Fair points. You're right that overproduction has costs. I agree, I'm just saying US economic thought is hyper sensitive to that particular cost of overproduction, as if low prices and excess capacity is the worst thing that can happen, and dismisses the costs of monopoly and unearned income generation, and other costs that society pays when production is held back for higher corporate profits.

This article clearly is written from a Wall Street perspective, but China is not Wall Street.

Wall Street fears a "crash" above all else, because a "crash" causes existing winners to lose, which is something that cannot be allowed to happen in the US. But China understands that a crash for one person is an opportunity for others, and what matters is overall progress, not just making sure nobody ever loses money. People losing money is part of capitalism and part of the industrial lifecycle, so a "crash" is not some kind of existential failure, but just a rumble in an evolving market.

China has a tendency to fund a huge amount of companies who invest extravagantly in building overflowing amounts of capital. Then a lot of those companies go out of business, the whole sector "crashes" (we could also say "matures"), all that huge amount of capital is snatched up and purposed to extremely efficient PRODUCTION which is the part that Wall Street doesn't care about.

The same thing is happening with solar; from a Wall Street perspective it's a failure because prices keep falling and solar companies aren't making profits. From a Chinese perspective it's a success, because they are blanketing their mountains with cheap solar panels and they are going to achieve energy independence which will help the whole economy. They understand you can't have cheap power and also have extremely profitable energy companies. You can't have low solar prices and also boost profits of solar companies. So what Western articles will describe as a "failure" and "collapse" is actually an evolution of the market to the next stage of hyper-efficient production (also known as low profitability) which the US never achieves because they step in to make sure incumbent interests don't lose money (even if the overall economy or consumer "loses money" in the long run).

In the central cities, Europe's answer to traffic congestion is to reduce the need for cars in general, and reduce the number of cars on the road. Self-driving cars aren't going to do either thing. Streets are already clogged with cars so self-driving ones aren't going to make any positive improvement unless they allow replacement of a personal car with a self-driving car, and that's only going to happen in the long run if self-driving cars are for some reason cheaper than Ubers. Even then, even Ubers/SDC's take up space on the road; there's only so much gain to be had.

It makes sense that SDC development is happening in America, because in America, only car transport is allowed. It has been decided that roadway infrastructure is going to be the only form of infrastructure to get public investment and the only one which will be accommodated by public policy, no matter what. The fact that SDC's aren't really going to move the needle here either, is a lost point because there's nowhere else for investment dollars to go.

Logically, mass transit moves so many more people than cars, that in terms of dollars per person moved, cars are nearly irrelevant by comparison by the raw numbers. A single subway line carries more people than the busiest highway in the world. And cities may have dozens of subway lines. Throwing money after cars, when the streets are already clogged with cars, is just a waste of money, self-driving or not. So European cities are more likely to invest in things like the Grand Paris express, a completely new subway system (which, notably, is electrified and self-driving). By comparison, self-driving cars are just a technology that's seen as a way to increase the number of cars on the road, increase congestion, increase wear and tear on the roads, all for the "benefit" of saving the salary of the drivers, which is an important source of low-wage employment, and it's just not compelling at all.

Having ridden Waymo a lot, and also driven through European cities, I actually think they could navigate through European cities just fine, and also safer than human drivers. It's not a technology limitation IMO. It's just...why. At best, you save the cost of a driver, but even then, you simply can't improve overall transport efficiency vs. taxis/Ubers, which they already have.

Not objectively worse; just different tradeoffs.

LFP can be routinely charged to 100%, unlike NMC which is recommended to charge to 80% most of the time. In fact, LFP thrives when trickle charged all the way to 100.% and battery manufacturers recommend charging to 100% to maintain battery health. LFP also have a very flat discharge voltage curve, so in cars where that matters, LFP can be discharged deeper than similar NMC batteries before the voltage drops too far. Between the 100% charge and equivalent or better discharge, actual capacity-per-weight of LFP in a car is very competitive with NMC, plus cost is lower and fire risk is lower. Which is why Tesla has been using LFP in Model 3 and Model Y for a long time now.

Furthermore, a similar pattern is in the process of happening with tariffs. The month before the first wave of tariffs hit had the largest amount of foreign imports in history, because everyone pulled in their orders. Then the month after tariffs hit, imports dropped like a rock, as expected, because everyone had high inventory and prices were higher. What we haven't seen yet is 1) what the long term tariffs will actually be, because unlike EVs, where everyone assumes the natural subsidy rate is zero, the natural tariff rate is also zero but everyone expects some amount of tariffs now that pandora's box has been opened and 2) What the final impact to consumer prices will be once companies burn through all that pre-tariff inventory they bought.

Carmakers especially Hyundai have already dropped prices after the credit expired, proving they were jacking prices somewhat to capture the tariff...perfectly predictably. When the 7500 credit went into effect, Ford increased the price of the lightning by exactly 7500...they didn't even use a slightly different number to conceal it; they used exactly 7500 price hike. The inverse is happening after the credit expired, at least among makers who are motivated to sell cars...several Hyundai models have dropped by $5000 already.

