The US has invested a lot of money, lives, political capital & environment to become a big oil & gas producer.
One of it's potential weapons against China is that China imports most of it's oil & gas. China also has a few easy geographical choke points to prevent it from importing gas. Solar & wind plus electrical vehicles destroy this advantage.
So China has many reasons to push in this direction while the US is doubling down on it's bet, even while other historical oil countries like Saudi Arabia are diversifying away from oil.
I don't buy that it isn't in the US's strategic interest to diversify away from fossil fuels.
We know the shale oil boom wont last, that larger reserves are in other countries. The Us should be diversifying now, before it runs out. To be prepared. Eventually we'll just be back to beholding to some other country for oil.
It's like we were granted some breathing room and just squandering it, when we could be leaping ahead by developing other sources of energy.
> Corn destroys farmland & requires very high fertilizer & pesticide inputs, plus extra fuel to to apply all those - ask any old farmer but this one has a lot of sources
Also solar farms can easily be hidden. They don't need to be next to a public road way and you can put trees around them. They're also great for dual use land with small animals &/or certain crops.
I'm a huge fan of the ease of cleaning & repairing iRobots, especially the earlier models. I don't know if the competitors match that but I have preferred their simplicity & quality.
China competitors are always going to be tough to beat in terms of margins.
AKA - Microsoft is trying to layoff employees without getting more bad layoff press while they make record earnings.
A company where most employees work digitally with people across the world is requiring people to sit at a desk in a physical location. The irony is blinding & shows an utter lack of transparency by leadership.
I certainly saw engagement, collaboration, etc. going down once things switched heavily to video calls (even before COVID) rather than meeting in-person in various ways--especially among people you didn't already know.
Of course, in many situations, it's unavoidable. I'm probably not going to hop on an international trip at the drop of a hat--though I certainly attended events.
But there's some subset of people that just don't want to travel or go into an office at all and IMO they're mostly mis-guided.
I’ve had the opposite effect. Meetings where everyone is on video run so much better.
More on task, plus transcriptions & other features dramatically improve the meeting. I can more easily understand accents, read when people talk over each other, ai generated notes and tasks, and I can rewatch parts of the meeting by searching for something said. Also easy to detect who dominates the meeting and who might need to be included in talking more.
I'm not sure big in-person meetings in rooms are especially useful but eating with people, having discussions in small conference rooms, social events, etc. were. Big online meetings never engaged me much and I certainly almost never rewatched parts of a meeting. And latterly it was sort of "Who are these people" if I hadn't known them before.
I do agree that video conferences that have agendas, collaborative notes, and so forth matured during COVID (though we did them before) but don't require a video meeting.
Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.
Only semi-related but in office at a cubicle is the least productive environment I've ever seen for companies. I cannot personally take a leadership team serious if they care about productivity & fiscal responsibility when they have cubicle farms of more than 10 people in an area.
> Having done years in both settings, random non-work related discussions were always more prevalent in office type atmospheres.
Whether you realize it or not, these are team-building exercises. It brings people closer, sometimes too close (I slept with one of them lol), but overall this is a net plus for team dynamics.
It's really hard to bond with people exclusively through chat. Especially if you hide behind an anime avatar or refuse to switch on your video.
I don't need to bond with you. I don't need team-building exercises. I have been working for over a decade and made 0 friends at the office. I'm an easy going guy, though, no complaints or anything. Just keeping it professional is good enough. A bit tired of the whole "we are a family" thing really. Plenty of successful open source projects are successful and driven by people working together remotely and behind avatars.
How common are cubicles now? I haven't seen one in nearly 20 years. And I find open-office environments kind of discourage non-work chat because you know you're disturbing others for no good reason.
One of it's potential weapons against China is that China imports most of it's oil & gas. China also has a few easy geographical choke points to prevent it from importing gas. Solar & wind plus electrical vehicles destroy this advantage.
So China has many reasons to push in this direction while the US is doubling down on it's bet, even while other historical oil countries like Saudi Arabia are diversifying away from oil.
It should also be noted that many Chinese companies are selling at a loss or very low margin, especially the electric car companies. https://www.reuters.com/investigations/china-is-sending-its-...