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> US stock market index funds will crash when the US stock market crashes. That will require very large sums of capital to decide to move away from US capital markets. To give an idea of how much money would need to move - VTSAX alone is about $2.1 trillion, with hundreds of billions of dollars of shares of each Mag7 stock.

I'd like to make a technical note about markets because I see this mistake repeated in the comments. The money doesn't have to move out of the US markets to somewhere else for the stock market to crash. It only requires a destruction of confidence. For a hypothetical example, suppose the S&P 500 closes at 7000 on a Friday, and everyone loses confidence in the S&P 500 over the weekend (for whatever reason). The market can open on Monday 3500 with not a share traded before the open (no money was moved out of the market), and investor portfolio values are now cut in half. Since confidence is broken, nobody buys the dip, and the market closes Monday down to 3000.

It's an extreme example, but it's worth understanding the fundamental underpinnings. The markets are a confidence game. Sometimes we forget because we have good reason to be confident (e.g. in the S&P 500) and so it fades into the background that something like this could even happen, but it's not hard find these sorts of events in history.


You are correct, but only insofar as destroying paper value. If investors have a firesale because the market would prefer to realize whatever value might be rescued, even at a loss, but the proceeds of the sale stay inside the US, then that capital is more likely to be reinvested in the US once investor confidence returns. This is the underlying reason why most long-investors should continue to hold their positions despite short-term losses. The fact that NVDA has a $4.6T market cap, as a product of about 24 billion shares multiplied by about a $190/share price, does not mean that the market believes that all 24 billion shares could be sold for that $190/share price. That is a convenient fiction that falls apart when investor confidence bursts, but that does not in and of itself truly represent value destruction (Nvidia employees will still wake up the next day and go to work), at least not until second-order-effects kick in (e.g. Nvidia employees leave because their RSU packages are no longer competitive compensation). People who stay long in the stock market can wait for investor confidence to return, in which cash is reinjected into the stock market, and the losses in diversified portfolios are not realized. If the S&P 500 investor takes a 50% hit in a crash, decides to hold, then the S&P 500 rises by 140% in the next two years, then the investor who held will still realize a nice return.

The way in which that narrative does not happen is if the capital leaves entirely to be locked up in other investments; in the context of index funds which would anyway rebalance to rise with those other investments, if the capital leaves for other countries, to investments that are not covered by the index funds.


Correct. The price of the market is the price people are willing to pay. It is not directly related to the move of capital. That said prices are also a function of supply and demand, if there is no demand (e.g.) for US stocks then it is more likely price will go down. If everyone wants to sell US and buy Europe, e.g. because they think the European competitors to Apple, Google, Amazon, nVidia and such will outperform, then presumably the prices at which those companies trade will trend down.

Obviously data center bidders would prefer their activity to be kept in the dark, but does that make for good outcomes for anyone else except the bidders. First, the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center or not, often they don't. Then if they do, they'd rather have a bidding war than some NDA backroom deal with a single entity. All this does is serve Big Tech and Big Capital, and they don't need to run on easy mode, sponging off the small guy at this stage.

> the community would like to weigh in on whether they want a data center

This is the enabler of pure NIMBYism and we have to stop thinking this way. If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules. Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.


I thought I made it clear, I'm not against data center build outs per se, a community might decide it's worth it to build one. If a community decides to go ahead with it, make it clear and open for the public to bid on it so the residents get the best deal available (e.g. reduced power bills, reduced property taxes, water usage limits, noise/light polution limits, whathaveyou...). These massive data centers are a new kind of business that most communities don't have much experience with, and I doubt they've had time to codify the rules. It sounds like the states are starting to add some more rules about transparency, which seems like a step in the right direction for making better deals for all involved.

The subtitle of the article tells us this is happening.

> Wisconsin has now joined several states with legislative proposals to make the process more transparent.

But it is a reactive measure. It has taken years for the impacts of these data centers to trickle down enough for citizens to understand what they are losing in the deal. Partially because so many of the deals were done under cover of NDAs. If anything, this gives NIMBYs more assurance that they are right to be skeptical of any development. The way these companies act will only increase NIMBYism.

> Making it all discretionary based on vibes is why Americans can't build anything.

Trusting large corporations to provide a full and accurate analysis of downside risks is also damaging.


> If a place wants this kind of land use and not that kind, then they need to write that down in a statute so everyone knows the rules.

Ironically this is a recipe for how you get nothing built. Zoning laws are much more potent than people showing up at city council meetings.


I feel like the term "community" is leading intuitions astray here. The actual decision at question here is whether the local government provides the necessary approvals for a company to build what they want on their private property.

It's good and proper for the government to consider the impacts on a local community before approving a big construction project. That process will need to involve some amount of open community consultation, and reasonable minds can differ on when and how that needs to start. The article describes a concrete proposal at the end, where NDAs would be allowed for the due diligence phase but not once the formal approval process begins; that seems fine.

It's not good and improper for the government to selectively withhold approval for politically disfavored industries, or to host a "bidding war" where anyone seeking approvals must out-bribe their competitors.


Its the same argument for high-density hog farming. If the use of private property may impinge on the neighbors, either through invasive noise, or costs to public utility infrastructure (power, water) then the community ought to have some insight and input, same as they have input into whether a high density hog farm can open right on the border of the community.

