Who owned these key LFP patents? It was not clearly laid out in the article which countries owned them, let alone which companies.
If they were owned by Chinese companies, then is there some faint hope that Western companies can finally start making EVs that are no longer embarrassingly inferior to their Chinese counterparts?
A foundational research team in a Canadian university in Quebec, if I recall correctly. They licenced these patents to the Chinese companies royalty free when used the Chinese domestic market. The Chinese spent the time developing LFP to where it's now a bleeding edge of batteries, while practically no-one else was interested.
In a retaliatory fight over the EVs, in October 2025, the CCP issued a ban on transfer of advanced technology for LFP batteries, and battery manufacturing equipment.
Man if that is anything close to the truth, it would explain a lot and be pretty depressing. It would imply leadership doesn’t understand software at all, and considers it a liability rather than an asset.
I keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things?
The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly:
- The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past.
- Such disasters often lead to regime change (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest)
- The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change.
- Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power.
So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.
That's speculation, and probably good speculation.
On the concrete side we do know that they also care deeply about local pollution. They made massive efforts to clean the air for the Beijing Olympics, amongst other many other moves to reduce local air pollution.
I'm in Beijing right now. I was also here 20+years ago. The difference is astonishing. Back then the air was filthy, it was hard to breathe, you never saw the sun. Today it is blue sky most days, EVs everywhere, electric scooters, busses, even garbage trucks. The roads are quiet. The air is clean. The high speed rail system is astonishingly good. This really feels in some ways like living in the future. The West is years behind.
Of course there are still a lot of obvious problems to be addressed, but the rate of progress is the really impressive thing.
I don't understand why you think I am making this argument you're referring to, when I SPECIFICALLY said "I don't understand the Chinese motivation" AND I presented the US side, which I am familiar with.
My whole post was an ask for more information on the Chinese side (each of my 3 phrases were asking this!), which you have provided thank you very much, but I could do without the "you're dumb" when I ask a question.
I would like a way to sort all comments on a topic by net upvotes. I believe the current system ranks toplevel posts by net upvotes, and the same recursively for sibling replies, but that means a highly rated reply to a low rated parent comment will get lost in the nether regions of the page.
Of course I understand that max upvotes is not the be all and end all, but when there are a dozen interesting posts a day, each with 300+ comments that I want to parse, I need a way to still have some life, so a way to get the net reader take on the top few comments would be a nice filter.
I am not sure everyone is speaking the same language here. A UK gallon is 25% bigger than a US gallon, so UK mpg is correspondingly higher. Also the testing is presumably different, so numbers measured in the UK are not comparable with US numbers even taking account gallon size differences.
I assume the questioner is asking about US mpg? The Prius was there for sure in US mpg (just, at 51mpg), not sure about others.
One thing I am curious about - how many generations of process shrink is one of these machines good for? They talk about regular EUV and then High-NA EUV for finer processes, but presumably each machine works for multiple generations of process shrink? If so, what needs to be adjusted to move to a finer generation of lithography and how is it done? Does ASML come in and upgrade the machine for the next process generation, or does it come out of the box already able to deliver to a resolution a few steps beyond the current state of the art?
If you’re interested in this stuff Asianometry has lots of great videos. They’re not all on semiconductors, but he’s done a lot on this history, developments, and what’s going on in that world.
Took Amtrak from LA to San Jose last week, which was a good experience. The train runs along the coast for a good stretch, from Ventura through Vandenberg and then through the hills. It's certainly not the fastest way to go (~10 hours) but you can leave in the morning, have a couple of sit down meals on the way, watch the world go by, work if necessary, and be in San Jose in the evening. Probably not something to do regularly, but a great occasional change from flying.
Since Amtrak is often delayed due to freight having priority, traveling the other way is more risky from a scheduling point of view, since the train starts in Seattle and could already be heavily delayed by the time it gets to San Jose.
