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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25152 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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It is by now common knowledge that Russian intelligence very nearly took over Deutsche Bank without anyone in the German government even knowing (or caring), and while pressuring the German financial regulator into pursuing a criminal investigation into the Financial Times' journalists trying to figure out why it didn't make sense.

What is less commonly understood (and in part only now being revealed) is what a combination of hilarious disaster and glorious victory the Russian intelligence operation in question was. Having stumbled onto Jan Marsalek, the co-founder of Wirecard (a longstanding fraudulent German fake payments startup), an autistic Austrian-Czech who was obsessed with secret agents and James Bond, while he was abortively attempting to extend his scam to Russia, Russian intelligence compromised him with the help of an ex-pornographic Russian actress and several "retired" FSB officials.

Over the years, Wirecard helped move (with Marsalek's full approval) the funds of sanctioned Chechens, questionable Libyans, and shady Russian-Israelis between East and West, with the help of ex-KGB fixer Stanislav Petlinsky and his Israeli financier son. They had under their control the darling of the entire German tech industry, a man praised by Merkel, and a company so overvalued it was genuinely attempting to buy Deutsche Bank. They had thoroughly taken control of Austria's intelligence apparatus, which meant they had unlimited access to classified intelligence from Western allies, the entire European border entry database and so on. And then it failed, because it could not locate 1.9bn Euros.

It turned out that a great deal of the FSB program, as it happened, had only tangentially to do with what one might consider the interests of 'Russia' the nation. Much of it - including large elements of the assassination program - had to do with the grift, the transferring of money, the profiting of various senior officials, and the fear that MI6 or the CIA would buy the information on who was making money in Russia (and how) from defectors like Skripal and Litvinenko. A competent FSB would have furnished Wirecard with the money needed for KPMG to sign off its audit (something well-paid accountants are always desperate to do) by showing proof of the 'missing' 1.9bn euros. But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.

A tragic tale. Marsalek is now an Orthodox priest in hiding deep in Russia. Its inhabitants, that great people of so many contradictions, live to fight another day. I'm excited to see what they come up with next.

But when it came to it, the FSB could not do this. The Russians, for all their immense capability and cunning, were so addicted to the grift that they were unable to salvage their own intelligence operation because they were too busy enriching themselves.

The hell are these people on about. We're supposed to believe they couldn't fudge some numbers in a bank's database with the help of not one but TWO countries spy agencies? I'm calling bullshit.

I hadn’t heard this particular story, but it absolutely tracks with the naive way that modern western leaders approach global politics. There’s just a weird thought that all they need to do is “be the good guys” and they win by default. Couple this with the idea that bad actors wouldn’t use subterfuge to get what they want and it’s a system that’s not hard to either work around or subvert. We expected Russia to just collapse when we disconnected them from the global exchange. We sneered at them rushing western stores to get the last goods before they closed. What we never ever seemed to consider is that Russia might well have had contingency plans for the sanctions they knew the west would impose, that they’d already created BRICs and could do just fine without us. We expected a short war tha5 they would lose any day now. Annnnd guess which side is lowering their draft age.

We’re in some sense victims of our own success. We have been so dominant for so long that we don’t think about how vulnerable our systems are or what a determined nation can do.

I’m trying to imagine how this statement would look if you applied half this scrutiny to the Russians.

What’s their excuse for failing to deal with “contingency plans” like the amount of money flowing into Ukraine? Was it not predictable that America would throw unreasonable amounts of capital at a problem as long as it didn’t spend American lives? That’s been our MO since at least 2001, if not earlier.

The counterpart to questioning the rationality of “be the good guys” is asking why being the bad guys is supposed to work any better. And the answer is the same for us as it is for them: no one frames it that way. We (and they) come up with some plan to achieve a goal. Then it gets labeled after the fact by commentators looking to score political points.

