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0 pointskristopolous2y ago0 comments

It went deep into the negatives for a bit. Often, at least with me, people mistake my efforts at sincere analysis as some kind of advocacy.

I'm an American. I've never been to China or seen one of these Chinese electric cars in person but everything suggests they're on their way to a formidable auto industry in the electric and city-car/light use space - the demographic that Honda and Toyota captured in the 70s and 80s.

Of course if you've done any traveling you'd find many countries have a national auto-manufacturer that's deeply popular in country without much penetration outside (take Vinfast or Saipa for instance) and the Chinese auto companies have yet to prove they can stake a foothold outside of their home country at the Kia or Mercedes level but they just started.

BYD just entered Japan under 2 months ago and XPeng entered Europe only about 6 months ago.

Time will tell, but we could be seeing the very early stage of Chinese auto brands becoming household names.

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Garvi2y ago

Racism against US economic rivals has been the MO for decades on western social media. It's certainly widely known that the US has "embedded operatives" at the biggest tech firms. This is what they do with their time. Censor anyone that doesn't get dogpiled. The dogpiles then serve as a deterrent. I will never forget the racist "covid in russia" threads in /r/worldnews. Weekly renewed threads, old ones deleted, full of people expressing their hopes for a high number of covid deaths in Asia. Some used innuendo, some were quite direct. They were all rewarded with happy points.

History will treat these sites as the he modern equivalent of the hitler youth. For instance the recent US invasion and occupation of parts of Syria seems to be completely missing from peoples memories. Were Americans simply not informed in the first place? We got millions of Syrian refugees into the EU.

kristopolousOP2y ago

The term for this generally is american exceptionalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Essentially the US pretends like it's the only country. It's softened in the past 20 years with the rise of the internet but the bubble used to be extremely strong when I was younger.

Garvi2y ago

Interesting. I studied propaganda academically (communicology studies) and would have argued it's gotten worse in the last 20 years, due to new technologies. That is not a strong opinion of mine and your post made me think. I'd like to better understand your point. Are you US American? Are you talking about cold-war propaganda as having been worse or the post 911 hysteria?

kristopolousOP2y ago

I'm an American.

There's many metrics for measuring this. Frequency of international travel is up for Americans, even normalized for immigration.

The consumption of foreign media such as anime kpop and bollywood films is up.

Classic white Americans have also become more multilingual and their cuisine choices have diversified.

It's not great but it's up from a baseline of terrible where people would be asked to point to England on a map and then point to, say, Japan or shown some Hangul text and think it's Farsi. They're not quite that awful anymore.

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bavell2y ago

American here, it has vastly eroded in the past two decades among the younger generations.

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mistermann2y ago

> Racism against US economic rivals has been the MO for decades on western social media.

Could simple nationalism (or something else) not be the motivator?

tuatoru2y ago

Hard to explain why Europeans, for example Volkswagen or BMW, are not treated similarly, then.

mistermann2y ago

How sure are you that they aren't? Don't forget you are describing your/a model.

throwaway4good2y ago

Most of the Teslas sold around the world, not the US, are made in China.

As it looks now (in Europe); the stigma associated with China is very strong and the brands that succeed likely will be western (at least in name) but made in China.

kristopolousOP2y ago

Such as volvo. The "ownership" is kind of a weird thing ... for my interests I think it's where was it mostly designed and tested.

GM is involved with Wuling for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC-GM-Wuling but I think we call this Chinese, right? Transnational industrial capitalism is weird like that.

qwytw2y ago

> succeed likely will be western (at least in name) but made in China

Not if they increase tariffs beyond the measly 10%. Which they should.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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Garvi2y ago

kristopolousOP2y ago

The term for this generally is american exceptionalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Essentially the US pretends like it's the only country. It's softened in the past 20 years with the rise of the internet but the bubble used to be extremely strong when I was younger.

Garvi2y ago

kristopolousOP2y ago

I'm an American.

There's many metrics for measuring this. Frequency of international travel is up for Americans, even normalized for immigration.

The consumption of foreign media such as anime kpop and bollywood films is up.

Classic white Americans have also become more multilingual and their cuisine choices have diversified.

1 more reply

bavell2y ago

American here, it has vastly eroded in the past two decades among the younger generations.

1 more reply

mistermann2y ago

> Racism against US economic rivals has been the MO for decades on western social media.

Could simple nationalism (or something else) not be the motivator?

tuatoru2y ago

Hard to explain why Europeans, for example Volkswagen or BMW, are not treated similarly, then.

mistermann2y ago

How sure are you that they aren't? Don't forget you are describing your/a model.

throwaway4good2y ago

Most of the Teslas sold around the world, not the US, are made in China.

As it looks now (in Europe); the stigma associated with China is very strong and the brands that succeed likely will be western (at least in name) but made in China.

kristopolousOP2y ago

Such as volvo. The "ownership" is kind of a weird thing ... for my interests I think it's where was it mostly designed and tested.

GM is involved with Wuling for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAIC-GM-Wuling but I think we call this Chinese, right? Transnational industrial capitalism is weird like that.

qwytw2y ago

> succeed likely will be western (at least in name) but made in China

Not if they increase tariffs beyond the measly 10%. Which they should.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse