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Former GM Executive: BYD cars are good in terms of design, features, price, quality. If we let BYD into the U.S. market, it could end up destroying american manufacturers

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  • I think that's kind of the point. What the current case industry is doing is getting them smoked. They need to let go of the past the "institutional knowledge" that's exactly why Ford and Chevy won't compete with Chinese EV. Those are built from the ground up for the modern era with modern leadership modern supply chains building institutional knowledge that matters today and into the future. I would love nothing more than to drive a Ford EV. I am considering the f150 lightning but in comparison to things I see online it's really far behind.

    Well they'd have to cut c-suite and shareholder's cut because everything else that could be squeezed out has already been squeezed out, so the c-suite and shareholder will convert their money into the political power it takes to just block out the competition.

  • Not enough Americans will buy small euro cars. Do you seriously think they wouldn't just do that if they could justify the cost of switching off a f150 assembly line to make a small car they would. Ford and Chevy both had a ton of small cars throughout the years but the sales aren't there anymore.

    Ford stopped making cars because they can't compete with the current crop of cars coming from Japan/Korea and Europe regardless of how much money they throw at the problem. They have their niche with trucks and SUVs and are happy to stay there. China builds cars using massive government subsidies, slave labor, and local resources that aren't available to anyone else in the world which is why I think it's right to fight against them because it's impossible to compete against them just like a small local grocery store can't compete against Walmart.

  • When Americans of all political stripes finally wake up to global realty, they'll most likely do it lying on a sidewalk, naked in the rain, with their fingers in their ears saying na-na-na-na-na-na...

    People will eventually have to face that the economic golden age of the 1950s and 60s wasn't a normal state we can return to if greedy billionaires just let us. The rich definitely grabbed the biggest share of the prosperity, but that brief era of prosperity wasn't normal, it was entirely abnormal, and it's been over for quite a while. We've been fooling ourselves and keeping it going for the last half century by living on credit, and that's about to end. I don't know what new era is about to start, but the American era is over.

  • The same thing happened in the 80s with Japan. The Japanese were no longer making crappy cars but small and very reliable, affordable cars. Detroit was still making rust buckets, obsessing over powerful engines with bodies that rotted out and defects galore. Detroit got beaten up badly (Chrysler had to get a gov bailout) until they cleaned up their act and improved their products. Protecting Detroit from competition would've just saddled US consumers with decades more of crappy, overpriced, low quality, cars.

    We still don't let in the small pickups the rest of the world enjoys.

    defects galore

    A friend of mine from high school attended the GM Institute and became an engineer for them. One of his first projects was on a team that bought a Lexus and an Infiniti when they first came on the market and took them apart to see how many production defects they had. He said a typical American car at the time (and this was in the '90s after quality had rebounded somewhat from its disastrous nadir) had 300-400 defects. The Infiniti they took apart had 2. The Lexus had 0.

  • So they dont care about making cars for the world market, they just want regulations to allow them to milk the american market...

  • So here is the thing.
    U lost. The moment I need American people to bail you out, you need to treat American people way way the fuck better.

    Worker rights, mandatory vacations, work protections, pensions, guaranteed healthcare etc.

  • No shit, people want cheap, reliable transport and workers would want to build them, build and work on replacement parts, build batteries, etc. The only people supported by blocking BYD in the US are executives, shareholders, and the politicians they bought.

    US is not a country, there is no strong federal power to choose direction.
    US is like Poland before being divided, everything run by oligarchs and every oligarch just pulling for himself.

  • We can't buy Chinese EV's in Canada thanks to the 100% tariff imposed by the GoC. I wish they'd get rid of the tariff. Our cheapest EV option right now is the Fiat 500e and that starts at over $30,000.

    I guarantee u US pressured Canada into not allowing byd

  • I will strongly disagree with “over engineered”. Why a car company with all their money and bailouts that they can’t compete with Apple/Android on touchscreen features and responsiveness is the whole reason why Chinese cars will kill American car companies. Chinese cars support Android auto even when Google play services isn’t even available in China (last I checked).

    Okay, I'll concede that point to you. U.S. carmakers suck at software. And, even on the hardware, they're resistant to change and slow to innovate.

  • So they dont care about making cars for the world market, they just want regulations to allow them to milk the american market...

    As is tradition

  • I think that's kind of the point. What the current case industry is doing is getting them smoked. They need to let go of the past the "institutional knowledge" that's exactly why Ford and Chevy won't compete with Chinese EV. Those are built from the ground up for the modern era with modern leadership modern supply chains building institutional knowledge that matters today and into the future. I would love nothing more than to drive a Ford EV. I am considering the f150 lightning but in comparison to things I see online it's really far behind.

