6 ms·

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are b

by ak217 10mo ago

Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.

sdoering 10mo ago
Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range). But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago). But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't. Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.
- bootsmann 10mo ago
  > cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
  - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is. German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.
    - ViewTrick1002 10mo ago
      I think this take is too shallow, and based on hindsight. Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time. https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-year-relationship/a-61057166 https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye... When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia. Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist. I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
      - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
        ‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-dependence-russian-energy-gas-oil-nord-stream https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... - June 2nd, 2022 > An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.” > When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”. > In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies. > “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.” We win or we learn.
- tirant 10mo ago
  I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example. Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
  - junto 10mo ago
    That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself. Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time. If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
    - jack_tripper 10mo ago
      >but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments How would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their ivory McMansions?
    - lukan 10mo ago
      "If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly." What happened to Blitzkrieg?
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      > If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly. Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good). e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Present_and_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...
- aktuel 10mo ago
  > cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.
api 10mo ago
It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past. Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant. I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  >I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower. "Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?" -HN comments
  - api 10mo ago
    No I saw it. I just felt like that was the moment it tipped.
    - jack_tripper 10mo ago
      [flagged]
    - jack_tripper 10mo ago
      [flagged]
    - epistasis 10mo ago
      This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff. And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students. We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation. We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.
calvinmorrison 10mo ago
good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!
- jfengel 10mo ago
  Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators. That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.
  - dalyons 10mo ago
    Chinas labor costs are no longer cheap either. They just have higher tech factories now.
antonvs 10mo ago
> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate … Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? He’s saying it as a realist. China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.
  - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
    > shutting off battery and rare earths access Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      Brazil? https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earths.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth... Output in 2024 was 20 tons. The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons. I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.
      - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
        Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge. I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.
ohdeardear 10mo ago
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by ak217 10mo ago

sdoering 10mo ago

Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range). But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago). But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't. Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.

bootsmann 10mo ago
> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.
- toomuchtodo 10mo ago
  Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is. German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.
  - ViewTrick1002 10mo ago
    I think this take is too shallow, and based on hindsight. Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time. https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-year-relationship/a-61057166 https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye... When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia. Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist. I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.
    - toomuchtodo 10mo ago
      ‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-dependence-russian-energy-gas-oil-nord-stream https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... - June 2nd, 2022 > An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.” > When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”. > In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies. > “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.” We win or we learn.
tirant 10mo ago
I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example. Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.
- junto 10mo ago
  That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself. Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time. If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    >but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments How would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their ivory McMansions?
  - lukan 10mo ago
    "If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly." What happened to Blitzkrieg?
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    > If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly. Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good). e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Present_and_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...
aktuel 10mo ago
> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.

api 10mo ago

It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past. Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant. I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.

jack_tripper 10mo ago
>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower. "Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?" -HN comments
- api 10mo ago
  No I saw it. I just felt like that was the moment it tipped.
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    [flagged]
  - epistasis 10mo ago
    This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff. And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students. We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation. We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.

calvinmorrison 10mo ago

good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!

jfengel 10mo ago
Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators. That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.
- dalyons 10mo ago
  Chinas labor costs are no longer cheap either. They just have higher tech factories now.

antonvs 10mo ago

> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate … Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”? He’s saying it as a realist. China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.
- matheusmoreira 10mo ago
  > shutting off battery and rare earths access Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    Brazil? https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earths.pdf https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth... Output in 2024 was 20 tons. The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons. I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.
    - matheusmoreira 10mo ago
      Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge. I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.

ohdeardear 10mo ago

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