It's not an enforcement issue so much as it is a heavily exploited loophole. Part of the reason freight trains are so long is so that they can't fit in passing sidings. Since Amtrak does fit, they end up having to yield because the freight trains simply cannot.
Could this be fixed by legislation on max train length to ensure all trains fit in sidings? Yes. Will that legislation get passed? No.
This is correct but needs more explanation. What the commenter is alluding to is Precision Scheduled Railraoding ("PSR") [1]. Basically this means having really long trains with half the crew and cutting down on safety inspections to increase profits by spending more time delivering freight. It also gets around the Amtrak priority. Why fewer staff? Because you only need one engine crew for a train twice as long.
Increasing train length on tracks not designed for it is a safety issue. Think about it, you have a whole bunch of separate carriages. Some are turning because that's wher they are on the track. Others are going uphills, yet others downhill. All of these forces become a problem that arguably increases the likelihood of derailment, the kind of which we had in East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago.
The labor situation is so bad that there was the threat of a strike in the Biden administration. For what? Paid sick leave, mainly. Biden got Congress to use their powers to end a strike by "essential" workers and then quietly later went and partially conceded to their demands.
Retiring crews haven't been replaced so the labor is at dire levels, all to slightly increase profits. It was estimated that if UP conceded toa ll the union's demands it would reduce their profit by 6%. Not revenue, profit.
Having a enforced max length on any route especially those with commuter service is not a bad idea, it is the tendency of freight to scale up the number of cars as much as possible for efficiency, passenger services work better shorter with more frequent services.
Yes there are myriad other reasons Amtrak gets delayed, it is not like this is the only bottleneck they have, but that doesn't mean this is not also a key problem.
No idea how true/false the comments are, but one reason to lie would be to scapegoat someone else for Amtrak's problems. If an airline's flights were regularly delayed by 6-24 hours, they'd go out of business
I don't think anyone is outright lying. I think they are just not telling the full story. What that full story is though I have no idea, nor do I have any way to figure it out. (Any investigative reporters want to spend a year or two tracking this down? Beware that there probably isn't enough interest to pay for the time you spend)
From what people in the industry have told me, freight train management is no less scummy than any other kind of freight transportation management, and they continually make trains longer and longer despite nearly everyone’s objections. Some are miles long so there’s no way engineers can see the front of the train even with a gentle curve, and they’re taking hazardous cargo through populated areas.
Wasn't there a big train crash with hazardous materials on an understaffed train a few years ago? And a strike for more sensible working conditions that was struck down by Congress?
I love that the US moves so much freight by train rather than truck, but everything I hear about how trains are run in the US sounds terrible.
The infrastructure is horrifying and the railroads do everything possible to defer any and all maintenance. Practically every train arrives late, but the customers can't really do much about it (how else are you going to move 4 million pounds of coal?)
Yeah, kind of like when they put ‘style’ on the end of a product that copies the aesthetic of something without functionally being that thing— like a kosher-style deli or a professional-style stove— the mainstream democratic leaders are pro-labor-style politicians.
I've been out for a couple years and was just a code monkey anyway. But they did treat me poorly, and it was quite shocking seeing how the sausage was made.
The problem is, overtaking is one thing when you got two parallel rails and ample point switches.
But when you don't have them or only every 100km or whatnot, or any of the potential places (such as in a train station) just isn't long enough to accept and buffer a 3 miles long train... then good luck, there just is no physical opportunity for the faster passenger train to speed ahead, not to mention the absurd amount of energy wasted in braking and then re-accelerating that 3 mile freight monster.
Fixing this would be possible - either by limiting the maximum length of a train or by forcing the extension of parallel rail segments. The former makes logistics significantly more challenging plus it requires more staff (which is the real problem, long haul isn't wanted much these days, neither rail nor road), the latter is darn expensive and someone has to foot the bill - Congress certainly won't.
> ...not to mention the absurd amount of energy wasted in braking and then re-accelerating that 3 mile freight monster.
