• CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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    3 hours ago

    Its not “picking up our bat and ball and stomping off,” it’s recognizing that this new “team” is full of ringers who take no issue with cheating to win, who will pay referees to give them favorable calls, and who will only put on a good show for the crowd for as long as it takes to secure 1st place. This team also happens to control the supply of bats and balls and ensures that they get the best of the best at no cost while other teams are getting second rate bats and balls at sky-high prices. Those people talking about “how great the game was” don’t see or understand any of this, so their opinions should be disregarded. They didn’t witness a real competition, they witnessed something akin to a Harlem Globe Trotters or a WWE match.

    You’re still framing this as if it’s about protecting our companies, but this is protecting our market, our jobs, and our agency as a nation. US companies only make up a small part of all this.

    Furthermore, if you look at the situation in China with EVs, they have entire graveyards of practically new EVs rotting away because they’re turning the automotive market into yet another segment of cheap, disposable products, which is not only terrible for consumers but also for the environment.

    Are you really that desperate to buy a brand new car every year like its the latest iPhone that you’d upend the entire world market and put millions and millions of people out of work not just in the US but in the rest of Asia, Europe, Canada, and Mexico? Do you really think they’ll continue the massive subsidies driving their prices so low once all the competition is gone? To get a little conspiratorial, with the design of modern EVs being entirely software controlled with wireless links back to the “mothership”, are you willing to hand over control of the nations’ entire fleet of vehicles to a single government entity that has demonstrated time and time again that they’re willing to use whatever force necessary to maintain complete control and keep everyone in line?

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      50 minutes ago

      No i think china decided to invest in manufacturing of future cars. They planned years ahead, developing rare earths and batteries. Then they encouraged new vehicle manufacturing, supported them, pushed them, invested in them, things that all countries do to build a priority industry. Sure there’s some inefficiencies, they wasted some of their money. But they dominate rare earths, dominate batteries, and are on their way to dominate EV manufacturing.

      I’m all for some amount of protectionism, some amount of investment, planning on related technologies. We need to fight on equal ground. US economy took huge profits, huge pay, huge benefits from legacy car manufacturing and its important to support that 8n future manufacturing, to try to keep reaping the benefits.

      But after doing a lot of research on batteries, we failed to develop manufacturing. After finding huge rare earths resources, we failed to develop those. We finally seemed to get our act together with incentives to develop new technology vehicles, to establish a large and growing market, to develop related technologies here, and to push legacy manufacturers to make the transition, and just threw it all away. It’s great for shareholders that legacy manufacturers will make sizeable profits on obsolete technology for a couple more years, but this is yet another case of throwing away any advantage we had, of pushing manufacturing more offshore.

      Yes, I’m afraid that in a couple years when legacy manufacturers decide to get serious about new technology vehicles, they will be too far behind to succeed. They will be buggy whip manufacturers unable to build viable products for the automobile age, unable to compete where there will be a new set of established dominant manufacturers. China is not to blame for our failure, we are