No, it's never been able to compete on the market in terms of cost per kWh without massive amounts of government money. Just try building a nuclear power plant. Without this funding, no bank would give you credit, no insurance would insure you or any bank stupid enough to finance you. And alternatives are only getting cheaper, while trying to deal with the enormous risks continues to highten the costs of nuclear.

And that's not even talking about the enormous hidden costs off loaded on exploited people who have to mine the uranium. Or on future generations who are forced to take responsibility for nuclear waste in the only realistic way: actively guarding ever more and ever larger high security buildings full of poison (yes, the toxicity is just as problematic as the radioactivity) and hoping really hard against probability, that no natural or human made disaster will ever strike in basically all eternity.

it seems like differences in worldview stem from a disregard of the universal ethical principle

and it makes sense then that common ground cannot be found when opposing viewpoints are rooted in incompatible principles.

That's a very normative and idealist worldview, that itself fails to regard other, opposing principles and thus doesn't live up to the standards it pretends to set. In reality, differences in worldview often have material reasons rather than ideological ones. For example all the brilliant dialectics of Hegel ultimately amount to him embracing the Prussian monarchy as the ultimate end result of history. The final goal of all human morality. It just so happens, that he was a privileged intellectual, comfortably living under Prussian rule.

I'm an amateur too and yes, personally, I think one should definitely "hop around" between authors before engaging more deeply with one of them. Or else be prepared for a rude awakening once you finally managed to work through one author (any author) and the next one just completely destroys their core premises in a few sentences. Yes, this will totally happen with Kant.

universal ethical principle stating that one should always respect the humanity in others, and that one should only act in accordance with rules that could hold for everyone.

That's an incomplete description. Kants real categorical imperative claims we should always act in such a way, so that we can, at the same time, wish for the principles of our actions to become universal law. For example Kant says it's always wrong to lie, no matter the context, because if everyone lied, no one would understand each other and lying would become pointless. So if a murderer asks you were you hid their next innocent victim, you are compelled to answer truthfully.

A dialectical critique of Hegelians against Kants categorical imperative lists many examples where it leads to absurd conclusions. For example is it ethical to give to the poor in order to reduce poverty? Not if you follow the categorical imperative, because if that became universal law, poverty would be eliminated and charity would be pointless. So, strictly speaking, you can not act in this way and at the same time rationally wish for your action to become universal law. In the same way, the categorical imperative can be seen to fail to address any material contradiction on a society wide scale.

I'm not saying Kant isn't worthwhile(although it almost does seem as if he made his writing hard to understand on purpose). Any philosopher can be criticized and many still have a lot to offer us. It just helps to know what you're getting into.

For a general overview and if you like podcasts, you could listen to "history of philosophy without any gaps" with Professor Peter Adamson. The main series is about philosophy in Europe and the Islamic world (which includes Jewish philosophy). It's engaging and funny and starts with the Pre-Socratics and over 450 episodes later is still going in the Renaissance. There are also spin-off podcasts for African, Chinese and Indian philosophy.

Studying history, you'll get a good understanding of why people call the entirety of philosophy merely "Footnotes to Plato". Also it helps in understanding any philosophical text to know what context philosophers react to (for example Kant reacted to Hume, Hegel reacted to Kant, there is no consensus on who had the better arguments). You also definitely go away from the podcast with a sense of "history isn't over".

Studying history helps understanding how contemporary philosophy isn't "better" or "worse" than philosophy at other times in history. People have always been smart and always had complex ideas. And who knows if philosophy of our time will later be remembered as an important contribution. Another important lesson from studying the history of philosophy is that it's easy to attack any philosophical system, but hard to build one. You can very quickly go from "wow, this makes a lot of sense" to "this is completely absurd" and still gain a lot from engaging with the material.

For a good sense of how well a particular philosophy holds up against it's critics, I like reading the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy as well as articles linked in the sources.

This article is just the tip of an iceberg of very publicly available facts. US people have been indoctrinated to believe in nuclear power because of nuclear weapons and centralized energy corporations high on government funds. Elsewhere it's long between accepted as a scientific and economic fact that it can never be the solution. It's never been economically viable. It's ecologically destructive. It's technologically outdated. Other countries only need it to support or deter the imperial hegemon. US leftists need to finally rise above almost a century of propaganda and face the truth: in a peaceful communist world, no one would ever even think about building something as ineffective (in cost per kWh) and dangerous as a nuclear power plant.

It's just that normal gravity on earth feels exactly like being in an accelerating elevator in space. So you can't tell the difference from the inside. Like in the elevator you can ask them, whether you're still on earth or accelerating in space. Einstein used this thought experiment to develop the general theory of relativity.

Basically Einstein thinking about that weird feeling you get in your gut when an elevator starts upwards led to him concluding that mass bends spacetime making light from distant stars go in curves around the sun, which was confirmed during the next available solar eclipse.

These "right wing christians" are a militia that's responsible for the infamous massacre of Sabra and Shatila, supported by Israel. The so called "Lebanese Forces" fighters were mostly made up of the Kataeb party, which was founded, after their leader visited Nazi Germany and, deeply impressed, modeled the organization after the brwon shirts, with Nazi salut and everything.

So the US counting on literal fascists again for their regime change operation. No surprise, I guess.

That's a really really long idealist article, that dosn't say much in the end and might have been much shorter if the author had a materialist perspective on fascism.

I just checked, Polaris is about ten times younger than sharks. The other two stars of its ternary star system are older, but not visible to the naked eye, so early sharks would not have been able to use them for purposes of navigation.

The reason is that all those other things create actual value, thus cutting into profits of capitalists if publicly funded. If you're a capitalist state that wants to steal massive amounts of wealth from the people and redistribute them to the rich by funding an Industry, then war really is the industry you want because it only destroys value.

For example, if you cancelled the Pentagons budget and funded centrally planned healthcare instead, no private healthcare provider could compete. It would completely close down a huge market. Same with education, infrastructure, etc. War doesn't have this problem of closing down a market, but has the advantage of opening up new markets (resources, cheap labour, more consumers, even rebuilding after the war, etc.) via imperialism.

Edit: In short, imperialism is in part a reaction to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and offers an opportunity to renew primitive accumulation.

Maybe it's about measurement, but also look closer, the change is not 2006, it's 2007. It's when the financial crisis related to the US real estate bubble hit. Also the x-axis is in percent. So it might just be, that the crash hit the regions harder, whose banks had invested most in the bubble: US and Europe. The apparent rise we see might just be production in the global south staying constant, while falling elsewhere.

Also China started huge investments, but I think most of that was at the end of 2008.

Edit: No, I was wrong. Looks like production shifted from medium skilled south to low skilled south. I have no explanation.

This would work inverted as well: "Yeah, I'm running a quick vibe check on the data to find out where the noise is coming from."

What everyone says doesn't completely answer the question. Yes it's about selling your data and attention to advertisers. But if it's about the "meta", than there is a twofold strategy about it: first exploiting the network effect (wikipedia link) while growing. And then locking in the market ("keep you in their ecosystem"), thereby locking out competition. It's ironic, but capitalists hate competition (in their own field) so much they would do everything to avoid it.

Their ideal endgame is what Amazon has achieved: becoming so big, they can start selling other capitalists access to their walled in market.

All these platforms could have been made compatible with each other (like federated instances). Without content walled in behind logins, we would be able to put together our own feed with content from all over the Internet and choose our own algorithms to sort it. But then no one could sell your attention or data to advertisers and small creative upstarts would be able compete with big entrenched content providers.