It’s not that I think “Boeing the bad guy” works better. I don’t think the morality of a country and its fate are nearly as intertwined as commonly believed. I put the concept in the same continuum as the idea that eclipses are signs from the gods. What works is smarts and tactics, and a large dose of willingness to take power. What I fear is that large swaths of people in the halls of western democracies tend to believe that the righteousness of a cause means it will eventually win. I think that’s a dangerous way to think because it creates a false sense of security. We’re defending Ukraine so we will eventually win (by the way, they’re short enough on fighters that they’re recruiting teens to fight) no matter what Russia has or does. We think it right that Ukraine get Donbas back along with Crimea. Except those are now considered under the Russian nuclear umbrella. Right has nothing to do with reality because we don’t exist in a Hollywood movie.

But the Russian strategy is every bit as out of touch with reality. It’s as if their people (or at least their deciders) failed to consider contingencies, other actors, and so on. Doesn’t that sound unlikely?

I think you’re skipping over the mundane reasons for the West to end up in this situation in favor of a grand narrative about moralism and hubris. And you do so while assuming that Russia is always rational, always determined, avoiding all these pitfalls.

Tangentially, I've seen the story being rounded to "Marsalek is an Orthodox priest" as you do a lot, but when the story broke there was nothing indicating that he actually has taken on the role, but just that he assumed the identity of some Orthodox priest, who probably knew and may or may not have had a choice in the matter, for the purpose of crossing borders (with some interesting implication that there is a larger scheme of rural clergy donating their personae to Russian intelligence for such ends). Village priest is not a role that a random foreign business bro can just slip into, for reasons ranging from the linguistic to the Russian Orthodox church being socially quite tight-knit.

Sorry, I did actually mean that as a joke, and the part about him being wrenched out of that life to run spies in England, too.

I don't have much to add, other than some fun excerpts from the first article for those who won't read the whole thing

Three years later, a British former undercover cop, who now works as a private investigator and goes by Jon, was hired to work for a client who had set up temporary residency at the Dorchester hotel, in London. The client was well built, with close-cropped hair and an even stubble. He was of Libyan background, but had grown up in France, spoke flawless English, and tipped the hotel staff with high-denomination notes. “He wanted countersurveillance on himself when he was in the U.K., to make sure that no one was following him,” Jon told me.

Jon doesn’t like the term “private investigator,” because he thinks it diminishes the scope of what he does. On an average day, he collects the travel histories and police files of five to ten targets, through contacts in the public sector. They don’t know his full name—they just know not to ask questions, and that they will be paid in cash. His clients include businesses, government agencies, and billionaires, and his duties range from spying on philandering spouses to helping international criminal gangs insure that a stolen passport can be used to get a murderer across a border. “There’s a lot that is very questionable that I can do, that I have done,” he said. “In the police, you have to have morals—or you’re meant to. That’s the whole point of being a police officer. And then you come out into the private sector and—let’s be honest—it really doesn’t matter.” For almost four hours, he spoke candidly, on the condition that I neither publish his full name nor describe him physically.

...

In the following months, the attacks on short sellers grew increasingly personal, and even violent. Fahmi Quadir was punched in the head by a masked man with brass knuckles while walking her poodle on the Upper West Side; she was knocked unconscious, and the assailant, who stole nothing, was never found.

It also appeared as if operatives were collecting detailed information on Nick Gold’s trades; in the next few months, all his leveraged bets were liquidated, with losses into the tens of millions of pounds. “My name was tarnished. Banks were now shutting me off, overnight,” Gold recalled. “My wife left me.”

If I read all that on some random substack, I wouldn't think twice about disbelieving and ignoring it.

Speaking of disbelieving, the authors of the second article are the same as the authors of the havana syndrome piece from last week, one I was as skeptical of as some others here. I'm genuinely not sure if / how much I should discount the content of the second article as a result - the Havana article does lay out its evidence in a way that makes the faulty inferences clear, while this new article directly states the main points, idk.

What part of beating up a short seller with probably $3 million under management feels fake to you?

Maybe she has more money but beating up the cranks in the financial market would seem to only raise attention versus squashing it.

