“If we want more growth, we need to allow creative destruction so new companies can deliver the productivity we need.”
Octopus energy ceo greg jackson
“If we want more growth, we need to allow creative destruction so new companies can deliver the productivity we need.”
Octopus energy ceo greg jackson
I really do not like people boasting about how foreign dictatorships are doing everything better while bashing our local democracies. If this guy wants to see an electric truck, he can simply walk onto European streets. They are there. And they are available from those “incubent manufacturers” that he bashes in the article.
There are 50 ton e-trucks available and rolling in Europe? Please, tell me more. That is very interesting.
Electric Trucks are limited to 42 tons in the EU and there are good reasons for that. That really doesn’t change much in this argument - we also do no have those australian road trains and that is also fine
Regardless, which manufacturers are putting these machines on the market?
Just recently I was talking with a professional trucker, who owns a small fleet, and when mentioned reading on projects to develop such vehicles, he denied even the notion itself. And this is a man being hard pressed to keep his business afloat.
Well, then this guy is not good at his job. You can buy the eActros from Mercedes Benz for example. And most manufacturers have an electric truck on the market. You can see this on the map above: If 18% of new trucks in the netherlands or 7% in Germany are electric, somebody has to produce those vehicles and put them onto the market. If a professional trucker can’t see that, he is really incompetent at buying trucks.
I’ll put that towards local market fighting to keep the status quo and people resisting change; most small truckers buy second hand trucks and are extremely wary of change. I’m in Portugal.
Mercedes-Benz eActros, Iveco S-eWay, MAN eTGX, Volvo FH electric, …
Watch the Elektrotrucker on Youtube if you want to know more about it. Channel is in German, he is at the moment on a round-the-world trip with an eActros. https://www.youtube.com/@elektrotrucker
He does English dubs for the more popular videos though.
You have more freedom and choice here than in Europe. Get educated and visit China. And stop regurgitating the western propaganda about dictatorship.
Your president is a dictator who has been in power since 2012 after removing term limits. This dictator has declared himself in office for life, as all dictators do. You may be happy with the result, but you do not have the right to choose your highest leader, and are by definition ruled by a dictator.
Shall we talk about what China is doing to the Uigurs, what happened on tiananmen square in 1989 and how many people Mao killed? Or about the corruption in the higher levels of the KPCh? Let’s have a free discussion between free citizens here without our governments intervening!
Sure. According to the UN, UK, and every single independent investigatory body not currently operated by the CIA, China imprisoned more Uyghurs than necessary in the 1990s and held them in prisons below EU standards but above US standards. At this time there is no evidence of genocide, nor is there evidence of continued discrimination.
Sure, let’s talk about ‘Peaceful’ “college” “students” stealing rifles from a military base and shooting unarmed police, resulting in a militarized response to minimize casualties.
Lots of people die in a revolutionary war, that is the purpose of them.
You are only aware of that because of the anti-corruption policies of the modern CPC; which has resulted in dozens of arrests and executions. Your press calls it “Xi killing non-loyalists.”
For anyone else reading this who isn’t a communist dictatorship lickspittle, read about the Great Leap Forward and the 100 Flowers Campaign for examples of how Mao’s bloodthirst and incompetence killed so many Chinese.
Communist dictatorship is an oxymoron, and China’s governance system tends to rank highest among international poling for satisfaction of democratic representation.
That being said the Great Leap Forward did have mistakes. That’s what happens when you try to modernize a SLAVE AGRARIAN SOCIETY RUN BY MONARCHISTS to a modern country. It also ended the famine cycle that had been common in China for several hundred years. Given modern estimates show 6-10 million deaths during the recovery of one of the largest revolutions and most drastic socioeconomic evolution in world history, that’s a pretty good ratio.
As far as the 100 Flowers Campaign, yeah. That was a good thing and showed why education was more important before freedom of the press could be established. Mao et al naively thought China was immune to propaganda campaigns at that point in the revolution and believed that criticism would come from people that genuinely believed in freedom and progress. And they were right, for a large amount of the criticisms posted, all of which have since been addressed surprisingly enough. But the ‘let’s let the US own us, let’s return to a puppet state, let’s sow racial division instead of national unity,’ propaganda campaigns threatened to split China, which would have resulted in additional western-owned colonial puppet states like Japan.
