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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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  • Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today's dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don't know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.

    Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren't treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.

    Japan used state capitalism to promote it’s auto industry and other key sectors to sustain strong growth. America’s weakened billionaire owned government system is just being strip mined into the ground. We won’t be able to compete in an economy that’s only product is wealth extraction because of our massive corruption.

  • Yes but after they win they have to raise prices...

    Yes, and so may BYD. I have no idea what are you arguing for.

  • Good. Fuckem. They make shitty, oversized trucks that are a danger to pedestrians and people who drive reasonably sized cars anyway.

  • Where free market? It will regulate itself /s

    Well China did subsidize that industry massively, to a point were their domestic market is flooded with very low margins. So the market is already very distorted. But I find it hard to hate on that because flooding the market with electric vehicles and solar panels is better than anything economists are coming up with.

  • I mean, what is the reason those Indian engineers chose the US over India?

    and Trump is destroying all of it

    The way things are going for you, nobody with a half a choice would decide to migrate to the USA for work

    Adjust to your new reality pal

  • Six months ago I moved from the US to a country where BYD and other Chinese brands are available. In the past I owned GM cars. The former GM executive is correct. After trying Chinese cars I find it extremely difficult to justify paying 40-60% more for a car made by GM or anyone else. GM’s best selling cars here are made by its Chinese joint ventures and aren’t available for sale in the US, and they are the only GM cars I would buy.

    They're pretty well known here for low quality flashy vehicles, with premiums for luxury not quality.

  • I am union so don’t misunderstand the comment, but doesn’t BYD rely heavily on terribly paid non-union labor to reach it’s price advantage?

    No, it relies on massive automation. Similary their solar industry etc

    For example

  • China builds cars using massive government subsidies

    The federal government ended the the EV subsidy a few years ago.

    slave labor

    lmao. We know what slavery looks like, you can see it in the cotton fields outside Angola Prison, rows of enslaved people, and overseer on a horse, all behind barbed wire. In Xinjiang I saw farmers driving combine harvesters in roadside fields.

    local resources that arent available

    You're getting closer. Through 1 and 5 year plans, the CPC uses SoEs (and sometimes just asks private companies "nicely") to ensure the foundational inputs, steel, rubber, chips, college graduates, etc are all available to industry at the specific price point and volume that competing private firms need to produce say, 100m EVs or a million more apartments.

    Any country can do a little central planning to make sure private industry has what it needs, but this only works if you're able to take action against companies that exploit the system.

    The federal government ended the the EV subsidy a few years ago.

    Buyers of any EV not just American EVs.

    lmao. We know what slavery looks like, you can see it in the cotton fields outside Angola Prison, rows of enslaved people, and overseer on a horse, all behind barbed wire.

    I'm glad you find slavery so comical.

    Were these inmates enslaved for their religious beliefs being different than the official party line? We they imprisoned for not wanting to be controlled by a dictatorship? No. No they weren't.

    Through 1 and 5 year plans, the CPC uses SoEs (and sometimes just asks private companies "nicely") to ensure the foundational inputs, steel, rubber, chips, college graduates, etc are all available to industry at the specific price point and volume that competing private firms need to produce say, 100m EV or a million more apartments.

    Gee, it sure sounds like you're listing even more slavery than I mentioned. Imagine Trump declaring that every college grad needs to make themselves available to build a border wall.

    Any country can do a little central planning to make sure private industry has what it needs, but this only works if you're able to take action against companies that exploit the system.

    The only exploitation mentioned here is the government exploiting the people. It seems your argument is based on your warped belief that if the US is committing atrocities than it's okay for everyone else to do so, yet your examples are in stark contrast to what's happening here. Your views are frankly quite disgusting and proof of how absurd the Chinese government's propaganda arm is.

  • I mean, didn’t Japanese and Korean automakers already do that?

    Yes. They did. That's called competition. It forces companies to improve by destroying them, except they don't want that. And politicians don't want that, cause it makes corruption unstable.

    Killed Detroit too, though. But, eh, helped other parts. It's life.

    Thus already in the 90s with the TRON OS a different approach was chosen by US regulators - threaten Japan with sanctions if it's allowed to compete with Windows inside Japan .

    They can't threaten China, but they can prevent Chinese competitive goods from entering US market and improving its economy again.

    Bad economy - poor and stressed people, poor and stressed people - worse political decisions, worse political decisions - good for middlemen which in our age shouldn't exist frankly. We have the technologies for direct democracy, it's not 1920s.

  • Where free market? It will regulate itself /s

    It will. It really does regulate itself, no /s needed.

    Except that happens via some businesses going bankrupt and some adjusting.

    And either it's free enough for monopolies to crash, or regulated enough for monopolies to be killed, or both.

    If it's neither, then you have today's tech industry.

    EDIT: And here the fears are that big companies will go down with their shareholders whining and their political cronies suffering and so on. Whether you want free market or literal socialism, the main problem is in separating private narrow interests from the state machine.