Funny thing is her valeant short position didn’t even work. It quadrupled till it got the kiss of death of a Jim Cramer buy recommendation.

If she was actually any good she would have gotten super long valeant.

Okay, this bit here with "Jon" is sounding very Steele Dossier to me. You can totes trust this is 100% accurate! After all, he's a former spy! Why would he lie or make shit up when talking to us?

If a guy is telling me "I have no morals, I'll help murderers escape so long as they pay me enough", why should I trust that he's never ever going to fib the teeniest bit when selling me a story?

The story doesn’t need Jon. The ex-Libyan intelligence chief (who is quoted by name in the other article) discusses the operation mostly openly. Marsalek hired him to target short-sellers, he hired people like “Jon” and others to do it. The organized effort to attack short-sellers also isn’t fictive, as I said the German government literally opened a criminal investigation into the Financial Times for supposedly conspiring with short sellers to drive down the share price because they published articles questioning Wirecard’s accounting.

The thing about both this and the Havana Syndrome piece is that they obviously come from intelligence, meaning that someone in (probably the UK/US) government sent them this dossier and told them to publish it; otherwise these journalists would never have most of the information in the piece like when random Russian intelligence figures happened to enter or leave certain countries, precise meeting times, even references to historic CCTV footage that would have been collected for counterintelligence purposes. An implicit but unstated part of the story is that UK and US intelligence probably knew how compromised the Austrian security service was but used it to try to figure out what the Russians were doing; the problem was that the Russians were also aware that they knew and had so thoroughly compromised the Austrians that they were still actually able to get away with a lot under the nose of counterintelligence.

The Austrians have finally charged their ex-intelligence chief based in evidence they announce is from MI5 last week. The suggestion is that the guy, Ott, was Marsalek’s contact after he had been temporarily forced out of Orthodox priesthood and asked to be the handler for a Bulgarian-Russian spy ring in suburban England which British police busted a few months ago. But yes, it should be very clear that this is a specific side to the story.

The thing about both this and the Havana Syndrome piece is that they obviously come from intelligence, meaning that someone in (probably the UK/US) government sent them this dossier and told them to publish it;

If so, then the dossier was originally assembled, vetted, edited, approved, and ultimately released as a political op. The most significant thing that can be reliably concluded from the story is (further) evidence that western intelligence agencies carry out such political-narrative ops on their own citizens. I am surprised at the willingness to accept the story at close to face value, given all that we've learned in recent years.

Yeah yeah you can’t believe anything the government says etc etc. This is a trite, banal, useless, pointless, infantile, irrelevant and altogether worthless criticism. It says nothing and means nothing. Yes, I think the broad outline of events as described in the article is true. There is little reason to believe otherwise. Likewise, there are truths discussed in the Russian and Chinese state press. In this case, this has to do with a longstanding and very real series of events that have been unfolding for many years, mostly in public view. The real sheeple, as ever, question everything without believing anything, which means - of course - that they know nothing at all.

The real sheeple, as ever, question everything without believing anything, which means - of course - that they know nothing at all.

Not at all. We know this is an intelligence op, therefore it should not be trusted. That does not apply to everything. But now I'm surprised that you don't agree? Do you trust the narratives ("...unfolding over several years...") surrounding Trump as a Russian asset?

No, Trump was never a Russian asset, although a half-hearted attempt was made via Manafort. The IC largely ridiculed the Steele dossier even at the time, at least people I know who are part of it did.

And if they are deliberate leaks, that makes me even less willing to take on trust that all the story says is exactly as it happened.

I think it’s pretty likely things mostly happened as described, it’s just that the entire other side of the story is missing. US intelligence likely engages in a lot of similarly underhand action with our geopolitical foes, for example, which these guys or Bellingcat aren’t going to expose.

