impartial_fanboy [he/him]

I think the growth vs. degrowth framing is really poorly defined, there’s not a clear distinction between capitalist growth (basically GDP) and development of the productive forces and any discussion of the topic easily devolves into people talking past each other because they’re using different definitions for the same terms.

A lot of GDP growth today is in things that manipulate the market and can be gotten rid of entirely like advertising, which is nearly 20% of US GDP by itself. This makes it relatively easy to get rid of but is a double edged sword. This focus on financial growth over the ‘actual’ economy over the past ~50 years has left it neglected and so the (re)development of the productive forces of North America (not just the US since the economy is already quite integrated) will require massive investment and thus ‘growth’. It will obviously be a different sort of growth than has been done before (yes, even than the Soviets) so it is hard to say how exactly it will look but it won’t happen unless the economy is under the control of the mass of people who make it up.

Fossil fuel extraction will continue probably for a very long time (we use it for nearly everything) but at a greatly reduced scale as alternatives are developed. Modern agriculture is actually fairly space (and thus calorie per hectare) inefficient because it’s easier to automate and thus reduce labor costs. Likely there will be many more people who work in agriculture but still on the order of single digit percentages of the population (just more than the ~2% it is now). Enhanced weathering has the potential to be a sort of Hail Mary for CO2 sequestration, it can also be used on cropfields as fertilizer though it probably can’t replace all nitrogen fertilizer but I don’t know enough about it to really say either way. I think other forms of CO2 sequestration are mostly in the realm of fantasy so hopefully enhanced weathering doesn’t have too many detrimental side-effects.

As for resource extraction more generally, it will also have to continue for a long time in all likelihood. Perhaps deep sea mining of those naturally occurring polymetallic nodules will be less impactful than traditional mining, perhaps not. Asteroid mining could genuinely be revolutionary in this aspect but the investment involved to get it a necessary scale would probably take too long for it to be a viable short-term solution even if there was a revolution tomorrow. Things can be done to make traditional mining less impactful that aren’t currently because they aren’t profitable, but it will likely be the worst thing that continues in any transition. Rewilding other areas to compensate will ease the damage.

It will be a difficult transition. Go too slow and you risk the environment degrading to the point of the collapse of production entirely. Go too fast and you risk the same by not having the inputs necessary to sustain it. The market is too slow and passive to handle the situation and so it will only be overcome if the (real) economy can be steered by society as a whole.

His personal disgust with it.

5v5. All the most toxic games are 5v5, whether its CSGO or League etc. I can’t stand them. Though the real problem is automated matchmaking and lack of server browsers, most other pvp games have ways of mitigating the toxicity but 5v5’s really just encourage it full tilt.

I really wish larger team based esport games were the ones that took off, but alas.

Guild Wars 1 had a lot of unique and weird weapons but the Fiery Dragon Sword is one of those rule of cool weapons even though it makes no sense practically.

He needs to read the Enchantments of Mammon.

To be fair to him this is nowhere near as bad as Sabine’s capitalism video which was really embarrassing even on a Lib level, she just really had no idea what she was talking about.

It just felt like for every positive point he made he had to throw in a jab or two to balance it out, which is unfortunate. Either he actually believes it or was afraid his audience would run away thinking he’s a commie if he didn’t perform sufficient disavowal.

I had literally just found this guy’s channel a week ago and was super excited. It was disappointing how much disavowal he did (or felt he had to do) to appear ‘impartial’.

But honestly this video was pretty basic literary analysis of Capital. Which I guess is good for libs to hear, a couple might actually read it maybe.

Yeah, his name is Stafford Beer.

Jared Leto’s character was originally going to be played by David Bowie which would have been better because then Jared Leto wouldn’t be in it.

The bigger problem is what it doesn’t say, like about anything about the board of directors or shareholders. I don’t think it would help much unless they’re also familiar with Chinese labor law.

This all comes with the caveat of it being a translation but I really don’t think it says what you think it does.

