This is not about research articles, but it is advertising already existing commercial products.
There are a handful of competing Chinese companies, which have launched during the last few months greatly improved batteries, both for cars and for stationary energy storage, removing the main complaints against such batteries, like charging times, loss of capacity at low temperatures and use of materials that might become scarce.
Guys!!! Important!!! Don't buy or lease an EV now!! Battery breakthrough is coming! Your car will be obsolete trash in two weeks tops! Buy ICE car instead! Stable investment!
It is a slightly weird experience trying to buy an EV as they genuinely do get significantly better very quickly. It's like buying a computer in the 90s or a phone in the 00s.
Why can't we just import munitions and medicines from overseas as usual?
It's inefficient to manufacture in the US because of all the regulations to prevent occupational hazards and environmental destruction, the minimum wage and unions, the high price of medical care, and having to transport all the input materials to a US factory.
Hopefully your question is sarcasm, as it should be obvious why this is a terrible idea on many fronts.
In case it isn't, for starters, especially given the way the world seems to be changing these days, if you put all of your critical supplies in the hands of another nation, especially an adversary like China, you basically are at their beck and call when things get ugly. Even non-advesary states can either have regime change or just not want to deal with you, and all of a sudden everything is completely out of your control. Others basically own you at that point, which is obviously unacceptable from a defense or critical logistics standpoint.
On a whole other level, it's incredibly immoral and stupid that we're ok with externalizing problems that labor and environmental standards protect. If you wouldn't accept having your kin or friends work in the sort of conditions you see in many exploitative "cheap labor" centers overseas so much so that it's codified in law, why is it OK to just pawn it off on another nation's people? If you wouldn't accept the environmental damage that other countries seem willing to inflict, why is it suddenly ok when laundered as free trade, especially given how concerned we are with the global reach of environmental problems. If there were ever an application for tariffs that made sense it would be to ding the shit out of products and services that come from states that don't meet minimum levels of labor and environmental law.
The only reason we don't do this is that we're addicted to cheap shit and can't think more than maybe a year ahead.
Well read about the last years of the British Empire. They too spent a lot of time and energy giving speeches about what is "unacceptable" but that has nothing to do with what actually happened to the country after the empire wound down.
Paper tigers preach and bully because words are cheap, winners build. Americans who have only known unearned prosperity through historical inertia are in for a painful century.
reply