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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Electric vehicles may become a new front in America's tech war with China after a US senator called for Washington DC to block Chinese-made EVs to protect domestic industries and national security.
Sherrod Brown, senator for Ohio and chair of the Senate Banking Committee, penned a letter to President Biden, claiming "there are currently no Chinese EVs for sale in the United States, and we must keep it that way."
He warned that "Chinese EVs, highly subsidized by the Chinese government, could decimate our domestic automakers, harm American workers, and give China access to sensitive personal data," insisting the US government must ban Chinese-made EVs as soon as possible, calling it "a matter of economic and national security."
The move comes as the dispute between the two economic superpowers over technology rumbles on, with the US last week sanctioning four more Chinese companies, claiming they were involved with providing chips for accelerating AI to China's military and intelligence users.
Among those added to the Entity List maintained by the US Department of Commerce was Sitonholy (Tianjin) Co, understood to be one of the largest distribution channels for Nvidia's datacenter products in China, thus cutting off supplies of Nvidia GPUs to many Chinese companies.
[...] The number of Chinese cars purchased by US customers is understood to be very low as these are subject to an extra 25 percent tariff on top of the regular 2.5 percent import duty that DC applies to imported vehicles.
However, Senator Brown notes in his letter that BYD already sells an electric hatchback named the "Seagull" for the equivalent of less than $10,000. This compares with the $28,140 that has been reported as the starting price of the current cheapest electric car available in the US, the 2024 Nissan LEAF S.
There is also a national security twist as Senator Brown claims that data collected by the sensors and cameras in Chinese EVs could pose a threat. "China does not allow American-made electric vehicles near their official buildings. To allow their vehicles freedom to travel throughout the United States would be foolish and highly dangerous," he stated.
Senator Brown also claims in his letter that nearly 20 percent of all electric vehicles sold in Europe during 2023 were made in China, citing this as a cautionary example.
The European Commission last year announced an investigation into subsidies in the Chinese EV industry, but there are said to be misgivings in Germany and elsewhere that a ban on Chinese EVs could backfire, with Beijing retaliating by locking Western carmakers out of the lucrative China market entirely.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday April 17, @10:37AM (18 children)
(I was at a small protest, he stopped by to say hello.)
He's always been fundamentally a "back the blue-collar union factory guy" sort. He's also in a difficult re-election race, and his state has a bunch of auto parts plants that could benefit from making EVs here in the USA. I could totally imagine this sort of thing looking good for him, and it's relatively easy for him to do.
But I have to admit, I personally like the swing away from wide-open trade. The only people who have really benefited from that are people who are already very rich.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday April 17, @04:02PM (4 children)
Trade in itself is very good, and it has benefited us all greatly. For instance, decades ago air tools such as pneumatic wrenches used to cost over $100 each. Now, a new 1/2 pneumatic air wrench is less than $50. In the 1970s, Detroit was giving us crap for cars, and it wasn't until good quality Japanese cars arrived in a big way in the 1980s that that changed. I mean, come on, before this revolution in quality, the expected End Of Life of cars was just 50k miles! Now, it's EV time, and here we are again, tough to get that and rooftop solar at a competitive price.
What is particularly frustrating is the narrowness of our own thinking. Why, for instance, isn't making the batteries more easily replaced, basically swappable, a top design priority? And aero. The coefficient of drag could easily be less than 0.2, but even under the pressure to squeeze more range out of BEVs, they leave that low hanging fruit unpicked. Then, there's safety regulations some of which add a lot of weight for very little improvement in safety. Strong (and weighty) B-pillars in everything, no matter how low to the ground and therefore rare rollover accidents are. In the US there's no spectrum of safety, there are only the two extremes: the very high risks of motorcycles and the as-low-as-we-can-make-the-risks extremes of cars, with one exception: the classic car. You can't import a modern car for the Mexican market into the US without having all kinds of work done to beef up safety. Chinese BEVs could shift some of those dogmas.
Today, what would we do for computer chips without Taiwan? Pay 3x as much?
