Hacker News Reader

Comment by twofornone | Hacker News Reader

>The rest of Cold War 2.0 hasn't really started yet

I suspect it has been raging for some time now, online, by bots and so called shills in the form of information warfare.

View on HN

It's been going for well over a decade, and it's intensifying.

When I say "hasn't really started yet" I really mean it. China gutted Nortel here in Canada, and they've been hacking and ripping off IP wherever they can, but realistically this is nothing close to the scale of the Cold War. They've been biding their time and playing down their capabilities. Holding relatively small numbers of nuclear weapons and largely focussing on building soft power through investment ala belt and road over real power projection that the Soviets or Nato have done. That's starting to change, but it's not a real Cold War until the business class gets nervous going over the boarder and right now they're still piling into China.

China has hundreds of EV car startups and it appears that they are reaching the capability of making half decent cars. When these cars enter places like the US market, they are going to decimate the competition. We should probably expect an invasion of Chinese cars in the next few years.

For example:

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_e2

This car looks like a decent entry level car, 190-250 Miles. starting at around ~16k. Even if it sells for 25k in the US, it seems like good value.

The 1980s wasn't called the "Cold War era" because Japan suddenly gave us nice cars. The USA welcomes economic competition with foreign rivals. May the best car win.

The issue is that China is beginning to aggressively take out interest in Democracies in their sphere: first Hong Kong, and everyone knows that Taiwan is in their crosshairs now.

We didn't (and wouldn't) go to war over Hong Kong. Taiwan however... that's different and is truly a serious threat.

---------

If anything: additional trade and cultural exchanges are needed to foster a spirit of competition / cooperation even in the face of our nuclear weapons being trained upon each other. We don't really know if the Moscow Circus prevented a US / Soviet nuclear exchange... but maybe it did??

EVs may be a winner take all market in the sense that there is a lot of software and tech that the incumbents (except Tesla) are traditionally bad at. If the market expects this it may take a long time for incumbents to catch up. We might see bankruptcies and consolidation. Auto manufacturing is the final large manufacturing industry left in the US and it going away will hurt the country dearly.

> When these cars enter places like the US market, they are going to decimate the competition.

Surely they will then become national security threats?

Wonder if they had autopiloting built into them, could control them across the ocean.

NEDC range is about 80% of EPA range, so that would probably be ~150-200 miles of range if it sold in the US.

$16k is great though. The base Nissan Leaf is $27k for 150 miles. At the same time, I'm not sure how much importing it would raise that. If, like you said, it sells for $25k in the US, that's a decent value if it's other features are comparable to a base Leaf, but I don't think it would decimate the competition.

Yup. Weird connections with Tesla.

> China gutted Nortel here in Canada

Didn't Nortel go under because of accounting fraud?

Huawei only started releasing competing products years after Nortel went bankrupt.

> That's starting to change, but it's not a real Cold War until the business class gets nervous going over the boarder and right now they're still piling into China.

It's sad, but this is one of the only avenues I can imagine that will bring real benefits and change for a lot of Americans.

Post-WWII, the ownership class had to offer a good deal compared to the Soviets, lest they risk communism coming for them, too. They had to provide working people opportunity and had to help build a thriving middle class in order to stave off sympathy and collaboration with the USSR.

Today, if owners don't want Americans to be bribed by the CCP into spying for them and handing over the IP they own, they're going to have to offer Americans another good deal in comparison. That's my optimistic take, but I can also see jackboot tactics being implemented instead of raising Americans' standards of living.

I don't think we can afford to raise standards of living across the US, in the sense of giving them more spending power. People will spend the money on lots of fossil fuel derived things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com