Yes some people see the datacenters as part of an ethical issue. I agree its not proper for permits to be withheld on purely ethical grounds, laws should be passed instead. But there are a lot of side-effects to having a datacenter near your property that are entirely concrete issues.


Why shouldn't permits be withheld on ethical grounds? Isn't that just giving permission for companies to be unethical and get away with it?

If a government wants to penalize companies for unethical behavior, they should pass a neutral and generally applicable law that provides for such penalties. Withholding permission to do random things based on ad hoc judgments of the company involved is a recipe for corruption.

Clearly there needs to be room for both things to occur. You should absolutely begin with passing laws, but to think that the laws on the books can cover every situation is naive. When companies skirt the law and cause harm, there needs to be a remedy.

I don't agree. The benefits of a business environment governed by due process and the rule of law far outweigh the benefits of individual government actors having arbitrary discretion to fill the gaps. As we've seen clearly on the federal level this past year, once you create that discretion, the common way for corporate executives to "prove" that they're nice and generous and deserve favorable treatment is not good behavior but open bribery of public officials.

Bribery is illegal. What hope do you have for due process and the rule of law when it is being carried out as it is now? You can't use an extraordinary case to justify your belief about the ordinary case.

Also, we don't live in a world adjudicated by machines, there will always be discretion and the potential for special favors. No matter how much you tie the hands of regulators there will be some actor who will have the power to extort. Not to mention that regulation is not opposed to due process and the rule of law, but is the most important component of both.

Imagining a world without discretion is imagining a world where corporations can do as much irreparable harm as they want as long as there isn't a law against it.


I agree with you. this should be handled by the legislative process. but we should also agree that secret deals announced as a fiat acompli are pretty fertile ground for corruption also

Right, and as I said I agree with that. But is there any reason to worry that communities aren't getting the input they're entitled to? The article mentions one case in the Madison suburbs, where "officials worked behind the scenes for months" and yet the residents were able to get the project cancelled when the NDA broke and they decided they didn't want it.

You make this sound like a conspiracy. This is normal practice in economic development, check off boxes until announcing to the public. The public rarely has much power in voicing their opinion but data centers are the current evil entity.

> data centers are the current evil entity.

There's a reason for that: they compete for resources but contribute relatively little back to the local economy. In that sense they're quite different from previous large corporate investments in a local area.


Again, I think it’s a muddy example. I have yet to see compelling data that on average data center are meaningfully raising rates and most of the rate increases are more due to the aging infrastructure in America that was neglected for too long.

If anything these should be examples on the failure of how these resources are being sold and good opportunity to build a better system.


In another life, I would do things like measure the cost in developer time of bugs making it into developer repos vs. the cost in time of running tests in CI to catch such bugs, so evidence based decision making. It was mostly ignored, and at first I was surprised. A multi million dollar organization of people making negative EV plays, which I chalked up to the political pressures being more important than the wastage. More on that later.

As far as estimates go, I've also struggled with the industries cult(ural) rituals. I tried to put forward a Gaussian based approach that took into account not only the estimate of time, but the expected uncertainty, which is still probably off the mark, but at least attempts to measure some of the variance. But again, the politics and the rigidity of the clergy that has built around software development blocked it.

On the bright side, all this has helped me in my own development and when I think about software development and estimating projects. I know that outcomes become more chaotic as the number of pieces and steps compound in a project (i.e. the projects normal curve widens). You may not even get the project at all as defined at the outset, so my normals approach is still not quite the right tool.

I think this kind of thinking can be helpful when working solo or in a small group who are exposed to market forces. But for solo and small groups, the challenge isn't so much about the estimates, it's about how you're going to fight a battalion of mercenaries hired by big VC money and Big Tech. They can often afford to be inefficient, dump in the market, because their strategy is built around market control. These aren't practices small players can afford, so you need to get creative, and try to avoid these market participant kill boxes. And this is why, coming back to my earlier point, that often times, inefficient practices and politics plays a big role. Their trying to marshal a large number of troops into position and can afford to lose a few battles in order to win the war. The big money plays by a different set of rules, so don't worry if their doing it wrong. Just recognize your in the army soldier!


It's sad how software organizations refuse to learn from history. The US Navy was using PERT to manage huge, risky projects back in the 1950s with pretty good results. It can give you a Gaussian distribution of project completion dates based on best / middle / worst case estimates for individual tasks with dependencies.

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


We had an Asian store across from the middle school where I hung out and we played Street Fighter for hours after school. The second generation Hmong that came out of the Vietnam war would would hang out and play. We all loved it! I'd often play Ken and they'd play Ryu, haha, we love our avatars. Sometimes I gave them a run for their money, sometimes they taught me new techniques, like a new sequence of moves.

Some of the other kids on my street went to private schools and I think they missed out on some of the lessons/bonding I got from interacting with a variety of people in public school. It's good to get out into social setting and mix it up with folks.


> Some of the other kids on my street went to private schools and I think they missed out on some of the lessons/bonding I got from interacting with a variety of people in public school. It's good to get out into social setting and mix it up with folks.

I went to private school, and would "miss the bus" after school on purpose so I would have to take the city bus home. There was an arcade in downtown Minneapolis a few blocks from the school where I'd hang out and play Mortal Kombat for an hour or two before heading home. Maybe stop by Shinders on the way to the bus stop to grab the latest copy of Wired or whatnot.

