European manufacturers are facing a two-front assault from China that has German industry associations warning of deindustrialisation: on one side, artificially cheap Chinese goods are flooding into Europe, and on the other, Beijing has demonstrated its willingness to abruptly cut off access to critical inputs like rare earths and semiconductors.

Germany's trade deficit with China hit $76.52 billion last year and is expected to surge to around $100.87 billion this year, The Economist reported, driven by collapsing German exports and a rush of imports in categories like cars, chemicals, and machinery that were once German specialties. Chinese brands now account for 20% of Europe's hybrid market and 11% of electric vehicle sales. German cars command just 17% of the Chinese market, down from 27% in 2020.

In what way are the goods artificially cheap? It sounds like China is out-competing Germany, and Germany needs to adapt.

You're right. And before people chime and say

but the billionaires don't have the wealth, because if you add up their wealth, it's a small fraction of the problem!

we need to realize a few things: the billionaire oligarch ultra-wealthy folks (the top 0.1% or so ~ those with hundreds of millions of dollars or equivalent, or more) choose to allocate huge amounts of wealth to frivolities (yachts, etc.), which in turn sucks away resources from real concerns (food, housing, health care, the environment, elder care, education). We live in a world with finite resources and the allocation of those resources matters. There is a zero-sum element at play. In addition, the uber-wealthy control the major global media and also the major political parties, which means that the uber-wealthy control the national discourse & the allocation of national wealth. We need to push back against the ultra-wealthy or else we will be left with a mere pittance. They will call this pittance "basic income," and it will be bare-minimum subsistence living, scraping-by survival income.

Don't be surprised if attempts to tax the wealth of the ultra-ultra-wealthy will be met with a deluge of articles in the news media about how it can't work, won't be done, etc. Tax wealth, not work!

Most of the "sentences," as defined by punctuation, are really just phrases. The article was published on Substack, so not only are there no editors, but apparently no standards. Please take time to edit your work, otherwise it's illegible. I'll take a stab at repeating what I just said, but in that same terse style:

The author used sentence fragments. Hardly 5 words. Barely even phrases. What the hell? Twenty years ago, this would have triggered editorial review. Not now. Nobody cares! It's awful. Here's what bloggers don't want to acknowledge: writing takes time and effort. It's a skill. And guess what? If you write well, people will have an easier time understanding your point. If there ever was one.

The Luddites protested because they didn't own the textile factories they worked in, and so were easily made irrelevant and cast away as more automation took place (they were not anti-progress or anti-techology per se!). Similarly, whether or not AI kills jobs depends on who has ownership of the AI. If the workers and labor classes were to "own" AI, then those same workers could do their jobs more easily, keeping their jobs with more free time and a higher quality of life. If the management or ownership classes were to own the AI, then the owners and managers could capture any efficiency gains for themselves, fire workers, and saddle the remaining workers with more work, to be done with assistance from the AI.

We really just need to automate CEO roles. AI won't ever need a golden parachute, so right away there are huge opportunities for savings.

Mass adoption of cars for individual transport was the single largest policy blunder post WWII. They're expensive, dangerous, inefficient, bad for our health, bad for the environment. Millions of people were displaced to make room for highways. Our lives are far worse for surrendering our freedoms to car dependency.

Does the AI ever admit that it doesn't know what the rest of the inscription said? That's the only honest answer.

Do the Google team repeat the process after removing randomly selected data from the training and see how the outcome changes, repeatedly?

Central Park is larger than anyone's back yard will ever be. It's possible to go jogging, biking, on gondolas... People in Manhattan don't need back yards because Central Park is right there. And no, it's living in isolated cookie-cutter stroadvilles that makes people unhappy, not living in cities.

However, I do think the climate scientists made a HUGE strategic error yelling that the sky is falling from every rooftop they have access to and now Mr & Mrs J. Doe are bored and numb.

The problem isn't with the science or the scientists, it's the fossil fuel industry doing everything it can to discredit science & distract people.

There have been more than 400,000 live births in California every year since 1979. In contrast, the article says that 300,000 people immigrated in 2024, and even plunged to 40,000 a few years earlier. Well, 400,000 is greater than 300,000 so no, immigration is far from the only thing propping up California's population.

In the late 1960s and mushrooming in the MBA 1980s, professional managers (management degree, MBA, finance degree) took over leadership of many large USA companies. Those professional managerial class spent focus on cutting cost and efficiency instead of building new products and inventing things. It drove out of upper management or kept out of upper management the next generation of corporate leaders who's learned the business from the factory floor or entry level jobs.

It's worse than that. Management was promoted as a means of union busting. Rather than promote people out of the labor movement, the capital owning class instead promoted a management class to keep labor in check. And it worked!

Correct. We will "fix traffic" and end traffic congestion & traffic jams only when there are viable alternatives to driving.

How about $100k / year to replace a Fortune 500 CEO? That would be a good deal.

Econ 101 here: there won't be a shortage, there will be an increase in electricity costs. Maybe the datacenters will be too costly to run, to the dismay of the AI companies, or maybe poor people will be priced out of the market. But a shortage would happen if e.g. the government intervened and set low price caps on electricity.

Yes, the summary basically says a much, but then what's with portraying it as a shortage? Doesn't everything face "operational constraints" based on real world costs? The particulars may vary, but competition for limited resources remains a constant.

It's not that the sideline tracks are antiquated, it's that freight operators have increased the length of their trains to cut down on the number of operators (people working), for profit. They're making more money and inconveniencing us in the process. Oh, and these longer trains that run short-staffed are dangerous: that's how we get the East Palestine train derailment.

Then maybe Elon Musk already considered nuclear and passed on it?