The German car companies are struggling intensely against Chinese competition, everywhere outside of the US, and especially in China. The Chinese electric cars sell for 3 times less than the German ones in EU. The Chinese also invested heavily in e tech. The Germans? Not so much.

Heh, it was bought by BMW in ‘94.

I was under the impression tidal was mostly tapped out because any half-decent location has already been turned into a power plant.

My baseline expectation is some opposition to any new energy infrastructure.

Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.

Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.

And leveraging fusion research to rethink how drilling is done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8sjdOjNxIE

> baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes

That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.

If demand spikes nuclear power plants aren’t fast enough

The already use it and are not impressed.

AI wears out quickly if you have special demands.

Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.

Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.

Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.

https://hbr.org/2001/10/first-mover-disadvantage

They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.

Well, not really. Investing in heating homes or powering light bulbs is, outside of extremely extreme situations, always a good investment, because people will always want to do that.

AI is also just super young, has apparently zero mote, requires insane amounts of hardware that basically becomes useless after a couple of years, and has promised, over and over, the AI revolution is just around the corner multiple times without ever delivering.