Definitely let me get out of the private school bubble a bit, and gave me some lifelong problem solving skills - both socially and practically speaking.


Wired was such a great magazine to read as a teen in the 90s. I remember just itching for the next issue.


Yet there was always that one kid that knew how to soft-lock Street Fighter II arcade cabinets with Guile. Samurai Shodown, The King of Fighters, and Mortal Kombat were also fun. =3


I had a pre-teen death rivalry with another kid over Samurai Showdown. I was the blue tuberculosis guy and he was the long haired samurai, and we'd meet Tuesday-Friday afternoons to burn quarters killing each other. At one point the owners used toy finger-handcuffs to tie us to the machine until one of us won. There was pizza!

I've always wondered what happened to him.


>I've always wondered what happened to him.

Probably, just ran out of Quarters for awhile... or discovered Final Fantasy VII on PlayStation. =3


That electric train is a nice image. India has plenty of opportunity to take advantage of cheap solar power and push cargo around the state with it. They are adding more electric vehicles by the day, which will help places like Delhi become more breathable, though the last time I was there, farmers were still burning the fields, causing a lot of air pollution in Delhi during the burns. The manufacturing base is improving, so you can buy relatively cheap vehicles.

Your money goes further in India. Their tax collection is pretty weak, so they print money to fund government spending which usually means higher inflation than we're used to in the US, but they're starting to get a better return on their infra spending as the country is lifted up via the use of the most recent tech (trains, smartphones, fiber, solar, battery, etc...).

It's been fun watching the country and region develop over the years. They still have a ways to go, and in some ways I think I'll miss the old chaotic India. You don't find cows wearing decorative garlands in downtown Chicago or New York. I bet whatever India transforms into, it'll hold some of it's unique charm. That's my hope anyway.


>>Google could have been an advertising company with a search engine. I'm glad they aren't.

>They kind of are though?

Splitting[1] is a psychological phenomena that you'll find often once you learn to recognize it. Google can both be doing great research, and run a significant influence operation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)


This antinomical understanding (contradictory opposites that are both true) has its origins in Kant's work[0], which was of course picked up by Freud, consciously or not.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant%27s_antinomies


I’m pretty sure the idea that things can be good in some ways and bad in other ways came way before Kant.


Its not "good in some ways and bad in others," its the idea that every action is fully mechanical and that every action is fully freely determined can both be argued to be true within the laws of cognition, even if they are completely opposed to one another.


This may be of interest to you, a few years before Kant with “Syādvāda” going beyond the binary implied by contradiction alone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada


Google is not a person


Splitting is referring to people's dichotomous impressions of Google.

Google is not being described as a person.

Google is not a person.

Google just is.

Google!


Feels like everything falls under this psychological phenomena nowadays


I assume that’s because most of the world we regularly interact with is run and/or shaped by humans


The scaling up of battery manufacturing for EVs and now solar storage has lead to prices I would have never imagined I'd see in my lifetime. It's one of the success stories that, having lived through it, has been a real joy.

I know that folks might have been able to point to a graph years ago and said we'd be here eventually, but I had my doubts given the scale required and hacking through all the lobbying efforts we saw against solar/battery. Alas, we made it here!


Alas is right, China is poised to dominate battery, solar, and EV technology and to translate it to military technology as well. Meanwhile the Republicans are blowing up US alliances and sabotaging the battery/EV industrial development policy that was actually making progress in giving the US hope in catching up.


It’s the innovators dilemma. We have so much not just technical but cultural and political sunk cost in fossil fuels and traditional industrial era infrastructure. The Chinese are just developing now and don’t have so much of that sunk cost. So they can think like it’s the future. We are stuck in the past.

Eventually there may come a day when it’s China that is stuck in the past, looking back to the early 21st century like we look back to the middle twentieth, and someone else will be ascendant.

I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century. It was the moment we chose to exit our position of world leadership both culturally and technologically.


May be it is not of an innovators dilemma?

Chinese CCP are willing to scarifies whatever traditional industrial era infrastructure in order for things to move forward and gain a global advantage. Especially when they are not the one paying for the scarifies.


Certainly sounds like a sunk cost dilemma.

Just because a country has previously invested in fossil fuels, it doesn't follow that they can't get the benefit of solar with future investment. However, there's a lot of powerful money/people/corporations that depend on fossil fuels for making billions - that's the real problem as that skews the market and politics of energy production/distribution.


That political sunk cost is why the innovators dilemma happens. It happens in companies too where managers, executives, and top employees will have their careers built around a certain way of doing things. Change threatens that so they will resist change and double down.

Basically success creates the preconditions for this failure mode in the future.

It might be thought of as a form of overfitting. Success results in overfitting to a local maximum.


"Make America Little Again" --Donald J. Trump


>I really felt like Trump’s 2024 election was the moment it became the Chinese century.

You must have been asleep at the wheel or living under a rock to have mised China's rise over the last decades. They didn't wait for Trump to get elected in 2024 and then flipped a switch from third world country to global superpower.

"Damn, this hot cup of coffee burned my tongue. Why would Trump do this?"

-HN comments


No I saw it. I just felt like that was the moment it tipped.


