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.

Would those same insurance companies even cover a wreck that happened if the driver hopped in the back seat? That is what we are talking about, not a driver using autonomous features that they can instantly override at any time.

That doesn't make sense, the average gamer will play more than 15 hours a month, that's a tiny bit over 3 hours a week. At that point, you'd just not bother with a console that costs hundreds at all.

So Microsoft is misleading, obsfucating or just flat out lying that only 4% will be impacted. Plus it makes terrible business sense for your cheapest product to meet the needs of your 96% of your customers, its the "2nd cheapest bottle of wine" effect, if you know nothing about wine you buy the second cheapest bottle as it's usually a fair bit better than the cheapest for a fraction of the price extra. So effectively your cheapest product is there just to be shit and drive people to slightly more expensive options. You want most customers buying the 2nd tier (or 2nd and 3rd if you've got a 4 tier system) which isn't much more than the bottom tier whilst your top tier is expensive.

Consoles were always money sinks, however I suspect Microsoft has gotten sick of subsidising them.

PCGMR here, steam quadrupled the price of my subscription this month, as they do every month... let me run the maths... 4 x £0 is still £0.

Don't think I'll be cancelling, even though I still get to keep all my games.

Time to admit the XBox and PS are both effectively dead. And nothing of value was lost.

How good is their game-streaming at cutting out the various 'filler' time(loading screens, startup animations telling you that Nvidia is the way it's meant to be played) and does it have some sort of 'suspend' state to handle cases where you would pause a game if it either doesn't have save on demand anywhere or takes a little while to load from save?

I know I have a bunch of games that I don't actually play all that much, in wall time terms; but Steam's 'executable run time' number is 2x-10x as high because I'm not necessarily going to save, quit, open, load if a game can be paused and alt-tabbed without crashing or continuing to eat all the GPU time to render a static image I'm not looking at; and I'm not necessarily going to do anything other than pause if I'm called away for 15 minutes by something else.

Unless the streaming service is impeccable at cutting out the various little waits it seems likely that people are going to start resenting the time limit even more than their level of seriousness and actual hand-on-controller-and-attention-locked time suggests.

Given that they already purchased Activision Blizzard King, including the "King" part of it, they clearly already have a considerable interest in casual players.

What is less obvious is how that is supposed to work for their streaming service. The stuff aimed at casuals, sensibly, is normally targeted at either potato-tier PC specs or the (pretty punchy in absolute terms) mobile devices that people worth targeting have.

It is much less clear whether there's a 'casual' market that demands current-gen console performance in very limited amounts rather than mobile or iGPU level titles. Given the extreme prevalence of various 'free to play' models that do sneaky monetization later it also looks like the 'casual' market's (significant) amount of money is largely locked up behind the sort of price sensitivity that requires clever psychological tricks to break through. I'm not sure that they'll be a good fit for something as obvious and psychologically burdensome as a ticking countdown timer hanging over every minute they play.

I have no particular reason to assume that Nvidia is lying about what this software does; but unless they've stumbled on a veritable miracle it's going to mostly be a mechanism for running largely separate models of whatever size your hardware allows; not anything close to what the datacenter comparison implies.

There's a reason why Nvidia sells most of their higher end models intended for parallel use with NVLink between the chips inside the chassis and a lot of either infiniband or RDMA-capable ethernet between multiple chassis; as well as shoving a considerable amount of RAM per GPU onto those parts. And it's because latency and bandwidth matter a lot.

As it is people seek out the unified memory parts, Apple's or strix halo, or nvidia's little GB10, because the GPU having to go to main memory over a mere x16 PCIe link is already a serious problem. If you think either 256 or 512 Gb/s directly to the PCIe root on the same die as the main memory controller doesn't cut it I have some...bad news...about how well NICs are probably going to work for you, especially with the Nvidia parts that don't support RDMA even if you have NICs that do.

Nothing will change until lots of people die (not just from the effects of such, but also things like "the boomer generation fuck off"), and/or the billionaires get hit in the wallet.

Same old story.

Remember ladies and gentlemen, you're sharing the footpath with drivers who think a car without an instrument binnacle is a good idea.

I recall an explanation of charge separation in clouds when waterdrops would form a thin layer of ice which would shatter in tiny pieces. This would leave a charged waterdrop behind. The ice fragments and the waterdrop would move at very different speeds and this would lead to separation of charge.

I wonder if those water drops have the right charge for corrosion.

Don't give them ideas!