If you can train is less than say 6 hours. Trains are hands down better.

They are much more reliably on time.

The station is usually much closer than to the ultimate destination than an airport.

There's little or no waiting in queues or what not, in a lot places you can roll up the platform 10-20 mins before departure.

The seats are better for pretty much every class of ticket. sans a standing ticket but Planes don't have those.

Once you factor getting to and from the airport, messing about with check in, security, and boarding at around 6 hours a train is better than a 2 hour flight.

There's a bit more to it than that. But yes EVs are subsidized in China.

I worked in a business where we had one product that was useful for automakers but especially useful for EVs. About 8 years ago the EVs in China were mostly cheap shitty BYDs.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the government changed a bunch of rules and regulations for new cars. Within a month design teams were being established at every major automaker in China focusing on EVs. It was a great year for us.

Key EV components, especially the materials to make batteries, started to come down in price.

Then the green plates started turning up. Every city has its own rules for car registration, some places like Shanghai, would auction new number plates each month resulting in a low supply and high demand. It was possible to buy a car cheaper than the number plate. Then if you register an EV you can get a green plate for almost nothing.

About 3 years ago the cities started requiring new taxis and busses to be EV. Places like shenzhen just converted everything to EV. Released licenses for training and testing self driving.

Charge stations started popping up everywhere. There's no way a shopping mall or new residential development could avoid having at least a large section for charging. My own home, converted an entire floor to charging parking stations in the underground car park.

Finally tesla set up Shanghai giga factory. I have no idea how they managed to make that deal but not long after they started shipping model 3s domestically they slashed the prices down to cheaper than a niceish BYD.

If you go to Shenzhen today about a third of cars are EV and you will see a dozen brands you've never heard of before (some are terrible cars, but most are reasonable quality and a handful are bullshit luxury)

As in tradition in China, the government will now let them go into a price war to push the manufacturers to find cheaper ways to make them. Many will go bust or give up.

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.

capslock drains the battery too quickly

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.

as a single dad living with one teenager kid, the two plate strategy was a total game changer.

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.

+1

haven't been back since I got the Rate limit message.

Sync brought me to reddit. I'll happily follow sync to lemmy.

Hi Tasmanian here.

You can go to a zoo and hug a zoo devil. they don't really care.

In the wild, they run from humans. At night they howl like something out of a Clive barker film.

Growing up we had chickens. if a devil got inside the chicken run, you'd only really find feathers and blood. Those fuckers would dantes inferno it.

According to the law, if they are a pest you need to trap them and set them free away from you land. So you get here big box metal traps that have pegs attached to them by chain so you can anchor them into the ground.

one morning I went to check the traps and one was gone. based on the marks on the ground it had been dragged up the hill from the inside. All the bush between there and about 250m up the hill had been flattened. wattlle trees had been squashed to the ground. At the top, a fucked up metal trap that had split along one side.

This is why we call them devils. They seem scary...

Fun salad fingers story. When it first came out it was a hit in our circle of friends. It was also hosted on a website called fat-pie.com

One girl wanted to show her friend and her friends mum at their place, so she just googled "fat pie" on front of everyone.

Salad fingers was not above the fold in the search results. It was especially bad because her friend was a bit tubby.

It's going to freak you out to learn there are actually pro-unification people in Taiwan of the "one country two systems" ilk. A lot less than there used to be, and I doubt it will ever be more than it is now.

This guy has been mega successful on the mainland he had reason to believe it would be a good thing for Taiwan.

If you ask people on the street most of them just want peace. Even if that means the Taiwan question never gets answered in their lifetime. When some thirsty westerner grand stands about Taiwan they cringe in fear knowing it will be their families who has to pay the bill.

Alot of people on either side of the strait feel nothing will happen and are tied of politicians amping it up and tempting fate.

maybe I misinderstand your meaning but at its heart the real problem is that chip engineers salary has been stuck at ten years ago for about twenty years. Like 50k usd.

This in and of itself is not a huge problem but with no downstream opportunities there isn't enough talent considering a career toward the top of the value chain.

The 1980s and 1990s saw alot of people come back to Taiwan, but the 2010s and 2020s sees it happen in another direction (mainland, the salary is awesome).

Of course many will say factory workers don't need to smart enough to do design. but IC production is complicated and needs skilled labor with some understanding of what they're doing.

high speed train in china is fuck planes, not fuck cars.

imagine what happens when a plane ticket is half or a third of the price, and you land down town at subway station...

now the subway... that's fuck cars.

if you think that the high speed rail in china is a net negative, i have a ghost city to sell you.

I didnt like friendlyjordies brand of humor. not one bit.

when he started going after that dog cunt broz I couldn't help myself. I had to watch.

by now I love him, he's become a hero of what free speech (such that it) is in Australia. served with a massive dose of sarcasm and ridicule.

I'll keeping giving him money and watching his shit while he keeps going there and calling out all the bullshit that goes on in australian government.

Solar manufacturing is not destroying China's environment, fossil fuels are. By a massive margin.

They need to get off that merry go round as quickly as possible. While the efforts they've made are incredible it needs to continue to accelerate.

I wouldn't say they've achieved these prices through subsidies in the way many people think. government support pushed their entire renewable industry ecosystem, western manufacturing went belly up, and now they are reaping the benefits.

For me it's like this, I have a useful point to add to the conversation but when I interject the lag is juuuuust long enough that it ends up I'm talking over the next person.

So when I lead a meeting with zoom participants I either force dead air to allow the remote people to jump in, or I eat as much dead air as possible to lock them out of the conversation. depending on my own agenda.

incidentally this problem doesn't exist in asynchronous collaboration methods. but zoom and it's like win out on shear informwtion bandwidth.

The current video conferencing and remote working systems are indeed amazing feats of technology and social acceptance, but we still need to work on it. a lot.

Boom, headshot.

This feels more like he has contractual obligations to be on stage for a certain number of minutes.

it's one of those pop idol malicious compliance tantrums. "so I have stand on stage for the full 90 minutes?"

"ill show them...."

my mum bought me a vic-20. it was beat up and didn't have a tape deck.

I had type my games in from a magazine in basic for a summer, I was hooked.

My uncle gave me a photocopy of a book about assembly for c64 and showed me intros on his c128. He had no idea about programming, he just figured I'd be into it. I worked my heart out to get the cash together for a c64 AND a disk drive.