This is exactly right, IMHO. We were in a course to counter China's momentum, we had handled COVID so much better, our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it and was poised to take tiff.

And then it was all killed. And we are killing off our other competitive edges over China, the way we attract all the world's best science and tech talent to build here in the US rather than in their own countries. We have sat back scientific research 2-5 years by drastically cutting grants in nonsensical ways and stopping and decimating a class of grad students.

We were the most admired country in the world, and in a short amount of time we have destroyed decades of hard work building a good reputation.

We won't get that back in a year or two, it's going to be decades of work.


>our industry had a huuuuuuge investment in it

Which industry? How 'huuuuuge' was the investment?

>We were the most admired country in the world

According to who?


This was reported all over, but certain circles considered it politically incorrect to acknowledge that anything good happened in the years 2020-2024, so perhaps you can be excused for missing it. Some random web hits. Check out the graphs herein the massive investment in factories:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/the-ira-...

https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/inflation-reduction-a...

Back then when I would inform the politically cloistered about this massive boom in factory construction and the hope for US manufacturing in strategically important energy tech, the most pointed critique was "yeah there's lots of spending but that doesn't mean that the factories are going to make anything." Turns out the skeptics were right. It was a huge mistake that all this stuff went into areas where it is politically incorrect to acknowledge that clean energy is changing the world. Management was not able to trumpet the new investment and the workers dont want to acknowledge what's driving the new higher wages.

As for the US being the most admired country, I work in science and a bit in entrepreneurship. The US was so far and away the leader in these that there's no comparison at all to any other country. Any visitor is completely blown away when they see what's going on, even when they heard ahead of time how much better science and startups are in the US. It's a bit shocking that you think the US was not one of the most admired countries out there, unless you're posting from China or Russia.


It was that Trump and the MAGA crowd conceded to the Chinese by destroying US goodwill and credibility built up over decades. The US will probably never recover those advantages, just as China is ratcheting up its program of dominance. Trump et al have destroyed many things that made the US great.

It's bewildering why anyone would do such a thing but here we are.


I don't think it's unfixable but the behavior is still kind of odd.


good. maybe we can copy some shit for cheap and leap frog a few generations instead of leading the world!


Unlikely, since our labor costs are still considerably higher than elsewhere. For a very long time our economy has rested on developing high margin products and letting others do the low-marginal-overhead of making it. We assumed that they were not going to catch up to us as innovators.

That was a dangerous mistake, and we may be left with nothing.


Chinas labor costs are no longer cheap either. They just have higher tech factories now.


Same here in Germany/Europe. Our conservatives actually destroyed the solar industry for the third time. Our conservative party has actually destroyed significantly more jobs in solar industries over the last 20 years than it keeps alive with subsidies of 70k€ - 100k€ per person working in that industry (direct and indirect subsidies make the 70 - 100k€ range).

But hey, our populist right tell us, that the subsidies for "green technology" are bad and that we need to get rid of them, because they are making energy so expensive in Germany (cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago).

But hey - people vote for those parties. Because they know their economics, not like the leftists, who don't.

Germany (or Europe in general) is fucked. In a few years, we will reap what we now sow. And not because of our social systems or immigration, but because our oh so great political leaders are not willing to invest in the future.


> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago

This is not the argument you want to make. Energy prices are a significant component of the basket used to measure inflation. Like yeah, you expect energy prices to sink if you discount for the rise of energy prices. Germany is suffering from high energy prices its the key factor why the country has been stagnating economically for the past 6 years.


Their energy prices are an outcome of incompetence, having tied their energy prices to Russia and a gas supply from them. In hindsight, economic diplomacy is not the path to keeping an authoritarian in check; a strong military and energy independence is.

German energy prices will decline with battery storage and more renewables pushing out the last of their coal and fossil gas generation. Should’ve kept the old nuclear generators running too, as long as possible. Alas, a lesson they’ve learned.


I think this take is too shallow, and based on hindsight.

Germany has had fossil gas ties to Russia since the Soviet time.

https://dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-ye...

When the iron curtain fell pretty much all of Central Europe liberalized and democratized. The sole exceptions being Belarus and Russia.

Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.

I remember growing up and gaming online thinking of Russians as nothing strange compared to anyone else. This changed with first Georgia and then very much Crimea.


> Thinking they wouldn’t choose the same path is revisionist.

Societies tend to not change how things work no matter who is in charge.


That is a myopic view of history.

Just look around yourself. No society is comparable to what it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, etc, in any country. If you think nothing changed in a society, you're just poorly informed.


‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/02/germany-depend... - June 2nd, 2022

> An arrangement that began as a peacetime opening to a former foe has turned into an instrument of aggression. Germany is now funding Russia’s war. In the first two months after the start of Russia’s assault on Ukraine, Germany is estimated to have paid nearly €8.3bn for Russian energy – money used by Moscow to prop up the rouble and buy the artillery shells firing at Ukrainian positions in Donetsk. In that time, EU countries are estimated to have paid a total of €39bn for Russian energy, more than double the sum they have given to help Ukraine defend itself. The irony is painful. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote recently. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

> When Putin invaded Ukraine in February, Germany faced a particular problem. Its rejection of nuclear power and its transition away from coal meant that Germany had very few alternatives to Russian gas. Berlin has been forced to accept that it was a cataclysmic error to have made itself so dependent on Russian energy – whatever the motives behind it. The foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, says Germany failed to listen to the warnings from countries that had once suffered under Russia’s occupation, such as Poland and the Baltic states. For Norbert Röttgen, a former environment minister and member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU), the German government bowed to industry forces pressing for cheap gas “all too easily”, while “completely ignoring the geopolitical risks”.