You’re seriously defending the Great Leap Forward where peasants were made to live in communes and melt down their metal tools in backyard furnaces to make worthless pig iron while the nation starved due to inept and incompetent agricultural practices being enforced on them by the dictatorship? It’s almost laughable if it wasn’t so tragic - yes, farmers, just plant all your seed in a giant pit and it will grow thick enough to stand on!
My older Chinese born coworker who grew up in one of these communes didn’t know who his parents were, didn’t know his birthday, all because of that tyrannical shit. And it certainly wasn’t necessary to “mature the economy” or whatever your joke of an explanation is.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but to anyone else reading, everything he has said is easily disproven drivel. I won’t be replying again.
Good, better luck next time spreading your propaganda.
While this is true, this isn’t inherently a bad thing. The problem was creating an environment where ‘Dirt Emperor’s’ could form without any infrastructure for oversight; as well as the overall lack of education, as mentioned previously. This has been shown and China admits this was a mistake, and communes were used as a part of Deng’s argument for capitalist reform, showing that agrarian society cannot jump to socialism or communism.
However this laid infrastructure that wouldn’t otherwise have been laid, allowing for the reforms and later top-down management from the government to be effective in modernization of regions at a pace that has never been rivaled in human history. Source 1
You act like this was a plan from the government, it wasn’t. Again this is down to local corruption, and the reason China now has a strong centralized government. The Steel production quota was based on Soviet successes, but was incorrectly included in all regions as an expectation Cadres could be rewarded for; leading to severe local corruption without oversight. The expectation from the central government was that mines that were shut down due to the war and invasion would be reopened, and newer mines would be prospected.
Instead these regional bosses wanted to cook the numbers to look good, primarily believing they would be rewarded heavily, secondarily believing the new government was ‘just another dynasty,’ and thus would punish them if they failed to meet quotas or had issues or concerns. This was a false belief that lead to tragedy, but was not a consequence of the great leap forward as much as expecting corruption to not be so deeply entrenched in those that had management experience. Source 2
As a fun fact, this is why the current Chinese government system is set up the way that it is, with literally dozen of competing people reviewing any accomplishment of their peers.
This was more of a problem of individuals with the knowledge being essentially too worthless to keep in government. And that sounds odd given the results, but you fail to understand just how corrupt the previous government was. Any possible criticism you have of the Mao-led party, you can say was 10,000 times worse before the revolution, hence the revolution. There is a reason the KMT was a fascist dictatorship until the 1980s when they held their first ever elections for any office.
This wasn’t a policy, but what was a policy, and what the tragedy actually was, was eliminating sparrows without understanding their greater effect on keeping pests under control. With more limited seed stock the solution they came to was to eliminate pests that would eat seeds, without any concern or understanding as to what other things those pests might eat that would cause more damage. Otherwise most planting was allowed to continue as it had been.
This would be a lie that he told you. The communes existed for exactly 3 years. The broader organization (sectioning the population into 26,500 sections for management) continued until the 1980s, but local communes were dissolved during and post famine. Additionally to this, there is no confidently documented cases of separating children from their parents or eliminating birthdays. There are some anecdotes on far-right websites, but there is no actual documentation of this happening or ever being ordered.
To your broader point with this third-party anecdote, no, it wasn’t tyrannical to try to eliminate local lords and return control to the people. It wasn’t tyrannical to try to implement a communal environment that was largely successful in its wider goal of national unity. It was too much, too soon, based on idealism over the hard reality of what living in a feudal agrarian society does to the human psyche.
I mean, electrification is one area where China is significantly and undoubtedly outdoing every single democracy out there. How democratic China is has no bearing on that fact.
It does matter because this is totally what chinese state propaganda is broadcasting to the world. The old playbook the soviets have been doing
If your neighbor is putting up two solar panels, and you’re just putting up one, someone might say that your neighbor is doing more than you to electrify.
If your response is, “But they’re bragging about it! It’s propaganda! They’re a bad person!” then it kind of sounds like you’re just salty about the electrification thing.
That might be but then you have Audi with 87% less profit compared to the year before and that’s not Chinese propaganda. He might be wrong about the trucks but he isn’t about electrification.