It does strike me as a push against the frame of the gaslighting Overton window that Western media continues to present Grozev/Bellingcat as an independent journalistic outfit rather than the intelligence agency mouthpiece that it obviously is. It would be one thing if they acknowledged the suspicions but argued against it, but there seems to be a universal consensus that to treat them as anything other than brave and resourceful citizen journalists, who happen to have a particular knack for uncovering dastardly schemes by America's geopolitical opponents using Google search and tea leaves, would just be giving air to enemy conspiracy theories.

Well, I suppose there are degrees of control. Obviously Bellingcat is very tightly integrated with Western intelligence and almost all its sources are from there, but that’s the nature of intelligence reporting; your source is either your intelligence agents or theirs, nobody is ‘neutral’ in that world. The agencies use it kind of like the associated press, it’s a source for the stories printed by various other mainstream outlets. But again, I don’t think anyone in that space would dispute that it’s essentially an outlet for what the CIA / MI6 etc are willing to disclose.

This story is a great encapsulation of two important phenomena:

  1. How utterly asleep at the wheel most Europeans were in regards to Russia, especially post-Crimea.
  2. How much more dangerous Russia could be if they got a handle on corruption. But alas, no dictatorship can really solve corruption since it's too beneficial to the leader at the top for maintaining his position.

These two points are circular. A complacent and lazy Europe leads to a complacent and lazy Russia where the priority is people enriching themselves instead of furthering national goals. That's why recent events are such a disaster for the west. Russia is adapting to foreign pressure, which means this kind of corruption is decreasing as a necessity lest they lose to the US and get color revolutioned into a failed state.

Russia is transitioning from authoritarianism to totalitarianism, which typically increases corruption, not decreases it. At the same time, Russia is devoting more resources to fighting the West, so it's entirely plausible that it's becoming both more dangerous and more corrupt simultaneously.

This really does not seem to track with the definitions of authoritarianism and totalitarianism I'm familiar with. Would you call the PRC totalitarian? Ukraine? Turkey? Ukraine is broadly similar to Russia on every relevant metric now, PRC has much more political control and state meddling in private life (which I'd consider the definitional core of totalitarianism), and Turkey seems only slightly better (and their crackdown on Kurds and Gülenists still exceeds anything Russia did so far in scope, though you might pin this on those groups being more determined than any opposition in Russia).

Totalitarianism is a more extreme form of authoritarianism. E.g. Imperial Germany during WW1 was authoritarian, while Nazi Germany in WW2 was totalitarian.

China was totalitarian under Mao, authoritarian with the Deng Xiaoping reforms, and is tilting towards totalitarianism again with Xi, although that might have paused (unclear at the moment). I wouldn't really call Turkey totalitarian yet. Ukraine was authoritarian, but have had freeish elections since the Maidan, although they have a ton of other problems and are by no means a consolidated democracy yet.

This looks a lot like degree of hostility of the US is the best predictor of your measure of totalitarianism. If we use the Wikipedia definition of totalitarianism as a baseline,

Varying by political culture, the functional characteristics of the totalitarian régime of government are: political repression of all opposition (individual and collective); a cult of personality about The Leader; official economic interventionism (controlled wages and prices); official censorship of all mass communication media (the press, textbooks, cinema, television, radio, internet); official mass surveillance-policing of public places; and state terrorism.[1]

Political repression of opposition is present in all (Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey), though I'd broadly say the degree is Turkey < Ukraine <= Russia << China. In Ukraine this got much worse since the war; while before it they only banned the communist parties and engaged in soft repression of others, after the war started they went after more or less the whole opposition. Meanwhile, while Russia did visibly crack down on some of the most promising opposition parties (ex. Navalny's, Nadezhdin's), some manifestly oppositional parties like Yabloko are still operational and occupy positions of power, and the biggest one (the Communist Party) could be called cozy with Putin's but not exactly aligned either.

None of them have a real cult of personality around the leader, though China is the only one to come up with a construct like "Xi Jinping thought" so it gets close; I don't think any of them have controlled wages and prices; in terms of official censorship once again China is way in front of everyone (being the only one with a Great Firewall and actual proactive censorship regime), but my sense is that there Ukraine currently is actually ahead of Russia since they are thinking out loud about even banning Telegram; China is the only one with mass-surveillance policing of public places; for state terrorism none of them score particularly highly but Russia might win with the occasional false flags associated with Putin's rule.