> In February this year, German Green economic affairs and climate action minister Robert Habeck said that gas storage facilities owned by Gazprom in Germany had been “systematically emptied” over the winter, to drive up prices and exert political pressure. It was a staggering admission of Russia’s power to disrupt energy supplies.

> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”

We win or we learn.


See also: Gazprom, Gerhard Schröder (”Putin’s man in Germany” according to NYT) and the German nuclear power shutdown.

https://atomicinsights.com/gazprom-profiting-mightily-from-g...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-ger...


>> “I was wrong,” the former German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, says, simply. “We were all wrong.”

So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?

Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.

>We win or we learn.

Jensen Huang said that failure is learning but sometimes failure is just failure and you should know when to cut your losses before the failure goes from learning to bankruptcy. And Germany did far more failure than actually learning.


> So when are they retroactively giving back their salaries and pensions for having fucked up the livelihoods of their taxpayers?

Does anyone, ever, in any role, do this?

Do CEOs return their bonuses and pay and pensions when they close a business, let alone when they cut the workforce, let alone when they miss the growth of a competitor that is currently still not a direct threat and is instead fighting a battle of attrition with friend of the CEO and would only become a threat if they can take that friend's resources without the attrition destroying everything of value?

> Politicians have no incentive to ever make good decisions for the future of their country without any skin in the game from which their personal riches are derived.

The penalty for most errors in politics is the same as the penalty in any other job: you lose the job.

Most errors, because the really bad errors get you killed, either by an angry mob or by an invading army or by special forces (who may be from the latter while pretending to be the former).


A self inflicted wound. Europe keeps entering into spot gas supply contracts and paying through the nose instead of signing longer-term contracts for lower prices. The Russians have always been reliable suppliers even after sanctions took place, and calls from some hotheads to use gas as leverage was never seriously followed through by the real decision makers. And Habeck is an idiot. Lately Germany has not been buying enough summer gas to keep the storage full, and of course the storage gets emptied during the winter - people need to keep warm. To imply that Gazprom is somehow stealing gas from these facilities to exert political pressure is ludicrous, expecially since Gazprom has not even owned these facilities since 2022.


Europe Locks In Endgame for Russian Gas And Oil - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/europe-locks-endgame-russian-... - December 9th, 2025


Thanks for the link. I think the facts are correct but the conclusions are wrong. Yamal gas will be redirected to Asian markets by 2030, and Europe will keep losing its manufacturing base to locations with cheaper energy (e.g. the US). But something tells me von der Leyen will not have trouble heating her own home.


Take a look at US manufacturing activity over the last 12 months. The industry is contracting due to federal policy. US fossil gas prices are rising due to LNG exports, so it is not a sure bet cheap energy is available in the US for manufacturing.

https://www.themanufacturer.com/articles/u-s-manufacturing-c...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64344

CATL is building one of the largest battery manufacturing facilities in Europe in Spain. I think Europe will adapt without issue to manufacturing without the inexpensive fossil fuels it previously relied on Russia for.

https://www.catl.com/en/news/6614.html


I am not sure how US manufacturing activity contracting implies that Europe is not losing its manufacturing to the US. There are lots of news of European companies expanding in the US (one example would be Airbus in Alabama, lots of others). You are absolutely right about LNG exports, and it's unfortunate because it also pushed residential gas prices up, but just look at the benchmark prices in the US vs. Europe (TTF vs Henry), they are different by a whopping factor of 2 at the moment, and it has been worse in the previous years. Notice that the US manufacturing that tends to concentrate next the the source will get its gas even cheaper. Volkswagen CEO recently stated that manufacturing in Germany no longer makes sense. I believe Europe will adapt eventually, but the cost in terms of lost manufacturing and quality of life will be high.


> cleared of inflation energy costs are lower than 2013, 12 years ago

Dude, soaring energy prices are driving inflation. That's like saying the prices are lower if you just keep ignoring everything that actually makes them more expensive. Duh.


I don’t care if German prices for electricity are below inflation. They’re just still expensive. As an EV owner is difficult to find an electricity provider with costs below 0,25€/kWh, and most of them go beyond 0,30€. While I had prices in other European countries for around 0,05€/kWh at night for example.

Not only that, Conservatives, Socialists and the Green all managed to increase our electricity CO2 footprint by moving from nuclear to coal/lng.


That’s mainly because German has fucked up the smart meter rollout. In their wisdom they separated the meter and the gateway when other countries just combined it. They also made it super secure (good), but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments and their meters in the cellars have really poor or no cellular connectivity. When Germany can finally do steerable dynamic loads properly at 95% of the market rather than under 10%, it will finally make a difference on steering pricing for such consumers as yourself.

Germany is investing in massive battery parks dotted around the grid. This will make a difference to supporting base load and offsetting coal, but it will take time.

If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.


> If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly.

