There might be no industrial long term planning, but I think it’s because the US operates in a different mode — financial (late) Capitalism.

But gas pumps / electric charging stations are also private.

Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).

Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).

On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.

> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy

It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?

Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.

But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.

Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.

No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.

> citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy

citizens had no choice.

China still has capital controls, so the RMB cannot be a world currency when you can't freely move it in and out of China.

How much more surveillance and lack of privacy is there than the US? The US also has

- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams - surveilled digital communications - social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)

China's low level of corruption wins again

The Chinese are selling their EVs all over the world.

There are credible American auto enthusiasts that have got these cars and have been using them in the. US.

The superiority of Chinese EVs isn’t propaganda.

The gas pumps maybe are just a ruse but we know they are operating in China since unlike the US auto industry the Chinese one is incredibly competitive so if BYD was lying about their gas pumps the nearly 100 other competitors would have called them out

Put political freedom aside. Does China not have massive high speed train networks, the best EVs on the planet, the most renewable energy growth on the planet and a competitive domestic AI industry, and hugely more engineering graduates per year than the US?

Their trajectory is incredible, and I don't see what burying ones head in the sand does to help the US or Europe or the democratic societies of the world get/stay ahead.

Europe is third since the 2000s. The pushed the Euro to try to limit it (and from the mouth of someone who was present when they pushed, it was also caused by the black Wednesday of 92, the attacks on currencies increased, and the cost to rebuff them too).

And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.

Maybe, but BMW are at least trying. https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/electric-cars/electric-3-...

At least the Chinese tech will be available to European consumers, nothing says insecure like pretending a competitor doesn't exist.

I think this is probably because Europe is considered part of "the West".

you can buy Chinese phones/cars in EU, so we don't fall behind

though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!

That’s a rather tall argument given that the US is currently experiencing historic income inequality [1].

[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...

America is also, fundamentally, a divided country where people disagree over basic things (such as the distribution of rice) and there is a massive industry dedicated to amplifying that division.

On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.

Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.

Maybe. Agree that zero-sum thinking sucks. You gotta grow the pie. But. You also have to share the big pie.

In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:

A field exists and produces 1 unit.

A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.

America has a genuinely crazy side.

No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.

There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.

The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.

I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.

The Republicans are now a party of insanity.

It’s highly impractical to import cars less than 25 years old into the US for anything beyond “show & display” licensing, and that’s only for select models.

Modifying them to meet US safety standards and then getting them approved is arduous and expensive, especially if there’s no comparable US model to emulate / borrow parts.

What are the requirements of vehicles that drive across the border, like if a Canadian family is holidaying in Buffalo?

If they're driving a BYD, do they get stopped at the border?

What if they sold their BYD to a US family? Can it be registered and insured? I'd guess not, therefore it wouldn't get bought by a US resident in the first place.

It happens all the time that a government regulates foreign industries while giving domestic ones relatively free reign. Canada has no car manufacturers. Europe has no Facebooks or Apples. The US doesn't make diesel cars.

now now, Canada is only allowing 50K of these cars to be imported per year. This is a middle power extending a hand to a superpower in the new multipolar world, nothing more. Also BYD subsidies (and sales) in China have been dropped in the past year.

Is the tech better? Yes. Is protecting domestic auto capability from subsidies in the National Interest? Debatable. This convo always circles around to how we characterize subsidies (EV credits for Elon, direct state sponsorship by China) in a way that's always concealed just enough from the general public to stop people from asking hard questions.

> because they know there will never be competition

In the US only.

It seems to be the same small vision that lead to French cars being sold in droves in Latin America.

Biden’s banning them was not a good decision IMO.

At the same time, he was encouraging domestics manufacturers to start building their own EVs out, which opened up the possibility of unbanning, with reasonable import duties, once the American companies were competitive.

However, right now we are pushing American companies to go in the opposite direction and dismantle their EV efforts.

I think you'd have to be a bit ignorant of very recent history to think that America is some cesspool of lack of innovation in the electric car industry. They invented it, despite there being no competition at the time.

And you can do that while charging as there is no need to sit and hold a pump handle.

Its also fast enough that I don't have to plan for it. I could be running errands, note a low charge, and unless I'm in a big hurry stop for a charge.

Sounds like the trick is to use 1.5MW chargers. I guess that'll do it. I suppose the question is how they handel this thermally.

Yes, retooling gas stations is the way to go. Already happening in Norway where stations now show the price of kWh in addition to gas and diesel prominently on signs by the road. Charging is just a different kind of pump.

Indeed, I meant 10S. And what I meant by load being distributed along more cells, is that since you have many more cells, current drawn from each is lower. Which greatly prolongs the lifetime.

And hence the question I had with charging too fast. Since discharging faster clearly wears them more quickly, surely charging faster has a similar effect, since it's mostly the reversed process? A question probably easily answered with a query to a LLM.

Cool now at your busy "gas" station keep it working as the pile gets exhausted and you don't have the supporting grid to be able to deliver the needed power to keep it stocked with "gas".

At least not in Europe.

From what I read it's 1500 kW at 1000V or Peak use of 1.5 MW at 1000 A. That's a crazy amount of power.

You will exhaust your piles quickly, or they are enormous. So it's like "quick-charge" until we run out?

Feels like such a waste for marginal gains?

With the range as good as a modern EV the charge time already isn't a particularly that bad. I'd much prefer more chargers (so that you can combine charging with something else you were going to do anyway) than faster ones.