st0v

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.

shrooms can be a bit of a dice room on visuals.

once boiled up half a shopping bag of shrooms and split the tea with one friend.

There were infinite moments where the fabric of space time twisted up into the cosmos believably revealing to me a path into the heavens. I had to control my breathing otherwise the torrent of everyday objects flowing past me would move too quickly for me to get enough traction.

I once had three tiny died shrooms, and a bong hit disconnected my soul from my body and transferring me into an ancient dog sleeping in the sun on a wide open field in the wilderness. the entire thing seemed to go for eons but collapsed back into my living room in and instant when some rang the doorbell.

Then I’ve had shrooms where the trip was extremely profound and emotional but the only visual was the leaves of the trees just looked a bit brighter and more flappy in wind or some swirly clouds of colors bouncing around my hifi speakers.

you can visit the entire country on the subway or a short grab ride.

owning registering, parking, repairing and fueling a car is a completely unnecessary living cost, not to mention much much more expensive than the US or Europe.

what a lot of people can’t understand is that a car I’m singapore is a ball and chain. it’s not freedom by any stretch of the imagine there.

it’s a status symbol or a job requirement.

There’s a very simple way to measure the migration of manufacturing out of China.

get a list of the top ten cargo ports in the world. count how many are mainland China?

7 or 8 right?

okay let’s go down the list until we get Vietnam or India or someplace where’d you’d expect the manufacturing to go to.

aight… now compare all the cargo capacity for that entire country to one of the eight ports in China? tell you what, let’s include India, and Rotterdam, and LA… just add them all together. How many of 8 does it take to keep up with that 2 or 3 ?

so, cargo shipping capacity… big difference right? day light.

Vietnam wants to make iPhones. you gotta ship 110% of the various bits into Vietnam and then ship out 99% of the finished goods.

all those ports come with piles and piles of back end infrastructure. roads. trucking. rail. skilled workers…

there are infinite alternatives to China. but it will take 40 years to develop any of them to that level.

The former Chinese government (now kmt in taiwan) took a loan like 80 years ago. after the war, the PRC and the USA both just kinda assumed China wasn’t ever going to pay.

For a while there USA maintained that the KMT was the government in exile, but with normalization with the PRC, that all kinda got swept under the carpet.

The US debt held by China today, is the same as other countries are holding. People need to believe this will be one day repaid and profitable.