Not really. Plastics require hydrocarbons that can be sourced from anything, including coal or wood. Oil is just the most convenient source, but it's certainly not the only one.

And anyway, only 6% of oil is used for plastic production. Even increasing the demand for plastics won't materially affect oil consumption. Fossil hydrocarbons are also used as a feedstock for other industrial processes (fertilizer production mainly), but adding up all these uses accounts for just about 15% of global production.

There is no "glut of cars". China still has a lot of unmet internal demand. The problem is that EVs are becoming a commodity in China now. So all the business models designed to exploit high-margin expensive products are becoming obsolete.

Dealerships are suffering the most, there is simply no margin for them to exist anymore, so they're doing all kinds of tricks to make sure they appear to be useful to carmakers. The double whammy is the fast depreciation of EVs. Just like with computers in the 90-s, people know that in 3 years a new EV will be better in all regards. So why waste money on expensive value-add services provided by dealerships?

You can get permanent residence easily, this gives you access to the all-important Chinese ID card and all the rights of residents. Including an ability to register a business. Naturalization is possible and technically you don't need anything special for it, but it's exceedingly rare. You also need to renounce your other citizenship(s) for that.

China is now becoming a popular emigration destination for Russian scientists. It's now very hard for them to emigrate to Europe/US, but China is easy. It's also helpful if the emigrants still want to visit Russia from time to time.

No, they don't. The competition in China is cut-throat and the exported cars are not any cheaper than the ones in China. That's really all there is to it.

I'm using Kagi these days. It still has it indexed.

So Google is shooting themselves even more in the foot. Their search is already questionable, and they keep making it worse.

I used to run analysis using the US road network and the list of charging stations. A year ago, the longest stretch of roads without high-speed chargers was Montana to North Dakota, with 220 miles. The next one was in Oregon, something around 180 miles. More than 99% of the named locations reachable by numbered US highways and freeways were within 100 miles of a fast charger.

So technically, if you did even a bit of planning, you could reach ANY point on the public US roads and still have energy to drive to the next charger with a car having around 350 miles of range. With just 20-30 carefully placed stations, you can cut that down to about 250 miles of range, well within the current capabilities of EVs.

I eyeballed the map, and it looked like around 200 additional fast DC stations would put _any_ reachable location in the lower 48 states within 50 miles of a charger. This is the endgame for the range anxiety. And even at $1m per charger, it would cost less than one day of funding the military. Heck, even at $10m per charger it would still be less!

Connected appliances are great, as long as the connection is completely local.

Duh. BMW and Toyota. They have squandered years of development time. BYD is producing solid-state batteries in small batches for engineering tests, and they're scaling up the production now. They are expecting production rollout around 2027, with gradual scaling over the next several years.

At the same time, CATL is already producing LFPs with 200Wh/kg system density, enough for a 400-mile range on a typical EV ( https://www.catl.com/en/news/6... ). And the sodium-ion cells are at around 140Wh/kg, comparable to Li-Ion batteries in Teslas just 10 years ago with 200Wh/kg cells announced this year!

We might end up not even _needing_ solid-state batteries for most needs. I actually expect them to be used only for devices that need high energy density, like wearables and phones.

Ha. The X-ray lithography needs a pretty giant particle accelerator to work. It's not something that can be small. That's because it needs monochromatic and highly parallel rays. Various companies have been contemplating this for decades.

Advising customers, providing discounted traffic and instances, defaulting to us-east-2 in the console for new accounts, etc.

It's not the question of redundancy. It's the problem with customers just building everything in us-east-1, so it now dwarfs everything else.

The push is still there, it's just that us-east-1 has so much inertia that they _have_ to keep expanding it.

The replacement for us-east-1 is us-east-2. Amazon has been pushing companies to use it for quite a while. They even have discounted traffic between us-east-1 and us-east-2, it costs exactly the same as traffic within the us-east-1.

Why? EVs are just better and cheaper than ICE cars once the charging infrastructure is in place and you don't have some exotic needs. And it's in place in Norway.

Now do that with Youtube or Twitch that are airing live games.