Made in Sunderland, batteries made in the UK too. EV tech developed jointly with Renault.

Smartphones have matured enough there is very little incentive to upgrade.

64 camera lenses oughtta be enough for anyone!
  - Phone J. Gates

> And no the bubble isn't going to pop.

It's smells more bubblier over time. Sales of AI services are not self-supporting the hardware and infrastructure needed. AI usage numbers are based on the heavily discounted services supported by investors and market-share fights. These subsidies cannot last forever. Users will be more judicious with AI use when they have to pay real prices, and the market will realize it over-built.

Investors are pricing in big breakthroughs, and if these don't arrive, the existing stacks are financially hosed.

"and where blue collar workers get to retire on a full pension before white collar workers."

Yes, if only I could enjoy the life of a blue collar factor worker in China. Why can't I work 12 hour shifts 6 days a week?!

Most of the R&D in China is done with private money. The government does contribute, but it's more long term guarantees than it is cash.

In a democracy, policy can change ever 4-5 years. Look at the US, it's been alternating between pushing renewables to banning them to pushing them to banning them again, over the last 4 administrations. If you were a company developing renewable technology, would you have faith that your investment in R&D wouldn't be banned by the time it reaches market? Doesn't even have to be a ban, just an administration that is hostile to your business, and an electorate that would rather roll coal than see a wind turbine 20km off-shore.

The Chinese government said that EVs were the future and it would ensure that future came quickly and stuck around. It made sure the infrastructure was installed, and promoted them to consumers as a way to reduce pollution. Loans for development were made available. And it stuck to that for the long term, not just the next 4-5 years.

Democracy can do that too, but not in a two party system. Look at European democracies where coalition governments are the norm, where the system is designed to prevent any one party gaining complete power. Planning is longer term, and there is more certainty in future policy direction.

From Europe we look at Americans that way too. Long hours, ridiculously little holiday entitlement (I just booked flights for my six week break over the new year, and I've still got time off to spare), and a billionaire-Epstien ruling class who live in luxury. Only they also get pollution, mass deportations, bankrupted by healthcare costs, school shootings, and so on.

China is far from perfect, but it also doesn't compare that badly.

Probably working on an army of murderbots to protect him from the guillotine.

The usual way of fixing it is to designate those products as critically important and put in a mandate for making them available. Take water, for example. Data centres need it, humans need it, farms need it. If it was just sold to the highest bidder we would be in trouble.

I'm hoping that Chinese manufacturers step up to increase supply, because they will be less concerned about demand drying up. They have both a rapidly expanding domestic market, and the longer term goal to out-compete rivals on price. CXMT is unfortunately allocating a lot of production to AI as well, but they aren't the only ones. Hopefully NAND flash production also ramps up very quickly.

Many of the big Western car manufacturers sold EVs at a loss initially too. I had an original Nissan Leaf that was heavily discounted and came with a 0% loan.

So Grok based these claims on a survey done for a think tank. This just keeps getting better.

The elites hate labor shortages. They love labor surpluses.

It was worth a go, but it was always a long shot. You could interpret the current rules as requiring some of this stuff, but it's a hard case to make. Either way, it was probably necessary to demonstrate that the current rules are inadequate.

The European Commission is the EU's civil service. Petitioning it was always a long shot, because for them to act you have to convince them that there is a good case within existing EU rules. They aren't there to make new rules, they are there to enforce the existing ones.

They have effectively said that existing consumer protection rules don't extend far enough to force publishers to make offline patches and server code available, but in their opinion do offer some of the things being asked for already and so the petitioners should contact their state consumer rights body.

To get a change in the rules, it needs to go through the European Parliament and the elected MEPs. That's how democracy works. Elected officials make the rules, civil servants enforce them.

On Windows you can also use a package manager like Winget or Chocolatey. To disable auto updates, go to Firefox's preferences and search for "update", it's right there as a toggle.

There is also Librewolf that is a Firefox fork, or really more of a version with the default settings changed for maximum privacy, as I don't think there is much change to the code itself.

FF on Android doesn't crash for me. It used to, but it's come a long way. The main issue at the moment is the crappy UI for tab handling.