> Fixing this would be possible - either by limiting the maximum length of a train...
It can't be both. Splitting a freight train and then stopping and starting the smaller trains would take the same amount of energy as stopping and starting the single long freight train.
Unless they're deliberately moving empty freight cars to make it artificially long.
> Fun fact: by law, Amtrak has priority. Not that it matters much, even back when laws themselves mattered.
Are you sure about that? I've never looked up the law, but my understanding is that, for most (all?) of its routes, Amtrak is running on privately owned track, and, on such track, freight has priority.
(I'm surprised at the number of downvotes. The replies indicated that I'm wrong, which is awesome in the sense that I like riding Amtrak and want it to have priority, and so I understand the frustration; but I think that I cannot be the only one who has heard from every Amtrak rider they've talked to that freight has priority, and surely it's a good thing to seek an authoritative answer? Maybe it looked like I was rhetorically saying that someone was wrong rather than honestly seeking clarification.)
I've been told that there's a legal loophole where freight trains are built to be too large to fit into overtaking loops, and so don't need to use them.
My understanding is that as part of the Amtrak Improvement Act[1] Amtrak is given preference over freight rail, even on private track. However only the Department of Justice may enforce this, which it has done only once.
Fair warning I haven't read the text of the law in full, only heard this second hand.
Due to the history of Amtrak this is actually true. The railroads in America (while privately owned and operated) were built with much government subsidy. The railroad companies originally provided passenger service. Eventually, to ensure this service continued a law was passed that prohibited railroads from dropping passe nger service. After the rise of personal cars coinciding with the massive federal investment in car infrastructure in the 1950s with the interstate hughway system, passenger rail travel was in free fall in the late 60s and the railroad companies begged to be allowed to end passenger service. Congress stepped in and nationalized the passenger service exempting the railroad companies from their mandate to provide passenger service while requiring them to give passenger trains priority in scheduling. So, TL;DR passenger trains have legally mandated priority over the freight trains of the host railroad.
Working on trains is also often nice so you do not really lose much time. You can just do a normal workday at the train including lunch and then quit working for the day when you arrive.
I do that route all the time, "work from train" days before in-office events in SF are one of my greatest pleasures.
If I had one wish it would be a second daily Coast Starlight offset 12 hours from the current one. LA Union to SJ Diridon is roughly 9am to 8pm in both directions, so my second train would be the perfect night train from LA to SF.
I took the Amtrak Cascades from Seattle to Portland recently and was pretty impressed. It’d be a bit silly to fly, but it’s long enough that if I drove myself I’d be kinda tired when I arrived. On the train I got to nap and eat something. The boarding experience is great and the staff were pros. It’s not cheap though; I think it was about $90 each way for business class, and about $70 for coach. I plan on taking it to Vancouver BC next. :)
I think it's a pretty good compromise. I have tried in the past not to duplicate code at all, and it often ends up more pain than gain. Allow copy/paste if code is needed in two different places, but refactor if needed in three or more, is a pretty good rule of thumb.
And just like the rule that it replaced, the rule of three is now often interpreted as the "correct" approach always, while I still find reality to be more nuanced.
Sometimes you do have the domain expertise to make the judgment call.
A recent example that comes to mind is a payment calculation. You can go ahead and tie that up in a nice reusable function from the get go - if you've ever dealt with a bug where payment calculations appeared different in some places and it somehow made it in front of a customer you're well aware of how painful this can be. For some things having a single source of truth outweighs any negatives associated with refactoring.
On the other hand, just because you know you're going to have to refactor, doesn't mean you should start refactoring once you reach three; you might not yet know the ideal shape for this code until many more duplications.
The hard edge case is when you have a thing that needs to be duplicated along two axes. So now you have two pairs of things, four total. Four simple things or one complex thing.
If they were owned by Chinese companies, then is there some faint hope that Western companies can finally start making EVs that are no longer embarrassingly inferior to their Chinese counterparts?
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