A core idea of the European Union is having so much trading going on that no member can even think of starting a war with another because cutting off all that trade would be too painful.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 17, @07:16PM (3 children)
A core idea of the United States is having a common currency with so much trading going on that no state can even think of starting a war with another because cutting off all that trade would be too painful. Except, you know, when two halves of the country with clear geographic boundaries decide they have fundamentally different ideas of "the most profitable way forward" plus a nice human rights issue that falls along similar lines. Even then, my ancestry is Tennessee and around those parts we had families divided with one son going to fight for one side and another side going to fight for the other. As told 100+ years later, our particular ancestors either went to fight for the side that was able to pay a pension or just stayed home and bitched about how "the Yankee oppressors should all burn in hell" but knew better than to go off and fight for the apparent to them at the time losing side.
90 degree right turn....
I don't trust Chinese EV manufacturers... I trust US domestic automakers even less. What's the absolute minimum software necessary to make an EV work? We should be challenging our manufacturing sector to make big ticket items, like EVs, HVAC systems, even refrigerators, as simple as possible. Sure, use software, but don't allow obfuscaware. Clearly illustrate system architecture diagrams. The companies with the simplest (and most accurate) architectures win the biggest tax breaks - confuscation systems get tax penalties. Within those architectures, tax break bonuses for use of established standardized widely used highly interoperable interfaces, penalties for proprietary. Example: USB-C = tax break, Apple proprietary plug = tax penalty. In the functional software implementing the interconnected modules, clear statement of all requirements, clear documented testing demonstrating both successful implementation of the requirements and successful handling of failure modes. Tax break bonus for the cleanest, clearest coding, penalties for indecipherable spaghetti.
All in all: drive simplicity in the products. An EV has a battery, a charging system, a drive system, a regenerative braking system, anti-lock brakes, traction control, battery thermal management, power windows, power door locks, HVAC, lighting, passive passenger restraint (seatbelts), backup camera(s), maybe an entertainment system, airbags... and as little as possible over and above that. A person "reasonably skilled in the art" shouid be able to download .pdf manuals and quickly navigate to the system of interest's documentation, link into the (read-only) git repository and find the code that's controlling whatever system of interest and read through to see whatever detail of implementation is of interest - maybe why the seatbelts go into automatic inertial lock after 30 minutes sitting with the engine off. Rationale for that design decision should be linked and documented - was it regulatory compliance, if so what regulations (with links)?
Produce products with this level of transparency and I would pay a significant premium over obfuscuware. Make me king and I'll give enough tax advantage that the most transparently implemented and documented products cost 1/2 what the worst proprietary piles of profit protection cost at retail.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 18, @01:18AM (2 children)
Oh, and while we are here, every software module in the system should be OTA updatable, but only when a physical switch is set in the "updates enabled" position and another physical switch, momentary type, enables the update to start.
Cyber security is good, but why don't we have a layer of physical security to go with it?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday April 19, @02:16AM (1 child)
I have great-great grandfathers on both sides of the Civil War. I like to think the Confederate one wasn't that committed to upholding slavery. He deserted near the end, and who knows, maybe had little choice about joining in the first place and was merely waiting until the odds of getting away with deserting were good. The retreat towards Appomattox would have provided many excellent opportunities to slip away, while moving him closer and closer to his home in the Piedmont in North Carolina. But yeah, good point that the pain of ripping up trade ties often isn't enough to stop violence loving idiots from starting a war.
One of the curious things about current computing capability is how much these devices that are so fantastic at automating things are themselves strangely difficult to automate. Suppose you want to send keystrokes or mouse clicks to an app, without having to physically work a keyboard and mouse by hand? Where is the app to deliver keystrokes? Not included in the OS! Or, can't a second computer be plugged into a USB port and simulate a keyboard? Or, why can't all apps have something like the GIMP's batch mode? Sure, these things can be done, but for most users tools to do that are out of sight and out of mind. About the only thing that's fairly common is a macro keyboard. But much online gaming depends on the players not using such things, and the vendors will go so far as to ban players who do. One time I wanted to capture keystrokes to help with debugging a problem, and all I could find was key loggers for recording passwords, as if that's the only use of such a thing. I guess one reason such tools are not readily available and easy to access is that they make a lot of current security practices much less secure.
But I think a bigger reason for the feeble self automation capabilities of computers is the same as why there aren't more standardized and open products.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday April 19, @12:43PM
>Where is the app to deliver keystrokes?
