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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • st0v@lemmy.ziptoCreepyWikipedia@lemmy.worldSalad Fingers
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    5 days ago

    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.


  • There’s like a 15% tariff on imported cars (from memory), they’re definitely over priced there and always have been. There’s foreign brands thar aren’t imported, ie produced locally. For a while GM Shanghai was making a fuck load of cars there but its slowly been tapering off. My CN Telsa was bit cheaper than the same one in the US. But I couldn’t tell you that it’s apples for apples, sometimes the local model of something is cheaper because it’s made of cheaper stuff.

    The bigger issue for big city china when buying a car is the plates. If its an ICE the cost of getting plates can be 100x that of a EV. Regardless of where it’s made.

    As for stuffing products in a friendly customer or by some kind of stupid regulation is not common but happens. There is a complex web of incestuous company ownership and an equally complex web of influence and indirect ownership by the government. If someone needs to hit their numbers real bad it’s possible they’ll ask / insist / regulate that another company buys up to help make it happen. There are a few laws that are supposed to prevent it, but if nobody complains then probably nobody investigates.

    I’ve seen this happen a few times with stuff much cheaper than diggers.



  • 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.




  • 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.













  • 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.