Bulletins and News Discussion from December 23rd to December 29th, 2024 - The War on Christmas: Hypersonic Holidays

Image is from Futurama.

Happy holidays, fellow godless communists. We are in year three of the Five-Year Plan to eliminate all Christmas cheer and create a world free of the joys and festivity of Christmas. Nobody should have to be reminded that in our concrete brutalist communist strongholds, NO ornaments are allowed in December. Please report any Christmas trees, snowflakes, baubles, and presents to the evil secret police, and anybody caught violating their Volcel Pledge by having a tentative kiss under a mistletoe will be shot on sight.

Developments lately have been grim. Our Supreme Communist Dictator Brandon is being removed from office by Christmas-loving patriots, and soon, Christmas will adorn the White House for another four years. This is obviously very disappointing, but while Christmas joy is strictly prohibited, good vibes are still strongly encouraged. Revolutionary optimism (a term we only bring out when things are going very badly and we need to be delusional) shall triumph over defeatist rhetoric by stooges of the Christmas regime.

We must have hope. Our foreign allies aiding us in destroying Christmas now possess hypersonic weaponry, allowing us to compete with and overcome the engine technology powering Santa's sleigh. Abroad, they have destroyed factories and hit cities with missiles travelling at unimaginable speeds into precise targets, while the Christmas regime struggles to produce their own such missiles, as they are still reliant on aircraft bombing campaigns. Precision has a quality all its own, or something along those lines. We just have to hold out another two years or so, and I swear to you: we will live in a world without this accursed holiday.

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697 comments

Feels like we sort of passed over the massive news of the Northvolt (Europe's only EV battery producer) collapse a few weeks back, so I'm going to re-up it here to highlight how monumentally fucked the European automobile industry is long term. Not exactly news to anybody here that's been paying attention, but the staggering mismanagement of what is so obviously a key and strategic piece of European industry is perhaps still baffling. The article's name is "The Northvolt dilemma: can European EVs avoid relying on Asian batteries?", and as the Betteridge law of headlines states, the obvious answer to this question is "No."
Two months before Northvolt filed for bankruptcy in the US, Robin Zeng, known as China’s “battery king”, had a quick but grim answer as to why European battery makers were struggling to make good products. “They have a wrong design . . . they have a wrong process . . . and they have the wrong equipment. How can they scale up?” the chief executive of CATL told Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s $1.8tn oil fund. “So almost all mistakes together.” The bleak assessment from the world’s biggest electric vehicle battery manufacturer captures the scale of the failure for the industries behind the critical technology for Europe’s decarbonisation, leaving governments, companies and investors at a loss as to how to recraft the continent’s strategy to compete with China.
Northvolt’s demise means the battle for dominance of the European market is likely to play out between Asian battery makers. LGES and SK On both have European plants, in Poland and Hungary respectively, while CATL has a factory in Germany and a second site in Hungary due to begin production next year. But Tim Bush, a Seoul-based battery analyst at UBS, said there was little prospect at present that the Asian battery makers would be able to help the EU to meet its target for 90 per cent of the continent’s EV batteries to be produced locally by 2030. Bush noted that Korean battery makers were already paring back their investments in Europe, having invested billions of dollars in plants in North America that have been running at low utilisation rates because of lower than expected consumer demand for EVs. Potential Chinese battery investments on the continent were also likely to be complicated by the ongoing trade dispute between Brussels and Beijing over EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, he added. “The Koreans are not expanding, the Chinese have suspended construction and Europe’s new entrants are dropping like flies,” said Bush.
With European start-ups still behind in their ability to manufacture batteries at scale, industry executives say the only solution may be to continue their reliance on Asian participants until homegrown companies can absorb technology knowhow on battery chemistry, mass production and equipment manufacturing. “We need to find a deal with China because we won’t be able to compete . . . without the support of the Chinese companies that control the mining industry, chemicals, refining and their capacity and competence,” Luca De Meo, Renault’s chief executive, told reporters last month.
So basically, the Europeans destroyed their only chance of domestic battery consumption by epic mismanagement, and their acquiescence to USAmerican empire means they're fucking up their opportunity to draw Chinese EV investments into Europe proper due to tensions and sanctions, and the US/South Korea can't even begin to supply the necessary battery supply for the EU, so their car industry is basically fucked. The USAmerican destruction of European industry proceeds apace...
Source: https://archive.is/4Ys7n
- I guess it has been a hectic few weeks, we were bound to miss things.
  The Americans and Europeans are just too ideologically stuck in neoliberalism to reindustrialise. China's already out paced the in most manufacturing, and they see to be catching up with the more high-tech stuff like microchips as well. The only thing the US seem to be able to do about is sabre rattle and eat their allies.
  That said, I do find it darkly funny that Europe's economy is getting cannibalised to keep the US afloat, the Euros spent the last 2 centuries doing that to the rest of the world.
  
  That said, I do find it darkly funny that Europe's economy is getting cannibalised to keep the US afloat, the Euros spent the last 2 centuries doing that to the rest of the world.
  As a filthy euro, I say good riddance, we deserve it.
  Also in my view the US is way more dysfunctional and so would be more likely to squander the riches and fumble the bag, paving the way for Chinese dominance. An economically strong and united Europe might be a more stable centre of capitalist power in the long run, but this way we might be in a position of weakness when the US-led hegemony collapses and so forced to mend relations with Russia and China
  (Who am I kidding, the EU will keep being belligerent and chauvinist until nukes are dropped on every European parliament.)
  
  An economically strong and united Europe might be a more stable centre of capitalist power in the long run
  Europe had that slim chance around the 50s. Suez and then the inclusion of the UK into the EC ended that. The EU counter-pol to the US that was all the rage in the 2000-2016 era was not a sign of european strength but the american lax hand. I used to get snark by this very site when I said that the european nato states were just US puppets and that the US would tighten its grip if they showed too much sign of a divergent trajectory, lo and behold then nordstream 2 happened.
- Wow how lucky are we that the automobile industry isnt a significant portions of the industry of Italy, Germany and Spain -wait...
  It will truly be the cool zone when almost all of former classmates become jobless because they work at Mercedes-Benz.
  
  Whenever I'm down and think my job is pointless, I just remind myself that there are people in this world whose job it is to install turn signals on German cars, and I then I don't feel so bad.

697 comments