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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • There’s like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they’re definitely over priced there and always have been. There’s foreign brands thar aren’t imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn’t tell you that it’s apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it’s made of cheaper stuff.

    The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it’s made.

    As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it’s possible they’ll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.

    I’ve seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.



  • hello~

    westerner tech guy in China here. they haven’t thrown me out yet, but then they haven’t grown up an equivalent of we do yet either. they haven’t tried to steal it or learn our secrets either.

    nope for the last 3 or 4 years they’ve asked to license it to a local firm or better yet sell it outright to them. each time the price goes up and I suspect at some point it will become so irresistible that the founders will do it.

    interestingly the sanctions closed us off from a lot of big institutes and companies who faced with losing the capability entirely just went ahead and acquired a bunch of Japanese stuff and jerry rigged it together. so that sucked.

    because that’s it, if we don’t sell it to them someone else will and that’ll be the end of the party for everyone.

    pretty sure this has played out in history before.










  • For me it’s like this, I have a useful point to add to the conversation but when I interject the lag is juuuuust long enough that it ends up I’m talking over the next person.

    So when I lead a meeting with zoom participants I either force dead air to allow the remote people to jump in, or I eat as much dead air as possible to lock them out of the conversation. depending on my own agenda.

    incidentally this problem doesn’t exist in asynchronous collaboration methods. but zoom and it’s like win out on shear informwtion bandwidth.

    The current video conferencing and remote working systems are indeed amazing feats of technology and social acceptance, but we still need to work on it. a lot.






  • If you can train is less than say 6 hours. Trains are hands down better.

    They are much more reliably on time.

    The station is usually much closer than to the ultimate destination than an airport.

    There’s little or no waiting in queues or what not, in a lot places you can roll up the platform 10-20 mins before departure.

    The seats are better for pretty much every class of ticket. sans a standing ticket but Planes don’t have those.

    Once you factor getting to and from the airport, messing about with check in, security, and boarding at around 6 hours a train is better than a 2 hour flight.