Chinese carmaker behind Volvo and Lotus ships first two satellites for planned IoT ‘OmniCloud’ Chinese industrial conglomerate The Geely Group has completed work on the first two satellites of a planned constellation designed to help power self-driving cars and other services Geely is best known in the west for having acquired Volvo in 2010 and taking a majority stake in Lotus in 2017. It makes a wide variety of …
Comrade, are you casting doubt on the gloriously efficient space vehicle building being undertaken in the peoples paradise? Two months between the statement announcing a new factory and first delivered vehicle is easily enough time, our electric hand cart facility was operational in only one month!
So you won't be buying clothes or household items any more then ?
Not doing business with China is not an option until you find another country that makes what you need, and there are few countries outside of China that make clothes, light bulbs and all the rest of the tat you have in your drawers and closets. Good luck finding a fly swatter that is not made in China.
There are some options, but not many. So I think you'll find that you'll continue doing business with China anyway.
Pascal, it might help if you knew what you were talking about. All sorts of manufacturing already moved to (or already existed in) other countries.
Vietnam is a popular location right now, everything from Samsung phones to underpants come from there.
All we'll see is an acceleration of the moves away from China that rising costs and threats of tariffs had already kicked off.
A certain American businessman already has several dozen whizzing around the earth...
... but then I suppose the PRC must develop a rival so they can ensure devices distributed in their country can only connect to their satellites (which, of course, will have a free backdoor to the CCP, who'll no doubt relish the prospect of introducing even more Orwellian surveillance of their population)...
Seems obvious that, if China has a communist political regime, it also has a vibrant capitalist society on the rise. Geely is going to run out of fingers to put in pies at the rate they're going. It's all over the place.
Which is not really something I like very much. I prefer a company that centers its attention on doing one thing well. Making cars is not trivial, the tech is constantly evolving and if you're wasting money on theme parks then you might not allocate enough for research. I don't like that idea.
And 500 satellites a year ? Have they not heard of the Kessler syndrome ? If we keep having companies dream up satellite fleets by the hundreds, stargazing difficulties will be the least of our problems.
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The goal of the Chinese Communist Party is the perpetuation of the Chinese Communist Party as the controlling entity of China. The party leaders decided that being "capitalist" was a better way of retaining power over the long term, so they did that. Happy people with cash in pocket are less likely to engage in counter-revolutionary activities, you know.
So all of our journeys by road can be tracked all the time - doesn't matter whether by governments or commercial interests - they'll ultimately come to work hand in hand if there's money or power (or both) in doing so. Add AI to analyse the resulting data and anyone going anywhere exceptional from the mass norm will be flagged by an inscrutable black box machine and potentially "investigated".
No, this is not just a dystopian nightmare - it's actually starting to happen.
The trouble is that far too many of the population are more interested in being able to show where you have been, have WIFI in their car or have it phone the garage to arrange a service and all that crap than have any interest in the consequences. Whilst this sorry state of affairs continues apace and there is realistically nothing that can be done to stop it. There is no regulation and as we have seen with the data grabbing by the likes of Facebook, once it has started, you cannot stop it.
It is the users of this shite that are sucked in by "clever stuff" thinking that it is cool and of benefit to them that are the problem. The sad reality is that the majority simply do not give a toss as long as there is an app to do something. It is left to the dwindling minority of old timers or people who understand to bang there heads against a blancmange in despair.
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