Too slowly, if I'm following local news correctly (I might well not be, my German is enough to listen to podcasts but it's still not good).

e.g. this train station upgrade is currently about 20 years behind the original schedule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin-Köpenick_station#Presen...


>but then didn’t look at the fact that lots of people live in rented apartments

How would the political class know this obvious fact from the top of their ivory McMansions?


"If there’s anything about the Germans you can count on, is that they move slowly."

What happened to Blitzkrieg?


> Alas is right, China is poised to dominate …

Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

Seems like a win for everyone else, no? What happened to “competition”, or is that something that’s only supposed to be beneficial within the US?


China is governed by the CCP, which holds the world record for the number of people murdered by the state, feeds its citizens militaristic propaganda at scale, is currently controlled by a guy who fancies himself a dictator, and is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade. It takes a dangerous kind of willful naivete to just ignore that fact.


This is oversimplified view of the world and China.

China being powerful is not something new, it was the world's largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries (with exceptions being parts of the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western Europe and then the US surged ahead after the industrial revolution).

> is politically stable only as long as it continues to suppress free speech and free trade.

Your analysis is through the lens of Western culture. The definition and understanding of freedom and harmony are entirely different in China. I was in China and experienced this myself, so this is firsthand experience, not something I picked up from blogs or news.

In the Chinese context, freedom is defined collectively so freedom from chaos, poverty, foreign domination etc, whereas here in the West it's individual liberty. Harmony and social stability are seen as more valuable than political pluralism, so authoritarian governance is culturally framed as legitimate. You know that 100 million Chinese travel abroad every year and all of them come back to China? Chinese leaders and citizens still remember periods of fragmentation and civil war.

There is a widespread belief that adopting a Western adversarial political model could reintroduce instability and weaken national unity so something China cannot risk given its size and diversity (you know how many ethnicities there are in China?)

This is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (over 2k years since the Qin Dynasty), where stability and order are prioritized.


This and your other comment in this thread reads exactly like propaganda paid for by the CCP.


That's a funny meta comment, where are you from? Are you consuming a lot of US based content? I ask because I mainly see Americans here writing about the "CCP" based on what they regularly hear from government officials and certain news outlets. It's rarely framed as "China" it's usually "the Chinese Communist Party" emphasizing "Communist" because that word carries negative connotations in the US given its history and in the EU. But maybe framing is similar in your country.

So just to clarify, I'm from the EU, and I'm not paid for anything I write here. Maybe your world model is influenced by propaganda? The world isn't black and white.

I also encourage people to read more about the history and culture of other countries, especially the ones they have strong opinions about, which they often haven't formed themselves (In my experience, this is often lacking in US education, people learn a lot about US history, but not as much about the rest of the world).

Reading more philosophy can also broaden your perspective. In particular, I recommend learning about Singapore, its history, Lee Kuan Yew, and why many highly educated people there willingly accept restrictions on individual freedom. If you understand that, you can then start reading about China, its culture, and its history.


Yeah. I have also been to China myself, and have first hand experience walking around Hong Kong with people who later found themselves in jail, or riding the subway getting bombarded with saturation level jingoistic propaganda urging attack against the capitalist aggressors, or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

The silent majority is silent, yes. Those who try to do something get pushed out, or worse. It's the double-edged sword of immigration. But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.


Then you've had a very different experience than I have. If you don't mind me asking, where exactly were you in mainland China, and for how long?

Hong Kong isn't representative of China. I've been there and honestly, it felt like a post colonial UK dump. Going directly from Shenzhen to Hong Kong felt like going from a first world country to a third world one, but I digress.

I also talked with Hong Kongers (this year), and they told me a different story, one that isn't so black and white as the worldview you're projecting onto others.

> or getting a tour of Beijing from a friend who worked as a photojournalist and found himself followed by the security services and had to leave and seek asylum with his family.

That's another interesting anecdote. I actually know a photo blogger and a local journalist from China, neither of them is being followed by the security services, and neither has sought asylum anywhere. What was so unique about your friend?

> But the Chinese people love freedom like the rest of us - you don't need to go far to disprove your entire narrative, Taiwan and Singapore are right there.

You know Singapore isn't exactly a "free" country either, right? And Singaporeans are generally fine with that and accept the trade off. So who's disproving whose narrative here?

Different cultures have different systems and trade offs, different value systems and philosophies of life. But some people seem not to understand that and view everything through the lens of their own values, convincing themselves there's only one "right" way to live and that everything else is evil. The Holy Crusades had similar vibes.


What kind of willful naïveté does it take to ignore the nature of the current government of the United States?


He's not ignoring it.


Yours?

I'm sick and tired of whataboutism from people who are somehow motivated to carry water for aggressive dictatorships that threaten the rest of us. I've already lost my birth country to zombies like that (they call them z-patriots, or turbopatriots, the supporters of Russia's invasion of Ukraine). In case you missed it, my original comment was intended as a criticism of the current government of the United States.


> Are you saying “alas for citizens of the US who see things in competitive nationalist terms”?

He’s saying it as a realist.

China is building the equivalent to America’s sanctions power in their battery dominance. In an electrified economy, shutting off battery and rare earths access isn’t as acutely calamitous as an oil embargo, but it’s similarly shocking as sanctions and tariffs.