Section I just say the employees are informed of and get a performative say in what the company was already planning on doing, not that they get an actual say in that plan. Section II is only about working conditions and not about the nature of the work itself, if it should be done, how best to do it, etc. Section III also is only about contract points which deal with remuneration and not with the actual business of the company. This part of Section IV;

Electing or dismissing employee directors and employee supervisors

Is suspiciously worded and makes me think that it really only means their direct managers and department heads, which of course is an improvement but they aren’t voting on whether major shareholders get a seat on the board of directors or not. Even if it did include the regular C suite, it absolutely does not include members of the company appointed by the party/state.

Some of the better seeming parts have no teeth.

electing employee representatives to meetings of creditors and creditors’ committees of the enterprise subject to bankruptcy proceedings in accordance with the law

Just says they get to show up to the meeting, not that they actually have any say in that meeting. Especially the last part of section IV.

and recommending or electing management personnel of the enterprise as authorized

Is super weasel wordy. This could be satisfied just by acknowledging the recommendation of the assembly, it doesn’t actually require the company to follow that recommendation.

Section V also has no teeth. There is no mention whatsoever of the makeup of the board of directors or what say shareholders have. Which leads me to believe that this is whole thing is just designed to appease workers and not actually provide workplace democracy. To be clear, it is a potentially a step in the right direction if it is given teeth but as it stands it is absolutely just as ‘class collaborationist’ as Germany’s.

Of course all of this ignores the corrupting and profit maximizing nature of modern corporations which is not changed one iota just by changing who can vote for who is in charge (as evidenced by large co-ops like Mondragon) especially since they still have to compete against corporations who absolutely will cut every corner and cheat to get ahead.

Edit: I forgot how to format

Guess I’ll be the Lib.

How is this any different than the German codetermination system? Honestly it seems like they’re just copying it, though it does apply to small businesses too. Which is cool but I wouldn’t call it workplace democracy.

If you have enough emails from your job you could fine-tune one of the models on them and it would probably do pretty okay. It’d be really cheap cus it’s not that much data, assuming you don’t have the hardware to do it yourself.

I know you’re just making a comparison but if you actually paid off the national debt you would destroy the dollar.

Which you actually don’t want to do unless there’s a viable alternative, which there isn’t atm.

Really their wealth should be appropriated to build sustainable infrastructure across the globe so we can survive the catastrophe they’ve created without mass death (or minimize it as much as possible). But if you have the political will to do that then you might as well just push the communism button.

I’d recommend the book Engineers of Jihad. It’s precisely the people who wish to change the world and then are denied by external forces (largely the U.S. in this case) that are primed for radicalization.

Also iirc, Bashar al-Assad’s father was the one who actually developed the tactic/justification but I’m having trouble finding a source, it’s early.

God forbid … It’s not like they’re advocating for NATO invading China. Having criticism/doubts of AES does not undermine them, they’re not that fragile.

Or when they finally split the gender atom. Radioactive gender everywhere.

Oh yeah that’s the fun of dealing with a hypercomplex system. It should help with rewilding efforts but those won’t show results for awhile, assuming they’re followed through on.

To temper the bleakness a bit, it also means that with the right interventions it would be possible to have similarly drastic positive results.

The eccentricity of Earth’s orbit is pretty inconsequential. It’s something like a 3% difference between the furthest and closest points, the changes in tilt relative to the sun or the kind of surface exposed to the sun make basically all of the difference.

The sun only heats the top layers of the ocean, like a couple hundred feet iirc, and unevenly at that. It would take a very very long time for all the water in the ocean to reach a true equilibrium (if the sun turned off tomorrow) but it doesn’t get to because of the day/night cycle, the seasons, wind and the Earth’s actual rotation etc. So that produces recurring ocean currents, which are chaotic in nature, thus leading to the ocean temperature to vary (drastically at times).

This newest warming though I think is largely an unintended consequence of the new bunker fuel regulations in 2020 that drastically reduced the amount of Sulfur in it. The sulfur dioxide produced from all those container ships actually has a cooling effect so really the planet was ‘already’ this warm, we were just countering it somewhat. It also is what is mainly responsible for acid rain so we can’t just pump a bunch of it into the atmosphere.

Having read the article now, its just a run of the mill fearmongering piece for more funding. I don’t think we should take them as true believers, obviously some are dumb enough to be but this article in particular doesn’t seem to be doing that.

Why are they (or we) pretending that nukes don’t exist? There is no direct traditional conflict that will happen, it’ll either be proxy wars or nukes.