It also happens to be true.
They also are using a ton of coal and oil to recharge them.
They get away with looking better on per capita CO2 production because they have such a huge population, but it’s not all solar panels and rainbows there by any means.
Their electrical grid is old and can’t handle the crazy amount of solar energy they’re producing. So they need to run coal plants to keep providing power.
Even then EVs are better because they’re more efficient (requiring less fossil fuels per unit distance), but also almost half of China’s energy comes from green energy. Taken together this is objectively good.
ah yes, the old soviet ploy to make the everyone think their society is flourishing by… improving their society. damn sneaky commies
Yeah, improve society by murdering millions of people. And the result was really worth it because Russia or East Germany were really awesome places with a high standard of living in 1989.
electrification and movement from fossil fuels to renewables benefits more than just people in china, climate change is coming for everyone. any country (/especially/ one doing manufacturing for others) that is making strides like this should be learned from.
It works every single time. It’s so sad.
America’s perennial trend of bombing foreign nations is so much better at… creating dead children.
Norway walks into the room.
I don’t know if I agree. A dictatorship decides to make more batteries and so the industry bends. Land is taken by the state to build mines. Little regard for the people or the environment.
All of this makes it easier for China to just move to electric, and part of why the EVs they export are so cheap.
They subsidise by environmental impact and possibly human suffering.
* Not to mention they own the battery market.
I live in Canada and they’re building an LNG plant in my town. Nobody who lives here wants it but the federal government and province do so we can’t do shit about it lol.
Is Germany a dictatorship?
spoiler
The answer is yes, it is a bourgeoisie democracy; a dictatorship of capital.
I don’t think there’s a country in the developed world with a government that finds it distasteful to subsidize the consumption of their populace with environmental and human suffering. Moral superiority isn’t the difference being spotlit here. I think China just controls more manufacturing of its own which makes pivoting their society more efficient
The question was about politics and economics, not morals.
I would hope not supporting suffering and destruction doesn’t need to be explicitly stated to be understood.
Meanwhile the UK has royalty that live in opulent luxury whilst the working-class dwells in poverty. Their hayday of wildly looting and enslaving foreign nations is over. They have nothing.
I’m not sure the argument “EVs are bad for the environment actually” works as well as you think it does.
I wasn’t arguing that. The way China mines and processes lithium for battery manufacture, in which they’re the leading exporter by far due to their rich rare earth deposits, is destroying the surrounding areas.
That’s fair, but my point is: Is there any way to make lithium ion batteries otherwise? Like is there any evidence that for instance Australian lithium is “greener” so to speak?
I see, yes my understanding is that the process can be a lot cleaner and other countries do it (like the US), China just chooses to take cheap shortcuts to take stranglehold of the market, which they now have.
Do you have any sources which elaborate on this?
It at the same time sounds A) possible, and B) like the kind of thing that someone should support with evidence.
I have been hearing of this for a few years now, nothing specific recently that I can share, but I have enjoyed watching China Found Something Better Than Oil, which is the same topic but about neodymium magnets.
LMFAO! Wait until you read about the industrial revolution and the environmental destruction caused by Great Britain. Go suck your king’s cock.
Great contribution to the conversation
Europe’s washed up–capitalist liberal democracies can’t exist without looting. Each nation now wants to pivot towards war to begin the looting process again. Enjoy your austerity budgets. Meanwhile China will keep on winning.
Much of the reason China is winning is that it’s now looting the environment and minorities in its own borders. Europe needs to lower wages across the board and scrap environmental regulations to compete, particularly when it comes to lithium.
Have been seeing e-Atros in Switzerland and Germany daily during my commutes this year, they are everywhere if you keep your eyes open.
Small sample from the US but I’ve seen some all-electric Penske trucks making deliveries to nearby warehouses. Day-cab semis with full 52’ trailers
https://www.pensketruckleasing.com/truck-leasing/leasing-services/electric-vehicles/
Penske doesn’t make trucks.
Peterbuilt has several EV models. So does MAC. The industry started R&D in electrics years ago.
True but the batteries in them still are from china.
Have you been to China? It’s not a dictatorship.
He’s simply saying Europe is dragging it’s feet and allowing legacy companies to dictate the path to electrification.