    The problem is the world is transitioning to EVs, and burying your head in the sand won’t change that. Legacy manufacturers could be trying to find their place in the new world while they can, or they can stick with technology of the past, let someone else come to dominate the new technologies, and be left with a ever shrinking market until they disappear

  • The same thing happened in the 80s with Japan. The Japanese were no longer making crappy cars but small and very reliable, affordable cars. Detroit was still making rust buckets, obsessing over powerful engines with bodies that rotted out and defects galore. Detroit got beaten up badly (Chrysler had to get a gov bailout) until they cleaned up their act and improved their products. Protecting Detroit from competition would've just saddled US consumers with decades more of crappy, overpriced, low quality, cars.

    We still don't let in the small pickups the rest of the world enjoys.

    I would kill for a small electric truck... Telo is calling my name, but they don't have a functioning product yet.

  • So build them here, like every other foreign auto maker.

    They accomplish two completely different effects by two completely different mechanisms. The former being available to every manufacturer.

    So it's not free market after all because the big 3 can make vehicles at home and sell abroad while the others have to make them in the US for the US market. In what way is it not a form of favoring the domestic auto companies?

  • Is it a level playing field? In China workers rights are pretty non-existent and there’s no OSHA equivalent, at least not to the degree we have in the US. Then add in government subsidies, lower worker pay, reduced R&D costs because they pilfered the engineering from a US company, and you end up with a very lopsided market.

    To be clear, I am in no way defending the US auto industry. They have little customer loyalty for a reason – low quality, overpriced, subscription dependent vehicles with terrible warranties, expensive service requirements, and invasive telemetry. They need more competition to force them to make more consumer-friendly decisions, but China is hardly a fair competitor.

    In China workers rights are pretty non-existent and there’s no OSHA equivalent, at least not to the degree we have in the US

    How much maternity leave d'you get in the US? Cause in China it's a minimum of 90 days up to 180. And an extra 15~30 days of pat leave. Mandatory paid holiday? US: 0 China: 11. Sick leave? US: 0 China: months (at reduced rate). Vacation? US: 0, China: 1 to 3 weeks.

    An employer that fails to allow an employee to take annual leave must pay that employee 300% of the employee’s daily wages for each unused vacation day

    The work sfatey certainly remains an issue, like any developing country, but things are rapidly improving.

    Efforts at work safety shall be oriented around people and reflect the principle of people first and life first, with top priority given to people's life safety. The philosophy of safe development shall be adhered to and the principles of safety first, prevention as the main target as well as comprehensive administration shall be followed to forestall and resolve major safety risks at the source.

    Things aren't all roses in China, but y'all have to get off of your high horse when you know fuck all other than bland ass propaganda.

  • I'd think enrollment rates would be a severe lagging indicator of education quality. Institutions could likely coast on reputation for quite some time after education quality tanks. Inertia is powerful, and some could even knowingly decide to go to poor educational institutions just for the status it still gives among peers and in their community.

    That said, I have no first hand experience with US higher education, and wouldn't know what the quality really is, just saying that enrollment rates probably aren't a great indicator of it.

    True, I would argue though that after a certain amount of time, nobody even cares about the quality, it's the university name on the degree that is truly important.

    You can go anywhere on the planet even decades from now and say you're from Harvard (take your pick) and you'll be regarded as a knowledge god even if you were the last in the class to graduate.

    Educational quality isn't everything for getting into a good career, it's the reputation, and that is what schools in the US (and a few abroad) have in spades.

  • Okay, I'll concede that point to you. U.S. carmakers suck at software. And, even on the hardware, they're resistant to change and slow to innovate.

    Software is the answer to many of the mechanical issues too though. Granted, the physical engineering is definitely over engineered, but would they really need to have 6 different taillight frames when LEDs can be multicolor and just tuned with software for each market? I also see zero reason why manufacturers can’t start from a base and tweak for different market configurations. You also see car companies complain about complex regulation, but then in this day and age when east Asia can make you anything, that’s not an excuse I’m willing to be fed. I fucking hate Elmo like everyone else here, but why the hell is the Model Y the most popular car in the world. None of the other companies want to copy Tesla? They don’t want to compete? We’ve gotten to the point where it’s ludicrous that they’re not competing.

  • Dam maybe some of the American automakers who took billions in subsidies should have built cheaper cars instead of the largest trucks possible to skirt regulations.

    I literally can't afford an American car, i can afford a BYD tho.

    I can afford neither, but if I had to save up for one it would be the BYD.

    American cars are just large, stupid and inefficient. Also the parts are very expensive here in New Zealand

  • American manufacturing seems very incapable of change. If things worked this way for decades, why change it? Meanwhile the world moved on and they ask themselves why doesn't anyone wanna buy american...?

