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.
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Wouldn't this benefit everyone? Presumably the implications are far wider and more important than who makes the most profit from it.
Wouldn't this benefit everyone?
Not if capitalists have anything to say about it.
Many large discoveries by research in Australia in universities and CSIRO didn't get funding they needed in Australia, and the engineers and researchers simply found funding and moved to the United States. Then the US benefited from all that education and university research investment simply because the economy and startup funding was better.
I guess you know America is on a downturn if they see the same thing happening to them.
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.
If that's true, why aren't the Chinese, Japanese and Germans running around with amazing futuristic technology while "we're" over here still stuck in the stone age?
They manufacture it and sell it to us. The US led solar research. China organizations certainly contributed to research as well, but they're a much larger manufacturor than the US, despite the significant research advancement contribution by the US. US politicians failed to put any backing into domestic effects to manufacture solar and now it's second fiddle in an industry its research helped create. So, it's not in the stone age, because it's paying out the ears for it while other countries profit heavily.
They manufacture it and sell it to us.
So then we actually do "benefit from it", right? If we actually wanted to assemble the batteries, place thousands of components on circuit boards, whatever, we could.
So, it’s not in the stone age, because it’s paying out the ears for it while other countries profit heavily.
If it's so disadvantageous, why don't you start a company to manufacture solar panels or whatever in the US and become super rich? Why doesn't insert random rich person do so if it's so obvious? The answer is because it's probably not so obvious: lots of regulations, expensive labor, etc.
LOL have you seen where all our futuristic tech is manufactured? Why don’t you look into solar panels for a great example. Who’s making and selling them? Hm? Hint: it’s mostly not the US.
Also, if you think life in the US is “futuristic” compared to Germany and Japan, then it’s obvious you haven’t traveled there.
Because solar and chip making is pretty hard on the environment. We don't do it here cause you need to process the waste to make it less toxic, so instead we buy from places that don't care.
Other countries have lots of advantages over the US, but let's not pretend that it's a utopia over there. Japan is so overworked and makes immigration so difficult they basically don't have a next generation.
Germany is great and all, but they also have a lot of imports, heck they almost froze last year due to their over reliance on cheap Russian fossil fuels.
Why don’t you look into solar panels for a great example. Who’s making and selling them? Hm? Hint: it’s mostly not the US.
So somewhere else is doing the dirty, laborious part and we're getting the benefit?
The other person said "and not benefit from it". That's what I responding to. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that kind of outsourcing to places with exploitative treatment and lax environmental regulations is a good thing in general.
if you think life in the US is “futuristic” compared to Germany and Japan
I didn't say anything remotely like that.
Yes that notably cheap Japanese and German labor is going to undercut Boeing.
Japan has access to lots of cheap labor in Asia, and the Germans have Eastern Europe which has salaries a fraction of what Germans get.
Which is becoming rather untrue more and more. An good engineer in Wrocław costs about the same as in Germany. So many factories and offices there, it's hard to find people...
Source: am German, have a competing plant in Poland near Wrocław
This is what the US does to Swedish companies, only with the added benefit of running them into the ground (I'll never forgive what they did to Saab)
Oh please, who are you kidding? SAAB would have been dead at least a decade earlier if GM didn't try to save them. The only reason they lasted as long as they did was because of GM's injection of money into the company.
I never really understood why battery technology was so difficult until a friend put it in perspective for me. The only difference between a battery and a bomb is the rate they release their energy. Now I understand.
This is similarly true to a container of gasoline. The difficult part is we've yet to find a battery tech that comes even close to the same energy density. Gasoline has nearly 12000 Wh/kg, compared to the 200-500 mentioned in the article.
Thanks for sharing. I struggle with feeling such dread about the climate crisis. It's very helpful to see posts with positive stories like this. Such exciting possibilities for reducing fossil fuel usage and still having regular air travel.
There seems to be yet another new battery technology that will save the world every day. And yet, they never become available to the public. I really wish we could ban them from announcing until they can mass produce the battery and sell it to the public. It is almost as bad as all those articles about the "flying car that will be available next year" articles that have been appearing in magazines since the 1950's.
The issue is generally scalability. Lots of cool concepts but hard to mass produce profitability.
As this is Nasa, it's subsidized, but there should be even more government money going into energy storage as that is the biggest hurdle for renewable energy.