The best use-case I've found for 4k is playing Mario Kart in split screen mode. When playing with 4 players, each quadrant of the screen is full HD, so you can all sit close to a big panel and it's like you each have your own 4 HD panels. Doing the same thing on an HD panel results in each quadrant being SD or below resolution, which is definitely noticeable.

That may be so, but if you look at the data for the US, practically all the decrease in childbirth has come from the reduction in teenage pregnancy. You can basically say we won the war against teen pregnancy, but oops, it turns out society actually needs those babies, and they aren't being offset by any increase in childbearing at later ages.

Many automakers already dropped their prices after the credit. Hyundai especially, has dropped their prices across their product line, by up to $5000, proving they were keeping prices high to soak up the credit (I don't blame them; that's what subsidies do).

I hope I'm not the only one who remembers Ford increasing the price of the lightning by exactly $7500 after the tax credit went into effect. They didn't even try to hide it by using some other slightly different number.

EVs will be just fine without subsidies; what they need is not outright dis-incentives in the form of tariffs and arresting factory workers.

There are already dutch companies that make electric tractors, and yes, part of the reason is that famers already have solar systems and want to use their solar to run their equipment instead of buying diesel. Diesel is a huge cost for farmers, even here in the US.

The interesting thing is they went with 48V, so farmers can work on them without having to use any high-voltage techniques, and the batteries are swappable because you don't want to have a tractor sitting to charge. The batteries hang on the front and sides where they usually hang huge iron weights anyway, and they just lift them off with a forklift to change them out.

The Aztek was actually ahead of its time. Here 25 years later, the market is flooded with "compact SUVs" essentially the same as the Aztek, and just as ugly.

A possible difference is that the drift toward SUV dominance is a result of malignant regulation that unfairly penalized small cars, regular cars, big cars, and basically everything but SUVs. So I think people still hate compact SUVs just as much as they did when the Aztek was launched, it's just that now, there are no viable alternatives left like there were then.

I also think people don't like or care about thin phones, but they don't have a choice anymore. They also liked their headphone jacks, removable batteries, and removable media just fine, but they don't have a choice anymore.

There was never a phase in America where most people lived remotely on farms. People always live in communities, and always have. Even primitive peoples.

The first settlements in America were things like the Dutch colony that eventually became NYC. Or Jamestown Virginia. Or if you want to go further back, St. Augustine Florida. Or going even further back, the pueblos or Mayans. Even the nomadic plains indians and inuit live in settlements together. Out West, they built forts and the forts eventually became cities like San Francisco.

If you look at any 19th century American community, EVEN IN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMIES, people still lived in towns. You can see these small towns with their dilapidated main streets all over the Midwestern US, which used to be thriving communities before the train stations shut down and all the public investment went into the interstates and Walmarts that leech off of them. My grandpa lived in an incredibly small BFE town in Ohio that you could walk completely across in 30 minutes. When I was a kid he would always tell me about how he used to walk down to the train station and take the train to Wheeling WV (the "big city", which was also walkable) on the weekends. Which seemed so incredible to me as a kid I thought it was the ravings of an old man, but it's true. You can still find the timetables of the drains from back then. He could have gone to Florida if he wanted.

If you read early American biographies or history, people ALWAYS lived in some kind of colony or town. Laura Ingalls' life is a great example. You might read her books and think that they lived out in the "frontier wilderness". Then you read a little further and learn they were able to walk to school. So in actual fact, they lived within a child's walking distance of a town big enough to have a schoolhouse. Compared to modern American children, most of whom who couldn't hope to walk to school, that's unthinkable urban density.

When you read the chronicles of Narnia, a fictional book, it starts out by the children being moved out of London to the countryside. The "countryside" was 10 miles from the nearest railway station, which was considered incredibly rural.

Not even cities. Walkable towns. Walkable villages. Even the smallest, tiniest, BFE towns in America had a walkable main street. You can see these old walkable towns all over the East and Midwest, usually with cars blasting through the widened main street and all the businesses boarded up because they closed down the train station 50 years ago and invested trillions of dollars of public money on the Walmart out by the interstate.

It's not a situation where mega-cities don't need cars, or where cities don't need cars once they get to a certain size. No size of civilization needs cars. There is no scale or transition period where cars are needed. You don't need them when it's a tiny village or settlement, you don't need them when it's a fort or a small town, you don't need them when it's a midsize city, and you don't need them when it's a mega-city. All those things existed before cars and cars don't improve them.

Cars are great for intercity travel and logistics. Just not for driving around where people actually live.

This is why the solution is and will always be Georgism.

When your culture, legal system and tax structure makes it easier to make money on rent-seeking than it is to make money by useful production, don't be surprised when your whole economy arranges itself around extracting rent instead of generating production. Only suckers will pay 25% marginal rates on their labor, when they could pay 15% "capital" gains tax on a rent-generating asset (or more commonly, nothing at all by taking a $1 salary or creative accounting).

The script should be flipped; we should be taxing unearned gains at higher rates than labor and capital.

When BMI comes up, everyone turns into a bodybuilder.

Do people who care about an extra 200 per year buy Porsches?