Yes and no - yes it’s dumb to give up and let china have a defacto monopoly on the future of energy production. But no insofar as sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things. Because once you have them, they keep producing for you.


> sanctions on battery and solar don’t hit the same as oil and other things

Oil hits hardest. I’m comparing financial sanctions to a battery embargo. Both are slow. Both are powerful.


> shutting off battery and rare earths access

Trump just leveraged Magnitsky sanctions against brazilian authorities to obtain access to brazilian rare earths until 2030.


Brazil?

https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-rare-earth...

Output in 2024 was 20 tons.

The change in Chinese output between 2023 and 2024 was an additional 15,000 tons, going from 255,000 to 270,000 tons. The USA's own increased by 3400, from 41,600 to 45,000 tons.

I'm happy to assume Brazilian output will grow, especially if the USA invests a lot in it, but is it going to even be close to enough to make up for where China's already at? China was about 70% of the global output.


Honestly, I don't know. I just know this rare earths business, among other things, was somehow enough for Trump to drop the very deserved Magnitsky sanctions against a brazilian judge.

I hope it was worth it. I have to believe it was. Because otherwise he delegitimized the Magnitsky Act and fucked us in exchange for nothing.


It's alas for everyone but China. Who wants to be dependent on an aggressive totalitarian state?

You can't compete fairly with China because the government applies massive subsidies and is coercive with both imports and exports.

Right behind Russia, China is the biggest threat to global order and peace. It's no accident they are in cahoots.


Where do you place the United States under the Trump administration in that list?

I’m getting a strong sense of denial in this thread.


For real. I think there's a type of American that would rather hype up the evils of china than admit the distance the US has fallen from its purported ideals. This year I've seen students deported for criticizing Israel, mobs of poorly trained militarized federal police roaming neighborhoods violently disappearing people without trial, the number of homeless grow to 700,000, food kitchens with lines around the block and a president straight up selling pardons to drug dealers.

Chinese totalitarianism just doesn't seem like such a huge contrast as it once did. At least they get an increase in quality of life for the tradeoff. Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh


  > Also a lot of this reeks of Sinophobia tbh
the grass is always browner on the other side...


IMO, depends where you are in the world.

I'm in Berlin, I have more to fear from Trump's administration than from Xi Jinping's.

If I was in the Philippines, I think it would be the other way around. Initially I also had Japan and Taiwan in that comparison, but thinking a bit harder, there's also a risk that Trump is isolationist, that means the risk from each is more like a multiplier than a simple comparison.


You are certainly not alone in your beliefs, but it always amazes me which technologies get the benefit of doubt and which are severely penalized by unfounded doubt. Solar and especially batteries are completely penalized and doubted in a way that defies any honest assessment of reality. The EIA and IEA forecasts are as terrible as they are because the reflect this unrealistic doubt (random blog spam link, but this observation is so old that it's hard to find the higher quality initial graphs)

https://optimisticstorm.com/iea-forecasts-wrong-again/

Similarly, nuclear power gets way too much benefit of the doubt, which should simply vanish after a small amount of due diligence on construction costs over its history. It's very complex, expensive, high labor, and has none of the traits that let it get cheaper as it scales.


https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

10 new plants at USD 2.7 Billion each. They take six years to build. USD 2/Watt. They have standardised designs, have invested in grownig their manpower and know-how.


If you believe China's internal pricing numbers, sure....

But their actual investments in billions of dollars and in GW show that nuclear is not competing with solar, and is sticking around for hedging bets. They the are deploying far far far more solar and storage than nuclear. And if those nuclear costs were accurate, then nuclear would be far preferable. $2/W is incredible, as in perhaps not credible, but it would also be far cheaper than solar.

And even if China figured out how to build that cheaply, it doesn't mean that highly developed countries will be able to replicate that. Nuclear requires a huge amount of high skill, specialized labor, and doing that cheaply is only possible at certain levels of economic development. As economies develop to ever higher productivity, the cost of labor goes up, and it's likely that nuclear only ever makes sense at a very narrow band of economic development.


Original source of that observation was Auke Hoekstra nearly a decade ago:

https://x.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1730992987021226002


In addition to coming so far down in price, it's amazing to me how good the technology has gotten. Batteries that can easily discharge 5C in cold weather, cycle 10000 times, survive harsh conditions with zero maintenance. Panels that last for decades.

Which is why it makes me especially angry that the current US government is throwing away this gift in order to appease a bunch of aging leaders of petro-states. Literally poisoning the world for a 10-15 year giveaway to the richest of the rich.

I take some solace knowing that fossil fuels are now a dead end. And even though certain people are trying to keep the industry going, that end is sooner than ever.


We are the petro-state, and they're our aging leaders.


> cycle 10000 times

This is truly important, allowing the plummeting cost of the batteries to be amortized over so many cycles.


I take solace in the invisible hand which, in the longer term, ultimately directs greedy capitalists. Water finds its level, etc. etc.


Yes! It's awesome!

(Also, "alas" is a lament, expressing sadness, which is clearly not your intent.)


In general it's obvious this is the trend & amazing.

It is a little surprising to me that some markets don't see the benefit. I was pretty delighted ~8 years ago to get some 4500mah 6s batteries RC (under 100Wh) for ~$65 but the price doesn't feel like it's changed much since, based on some light shopping around. Just wanted to note what I perceived as an unevenness. https://rcbattery.com/liperior-4500mah-6s-40c-22-2v-lipo-bat...


