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Cake day: June 7th, 2024

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  • Electricity is one of those things that should be run by the municipality. Their incentive wouldn’t be to maximize shareholder value, but to deliver a basic need reliably and at the lowest cost possible. At the very least, it needs to be run by a Public Benefit Corporation.

    The minute you enter private enterprise into it, things go pear-shaped. A municipal power network wouldn’t have problems with solar or distributed neighborhood grids. It just means lower cost for them, so they would encourage it.

    They would need to get economies of scale, though. So you can’t have it just be city-wide or county by county. It has to be statewide. That way you can spread out the risk and costs. It also means investing in rural wiring since it’s no longer a matter of ROI.

    Same for gas, clean water, sewage, and broadband. This isn’t closet socialism. We currently do this for roads, freeways, state parks, postal service (sorta), and defense.




  • Chinese manufacturers look like they’ve figured out vertical integration and manufacturing automation. BYD makes a TON of items themselves, from battery to drive-trains, tires, telematics, sensors, etc. And they can iterate FAST. It also means their battery division sells to the car division at cost, whereas a different manufacturer would have to pay cost + profit. Also, robots.

    There’s no way a Ford, Toyota, or VW will ever go back to making their own components.