this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
382 points (96.8% liked)
Technology
59587 readers
3197 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You didn't say that, you just said "benefits" in general as though you were talking about all the benefits. I was just responding to what you wrote: that was my point.
Fine though, now I understand you were just talking about a part of the potential economic benefit of manufacturing those products. In the future, you could make these kinds of misunderstandings less likely by being more specific.
Is it your position Solar city 1) currently manufactures its own solar panels and 2) doing so is currently profitable and the business is thriving? Because as far as I can see it's not even clear they're still manufacturing solar panels. They had a deal with Panasonic but Panasonic exited a year or so ago, presumably because they couldn't get enough of a compensation for their investment even with the subsidies. Even at that point, it seems like they were just assembling components at the most, they weren't doing anything like fabricating the chips themselves.
"A New York State Comptroller’s audit found just 54 cents of economic benefit for every subsidy dollar spent on the factory, and external auditors have written down nearly all of New York’s investment. Most of the solar-panel manufacturing equipment bought by the state has been sold at a discount or scrapped." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigafactory_New_York
Regarding effects after Tesla acquired Solar City: "By 2019, Tesla's solar panel market share was falling, prompting the company to cut its sales force. Revenue from Tesla's energy generation and storage operations from January to September 2019 fell 7% from a year earlier to $1.1 billion." — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SolarCity
My take away is Musk tried to milk as much as he could from the subsidies and generally for society the thing was a net value loss. That's in line with my conception of how he operates.
My comment did not say that the US did not benefit. My first comment did not even use the word "benefit" or any of it's varants. I've stopped reading your comment here, as you obviously are not doing people the curtousy of reading theirs.
My mistake, I thought you were the person I originally replied to. My post was also specifically criticizing how they said we didn't benefit:
"Quick, let’s sell this US funded tech to the Chinese or Japanese or Germans and not actually benefit from home grown research. This has happened so many times over the decades it’s disgusting."
I'm not sure why you'd reply to my post if you're talking about something different, but I'll admit I assumed responses wouldn't be non sequiturs.
Wow, what a crazy coincidence. You stopped reading right before the strong counterargument. Seems to happen a lot on the internet, people just randomly get bored right at that point or find some other reason to be offended and blame the other party.