  • I don't disagree with the criticisms of American cars -- overpriced, uninspired, unreliable, over-engineered, etc. -- but to everyone saying "we should just compete", do you realize the realities that Chinese workers experience? Have you heard of 996? It's shorthand for a common work schedule in China: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. Benefits that are common in the U.S., even in non-union shops, like retirement plans, PTO, worker's comp, and overtime pay are rare. So, yeah, things can be made much cheaper if you are willing to feed your workforce into the grinder.

    Have you heard of 996? It’s shorthand for a common work schedule in China: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week

    So a typical American teacher’s schedule?

  • Very few children work in china right now, Chinese workers even have 5 days of vacation a year by law.

    That's 5 more than the US....

    There were probably more children working on farms in the US than in china, and I remember something about Florida wanting to reinstate child labour again?

    Yes, there may not be child labor. But in places we cannot see, there are still black industry chains. A brick factory was exposed some time ago. They let some people with low IQ or disabilities work. They were not given masks, and the air was full of dust. They may work more than ten hours a day or even more. What is the difference between this and slavery? I just want to give this example to illustrate that there are still many black-hearted factories in society, and there is also the possibility of employing child labor. In China, young people who have not studied will choose to work in factories, but they must be at least 16 years old. If they are younger, they will not be hired. Back to the issue of BYD, although we are proud that it can be recognized by the world as a Chinese brand, and many people in China also buy it. But recently there have been some news that they blindly work overtime within the company, and have meetings after get off work, etc. Someone exposed the chat records within the company. We are all ordinary people. We just want to fight for our rights. Even if it is a big company, as long as it exploits people, we must oppose it.

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  • AMD warns of new Meltdown, Spectre-like bugs affecting CPUs

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    anyoldname3@lemmy.worldA
    This isn't really the same kind of bug. Those bugs made instructions emit the wrong answer, which is obviously really bad, and they're really rare. The bugs in the article make instructions take different amounts of time depending on what else the CPU has done recently, which isn't something anyone would notice except that by asking the kernel to do something and measuring the time to execute affected instructions, an attacker that only had usermode access could learn secrets that should only be available to the kernel.
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  • I Counted All of the Yurts in Mongolia Using Machine Learning

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    G
    I'd say, when there's a policy and its goals aren't reached, that's a policy failure. If people don't like the policy, that's an issue but it's a separate issue. It doesn't seem likely that people prefer living in tents, though. But to be fair, the government may be doing the best it can. It's ranked "Flawed Democracy" by The Economist Democracy Index. That's really good, I'd say, considering the circumstances. They are placed slightly ahead of Argentina and Hungary. OP has this to say: Due to the large number of people moving to urban locations, it has been difficult for the government to build the infrastructure needed for them. The informal settlements that grew from this difficulty are now known as ger districts. There have been many efforts to formalize and develop these areas. The Law on Allocation of Land to Mongolian Citizens for Ownership, passed in 2002, allowed for existing ger district residents to formalize the land they settled, and allowed for others to receive land from the government into the future. Along with the privatization of land, the Mongolian government has been pushing for the development of ger districts into areas with housing blocks connected to utilities. The plan for this was published in 2014 as Ulaanbaatar 2020 Master Plan and Development Approaches for 2030. Although progress has been slow (Choi and Enkhbat 7), they have been making progress in building housing blocks in ger distrcts. Residents of ger districts sell or exchange their plots to developers who then build housing blocks on them. Often this is in exchange for an apartment in the building, and often the value of the apartment is less than the land they originally had (Choi and Enkhbat 15). Based on what I’ve read about the ger districts, they have been around since at least the 1970s, and progress on developing them has been slow. When ineffective policy results in a large chunk of the populace generationally living in yurts on the outskirts of urban areas, it’s clear that there is failure. Choi, Mack Joong, and Urandulguun Enkhbat. “Distributional Effects of Ger Area Redevelopment in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.” International Journal of Urban Sciences, vol. 24, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 50–68. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/12265934.2019.1571433.
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    fingolfinz@lemmy.worldF
    Magats wanted people with their same mental capacity to run things and oh look, it’s lots of incompetence
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    Hear me out, Eliza. It'll be equally useless and for orders of magnitude less cost. And no one will mistakenly or fraudulently call it AI.
  • Forced E-Waste PCs And The Case Of Windows 11’s Trusted Platform

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    K
    I was pretty lucky in university as most of my profs were either using cross platform stuff or Linux exclusive software. I had a single class that wanted me using windows stuff and I just dropped that one. Awesome that you're getting back into it, it's definitely the best it's ever been (and you're right that Steam cracked the code). It sounds like you probably know what you're doing if you're running Linux VMs and stuff, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions or issues I might be able to point you in the right direction for.
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