This looks a lot like degree of hostility of the US is the best predictor of your measure of totalitarianism.

This is backwards. The US has democracy as a big part of its ideology, and thus is naturally allies with most democracies and is inherently hostile towards most autocracies. However, it's not black and white; Saudi Arabia has long been authoritarian, and is creeping towards totalitarianism under MBS, yet they're still an important regional ally of the US.

Turkey < Ukraine <= Russia << China

Russia has also gotten worse since the war started. There's no real opposition. The closest thing to it died in a Siberian labor camp not too long ago. You're not even allowed to openly criticize Putin any more, which people like Girkin have found out. Ukraine has done a bunch of bad things too like postponing its election, but I'm pretty sure people are still allowed to criticize Zelensky without getting Girkin'ed.

methinks the Wikipedia definition is self-serving to some sections of the West, too. I think it is plausible there to be a totalitarian state presenting itself run by a committee without the Leader.

A better definition would concentrate on the degree of total control of the society, both private and public, or aspirations thereof. Instead of merely being satisfied by frustrating their political opponents in the public political life and being the boss, a totalitarian wants to use power of state apparatus to get rid of opposing thought.

The classical definition of the totalitarian/authoritarian distinction is that authoritarian regimes have non-state actors with real power which can act as a check on the state(eg the Catholic Church in Latin America), whereas totalitarian regimes don't tolerate any. Now obviously this is a definition that, for the USA, is rather self serving, but also cold war era Latin America genuinely didn't have a great leap forwards equivalent.

Yeah, that's not a bad definition. Do you have a link or source you can give me that defines it that way?

I don't really see any evidence that authoritarianism is the sole variable when it comes to corruption. It can be a factor but on the other hand the west is nominally democratic and it's ruling classes central ideology, DEI, is an ideology that exists entirely to enable grift. Lots of things can lead to corruption. In Russia's case the necessity of winning the war now that things have gone hot is reducing corruption. Can't win a war if your bombs are full of water and your intelligence gathering agencies are lying to you.

I would say that this 'being under pressure' is the bigger underlying factor when it comes to corruption. At least corruption that doesn't get caught quick and exists long term. That's basically the way that democracy and capitalism combat corruption when they actually function properly. If you're a corrupt business or politician you are going to have unhappy constituents or products that aren't competitive, they vote you out / don't buy your stuff. Authoritarianism is kinda like Monopoly where this pressure is removed. Though I think people overestimate the amount of power and freedom to act that authoritarians have, people still have the power to 'vote' via violence, but the stakes are a lot higher and coordination issues mean that this 'vote' is rarely exercised.

In the textbook definition of authoritarianism where one entity does have sole power to do whatever, like if a god came down to earth or something, this pressure is entirely removed though. This probably ties in with the idea that ,"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times."

I don't really see any evidence that authoritarianism is the sole variable when it comes to corruption.

It's easily one of the biggest factors, if not the single biggest factor period. Look at the corruptions perception index, and notice how many of the least corrupt countries are democratic, while many of the most corrupt are authoritarian or totalitarian. Look at the differences between Taiwan and China, or between the two Koreas. Same cultures, but different governing styles make a huge amount of difference. Look at Post-Soviet states that escaped Russia's orbit vs those that didn't, like Poland vs Belarus. The entire Ukraine conflict that's been going on since 2014 is in large part because Ukrainians want to be more like Poland than Belarus. DEI, while being a terrible ideology, is worlds apart from actual dictatorships like Russia or Venezuela or North Korea.

Dictators are never entirely secure, and totalitarian dictators can freely devote more of the state's resources towards maintaining their own positions than authoritarian ones can. They accomplish this largely through corruption.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

This is just a right-wing version of whig history, and relies just as much on cherrypicking historical datapoints as liberal whig history does.

Link just seems to be to a globalist ngo that ranks globalist countries positively?

These data sources are collected by a variety of reputable institutions, including the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

WEF and World Bank? really?

Just write your own list of countries you don't like and it'd have as much credibility.

Plenty of researchers use corruption perceptions in their research on country outcomes. Do you have a better metric you'd like to use?

If we can't agree on some underlying data then there's no point in continuing this conversation.

Look at the corruptions perception index, and notice how many of the least corrupt countries are democratic.

They're also geographically and/or culturally clustered together indicating that them all being democracies is a historical coincidence more than anything else. Also Nordics/Protestants being stuck up by-the-book types was a stereotype well before Europe started moving towards democracy.

Also Nordics/Protestants being stuck up by-the-book types was a stereotype well before Europe started moving towards democracy.

Less decisive historical observation than one may think, as the confound of comparatively democratic power structures in the Nordics goes all the way back before the French revolution. Things were meetings of free men since before the middle ages. When the Swedish realm adopted European style Riksdag of estates, they had a fourth estate of free land-owning peasants.

If states with elections can be authoritarian, and various forms of mnarchy, from feudalism to absolutism can be democratic, it's starting to sound like democracy is just the friends we made along the way.

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The east Asian democracies are quite far from the Western democracies, and many have similar cultures to eastern autocracies, yet the corruption of the autocracies is far, far worse. Again, look at South Korea vs North Korea, or Taiwan vs China.

That's communism vs. Non-communism, if anything (a system that pretends to be democratic, I might add), you even see it's echoes in the democratic Europe. There's also no shortage of corrupt democracies you're ignoring, and like I said, the lack of historical comparisons to when the non-corrupt countries weren't democratic makes this very low quality evidence.

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I wouldn't call Germany asleep at the wheel with regards to Russia. I would consider them turning the wheel as sharply as they could towards Russia.

The only surprising thing is that a crisis as immense as the current war in Ukraine was what was needed to wake up their leadership.

"Let's shut down some nuclear power plants and replace the energy with imported Russian fuel."

-Actual for-real recent German policy.

It's like they read Frank Herbert's bit about hydraulic despotism and decided to become the dependant helpless party in that exchange.

Well, the idea was more like "let's shut down all the bad energy (nuclear and fossil) and replace it with renewables".

The first was easy, the second was not, so here we are.

Really? Just before the Ukraine invasion, 50ish% of German natural gas came from Russia, accouting for roughly 25% of their total energy generation capacity, not to mention roughly a third of their oil (not counting other Russian allies). They laughed at Trump when he told them they were too reliant on Russian energy. Short of rejigging their economy to be entirely reliant on the Russian hydrocarbon teat, I cant think of a deeper national slumber.

It surprises me not in the slightest it took a war to (sort of) wake German political leadership to the dangers of their energy strategy- they are the same idiots who shut down their domestic nuclear power industry at the demand of uneducated Green Party morons, only to a) buy French nuclear power anyway, and b) mine a shit load more coal to make up for the shortfalls.

The post-war German political establishment is propped up only by the competence of their manufacturing sector, and as that slice of the economy falls under increasing strain, there appears to be a turbulent future in the offing.

uneducated Green Party morons

Funded by Russians.

I'm not convinced; I think following the money on environmental and socialist fifth-columnists leads back to Washington, not Moscow.

This is something I would like to hear more about.

The post-war German political establishment is propped up only by the competence of their manufacturing sector,

It's worth noting that China is coming for Germany too. Germany's trade balance with China gets more negative every year as China's manufacturing sector eats the world.

Coming next is automobiles. Without tariffs, Germany will lose most of its worldwide market share to China within the next 10 years. There's nothing special about German manufacturing that can't be replicated at much lower cost in China (and with much stronger network effects to boot).

There's nothing special about German manufacturing that can't be replicated at much lower cost in China (and with much stronger network effects to boot).

You might be right, but I wonder how sure of this we can be? Is there any reason why this might not be true?