  • Even if they changed how would they win?

    They're just too expensive to manufacture as compared to chinese ones.

    If they are too expensive due to cost of labor, they can do, look at other comments, increased automation.

    With automation China's advantages over US are mostly in the bureaucratic efficiency area. Both in the government's parts interacting with big companies and in the companies themselves.

    US big companies are just too used to preferential treatment and solving market problems with lobbying, which worked when they were the spearhead of progress or something.

  • No, it relies on massive automation. Similary their solar industry etc

    For example

    It brings up a valid point. Assembly line manufacturing will soon require massive automation lines to remain profitable, and without massive government assistance in not just money, but education and training, these kinds of automation factories will likely never be fully realized here.

  • the Chinese are really good at low cost manufacturing

    They're not "good" at it, they just have no minimum wage and no semblance of annoying things like worker protections or unions to be concerned with.

    China doesn't have a national minimum wage, but minimum wage is delegated to the local level there and definitely exists in every single province. Just echoing what the other user said, literally everything you said here is easily disprovable.
    https://www.china-briefing.com/news/minimum-wages-China/

  • 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.

    Bailouts are unacceptable period. Trained workers, factories, factory hardware, logistics specialists, engineers, patents and so on - they all remain in the economy. That a company fails and goes bankrupt is not a bad thing. It's just that company. Not the industry as a whole. If there are no additional mechanisms.

    Somehow Americans seem to have forgotten that the kind of "capitalism" which gets defended is about this exactly - a company goes bankrupt, too bad. There are other companies which will hire its workers and buy its assets. Possibly new companies created by its former employees. Its shareholders have gambled and lost, well, their problem. That's what an unregulated market is, by the way, and not bailouts to big fish and horse dicks for small fish.

    If something works differently - workers don't find a new place to work in, factories go to scrap metal, engineers go flip burgers, patents are collected by trolls, and new companies are not being created, - then something has been broken by an existing policy.

    Patents are the worst of it, but also non-compete clauses, legal impediments for creating new businesses, legal expenses making it harder, - these things have to be removed.

    I mean, people on Lemmy love to dream of something like what you list, those things are good, but maybe fixing some basic things about what you already have is no less useful. Especially since these fixes do not cost any money to maintain, while, well, pensions and healthcare do.

  • If our CEOs and business leaders are supposedly the world's best, why didn't they spent their capital shutting China down instead of their lavish lifestyles and payouts for their wealthy stockholders? I guess they aren't as good at running businesses as they claim to be.

    When the only goal by law is maximize profits, the motivation tends to favor minimizing cost. Change the rules, and enforce a new set of values. Only then will the situation improve.

  • Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today's dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don't know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.

    Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren't treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.

    Japan back then had (and still has) an interesting socioeconomic system, a bit similar to samurai clans went cartels, where workers are supposed to work all their life in one place (or close to that), don't squeal about worker rights and such, but be covered by lots of company-provided social nets and guarantees.

  • Japan used state capitalism to promote it’s auto industry and other key sectors to sustain strong growth. America’s weakened billionaire owned government system is just being strip mined into the ground. We won’t be able to compete in an economy that’s only product is wealth extraction because of our massive corruption.

    Back then American industries were just complacent due to insufficient competition, and Japan's industrial development was a bit of a miracle (that "living in year 2000 since 1980s" joke).

  • Good. Fuckem. They make shitty, oversized trucks that are a danger to pedestrians and people who drive reasonably sized cars anyway.

    My boss in the UK got one. In bright red. It looks like he's driving a fucking fire engine.

  • Oh no! The type of capitalism where we have to compete!

    Make it go away, Daddy Trump!

  • 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.

    That might be true, but also a certain revolutionary purging of world politics would do a lot to return to something close to that. The golden age happened after the world war and decolonization, when western countries were full of veterans, and laws governing their lives were much simpler.

    Internet-assisted direct democracy, open borders, open trade, radical changes in patent laws, simpler laws generally - all this can exist.

    We simply have too much legacy everywhere strangling development.

    The bad guys are trying to make it appear that the only legacy that can be stripped is that of French revolution ideals, human rights and civilization. That actually we don't have to strip, that is all good. Just them.

    It's normal. Sometimes humans need surgeries, and sometimes a part of an old building has to be dismantled - maybe there's a pipe in the wall that leaks, or maybe you need to retrieve a human skeleton found using some new technology, whatever. And you throw out garbage regularly.

    So a reform for direct democracy (with ranked choice between variants having, say, 1000+ initial supporters in some incubator to get to the vote itself, because we have computers, storage and connectivity to make everything desirable for such) IMHO would go a long way to fixing half the problems in the world.

  • 71 Stimmen
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    adespoton@lemmy.caA
    Most major content producers have agreements with YouTube such that as their content is discovered, monetization all goes to the rights holders. In general, this seems like a pretty good idea, and better than copyright maximalism. However, I’ve had original works of my own “monetized by rights holder” because they used my work (with permission) in one of their products, and so now have co-opted all expressions of my work on YouTube. So the system isn’t perfect.
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    That takes zero ingenuity.
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  • The AI girlfriend guy - The Paranoia Of The AI Era

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  • Catbox.moe got screwed 😿

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    archrecord@lemm.eeA
    I'll gladly give you a reason. I'm actually happy to articulate my stance on this, considering how much I tend to care about digital rights. Services that host files should not be held responsible for what users upload, unless: The service explicitly caters to illegal content by definition or practice (i.e. the if the website is literally titled uploadyourcsamhere[.]com then it's safe to assume they deliberately want to host illegal content) The service has a very easy mechanism to remove illegal content, either when asked, or through simple monitoring systems, but chooses not to do so (catbox does this, and quite quickly too) Because holding services responsible creates a whole host of negative effects. Here's some examples: Someone starts a CDN and some users upload CSAM. The creator of the CDN goes to jail now. Nobody ever wants to create a CDN because of the legal risk, and thus the only providers of CDNs become shady, expensive, anonymously-run services with no compliance mechanisms. You run a site that hosts images, and someone decides they want to harm you. They upload CSAM, then report the site to law enforcement. You go to jail. Anybody in the future who wants to run an image sharing site must now self-censor to try and not upset any human being that could be willing to harm them via their site. A social media site is hosting the posts and content of users. In order to be compliant and not go to jail, they must engage in extremely strict filtering, otherwise even one mistake could land them in jail. All users of the site are prohibited from posting any NSFW or even suggestive content, (including newsworthy media, such as an image of bodies in a warzone) and any violation leads to an instant ban, because any of those things could lead to a chance of actually illegal content being attached. This isn't just my opinion either. Digital rights organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have talked at length about similar policies before. To quote them: "When social media platforms adopt heavy-handed moderation policies, the unintended consequences can be hard to predict. For example, Twitter’s policies on sexual material have resulted in posts on sexual health and condoms being taken down. YouTube’s bans on violent content have resulted in journalism on the Syrian war being pulled from the site. It can be tempting to attempt to “fix” certain attitudes and behaviors online by placing increased restrictions on users’ speech, but in practice, web platforms have had more success at silencing innocent people than at making online communities healthier." Now, to address the rest of your comment, since I don't just want to focus on the beginning: I think you have to actively moderate what is uploaded Catbox does, and as previously mentioned, often at a much higher rate than other services, and at a comparable rate to many services that have millions, if not billions of dollars in annual profits that could otherwise be spent on further moderation. there has to be swifter and stricter punishment for those that do upload things that are against TOS and/or illegal. The problem isn't necessarily the speed at which people can be reported and punished, but rather that the internet is fundamentally harder to track people on than real life. It's easy for cops to sit around at a spot they know someone will be physically distributing illegal content at in real life, but digitally, even if you can see the feed of all the information passing through the service, a VPN or Tor connection will anonymize your IP address in a manner that most police departments won't be able to track, and most three-letter agencies will simply have a relatively low success rate with. There's no good solution to this problem of identifying perpetrators, which is why platforms often focus on moderation over legal enforcement actions against users so frequently. It accomplishes the goal of preventing and removing the content without having to, for example, require every single user of the internet to scan an ID (and also magically prevent people from just stealing other people's access tokens and impersonating their ID) I do agree, however, that we should probably provide larger amounts of funding, training, and resources, to divisions who's sole goal is to go after online distribution of various illegal content, primarily that which harms children, because it's certainly still an issue of there being too many reports to go through, even if many of them will still lead to dead ends. I hope that explains why making file hosting services liable for user uploaded content probably isn't the best strategy. I hate to see people with good intentions support ideas that sound good in practice, but in the end just cause more untold harms, and I hope you can understand why I believe this to be the case.
  • Mazda DMCA takedown of Open Source Home Assistant App

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    S
    Soon this all will be much easier. From 12 of September we’re going into a new world of EU Data Act that forces all companies to allow third parties to communicate with iot devices. Which a car is. So soon Mazda will need to provide those APIs in an official way.
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    A private company is selling cheap tablets to inmates to let them communicate with their family. They have to use "digital stamps" to send messages, 35 cents a piece and come in packs of 5, 10 or 20. Each stamp covers up to 20,000 characters or one single image. They also sell songs, at $1.99 a piece, and some people have spent thousands over the years. That's also now just going away. Then you get to the part about the new company. Who already has a system in Tennessee where inmates have to pay 3-5 cents per minute of tablet usage. Be that watching a movie they've bought or just typing a message.
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    When a Lemmy instance owner gets a legal request from a foreign countries government to take down content, after they’re done shitting themselves they’ll take the content down or they’ll have to implement a country wide block on that country, along with not allowing any citizens of that country to use their instance no matter where they are located. Block me, I don’t care. You’re just proving that you can’t handle the truth and being challenged with it.