> Over the past few years foreign carmakers in China have been flattened by local rivals such as BYD that have fast become world leaders in electric vehicles. As the Chinese market has gone electric, foreign carmakers’ share of it plummeted from 62% in 2020 to 35% last year. VW has lost its position as the top carmaker in the country. Last year it sold 2.9m cars in China, down from 3.9m in 2020. Only around 200,000 were EVs.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/12/04/to-halt-their-...
> because of banning Russian gas
That is the symptom. The real reason is the lack of diversification from Germany, assuming that hard discount would last forever.
The biggest VW market is china.
Just to point out, in 2020 one every 20 vehicles sold globally was a VW in China. VW sold more than twice of Tesla at its peak in China alone.
And VW has US plants so it's not that impactful, not different than us automakers woes.
Sadly true in the USA. The number of people working in games is dropping like a rock. Maybe in Europe.
I've seen this idea discussed by others, but I don't know any pithy slogans for it. (Unfortunately, it's the ideologies with the catchiest sound-bites which tend to dominate in the "marketplace of ideas".)
Gamedev is different, since even games from 20 years ago (e.g. Half-Life 2) require a higher-spec computer to develop than to target. The games you can make on a 20-year-old potato are limited: for those, I can see how the "means of production" idea might be more applicable.
I don't think myself wise enough to know how to fix this, and given that fact I certainly don't want to rule; but I can at least point out the problem.
Like, it's certainly easy to point out that there are things that aren't being done efficiently, but finding the balance on how to prioritize the right efficiencies is the why society exists.
I don't want to structure everything to support my good ideas: I want to structure everything to support everybody else's good ideas. We can surely do better than the status quo, which is to structure everything to support a few billionaires' bad ideas. (Why are the only business models for the web "gatekeep" and "surveillance advertising"? Why are we burning valuable hydrocarbons when we orbit a star? Why is the pornography industry so abusive? Why are our social lives mediated by the anorexia rectangle – what happened to local third spaces? Why do we even have the anorexia rectangle – what happened to personal computing? When everyone knows what's wrong with the municipal plumbing, including the people whose job it is to work on it, why is nobody permitted to fix it? Why are so many resources being poured into generative AI to solve problems that we already have cheaper solutions to, if only they were permitted to be be implemented? Why war?)
I do not labour under the delusion that I can fix any of these issues, or would be able to fix them if I were "in charge" (whatever that means). But I know that these problems are not intrinsic features of the universe: they can be fixed in principle.
Why do you need a new battery? I usually unplug old batteries in old laptops and just use them with a cord.