mapgrep

You've shown your words to be meaningless. You said the U.S. car brands were "completely irrelevant" outside the U.S., here you admit that's wrong. You move the goalpost and change your assertion to something entirely different. But there is no reason to think this statement has any factual basis either. You're just talking out of your &ss.

The Western carmakers have been responding rationally to market signals in moving away from EVs, meanwhile Chinese carmakers are responding rationally to government mandates and subsidies.

It's actually the Western approach that is logically more sustainable, modulo global warming impacts. So it's odd to say that selling what people actually want to buy right now is "dooming them to irrelevance." The Guardian and the people it quotes are actualy saying "car buyers are wrong" but by way of blaming the companies responding to their signals. In the absence of, say, a carbon tax, what they are doing is highly relevant.

Fracking led the U.S. to be a net oil exporter, meanwhile EVs have infrastructure costs Western governemnts are not prepared to subsidize any further. Those charging stations can easily cost $50k to install. The batteries are not cheap or easy to make, and the low price of Chinese vehicles is down to heavy subsidies, and much of Western demand was also propped up by subsidies that have been going away. Gas stations are built out, ICs are well understood. Yes the Iran situation has pushed up prices but that doesn't mean they'll stay high long term.

There is very little evidence the market actually wants EVs. They are nice to drive, probably net better for the environment and our health, long term will likely "win," but none of that makes them "relevant" today or ICs "irrelevant."

That’s interesting about Austria, thanks for that! I may have underestimated them. (I did check their growth rate and for whatever reason not as strong as S Korea…)

Post made some good points but in the end it's pretty nihilistic to say that elite spaces shouldn't exist merely because they tend to cultivate elites and other elite spaces. Also very reductive to say that Harvard exists just to perpetuate elitism (no, it has a genuine educational and research mission, whatever its various flaws, that's patently clear).

The world is flawed and imperfect and perfect things don't really emerge from it. Harvard is glorious. Our best and oldest (in the US) university is bad because it's not sufficiently egalitarian, and let's destroy it? It's an engine for our society and other universities have followed in its footsteps. Stanford, Caltech, Rice, Berkeley, the Claremont schools, etc etc - none of these were in the original ivy league, all are imperfect to some extent in their admissions and embrace and fulfillment of egalitarian ideals. They are also glorious though. They make our country a dynamic, innovative, intellectually vibrant place and attract students from around the world. They absolutely are key to our (staggering) economic and cultural success (in the US).

Elite clubbiness is an unfortunate side effect of success, but it doesn't mean we should then intentionally obliterate the engine of that success out of distaste for the cose of it.

The best insight in the article is actually this:

> cheaper real estate presents an opportunity for employers with vision

On top of any deterioration in office rents, companies need way less space than they used to since people are working from home many days. This opens up many possibilities that will IMO keep offices in prime markets filled:

-companies take more space per person in office for same cost, providing desks

-companies that couldn’t afford prime markets move in and use them as mainly collaboration spaces (“let’s all work out of Manhattan next week while we finish this project”)

-companies downsize in prime markets but reorient toward specific events - brainstorming, project closings, strategy retreats, get to know each other, cross department workshopping etc etc

No comparison between the excellent economic growth of South Korea and that of Greece, Hungary, Austria, or Italy going back to either cold war or post cold war days, despite this hypothesis of "empire gradient". If you google "World Bank GDP growth <countryname>" you can find charts back to 1961.

South Korea exports consumer goods to the large US market, this has been a massive fuel for their growth. They followed in Japan's footsteps (and China, for a time at least, followed in theirs). I can't think of a single manufactured product out of Greece, Hungary, Austria and few from Italy to the US.

Being on an "empire gradient" is just an arbitrary way to look at a country.

You know who else is on an empire gradient? North Korea. Afghanistan. Belarus. You're not even specifying which side of the empire gradient. Maybe being on the authoritarian, communist side did not work out so well for many countries?

I think what matters for South Korea is moving steadily toward more democratic governance, embracing capitalism, and proximity and historic ties with Japan (not always pleasant, obviously, but ties nonetheless) at a time when Japan was developing robust trade with the US and when Japan's own consumer sector was booming, providing another market for Korean firms.

Korea has absolutely followed the pattern of moving steadily up the value chain, for example in consumer electronics, in autos.

…he says, as his company eagerly does business with Xi in China.

No organization I am part of will ever do business with you if I can stop it.

You fought for Turing but I suppose the Uyghur concentration camps mean nothing to you. They are not British so how could their lives be worth fighting for when there is money to be made (for yourself) without regard to morality or any sense of decency.

But good job doing Cloudflare PR.

You’ve correctly observed that success can bring unpleasant side effects. I think it’s too late to save Linux from this. It is used by all manner of parasites. The tracking bugs that slow down the web and invade our privacy? They are quite often backed by Linux. The Android OS that allows Google to follow users’ every last movement, web search, and email? Linux. Database servers at Facebook, Google, and any number of data brokers? Linux.

I am not saying this makes Linux bad. What I am saying is, making it easier to charge for software is not going to “spoil” Linux with commercial parasites. If anything, paid software could help undermine the surveillance economy by providing a more direct way to support the creation of good software that doesn’t spy on you, like the default Google Android apps or the Google web apps many people use on Linux desktops. All that stuff is commercial too, you just don’t pay for it in money, and maybe the source code is open, but you darn sure pay with your personal data.