Mineral Fuels & Oil: Valued at over $23 billion, including crude oil, petroleum gas, and coal.
Machinery & Boilers: Totaling nearly $19.8 billion for industrial machinery, nuclear reactors, and mechanical parts.
Electrical & Electronic Equipment: Generating around $18.1 billion, led heavily by integrated circuits and semiconductors.
Medical & Technical Apparatus: Accounting for roughly $13.1 billion in precision optical, photo, and medical instruments.
Agricultural Products: Represented by over $12.5 billion in oilseeds and grains—dominating the global market for U.S. soybeans—alongside cereals and meat.
They can produce all of that, but it would have a short-term impact on them if they lost that stream from the US.
True, but if China had the ability to disrupt the lives of 100m voters' cars, they'd say "Hey, why don't you just stay out of this little Taiwan (or Russia or India) altercation coming up" and the US would definitely do it. We should have Chinese cars here. But we shouldn't have ONLY Chinese cars. And we should have a domestic software-replacement industry and laws which support that, rather than having laws which protect devices from software replacement/tinkering.
Ideally, I'd like to see a OBD-II / Canbus standard for modern car concepts, and standard connectors on screens and buttons, so you could just swap out your car computers, allowing 3rd parties to provide new interfaces and features. Yes, invalidates your warranty, but allows you to replace your 4 year old car infotainment system with something 10x faster and with the new phone support, etc.
In a truly ideal world, you'd buy a Ford or a BYD and a few years later, get a VW (or Bosch) computer to run it.
But that means having business models change, and that's being hugely resisted.
VW failed to produce EVs people wanted. They started too late, and their software design method reeked of waterfall, not agile, thinking. They figured EVs should be NEW and so made interfaces with no buttons, using methods which seemed modern, rather than finding out what customers wanted.
It's odd, because people loved the e-Golf, I hear. If they had made their normal cockpit for their EVs, they would have sold, and they'd be in a much better place now. Their new EVs are much better and they seem to have learned a lot, but they've burned a LOT of cash to get there.
And they are in a fundamentally bad place. VW cars were popular because they were powerful, not efficient. You could point to the sound of them and say "German Engineering, dude!" And they were priced high for it. Now, a cheap, crappy little EV blows away the VW turbo at the stoplight (really, I jump VWs with my old iMiev -- it's not the 0-60 that matters in the city, it's the 0-10) and batteries on the floor make almost all EV-only car designs really stable. Everything VW relied on is GONE.
So it's no surprise. They need to figure out what Germans need that Chinese folk don't, and deliver that in every form factor for as cheap as they can. Same for their other major markets. They'll get it, but they will get much, much smaller before they do. Sell your VW stock now.
There's a video on YouTube showing how they make the Bolt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Compared to any modern EV factory, it looks like a grandmother knitting caps to sell on Etsy. They know how to do it, but they'd need to invest in machines, and that would hurt their short-term profits. So that's not going to happen.
EVs are EASY TO MAKE. You can make them with way less labor, way less parts, faster build time, less rework, etc. We could be cranking them out, and building them cheap. But US companies are keeping their sunk investment in ICE vehicles going for as long as they can. Toyota has been doing the same thing.
(Quick story -- Dyson looked into making an EV. They decided not to. Not because it was too hard, but because it was too easy -- they figured there'd be so many being made for so cheap they wouldn't make the kind of margins they want.)
We should be allowing the Chinese vehicles in with a medium-high tariff, with a schedule to lower the tariff on a well-known, unchangeable schedule. This would force the US to compete while at the same time allowing the US companies to plan. Instead we are providing chaos which robs them of the money they need to modernize, while at the same time making the easiest way to maximize profits the exploitation of that chaos. This is the opposite of good economics, and screws the consumer more than anyone else.
Rather than compete, they are trying to milk the US market until they are forced to compete, at which point they will collapse.
I do not want US automaking to collapse. I'd like a variety of choices for cars. But we have entrusted the auto industry to people with MBAs, not people trying to build something which lasts. The will look for short term gain, then leave the smoking rubble behind them.
