>Who wants to be manufacturing technician when you can be lifestyle influencer!?
Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.
What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
What is really interesting is that worker pay in tier 1 cities in China (e.g. Shenzen) actually is higher than in EU countries such as Slovenia, Bulgaria or Czech republic. Incidentally these countries have a large number of EMS, and we know of quite a few startups that quickly grew production capability to be able to provide electronics assembly.
Technically the differentiation isn't cost reduction its in shored manufacturer. That can become an important requirement as firms become more wary of IP theft and other issues.
Besides other than that what can you really differentiate in this field that isn't cost? Its a service that is standardized regardless of country. Maybe you can provide different "styles" of boards (ie. different specs) or improve the entire submit to production pipeline but thats about it.
The pipeline is a massive one - especially for PCBA. Being able to get an instant quote and order in 5 minutes is worth a lot. Nobody wants a 2-week-long back-and-forth with sales and engineering for a basic prototype run.
The hardware needs to catch up I think. I asked ChatGPT (lol) how much it would cost to build a Deepseek server that runs at a reasonable speed and it quoted ~400k-800k(8-16 H100 + the rest of the server).
Guess we are still in the 1970s era of AI computing. We need to hope for a few more step changes or some breakthrough on model size.
The problem is that Moore's law is dead, silicon isn't advancing as fast as what we've envisioned in the past, we're experiencing all sorts of quantum tunneling effects in order to cram as much microstructure as possible into silicon, and R&D for manufacturing these chips are climbing at a rapid rate. There's a limit to how we can fight against Physics, and unless we discover a totally new paradigm to alleviate this issues (ex. optical computing?) we're going to experience diminishing returns at the end of the sigmoid-like tech advancement cycle.
You can run most open models (excluding kimi-k2) on hardware that costs anywhere from 45 - 85k (tbf, specced before the vram wars of late 2025 so +10k maybe?). 4-8 PRO6000s + all the other bits and pieces gives you a machine that you can host locally and run very capable models, at several quants (glm4.7, minimax2.1, devstral, dsv3, gpt-oss-120b, qwens, etc.), with enough speed and parallel sessions for a small team (of agents or humans).
I honestly don't know how things are going to play out but it seems to be back and forth escalating.
So much has transpired in one year: the initial shock of the mass raids, the blatant disregard of the law, blocking of apps like IceBlock, etc. Neither side seems to want to back down.
Abolishing ICE was part of AOC's original 2018 campaign platform. Now she did not mean ban all deportations but this organization was out of control 7 years ago and has just gotten worse. https://x.com/AOC/status/1031926879752802304
So like many things in the US, the right move was already proposed but it takes trying every other incorrect dumb idea before they will finally get to trying her idea.
Reminds me of the old Apogee/3DRealms/Build Engine DOS Games. In the sound card setup you could choose 44.1Khz but if you didn't have the CPU/sound card processing power there was also something along the lines of 33Khz and 22Khz and I always remembered how the sound degraded. It sounded nicer to my ears at times.
Man the US is the last giant standing. If the capitalists lose there, its game over. Before the events of the last few years I thought that maybe ultimately they were going to run to Israel or China if they lost the US. Both places are on shaky ground so probably not. If the US falls to Democratic Socialism, we could have a European style system across the entire western world. I hope to see it in my life.
Maybe that will be the lasting impact of Millenials and Gen Z: being a transition generation that finally kills this "unchecked capitalism" virus for enough time for humans to enter the next era successfully.
China may be a giant but those demographic issues will catch up to them so its really just the US thats the issue.
Very strange assessment. First of all Europe isn't democratic socialism. Its social democratic and in pretty much every European country the social democrats kicked out the socialists from the party or marginalized them.
By the actual numbers, social spending and so on, the US isn't that incredibly different from Europe. And Europe is by any definition capitalist.
And the US has plenty of regulation, so its not really unchecked, its just differently checked.
> finally kills this "unchecked capitalism" virus for enough time for humans to enter the next era successfully.
This is just incredibly simplistics marxist 'stages of history' thinking and almost completely useless. If the US adopt European regulation we wouldn't 'enter a new era'.
Yes what the Bernie people are proposing isn't really a 1:1 match of what Europe has. Thats too ambitious and only a small percentage of the left even believe we can strive for that. The rest of the progressive left is thinking smaller because they feel that some progress is better than nothing.
>By the actual numbers, social spending and so on, the US isn't that incredibly different from Europe. And Europe is by any definition capitalist.
Do you live in the US? The US is the worst of all worlds, spending (ie taxes) similar to Europe in many respects but the value is extracted at many layers along the way so the results are nowhere near what Europe can produce. Just look at the outcomes from healthcare, education, infrastructure etc.
>And the US has plenty of regulation, so its not really unchecked, its just differently checked.
You are just describing a symptom of the overall problem. Regulation is a tool that can be used incorrectly to further the goal of unchecked capitalism. Example: NYC elected a Democratic Socialist recently and he talks about corner store small business owners having to deal with extra permitting and regulation that affects them more than bix box stores because every little expense hurts them more than the big guys, this naturally leads to the small business more likelihood of failing when competing with the big guys. Its regulation weaponized due to corruption.
>This is just incredibly simplistics marxist 'stages of history' thinking and almost completely useless. If the US adopt European regulation we wouldn't 'enter a new era'.
ok. We've tried everything else and its failing. So there are really only two directions. We either try to check unrestricted capitalism or we just accept that the old way of living that we all went through will not be coming back ever and it was just a footnote of history.
Capitalists already lost. What republican party created is crony highly corrupt capitalism - that does not create competition but will make US look kind of like south america or russia.
USA is on the path to oligarch run fiefdoms and not capitalism in its original sense.
What you are describing is late stage capitalism. A result of the current unchecked capitalism we have. The Bernie wing is really just proposing checked capitalism. We are just returning back to the roots of the country where asset owners were the elites and they owned everything. The last half century was more of an exception....so i'd argue the capitalists won big. Will we manage to pull things back to the mean? Ask me in 20 years.
I mean his first wife(mother of that trans daughter) wrote the following about him in 2010:
"Still, there were warning signs. As we danced at our wedding reception, Elon told me, "I am the alpha in this relationship." I shrugged it off, just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious. He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa, and the will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home. This, and the vast economic imbalance between us, meant that in the months following our wedding, a certain dynamic began to take hold. Elon's judgment overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking. "I am your wife," I told him repeatedly, "not your employee."
"If you were my employee," he said just as often, "I would fire you.""
I was at /r/RealTesla when it began as an offshoot of /r/Teslamotors. A well known frequent critic of Tesla got banned and him and a bunch of other frustrated skeptics went off on their own.
The people in the auto and space industry were screaming from the rooftops about him for years. The Elon loving crowd were software techies who had no understanding and respect of the history of the auto and space industries totally ignored them.
Now to be fair to Tesla, they managed to attract tons of amazing talent that screwed up in some ways but produced absolute brilliance in many other ways.
Will Lutz ultimately be proven right just due to chance?(ie. Elon dropping the ball after everything that has transpired) I don't know really. In the end both pro and anti Tesla sides were right and wrong on many things.
I'm glad you have some evidence of it being nothing remotely new. Reading these comments I was starting to feel like I was crazy for remembering that he had always been pretty nasty.
>and other car makes are slowing down or cancelling EV developments.
The sales didn't materialize plus they were forced to do so by governments and short term investors that saw Tesla's stock shoot up. Now GM is writing off ~7 billion dollars. Whats worse is when Dems take back the white house, they will force the automakers to go back to green again. This back and forth is going to lead to disaster.
I’m not sure dems are willing to go out on a limb for EVs. Other environmental things sure, but EV has become kind of toxic over the last 5 years. Which is a shame.
They pushed it hard during the Biden years. Thats partly why GM went so hard into it. If they manage to really elect an AOC type candidate next time, they will definitely go back to it. Maybe if they get a Fetterman like candidate, they will back off but I dont think thats going to happen given everything that has transpired election wise over the last year or so.
>The sales didn't materialize plus they were forced to do so by governments and short term investors that saw Tesla's stock shoot up. Now GM is writing off ~7 billion dollars. Whats worse is when Dems take back the white house, they will force the automakers to go back to green again.
Ah yes, the terrible force of getting EV subsidies, which the Republicans have now cancelled causing the writeoff. How dare the Dems force the Republicans to do that?
The $7,500 credit is not really what I am talking about. Most of the 7 Billion in investment came during the Biden years due to pressure (from the administration as well as investors). So the industry complied, spent the money, built all these factories, terminated ICE programs and supply chains and now they are forced to write off a lot of this investment because the market is not there in the US.
What specifically was the nature of that pressure from the administration?
From the outside, it looks like classic Innovators’ Dilemma. Traditional automakers failing to adapt to a radically different drivetrain is practically guaranteed under Christensen’s hypothesis.
Much of that money is inefficient infrastructure that didn't have that much of an effect. The car makers didn't go hard with EV because of politics. They got into it because Tesla was making 25% margin on mass market EV and it looked like EV were taking over in massive way. Politics didn't hurt but the direction was pretty clear.
The problem is the traditional companies fell all over-themselves making grand promises without having any understanding, and putting in huge amounts of money while having not enough understanding of the market and supply chain dynamics.
Announcing like 4 gigantic battery factories when you have never built a battery and you barley understand the supply chain for most of the components isn't a great plan.
Before influencers people wanted to be actors. It predates the time before Electronics was 'lost' in Europe so thats not a convincing argument.
What you are saying really is that the world enjoys what we have on the backs of inadequately paid production engineers in China. As their demographic crisis does not produce a similar sized replacement generation, that benefit will go away as experts retire and no one replaces them. So one way or another wages will go up meaning inflation will go up and some of those 'lifestyle influencers' will now consider the field because it is a viable career path in terms of pay.
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