Are either of those numbers relevant? US auto companies heavily outsource component manufacturing to many, many other smaller companies. Seemingly you’d want to compare to compare the supply chain included job numbers along with the number of cars.
Disagree strongly on the soundness of the reasoning. Divesting themselves from manufacturing facilities, equipment, and skilled personnel has been a slow motion trainwreck for the big three US auto manufacturers. It opened them up to competition from Tesla and others. Tesla, who make the majority of their own parts here in the US.
Country of origin is what I said: "Tesla, who make the majority of their own parts here in the US."
And is the relevant measure, as all auto manufacturers employ job shops for various parts.
I don't care if Tesla or Honda manufactured a part in a building under their logo. I care that they invested in US infrastructure and paid US citizens to build the car I drive. That's what country of origin measures.
Heaven forbid we have to fight another war and all the factories and skilled tradespeople are in Mexico or Canada.
But that wasn’t my point. My point is that Tesla buys the parts and assembles them. They don’t build the parts. Just like VAG for example (who also assembles, and doesn’t build. They’re actually pretty interesting because they insist on multiple vendors in multiple regions for each part)
And my point is that they do not "manufactures/assembles about as much as any other western car company", as you claimed, as roughly 70% of the parts for their entire fleet are made in the US while other manufacturers are hovering at or below 30%.
We can keep going back and forth. It doesn't change the numbers.
China allows these billionaires to exist as long as they play ball and toe the party line, because China still owns a controlling share in every Chinese company that exists.
> Ma is an icon in China’s tech industry, one of its most successful and recognizable figures at home and abroad. He was speaking weeks before Alibaba subsidiary Ant Group, owner of the world’s largest digital payments platform, Alipay, was due to go public in Shanghai and Hong Kong. It would have been the biggest initial public offering anywhere in the world. On November 2, 2020, a week after his speech, Ma was summoned for questioning by the same regulators he’d challenged from the stage. Days later, Ant Group’s $34 billion stock market listing was suspended. For nearly three months, Ma disappeared from public view.
Why is it a bad thing that wealthy people are kept in check and have to follow laws? Or conversely, why is it a good thing that wealthy people can control the state, like in the US? I think the US being a plutocracy with only a veneer of being a democracy is nothing to be proud of.
You're jumping to some pretty extreme conclusions, I'm not in favor of plutocracies or autocracies and I think everyone should follow the law.
I come from an ex-communist country myself and I can tell you that what the political class was doing back then was definitely not "for the people". If you were part of the political elite (or a boot-licker) you had access to fancy things like cheese and chocolate, got to travel outside of the country, could occupy a good job, and other benefits.
I've seen corporations & billionaires run out of control like in the US where political bribery is legal and the government ends up catering to the 0.1% and not the majority of their constituents, and I'm not a fan of this, though I don't think the problem is democracy.
Okay but China is in no way comparable to ex-Soviet countries. You can't lazily lump them together just because of a label. There's a reason why PRC as a state still exists today, and it's not just because the government holds power.
The Chinese government enjoys massive support, mostly from poorer rural populations. Western views don't quite believe it, and think it's all an excuse to hold power, but they take the notion of not letting rich people take over the state, quite seriously, especially nowadays.
> China allows these billionaires to exist as long as they play ball and toe the party line, because China still owns a controlling share in every Chinese company that exists.
That's not different on the West. At least in China you know how much the government owns. In the West it's decided every year by unstable politicians.
It's entirely different, since this doesn't happen in the West. When did a billionaire get disappeared for re-education in the West last time? When was one forced to stop an IPO or sell their shares?
Wrong. The key point of communism is that everyone contributes to society as much work as they can and gets as much goods as they need. So money become unnecessary. In software world, I would say open source software ecosystem definitely looks like communism. When installing Linux, you install communism.
That is the key component of all communist countries we have had experiences of it but in theory you could see a country adopting a communist constitution and multiple parties fighting over elections to govern and decide on the specifics. So it is not really a key component of communism.
Human greed makes it so that it wouldn't last for long though.
That just sounds like a remix of "real communism has never been tried". Lots of things are possible in theory, but in practice a big part of why anyone would describe a certain country as "communist" is due to that country being a one-party communist state. If in practice a multi-party democracy and economic communism mix about as well as oil and water, a country still being a single party is relevant.
You can split hairs about marxist-leninist communism and politburos and some sort of pure economic communism, but that mostly seems like pedantry.
But that is still not what defines a country being communist. Just a dictature pretending to implement communism.
Your point is that all red cars with a prancing horse logo are Ferrari. What I am telling you is you will find plenty of red pontiac fiero and toyota MR2 looking like Ferrari up to the prancing horse logo from very far away but when you go much closer or hear them revving it quickly become obvious these are body kits on top of cars that don't have a single genuine Ferrari part inside.
I mean what on earth is an automaker doing with 700,000 employees?
General Motors employs 163,000[1]. Ford employs 177,000[2].
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GM/general-motors/...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/numbe...