| ▲ | benchmarkist 15 hours ago |
| Profits and subsidies are privatized, losses are socialized. That's how the system is designed to work. |
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| ▲ | xorcist 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| People keep repeating this as if it was true. The Chinese and American battery manufacturers have received enormous subsidies. This factory is mostly financed on the private market, and some bonds from the EU investment bank, but comparably less. That hasn't helped. Subsidized competitors are hard to compete against. The German factory have indeed received some government subsidies. But that is not the factory with problems (at least not yet). |
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| ▲ | Cumpiler69 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | >The Chinese and American battery manufacturers have received enormous subsidies. Nobody said subsidies are THE problem. The problem is the taxpayer being burdened with the losses while footing the bill for those subsidies, when they should be seeing a return on their investment, while the only ones who saw that were the fat cats. I'm sick and tied of the race to the bottom without any accountability of "hey look, China is giving billions of state subsidies, so that means we should too". |
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| ▲ | ngrilly 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Not in that case: https://sifted.eu/articles/northvolt-bankruptcy-investors-cr... |
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| ▲ | Cumpiler69 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This. The system works just as intended. If the state is throwing free money around why wouldn't you pick it up and pocket it? Your job isn't to create jobs or return on investment, it's to funnel that free state money in the pockets of shareholders. For those looking for another similar example of European subsidized tech failure check the ST-Ericsson story. |
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| ▲ | Al-Khwarizmi 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | China also subsidizes the car and battery industry and in their case, it seems to be working just fine. So a blanket statement of "state subsidies = bad" does not tell the whole story. | | |
| ▲ | Cumpiler69 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | Of course, everyone is subsidizing their industries, especially the US and China. I never made a blanket statement that all state subsidized are bad, I just pointed out some cases of major EU failures which you took as a blanket statement. |
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| ▲ | huijzer 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a bit of a black and white way of putting it. Yes, much state money is wasted, but not all. Some of the money went to Swedish construction workers for example. | | |
| ▲ | Cumpiler69 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | >Some of the money went to Swedish construction workers for example Ah, the myth of trickle down economics. | | |
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