If however a country would be prepared to cut through the red tape and have a standard design developed for say 10 plants at the same time, the price and construction time would be decreased greatly.

That’s a pretty big ask for a democratic government where half of the politicians are actively sabotaging climate initiatives…

The only countries where this is really feasible are places where federal powers can supersede the authority of local governments. A nuclear based power grid in America would require a complete reorganization of state and federal authority.

The only way anyone thinks nuclear energy is a viable option in the states is if they completely ignore the political realities of American government.

For example, is it physically possible for us to build a proper deep storage facility for nuclear waste? Yes, of course. Have we attempted to build said deep storage facility? Yes, since 1987. Are we any closer to finishing the site after +30 years…no.

saying that lower stage communism as marx called it or socialism as we call it today wasnt real communism is meaningless, and at best petty.

The problem is that the Soviet Union couldn’t even be correctly defined in Marxist terms to be socialist. Socialism according to Marx was a lower form of communism, one described as a transition from democratic capitalism to communism. The Soviets did not transition from a democratic state to communism, there were no valid democratic election from 38’-89’.

what was said when they said it wasnt real communism was that it wasnt led by communist and that it did not adhere to communist ideals and goals which it did.

I mean I still think there’s room for debate depending on who you’re talking about. I tend to think that the most simple definitional test whether or not you are adhering to communist ideology is to examine how the means of production is being managed.

Has the state expanded the means of control over the production to the workers in an equitable manor? Is the equity created by the workers being shared to the entire population of workers? By what means do workers negotiate their control over the means of production?

My arguments against Soviet communism is that workers had no meaningful control over the means of production. Groups of workers had no real access to influence the government such as voting as Marx described. The equity created by the workers was not shared equitably throughout the Union, with non ethnic Russians generally acting as a resource to be extracted from.

u would have to be some kind of alien lizard to not understand the context here which is why i know u are arguing in bad faith.

I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that when Marx was dreaming of a communist nation, he was not thinking it was going to start in Russia. It was an absolute shock when the 1rst country to commit to communism was autocratic Russia instead of Democratic Germany. Meaning a lot of Marxist writing isn’t really applicable to the Soviet State, Marx didn’t think about revolution occuring in a authoritarian state.

also some idiot lib going around saying that the gdr wasnt real communism because their ancestors had a bad experience with that system (or more likely they were landlords or capitalist and go what they deserved)

Or, they were one of the tens of thousands of leftist that were purged by Beria or Stalin. Pretending that the Soviets only killed landlords is not only academically dishonest, it’s harmful to future leftist endeavors. Self criticism is essential to eliminating internal contradictions from arising within the state.

it WAS real communism

I mean, it wasn’t, at least not according to the actual people who ran those governments. The USSR and the CCP were/are revolutionary governments, real communism happens when/if the revolutionary governments succeeds and transitions the means of control back to the proletariat.

and ur grandparents probably deserved it.

Really working hard to build those bridges of mutual respect and cooperation I see. This is one of the key reasons the USSR imploded in the first place.

The expansion of Soviet influence happened under the influence of Russian chauvinism, a major contradiction with the more successful maoist ideology today. Instead of allowing communism to be shaped by individual ethnicities or nations they did their best to russify or simply purge the base of power in the country, bolshevists or not.

Stalin and Beria did a whole bunch of purging of leftist to secure their control over the party. If you actually think everyone the Soviets killed deserved it, please go read about the Makhnovist, the Mensheviks, the Georgian bolshevist, hell go read what the Soviets did to the original leftist leader in North Korea.

difference is under capitalism it is constant under socialism it is rare.

Unfortunately that’s just not true. Revolutions are highly hierarchical due to their inherent need to react to militant reactionaries. As they begin to solidify their revolution and take over the responsibilities of the state, this hierarchy gets transferred from the the state.

Authoritarian governments are highly efficient, but are extremely hard to get away from once established. Often times the militant leader of the revolution is not the guy you want to be in complete control of the state after establishing a revolutionary government.

Mao was decent enough to accept this after the failure of the cultural revolution, Stalin on the other hand…

That study’s been going around for years in the media, but mainly because it’s sensational. If you actually read the article, I’d hardly say it’s very convincing, or very accurate. Also, this.

Existing estimates of mortality from cat predation are speculative and not based on scientific data13,14,15,16 or, at best, are based on extrapolation of results from a single study18. In addition, no large-scale mortality estimates exist for mammals, which form a substantial component of cat diets.

Slavery and wage slavery is happening across the globe, but companies with thin margins don’t resort to it any more than companies with huge margins (e.g. Nike). If anything, monopolistic corporations have much more power to use and enforce slave labor than the small and medium-sized factories selling at razor thin margins on Temu.

That’s most likely not the case. Larger corporations require more workforce stability and require better trained labour to maintain quality control. These needs are better fulfilled by factories who actually hire their labourers instead of hiring temps and auxiliary workers who make considerably less.

Factories that are supplying corporations like temu can only maintain a profit margin if they rely on the cheaper auxiliary labour. Often times hiring and firing them for specific manufacturing quotas. This is one of the reasons temu doesn’t have any consistency in quality.

Things sold in the US are way overpriced. Temu is actually pretty normally priced if you consider the average cost of living in the countries it ships to.

If anything they are extremely underpriced, especially when you equate the cost of shipping. The cost of a lot of items on temu are significantly lower than the production cost. As you said it’s rare to have a markup that exceeds 50% and a lot of stuff on temu is significantly cheaper than that.

I believe temu operates as a way to minimize the excess of surplus production. Basically in economics it’s always hard to balance the size of your labour force to meet the exact level of consumer demand.

Demand could be growing, so we built a new factory. