also getting in the way.

tw04 1y ago
The same Texas that has statewide power outages every time it gets below freezing (despite knowing for 25+ years it’s a problem) because of their lack of regulation and central planning? Let’s not be anything like Texas.
- huhkerrf 1y ago
  This just shows how you know only the talking points. The power outages are not due to lack of central planning, it's very explicitly the reverse. If Texas were hooked up to the rest of the country, those outages would not be a thing. It's the purposeful regulation that has caused those problems.
  - Calavar 1y ago
    So you're saying when the Texas grid fails, it's because of over overegulation. But the solution to those failures is to tap into the national grid, a grid that follows stricter FERC regulations. This argument doesn't make any sense.
    - huhkerrf 1y ago
      No, I'm saying it's because of _poor_ overegulation.
  - tw04 1y ago
    > The power outages are not due to lack of central planning It is 100% due to lack of central planning. The outages were caused by a lack of winterizarion of natural gas pumps which was a known issue in Texas but the lack of regulation meant companies could just ignore the problem. Why invest in winterizing when you can just jack up prices and make even more money when they freeze and there’s not enough power to meet demand? There’s a reason the power doesn’t go out in the winter anywhere else in the country when it gets below freezing and it’s not “a lack of regulation”.

corimaith 1y ago

There's nothing "obvious" in hindsight about the explosion in LLMs in 2023 and thus the increased energy demand, and the China certainly wasn't building for that. It very much was overcapacity as a way to keep the construction and manufacturing employed even when most profitable opportunities have been realized. Of course, the long cost of that is involution and lack of nicer jobs as capital is malinvested into diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that idea of overcapacity itself is acknowledged by the CCP in their calls to end price wars and involution I do think there’s is a very interesting dynamic in this meta argument; over the past 5 years or so, the “debunkers” have taken issue with “whistleblowers” arguments towards first zero covid, then local government debt, and now overcapacity and lack of consumer demand and “debunked” these as all being not an issue, only for the central government to turn around and end Zero Covid, rein in LGFV lending, and now the current crackdown on “disorderly competition” and mass dispersal of consumption vouchers. English Pro-China commentators don't appear to be well aligned with the actual views in China!

rafaelmn 1y ago
I have a feeling that this kind of efficiency/capacity analysis is similar to that joke about economist designing a human, instead of having two kidneys you have 5 people sharing one. I am a pro market guy for a lot of things, but what happens when you let the market operate something like basic infrastructure is everyone is shipping their shit/sewage in trucks and running a diesel power generator in their back yard.
- corimaith 1y ago
  Well first of all, that's not happening in America. The basic gist of this topic is that there suddenly a massive upsurge in energy demand, and existing networks trouble accommodating for it. Big deal, just build more power plants. The inability to build is the opposite of pro-market, it's literally NIMBYISM and government regulations causing that. Second of all, when we talk about malinvestment, it's about opportunity cost. Right now, the job market is pretty bad in China, consumption is weak, and businesses are killing themselves in deflationary price wars. Chinese Gen Z don't want to work factory jobs either, but white collar jobs like the West, but many of the industries related to those were suppressed. And this is all because the government chose to overinvest in propping up their manufacturing and construction rather than increasing consumption and fostering their services. For you as a rich American you can admire their cheap goods and cities, but you're also not exposed to the reality of the extreme competition in that society.