Note that this is the same mentality as the oil industry, and that's worked fine for them. I'd say "so far" but there is no "so far" for these people. They will keep taking their cut until there's no life in the industry anymore, then go to the next time to milk, using leverage instead of intelligent design and planning. The US consumer suffers. That's fine, because that's the the US consumer's job.
So if Canada changes the name of "Lake Champlain" to "Lake Donald is a Big Fat Bitch" Google will to show it to Canadian users as "Lake Donald is a Big Fat Bitch"? How about if they kept the name Lake Champlain, except for the part south of a line 1 meter north of the Canadian border which they called "Lake Donald is a Big Fat Bitch"? Would Google label the part 1 meter North "Lake Champlain" and label the rest of it "Donald is a Big Fat Bitch"?
It seems that is Google's stated policy.
Alternative, less offensive names: "Lake Stupid Tyrant", "Lake Petulant Child", "Lake Orange Infant", "Lake Stop Buying US Goods", or "Lake Swim North to Freedom"
Now, all of a sudden there's this annoying guy with captions saying AI-like things each time you move on the puzzles. It's completely put me off the site. They added ads recently, and I thought "that's fair and makes sense." But the awful animated comment on every move? I'll either stop using the site, or put a post-it note over that part of the screen, which by the way will bock the ads.
They can now produce code faster. That does not mean they know what to produce.
Road trips where you recharge are not a place where EVs save you money. Charging on the road is the same price as gas.
If you make the whole trip with no recharge (pretty easy based on the km you post) you save on the miles, but miles are cheap.
Don't think about the road trip savings. It's how much you save per year which is important, and that's going to save you about $1k to $1.5k per year. You also save on maintenance costs.
The EV would make that road trip more comfortable -- they are quiet, and much more pleasant to drive than ICE cars. People who own them do not go back to ICE.
I absolutely vote for "go more socialized". We pay SO MUCH for care here we wind up rationing it. You don't realize this until you get a diagnosis and plan for remediation in a more sensible country then come back here and are told by your doctor "Well... let's wait and see. No, we won't do any sort of tests on that, yet... Let's see if it gets worse." Which I literally have seen. And that's with good insurance. Because we fetishize our tests like they have cost and scarcity, when they are CHEAP in other countries. They do not have intrinsic value, they only have cost based on some pretty absurd profit layers. (Absurd in markup, and absurd in number of layers.)
I think your points on Obama are good. I'd like a more clear explanation of what the senate would be without the 17th.
(I didn't like Obama, because I'm a screaming liberal and he was pretty darn conservative, turned wars into something run by lawyers and did a lot of killing of people with neither a real declaration of war nor due process which included them -- you can make all the practical arguments you like, but the evolution of that is Trump murdering people in the Gulf of Mexico with impunity. Biden was much better. I suspect Michelle Obama would have been a much better president than her husband. It's fantastic that we had someone brown as president, and embarrassing that we haven't had a woman.)
If the idea is that the party in power in the state should pick via a smoke-filled room the two senators... that doesn't seem to represent the interest of the state, either. The senate has two roles. It's the house of lords for the US -- intended to advise. The do NOT run as "I'm a smart guy and an elder statesman" which is clearly part of your point.
But the other role is just to get votes for the constitution 200 years ago. We wanted Rhode Island's vote, for example. The were worried about being dominated by Massachusetts, for example, because of the population size. The senate no longer is needed in that capacity, because small states are in enough numbers to work together, and that was not really fair in the first place.
It would be better to give all states 10 reps in the house plus more based on population than to make a whole house where every state gets the same weight.
The idea that states as governments need representation at all exists because before the civil war we were not a country -- we were a collection of tiny countries "The United States in America" -- after the war we became "The United States of America" (not official phrases, but look in document searches before and after the war). We don't have to protect fiefdoms. I am worried that repealing the 17th is aimed at strengthening fiefdoms.
The two most beautiful words in the English language are "Cheque Enclosed." -- Dorothy Parker
