We're arguing the same thing I think. Hard work should be compensated with appropriate wages and living conditions, manual labourer or office worker or whoever. Ideally nobody should work, but until we build that work this is the one we've got. Labour is always morally "wrong" under capitalism because it is definitionally exploitative.
I mean ostensibly you're right, Americans absolutely cannot and will not do low paid heavy manual labour. I think the point is that it's not ridiculous to expect somebody supposedly on "the Left" to make the leap that maybe nobody should be doing low paid heavy manual labour. This is just classic socdem labour aristocracy spoils of empire type shit, that it's fine slave labour happens, just not here.
The environmental impacts of this dam were immense, as were just the like impacts on real people. Millions of people were moved to newly built cities or existing cities because their homes were flooded. Entire cities were dismantled. It was an absolutely massive project that unequivocally made the lives of millions worse (at least in the short term and watching their homes be flooded intentionally). Granted taming the Yellow River is a massive feat, and the power this thing generates is insane, but there are plenty of legitimate critiques to be made.
Nothing Ever Happens meets Trump 2.0. Honestly this is beautiful stuff, Trump blowing up the Atlantic alliance because of the Mercator Projection. Gerardus Mercator, welcome to the Resistance.
Feels like we sort of passed over the massive news of the Northvolt (Europe's only EV battery producer) collapse a few weeks back, so I'm going to re-up it here to highlight how monumentally fucked the European automobile industry is long term. Not exactly news to anybody here that's been paying attention, but the staggering mismanagement of what is so obviously a key and strategic piece of European industry is perhaps still baffling. The article's name is "The Northvolt dilemma: can European EVs avoid relying on Asian batteries?", and as the Betteridge law of headlines states, the obvious answer to this question is "No."
Two months before Northvolt filed for bankruptcy in the US, Robin Zeng, known as China’s “battery king”, had a quick but grim answer as to why European battery makers were struggling to make good products. “They have a wrong design . . . they have a wrong process . . . and they have the wrong equipment. How can they scale up?” the chief executive of CATL told Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s $1.8tn oil fund. “So almost all mistakes together.” The bleak assessment from the world’s biggest electric vehicle battery manufacturer captures the scale of the failure for the industries behind the critical technology for Europe’s decarbonisation, leaving governments, companies and investors at a loss as to how to recraft the continent’s strategy to compete with China.
Northvolt’s demise means the battle for dominance of the European market is likely to play out between Asian battery makers. LGES and SK On both have European plants, in Poland and Hungary respectively, while CATL has a factory in Germany and a second site in Hungary due to begin production next year. But Tim Bush, a Seoul-based battery analyst at UBS, said there was little prospect at present that the Asian battery makers would be able to help the EU to meet its target for 90 per cent of the continent’s EV batteries to be produced locally by 2030. Bush noted that Korean battery makers were already paring back their investments in Europe, having invested billions of dollars in plants in North America that have been running at low utilisation rates because of lower than expected consumer demand for EVs. Potential Chinese battery investments on the continent were also likely to be complicated by the ongoing trade dispute between Brussels and Beijing over EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, he added. “The Koreans are not expanding, the Chinese have suspended construction and Europe’s new entrants are dropping like flies,” said Bush.
With European start-ups still behind in their ability to manufacture batteries at scale, industry executives say the only solution may be to continue their reliance on Asian participants until homegrown companies can absorb technology knowhow on battery chemistry, mass production and equipment manufacturing. “We need to find a deal with China because we won’t be able to compete . . . without the support of the Chinese companies that control the mining industry, chemicals, refining and their capacity and competence,” Luca De Meo, Renault’s chief executive, told reporters last month.
So basically, the Europeans destroyed their only chance of domestic battery consumption by epic mismanagement, and their acquiescence to USAmerican empire means they're fucking up their opportunity to draw Chinese EV investments into Europe proper due to tensions and sanctions, and the US/South Korea can't even begin to supply the necessary battery supply for the EU, so their car industry is basically fucked. The USAmerican destruction of European industry proceeds apace...
Source: https://archive.is/4Ys7n
Some pretty wild footage. The prison Luigi is being held at has the inmates in uproar, and they basically do a live television interview about Luigi's prison conditions. The news anchor is able to interview inmates live because they're just shouting across the fence; lots of chants of "Free Luigi." Luigi is probably already 50% of the way there to leading a prison riot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCml-w9MQ7Y
Just want to point out that whoever the person is that killed the healthcare CEOscum absolutely knew what they were doing. Today is the tree lighting in Rockefeller Center, so there's a fuck ton of tourists out. They knew that the best way to get around the city is on bike, which they used to flee the scene right into Central Park. You can get there way faster on bike than anything else. And they knew that in Central Park, specifically in the forested area of the Ramble, there are few cameras and many places to hide where they could change clothes and then blend back in with the massive crowds hitting the city today. Also apparently used a suppressed pistol, and knew exactly which door the CEO would be coming out of/when to be there. Impressive. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that this assassin gets away with this. Trump assassins take notes.
Please Israel please invade Ireland please god it'd be so fucking funny if Israel tried to invade Ireland I will personally join the Irish Army just to fight Israel and draw so many stupid resources away from Palestine into some ridiculous Irish quagmire please Israel please
I mean the obvious answer to this nerd is that the world of Dune is distinctly not capitalist. The empire is a feudal institution, planets are personal fiefdoms, and all those in positions of power are not concerned with capital or money so much as they are prestige and power. The spice trade on Arrakis is more similar to something like the Chinese imperial salt monopoly (a state backed monopoly where most of the rents were used to fund the imperial coffers) than resource extraction under capitalism, albeit a Chinese salt monopoly that involved the Chinese colonising a distant land and using it for the sole purpose of salt extraction. The state in Dune is not concerned with capital formation or expansion, the nobles are not concerned, and while there are certainly merchants and traders (as there are in most polities) they are tangential to how the system operates and are not the ones who determine state policy. A "real universe" does not imply that capitalism exists in all places at all times, this guy is just too enmeshed in capitalist realism to understand that the kind of stuff he's saying only makes sense in a capitalist context.
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thethirdgracchi
joined 4 years ago
Wow, I can't believe they build 10,000 new apartments just for show so they can take tourists on tours through all 10,000 empty apartments and that they 100% will not use these to house citizens, crazy that it's all just fake. Just shows you how crazy the North Korea gommunist regime is.