Google AI says "AutoKey" - but I have been using xdotool for decades.
>Or, can't a second computer be plugged into a USB port and simulate a keyboard?
Ethernet is more conventional, but I think you can make ssh work via USB if you read a few HOWTO guides.
>why can't all apps have something like the GIMP's batch mode?
For the past 10 or so years, I have been working "behind the scenes" on a device that presents a .net GUI in Windoze/VirtualBox over Ubuntu. I have been developing a suite of apps that run in Ubuntu (poor man's multi-threading: each app is single threaded, if you've got a process that blocks too much: give it it's own app - yes, it's more resource intensive than threads, but somehow all this wasteful multi-app work still barely touches 10% of any given resource on the system at peak, less than 1% most of the time) - these apps are written in Qt and have their own GUIs that are only used by developers and testers to see what's going on in the individual functions they implement. At their core is the "QProcess::start("xyz")" call, where xyz is what you would normally type into a terminal. Doing things this way, I'm taking complex terminal commands with options and parameters and making them very systematic: click this button and the right form of the xyz command will be executed, with all its complicated options and parameters exactly the same way every time. Batch mode.
>for most users tools to do that are out of sight and out of mind.
And that's the point. Users don't want to open the printers dialog and re-select a new default printer after plugging in a new model, before printing their next report, so the "out of sight, out of mind" apps do things like that for them, resuming the print queue when it stalls, etc. Linux desktops (Gnome, KDE, et al) do a lot of this, but our product focuses on a small subset of desktop features and automates them for our users in their limited workflows.
>the only thing that's fairly common is a macro keyboard.
Typing on one now, I believe the form factor is called 60% - no dedicated F keys, I reprogrammed home to be end, fn1-esc to be ` and fn2-esc to be ~, and I have a fn1-N macro that does a cd into my normal working folder. Then I forgot how to program macros and haven't tinkered with it for years. I also have a very programmable "gaming mouse" that I got because it's got a nice feel and response - never touched its programmable functions at all. Too many brain cycles for too little return.
>the feeble self automation capabilities of computers
The features are actually there, and that's what makes them dangerous. Most people are unaware of the possibility - even those who are aware when you ask them to think about it don't consider it as a normal part of daily operations - out of sight, out of mind. That's why I feel like the "big RED physical switch" would be such an improvement for cybersecurity. All these touch-screen based "Are you sure?" prompts can be bypassed a thousand ways with "living off the land" tools. If you are running secure code, part of that security certification would be a requirement to throw the enable switch to enabled position and then to press the "initiate" button. Physically, those interfaces should be through the simplest possible paths into the microprocessors: debounced with RC circuits, ESD/EMI protected with passives, and otherwise direct wired into the same chip that will be handling the software update. The update code should start with a very clear unambiguous test of those two physical components before proceeding - kind of like the two keys required to launch an ICBM.
Yes, we should have a "patch Tuesday" that regularly ships updates for everything, and people should be applying them in a timely fashion. However, the updates should not be able to propagate like a worm to all the systems in the world without human intervention. Back in the '80s I came up with a "scheme for world domination" and the whole key to it was an "innocent" feature in network (BBS at the time) connected software: the ability to update the software, loading arbitrary code. There's no way around allowing the loading of arbitrary code if you're going to allow patching any possible vulnerability discovered in the future, but you can at least prevent the arbitrary code from spreading itself without human intervention.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 17, @04:06PM (11 children)
Well, as JFK said: ask not what you can do for your country, but what sugar you ought to be getting from your country. And I'm reminded of that Monty Python skit:
Global trade does more than make a few rich people richer. Meanwhile banning foreign competition makes rich people richer too. I think government power has better uses than deciding winners and losers. I will always resist abuses that create a large number of losers for the alleged winners.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday April 17, @07:53PM (7 children)
>I think government power has better uses than deciding winners and losers.
I agree - somewhat. I think government power is best used to provide protection for the citizenry. Protection from foreign invasion. Protection from criminals. Protection from fires raging out of control. Protection from charlatans who would defraud little old ladies out of their life savings. Protection from accident victims being left on the side of the road to die, further protection for those needing healthcare from being pushed outside the hospital doors told to seek care elsewhere (details, details...)
