The US, for all its "free market" pretensions, doesn't really do capitalism very well.
What people are now seeing in China, with the rise of more than a half-dozen EV companies in competition with each other, would be impossible in the US. We've got nascent protectionism, total non-enforcement of anti-trust laws (and a very slow and very cowed judiciary,) a complex+selective regulatory environment, and industrial policies that shift with the weather. American manufacturing firms like Tesla and US Steel no longer know how to compete on the merits. And big tech, like big pharma, is a game where small firms are inevitably bought before they can possibly threaten the entrenched major players.
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“China had a plan when they let Tesla have a fully owned factory. They wanted the technology and the knowledge and experience. With that came a risk China would take that technology and build better stuff,” said shareholder Ross Gerber, CEO of Gerber Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management. “That’s exactly what they’re doing. Now they’ve got really competitive vehicles, really competitive technology and the vehicles are cheaper.”
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This is what Beijing government did on high speed railway system. Global railway manufactures were asked to hand over their technology, then they can begin to build, ship, and run their rolling stocks on Chinese railway. Beijing did this in early 2000s, and now they dominated the high speed railway standards in many countries.
Apple can release a half-baked version of this before it’s ready, but then pundits will say “oh. Steve Jobs would have never allowed such unpolished garbage to ship.”
Sometimes it’s better to wait 6 months for something to be mature and stable. Apple has a long history of being conservative in this regard, and they often aren’t the first entrant into a market, but they still dominate because of very good integration with their ecosystem and a high quality bar. Apple Intelligence will probably be the same (bookmark this post for 3 years from now, when Gemini is being split into three businesses and rebranded / killed).
This is false. There is absolutely content on TikTok critical of the US, Israel, western businesses, etc that is boosted by TikTok’s algorithm and effectively censored or hidden on many American-owned social networks,
How do the critics divine the intention here? At a certain point, we're going to get to anything short of a riot being labelled virtue signaling. I'd like to avoid riots altogether.
NY is probably the only city where this could work because it’s the only proper American city that has a real metro system. Every other city will require major upgrades to have modern public transportation, and the density isn’t there in most American cities that were designed around the car.
I live in Boston and I could see it working here, now that the T is on a path to reliability.
While it would be great if money wasn’t a concern, you don’t need to plaster the city in a grid of metro lines. Careful usage of bus only lanes has really made a difference in some areas of Boston that I frequent.
Edit: The link above is only for heavy rail - Boston’s numbers are better if you also include light rail, which is a significant part of the system:
NYC Subway, Metro North, and LIRR have much broader and more frequent coverage to a lot more places outside the urban core than the bay area's network does. Iirc muni metro has passable coverage inside San Francisco, and Bart and Caltrain service a few linear corridors outside San Francisco pretty well, but a whole lot of the bay area is very far from transit. This means that bay area commuters could not as easily switch away from cars. Though SF is still probably the second best candidate for congestion pricing after NYC.
