Assad should try declaring martial law. That's a good trick.

Agreed, though the software part is a bit mystifying to me. It's not like Europe doesn't have good software engineers, so the fact that so many of Europe's carmakers are having so many problems competing on software is jarring. It has to be some kind of institutional/cultural clash within these organizations.

For the vast majority of military applications, including missiles, you do not want to use bleeding edge chip tech. You use 50nm or higher, anything with smaller feature sizes is not robust enough for a military environment.

See, this was always the problem with Chinese efforts to indigenize their semiconductor industry. Each individual Chinese firm had no incentive to use Chinese suppliers, rather than their more established Western competitors. Well, guess what, the US Government has solved that coordination problem for them. Just about every Chinese company, up and down the supply chain, now has an excellent reason to buy Chinese. Sure, they'll take years to work out the kinks, and there will be lots of chances to point and laugh in the meantime. But in the long run, the Sullivan-Blinken strategy of squeezing the Chinese chip industry might end up being one of the most counterproductive geostrategic ideas of all time.

It's not (or at least not just) about subsidies, cheap Chinese labor, etc. It's a fairly classic tech disruption story. Globally, the established carmakers know the future is electric, but they've got existing plants, workers who are trained to build ICEs, long established suppliers who make ICE parts, and so forth. You can argue that executives are being paid big bucks to solve such issues, which is true, but it's truly a hard problem. Especially when these are real factories and workers and industrial equipment you're dealing with.

But why did the disrupters come from China? Everyone is pointing to state support and existing strengths in battery tech, which are supply side factors, but there are also reasons on the demand side. Chinese people have relatively few cars (300 cars per capita, versus 850 per Capita in the US or 603 in the UK). As people get richer and start buying cars, there's a chance for EV makers to get in the door. This, by the way, is why it makes sense that the Chinese EVs are entering on the cheap end of the market, whereas Tesla, which started out selling to western consumers, entered on the premium end.

China has its own ICE carmakers, but they aren't established enough (and politically connected enough) to really push back against the onslaught of EV firms. (China can hardly impose tariffs on itself...) And at this point, the smarter ones like Geely have decided to go with the flow.

The problem is that the main American(*) EV maker, Tesla, is politically toxic to the save-the-planet camp. Whereas the favored US carmakers are incompetent.

(*) Looked at another way, Tesla is part of the Chinese EV wave, not in opposition to it. More than 50 percent of its manufacturing capacity and profits are from its Shanghai plant.

It's nothing to do with stopping pedos. The people pushing this year-in and year-out don't care THAT much about pedos. It's not a cause that's motivating enough for them to be putting in so much effort, trying to sneak in legislation after being repeatedly rebuffed.

"EV winter" is a silly framing. Many Chinese EV companies are on a roll, with BYD just surpassing Tesla in EV shipments in the last quarter. EVs are now mainstream in China and the car markets in other countries won't be far behind. Obviously, Tesla faces more challenges from the fact that it no longer has the market to itself, but competition is a good thing.

The rest of the developed world has had this for decades.

So I fully expect this initiative to be lobbied out of existence by Intuit and the rest of the tax filing industry.

He's not wrong. But it's worth remembering that when China faced a far smaller provocation from their own restive Muslims, in Xinjiang, they responded by locking up a large fraction of the population in vast reeducation camps...

"Enhanced Ad Privacy." That's the technology that, unless switched off, allows websites to target the user with adverts tuned to their online activities

That's some Orwellian shit right there.

Even more horrifyingly, children addicted to books stayed up late, reading under their bed covers using flashlights...