Tag Archives: politics

Ubiquitous Battery-Powered Vehicles

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These need things; here’s a partial list of Critical Items and some problems associated with their acquisition.

With respect to batteries, the raw materials—lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, among others—are expensive to mine and destructive of the environment to mine. Both the metals themselves and the mining tailings are highly toxic and expensive to handle and to dispose of.

Refining those materials comes with its own problems:

[The People’s Republic of China] processes some 70% of the world’s lithium and cobalt, and 99% of the manganese, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. [The PRC] also dominates the market for the parts that go into batteries, such as cathodes and anodes, as well as the production of batteries themselves.

And this:

[The] majority of motors used in today’s EVs rely on permanent magnets, which produce a constant magnetic field that helps spin a motor’s rotor and, in turn, power the wheels.
But these magnets require costly rare-earth metals such as neodymium and dysprosium. As with battery ingredients, the dominant supplier is [the PRC], and producing the metals can cause pollution

That makes us dependent on an enemy nation for our economic welfare.

On the other hand, there are such things as AC induction motors. These are a 19th century invention and are ubiquitous in today’s household appliances. However.

[They are] less efficient. That can reduce a vehicle’s driving range unless battery storage is boosted.

That increased battery dependence would make us even more dependent on that enemy nation for the materials. Aside from that, induction motors also take a double potful of copper, and copper mining is destructive of the environment.

And this: the electricity distribution infrastructure needed to for recharging the batteries doesn’t yet exist, and the current grid already is nearly fully occupied just handling today’s household and business loads.

And this: the production of electricity depends on inconstant solar and wind facilities, on fossil fuel (reliable and cheap, but currently under attack by the Left), and on nuclear power (currently hugely expensive to produce, with the building of additional nuclear power facilities even more expensive due to enormously expensive over-regulation).

The root problem (to use a phrase), then, is to get government out of the way of fossil fuel use and out of the way of adding nuclear power reactors to the electricity distribution grid. And expanding the grid to handle the increased load.

Red Lines

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President Joe Biden (D) is meeting today with People’s Republic of China President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G-20 meeting occurring in Indonesia. Supposedly, on the Biden-Xi agenda will be Biden’s desire to exchange red lines with Xi—each to learn the other’s.

I’m skeptical of the utility of such an exchange.

The problems with Biden and Xi exchanging red lines are two: Biden will respect Xi’s and Xi will not respect Biden’s, and Biden will not enforce his while Xi will enforce his forcefully in the unlikely possibility Biden does stray.

And one more: what would Biden do if his red lines conflict with Xi’s. It’s clear what Xi would do.

Update: In the realization, Biden was too timid even to mention the idea of red lines. All he had were some bland words of concern regarding “Taiwan” and the Taiwan Strait. Not a syllable about the PRC’s seizure and occupation of the South China Sea and the PRC’s seizure, occupation, and militarization of so many South China Sea islands that are owned by other nations rimming that Sea (even if that ownership often is disputed among those nations). Not a minim about the PRC’s aggressive behavior in the East China Sea and the associated threats the PRC makes toward Japan.

Useful Talks

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The US and the Republic of China this week began direct talks regarding pushing our trade and general economic relationship.

The US and [the Republic of China] are set to begin two days of face-to-face meetings in New York on Tuesday aimed at strengthening trade and economic ties at a time of ramped-up tensions between Washington and Beijing.

It also would be useful for the US to greatly strengthen our political ties with the RoC, as well as sharply increase our defense relationship with, and arms sales and transfers to, that nation, followed by SecDef Lloyd Austin and CJCS Mark Milley traveling to the RoC to meet with Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng and Chief of the General Staff Chen Pao-yu, followed in turn by President Joe Biden traveling to the RoC to meet with President Tsai Ing-wen.

In the alternative, it would be nearly as useful for those meetings to occur at the Pentagon and in the Oval Office of the White House.

Why Do the Workaround?

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NVIDIA Corp is busily looking for ways to circumvent newly enacted rules barring export of computer chips and chip technology to the People’s Republic of China.

Nvidia Corp has begun offering an alternative to a high-end chip hit with US export restrictions to customers in China, after the new rules threatened to cost the American company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Nvidia said the new graphics-processing chip, branded the A800, meets US restrictions on chips that can be exported to China under new rules rolled out last month. The chip went into production in the third quarter, the company said.

On the other hand,

According to a memo Nvidia sent to its channel distributors last Thursday, the A800 has the same computational performance but a narrower interconnect bandwidth, the capacity of a chip to send and receive data from other chips, crucial for training large-scale AI models or building supercomputers.

It’s not the data rates, though, that matter; it’s the computational techniques and the technology used to implement those techniques that are important.

NVIDIA claims,

The A800 meets the US government’s clear test for reduced export control and cannot be programmed to exceed it.

This is disingenuous. The chip can be reverse-engineered to learn how the computational techniques are achieved. Indeed, simply programming the chip—accepting, arguendo, NVIDIA’s claim about programmability—would be a useless enterprise when the goal is to gain the technology itself.

It’s true enough that it takes some little time to relocate manufacturing/assembly sites and to move supply chains. However, why should NVIDIA or any American company, especially our technology-based companies, do business with any PRC company beyond a—adjusted apace—period of transition away from that nation?

Why would an American company be so willing to transfer, or risk transferring, American technology to an enemy nation by doing business with that nation or any business domiciled in it?

Ranked Choice Voting

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In a Sunday letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, a correspondent had this, in part, in supporting Alaska’s ranked choice voting system:

In Alaska’s old system, like the current one in Pennsylvania, the general-election candidates are decided in partisan primaries by a small number of extreme voters.

This is a disingenuous rationale for RCV. No one kept the rest of the partisan primary voters from coming out to vote, in Alaska, Pennsylvania, or any other State. In actuality, those stay-at-homes cast their votes by abstention. The outcomes are their choice as much as they are the choice of those who cared enough to come out and vote.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) won her primary contest against a long-standing incumbent by collecting the majority of a very small number of primary votes cast. She then won her seat in the House by collecting the majority of an almost as small number of general election votes cast.

RCV does nothing to correct that laziness.