My Android phone comes hobbled unless I give it all my data to be used for training data (or whatever). I just asked, "Ok Google, play youtube music." And it responded with, "I cannot play music, including YouTube Music, as that tool is currently disabled based on your preferences. I can help you search for information about artists or songs on YouTube, though. By the way, to unlock the full functionality of all Apps, enable Gemini Apps Activity."

I'm new to Android, so maybe I can somehow still preserve some privacy and have basic voice commands, but from what I saw, it required me to enable Gemini Apps Activity with a wall of text I had to agree to in order to get a simple command to play some music to work.


That is the point when I turn around and walk away from that company.


I'm almost there, but the mobile operating systems (compatible with the phones i have) are a snag at the moment.


Just stop talking to your computer and use the screen interface, that still works.


When I'm on my bike, it's difficult. I will ride no handed and change a track, but it's more dangerous than it needs to be.

I might switch back to my iOS device, but what I'd really like to do is replace the Andriod OS on this Motorola with a community oriented open source OS. Then I could start working on piping the mic audio to my own STT model and execute commands on the phone.


Just stop if you need to adjust something?


That seems a lot like corpo- excuse making about adjusting usage to compensate for the fact that a product someone purchased has been changed, and broken, in order to be forced into agreement for a contract. That is called coercion in many places, but it seems like your recommended solution is that people accept getting screwed just so corporations can make more money when people complain…is that correct?


I'm just saying, how often do you need to adjust your phone while you're cycling?

It's a step back to not be able to do it by voice but if you're concerned enough about your privacy, stopping once or twice during a ride doesn't sound like the end of the world.

I'm not saying it's fine that Google took away functionality but, from a practical perspective, it seems like OP was acting like there's no other option available to change tracks. There is and it's really not that inconvenient.


I mean, any time you suggest "regulate companies" or "form a union", you get dogpiled. So until society gets its act together and collectively fixes these problems, the only immediate solution is to opt out.


Google already broke the basic functionality they wanted, dropping android now beats constantly looking for subpart workarounds.

Microsoft pulled the this crap with Windows, you once they stop caring about their you’ve already lost it’s time to stop paying their game.


So just don't bring a phone at all?


GrapheneOS or LineageOS on your phone gets rid of the AI cruft. Linux on your computer.

There are few things AI is truly very good at. Surveillance at scale is one of them. Given everything going on in the world these days it's worth considering.


OP wants AI to change the music. They just don't want the new EULA added to the mix.


AI is meaningless term when you extend it to cover everything, may as well just call it software.

So yea the software’s EULA changed for the worse, that’s the underlying issue.


Voice recognition has always been AI, and using an LLM improves it


Some parts of voice assistants used AI techniques other parts didn’t. Calling the whole thing AI is like calling Office 365 AI, it’s too vague to be useful. The most reliable parts are using dictation to interact with the preprogrammed bits.

Also, early attempts at dictation wasn’t considered AI, instead a machine learning etc was found to be useful so it’s been tossed into the AI bucket rather arbitrarily.


How long, though, until every input is AI-interpreted and your intention is "helpfully" translated to "what you meant"


To be fair it seems to already be happening. My phone keyboard, always prone to interpolating what I type into utter nonsense, seems to have gotten worse in the past year or so.


If you’re on iOS, and don’t use swipe keyboard, disable that functionality. I found it made a big improvement for me.


> Just stop talking to your computer and use the screen interface, that still works.

This reply demonstrates you don't understand the problem. Please don't contribute to the enshittifacation of everything by being an apologist for unethical behavior.


You can switch from Gemini back to Google assistant.

https://support.google.com/gemini/community-guide/309961682/...


Siri still works fine, I guess. I almost never use it (Android user) but got exasperated with Apple CarPlay's menus and asked it to play something in my wife's car.


Apple CarPlay forces enabling of Siri (to enable voice control) and presumably that'll turn on Siri AI too?


Dunno about AI, it works quite a bit like the old Siri, although she's got an iPhone 16 with a current iOS. Worked just fine when I asked it to play some artist other than the annoying YT Music playlists.


Chatgpt is a proprietary eponym[1], like kleenex, or Google for search. That's a relatively strong attractor based on their first mover status. I nevertheless use tissues, and search engines like brave search, sometimes duckduckgo, and claude or openrouter for my LLM models.

I think there are too many good alternatives for Chatgpt to turn the screws too hard on their users, but we'll see where it settles out. As usual, the most vulnerable will be squeezed the hardest (the ignorant and tech feeble). Hopefully competition and some oversight will keep the wolves at bay.

The finance people were chatting about the OpenAI's ad play a while back, glad to see it finally dawning on this crowd.

1. Not all jurisdictions have granted OpenAI the Chatgpt trademark.


I think I hear as many people calling it ChatGBT or ChatGTP as ChatGPT.


"Oh no it's GPT, a Generative Pretrained Transformer shaped into chat responses."


None of which, when searched, will lead the user to Claude, Qwen, et al.

Just OpenAI and ChatGPT.

So what’s your point?


Chachapita


There's always another asking, "Are you down?" It's a bit of a bop.

https://youtu.be/DpMfP6qUSBo


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