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Founders Fund Partner delian pushes back on the “China = engineering state, US = lawyer state” narrative: He argues that China excels at scaling existing manufacturing (solar panels, consumer electronics), but struggles with deep systems engineering and true creativity.

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31,771 views • 10 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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🇲🇽🇨🇳 China helps Mexico build the largest solar park in Latin America, supplying panels and engineering, but the park is 100% owned by Mexico's state electricity company. 🇺🇸🇪🇸 Under the neoliberal regime, Iberdrola (BlackRock) did dirty business with clean energy: bribing legislators to pass the energy reform, privatizing the grid and selling Mexico's own electricity back to it.

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Gigascale Founder and former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer says new solar startups will go after installation costs rather than compete with China on solar panels. "If you look at a solar farm, you lay down all this steel and put up all this framing for the panels. When that panel was the most expensive thing on the field, then [startups producing solar panels] made sense." "But solar panels are now the cheapest thing in the field. All the rest of the stuff costs more than the panel." "I think what we're going to see is startups saying, 'Let's rethink how we actually deploy solar from a form-factor and automation perspective. And just go after installation costs.'"

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Dan Wang (Dan Wang) is one of the sharpest thinkers on China and its relationship with the US. Dan spent six years living in China studying its manufacturing and technology ecosystem, and his new book Breakneck is the best framework I’ve seen for understanding US-China competition. I’ve read his annual letters and research on China for years and they’re some of the most thoughtful writing on how the country really works. In this conversation, we explore why it’s far harder for the US to rebuild manufacturing than for China to improve scientific research – a dynamic with implications for AI, national security, and investing. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:49 The Engineering State 2:41 Historical Roots of China's Mindset 4:25 Pluralism 7:42 US Spark vs. China's Prairie Fire 12:42 Who Will Adapt Faster? 15:09 How the US Can Revive Manufacturing 18:11 America's Many "Sputnik Moments" 27:42 China's Bleeding-Edge Cities 34:15 Comparing Work Ethic 38:27 ByteDance 51:00 The Lawyerly State vs. The Engineering State 59:56 China vs USSR 1:03:49 Fleeing China 1:14:18 The AI Race 1:19:33 Lessons from Huawei and Xiaomi 1:41:00 Kindest Thing

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