Anyway, in this post-agrarian society where we're all deeply interdependent on highly complex industrial products, I also believe that the citizens should expect protection from exploitation from the makers of those products which have become considered essential to normal life. No, government should not decide winners and losers, but they should reward those who "play the game" in ways that benefit the consumers of their products, and yes: that's the same as penalizing those who profit at citizens' expense.
>I will always resist abuses that create a large number of losers for the alleged winners.
There should never be be small numbers of winners. Competition is a key to a self-managing ecosystem, and we should be as self-managing as possible.
If we want to continue to enjoy the kind of progress have seen over the last 70 years, we should also ensure that there are as few "losers" as possible. The more people we have with significant means, the more powerful we are overall. A hundred million families with $350K per year income are vastly more powerful than a hundred million families with $35K per year income plus 22,000 men each stashing a billion dollars a year into offshore accounts while commissioning the occasional yacht and mansion.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Wednesday April 17, @10:27PM (6 children)
Henry Carey called it a "harmony if interests". Hamilton agreed, and even in pre-industrial USA described a system where rural areas and cities worked together to produce a strong, tight-knit nation (Report On Manufacturers that he published in the 1790s).
They both agreed that we should also be quite careful in the arena of international trade. The purpose of a nation is to execute the will of the citizens and protect them from foreign aggression. this fundamentally includes international trade. Yes trade is good, but international trade is war. The last thing you want to be is a nation reduced to the slave-mining population of a more powerful, more industrialized nation. For instance, England referred to Portugal as "their vineyard", reducing that nation to nothing but a vassal state enslaved to making their wine as England used free-trade and financial tools to crush all of Portugal's other industries.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 18, @12:13AM (5 children)
>international trade is war.
U.S. business (including domestic trade) is more like the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but with less rules about not killing your opponents.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 18, @06:16PM (4 children)
I'm sure that sounded awesome in your head, but murder and negligent homicide are illegal in most of the world, and those cases can even be (and have been) tried in the US. In addition, there are four to five orders of magnitude more rules for US businesses than there are for UFC participants, including plenty of laws and regulations about preventing ways to kill "opponents".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 18, @07:15PM (3 children)
> murder and negligent homicide are illegal in most of the world, and those cases can even be (and have been) tried in the US.
And, yet, Corporations are people - and businesses seek and succeed to bankrupt (kill) opponent Corporations every day, all around the world but especially in the US.
>In addition, there are four to five orders of magnitude more rules for US businesses than there are for UFC participants, including plenty of laws and regulations about preventing ways to kill "opponents".
And, yet, none of those rules (except some rarely exercised anti-monopoly statutes) say anything about putting your competitors out of business through starvation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday April 18, @09:51PM (2 children)
They can get married and have social security numbers?
I forgot that corporations eat food too. How silly of me.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 18, @11:16PM (1 child)
Corporations live on (eat) money.
And this all started with: international trade is war.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday April 19, @03:55AM
I'm not that concerned about feeding corporations then or the wars of international trade. Should I be?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 17, @09:41PM (2 children)
And, as Teddy Kennedy once said: "I'll drive off that bridge when I get to it"
(Score: 2) by cereal_burpist on Sunday April 21, @03:39AM (1 child)
Thanks for that; had to look it up! :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kennedy#Chappaquiddick_incident [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 21, @03:54AM
If he drove a Volkswagen, he could have been president [i.cbc.ca].
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday April 19, @05:56PM
...his state has a bunch of auto parts plants that could benefit from making EVs here in the USA.
I'm not so sure, American automakers want the EV to die. Rather than a drive train with thousands of breakable parts that guarantee a dealer to junkyard gravy train for the manufacturer, dealer, mechanic, auto parts stores, and others, an EV's drive train is an electric motor with one moving part.
They're pushing hybrids for that same reason, as they still have thousands of breakable parts in the drive train. The buyer gets a huge cut in the cost of fuel, but none of the very many advantages of a pure EV, and the fuel cost isn't even as good.
The EV is to a piston vehicle what a Model-T was to a horse and buggy. A hybrid is sort of like an automobile that needed to have help from a horse.
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry