aesch

Joined 4 years ago

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Dec 17

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Are you in the US? Who are you going with? I have solar without batteries and the system makes so much more sense with batteries.

Comment · 5 days ago

Panasonic (as well as CATL and LG) manufactures the physical lithium-ion battery cells while Tesla assembles them into a complete battery pack. When we talk about car batteries I think people are mostly referring to the battery pack which contains a lot of IP separate from the battery cell. So the supply chain is a bit more complicated its most accurate to say that while Tesla performs some of the manufacturing itself in the US it is not fully vertically integrated.

Comment · 6 months ago

The main point is that BYD is an existential threat to Germany and Japan. Per Wikipedia (List of countries by exports + List of countries by vehicle exports, latest available data):

- US: ~$144B vehicle exports / ~$3.23T total exports → ~4.5% - Germany: ~$280B / ~$1.99T → ~14% - Japan: ~$151B / ~$922B → ~16%

Even if you treat US states as separate 'countries' and balloon the US export denominator further, the ratio doesn't move into the same league. Autos are roughly 3x more important to Germany and ~3.5x more important to Japan as a share of foreign-earned revenue than they are to the US.

BYD taking the US auto export share is an inconvenience for a few states. BYD taking Germany's or Japan's is regime-altering for the whole national economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports

Comment · 6 months ago

It seems like BYD is a much bigger threat to Europe (specifically Germany) and Japan. The auto industry is big in the US but an insignificant amount of total exports. Germany and Japan could both lose their cash cows if the Chinese auto industry dominates international sales.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle_e...

Comment · 6 months ago

I don't know if America has done anything quite like this. The example I'm looking for is where a company starts in the US but leaves and incorporates outside the US and then the US attempts to block acquisition by a foreign company. Also, the enforcement mechanism while vague seems un-American. America might tax the company upon exit but it wouldn't hold the founders hostage in America. If you have examples I'd be curious.

Comment · 9 months ago

It's not meant as a slight against Iranian engineers, I believe Iranian engineers can be as talented as any engineers in the world. I just imagine they may be resource constrained. So the question is more about geo-politics, who stands to gain by transferring technology to the Iranian government that allows them to surveil the Iranian population and maintain absolute control?

Comment · 9 months ago

Props to the teacher for putting in the work to thoughtfully grade an AI transcript! As I typed that I wondered if a lazy teacher might then use AI to grade the students AI transcript?

Comment · 9 months ago

One could ask, who is giving Iran and North Korea this technology? Most of it they aren't developing themselves.

Comment · 9 months ago

Yeah, I agree there is some manipulation of the narrative in the use of pain tolerance to describe China's citizenry. It is in the CCP's interest to convince their population that pain tolerance is a virtue, rather than allow an alternative narrative that China's citizens must suffer the decisions of the autocrats because they have no ability to influence change.

Comment · 1 year ago

I'd be interested to hear about your experience working with suppliers. How did you go about finding suppliers and haggling with them?

Comment · 1 year ago

While I don't think this will ship in time. There is a global online hackathon using these robot arms on Hugging Face June 2025, 14-15. https://huggingface.co/LeRobot-worldwide-hackathon

Comment · 1 year ago

It is unfortunate and confusing that copyright and patents are described as intellectual "property" because intellectual property is fundamentally different than other property rights. Property laws as originally formulated applied to rivalrous goods where consumption by one consumer prevents consumption by others. Copyright and patents apply to non-rivalrous goods.

Rivalrous goods are relatively easier to protect and monetize without the assistance of the state. Non-rivalrous goods are pretty much impossible to protect/monetize without the assistance of a state.

Comment · 1 year ago

Are we entirely sure that energy and information aren't the same thing, or if they aren't the same thing they are both highly overlapping echoes of some more fundamental concept? Or maybe they are two sides of the same coin?

Comment · 1 year ago

Sounds like an extension of the second law of thermodynamics.

Comment · 1 year ago

I read a fascinating article on this dam removal last week! https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-other-side-of-the-wor...

The article tells both sides of the story of the dam removal in as fair a way as I think is possible. Many of the locals were against it and there was a strong advocacy group that fought for it, including a tribal constituency.

I came away from the article feeling I understood both sides better but with less certainty about what was the right choice.