I guess one thing I can think of is that China apparently can't copy TSMC or that Dutch Lithography company. Not yet anyway. Although I realize that's a somewhat different story.

Yes it’s true that China doesn’t dominate every industry right now. But follow the trend line.

Is there any reason why this might not be true?

QC. A lot of German-designed stuff is pretty convoluted and is banking on higher-than-normal precision in manufacturing to work properly; you tend to find that out pretty quickly when you buy their cars.

That's not to say that China can't do that, but just like salaries for [competent] software developers in India, it's going to cost you just as much for China to make high-performance parts as it is for you to source them locally (and the way to make those parts isn't going to suddenly walk off, and counterfeits aren't as easily going to make it into your parts stream)- turns out globalization works both ways. So getting them to do it instead is neutral at best.

And there are indications that the Chinese in fact cannot reproduce the most specialized parts because its manpower surplus meant people who could focus on that were out-competed (this is why polities that [can] depend on slave labor generally don't industrialize, and a manpower surplus is not meaningfully distinguishable from slave labor simply because the individual wages are so low). Which is why, despite Chinese expertise in industrial espionage, their attempts to actually build from the plans they steal generally don't end well, which makes them cost even more than it does Westerners. And when you realize how much Westerners spend developing these things...

Now, that isn't to say that advanced manufacturing will always redeem an overcomplicated shitty design that barely works in the first place (something the Germans have been historically, and are still to this day, guilty of), but it's arguably better than the alternative.

Though really, all the Western nations have to do to save their automotive sectors is to ditch the "we're banning the good cars by 203x" mandates. Which is part of why Tesla is mostly focused on, surprise surprise, using their engineering and advanced manufacturing expertise to widen their already-high profit margins even more by doing things like die-casting the entire car (something that will pay off, and another technology that can be licensed for other things, even if governments ditch the mandates).

Is Tesla’s corporate strategy now, in part, to get ahead of the West canceling the “ban all the good cars by 203x” initiatives? Does it look like that will happen?

“ban all the good cars by 203x” initiatives? Does it look like that will happen?

California, Washington state, Massachusetts, the EU, Canada, etc are banning the sale of ICE cars in 203x. Hypothetically it is happening. Maybe they'll push back the deadlines as we approach them.

Does it look like that will happen?

Given how foolishly and self-destructively governments acted in the face of 2020? I'm not holding my breath, though the governments that are about to replace the most foolish of them might punt (at least on a federal level; the Biden administration delaying the nastier EPA mandate until '28 makes sense for a couple of reasons and I suspect the other car-manufacturing countries are going to follow suit with punting- I question whether or not Japan ever will since the only thing less useful than a BEV compact car is a BEV kei car).

This is all just armchair speculation; but I think it lines up considering just how awful battery technology is at the moment. Either the mandates aren't reversed, in which case they never bother with a cheaper car and still manage to undercut every other automaker (who are still doing the "build a normal car, except with a battery" thing); or they are, and they need to drop the price dramatically in order to have half a chance competing with cars that are still objectively better (and having very few parts will help them significantly with that) and sandbag until better batteries come out.

Which... I'm not holding my breath about that either; electrochemistry is a harsh mistress.

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overcomplicated shitty design that barely works in the first place (something the Germans have been historically, and are still to this day, guilty of)

I just want to confirm this. Every company I worked for so far was in the business of making overfitted and overengineered clockwork software that went over time and over budget and tended to fall apart at the seams when any changes were attempted.

Germans cannot do things like agile, modular, minimum viable product or cost-efficient, it seems.

I don't think that's a particularly German problem. Bad software knows no borders.

I think you and Hyperion are agreeing with each other.

Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm just coming at it from the other side.

Given how insane their policies were, for all the reasons you listed, they should have never gone down that path; or, realized long ago that it was fruitless.

Given that they did do all those things anyway; yes, only something really shocking could have changed their minds.

Oops, posting too late at night. But yes, ze Germans are a weird lot politically speaking.

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