Can’t read the graph but seems woeful for non scandi countries. Fact is the EU could be doing way better to stimulate green tech.
It is a dictatorship, that’s basically a fact. It’s just a much better ran dictatorship than Russia. Sometimes the king is competent & even benevolent & so the kingdom can thrive.
Having been to China has very little to do with this, yes China has amazing infrastructure & whatever else, but this is not an argument in the dictatorship debate, in math terms A is true, B is true, but there is no connection.
ACTCHULLY I’ve been to China, and since I’ve been that means it’s not. I just walked off the plane and they said, “Wow. This white guy arrived in our country, we are going to overthrow our government and implement a democracy - the best the worlds ever seen.”
My first night in China they all whipped out there phones and voted. 100% turnout. 100% of the votes went to the benevolent dictator. Fundamentally nothing changed. But I’m the reason why China has a democracy now.
Yeah apologies. I was wrong.
I appreciate your willingness to learn and admit this so readily, don’t get me wrong. But how did you get here to this point without realizing China is a dictatorship?
I think when i saw the original comment I didn’t think it was fair to lump China in with the Gulf states as a dictatorship. I knew it was a communist, one party state but thought they wouldn’t classify themselves as a dictatorship.
In my other comment I looked it up and China does indeed call themselves a “people’s democratic dictatorship”.
Just got confused by all the terminology.
That is correct as well, but only because it’s ingrained to be resistant to openly proclaim such things. The cognitive dissonance about this very thing among the mainland Chinese is quite the fascinating topic actually.
But the terminology doesn’t really matter, most especially what they call THEMSELVES.
Honestly, sorry, not trying to come across as hostile at all it’s just kinda truly confounding. China exerts far greater direct control over its citizens than any Gulf state.
North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, btw
No worries, no hostility!
I think it’s hard because I’ve been there and saw a well functioning country where the people are happy and looked after. Public infrastructure was excellent. Certainly didn’t feel like a dictatorship.
As you say, terminology doesn’t really matter. Every system of governance is susceptible to corruption. From my POV I see China as a country that wants the best for it’s people. I see the flaws of democracy when targeted by extremely wealthy corporations and people.
Don’t get me wrong China has it’s flaws too. But to me it’s doing way better than the US, and the EU should look to strengthen ties.
Honestly I think it is inaccurate to even call it a people’s democratic dictatorship; the influence of capital isn’t zero. It’s less than other countries, but for example, Cuba is a much better example of a place where the people have dictatorial control over policy.
AI Bot?
Okay I am very impressed at what China is achieving in many fields and it’s truly more than impressive. I have lived in China for a year and I have going back a few times since. It is a dictatorship and you can fuck right off to .ml of you think otherwise
Apologies. Looked it up and you’re right! China is a self described dictatorship. Just a dictatorship of the people.
Given the degree of censorship and control China’s government leverages over its citizens, most political experts would call it a dictatorship. China’s constitution calls its government a “people’s democratic dictatorship.” This may sound like a contradiction of terms to many people. The premise of the “people’s democratic dictatorship” is that the Chinese Party of China and the state represent and act on behalf of the people, but possess and may use powers against reactionary forces. The People’s Republic of China is currently ruled by President Xi Jinping, who also serves as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, the country’s Vice President, the President of the Central Party School, and the 1st ranked member of the CPC Politburo Standing Committee.
Why has your map removed parts of Europe?
zealandosis
EU map
Wrong. What about Norway and Iceland? Why are they included?
It is a map of the EEA, which is EU + EFTA*
'* excluding CH, since they voted no.
Oh, hey another grouping of European countries that I didn’t know yet!
Is Liechtenstein included in this or not?
You can find the answer to that question and many others in the Wikipedia article on European integration.
That diagram is amazing.
The complexity - lol…
Yes, Liechtenstein is included. The Swiss voted against it in 1992, whereas the Liechtensteiners voted in favor.
I had to check because I was not sure but interestingly enough Liechtenstein is in fact member of the EEA, while Switzerland is not, even though Liechtenstein is in a customs and monetary union with Switzerland.
Bad news Norway…
It’s some weird map, looks to be Schengen with Switzerland removed and Ireland and Iceland added…
Iceland is part of Schengen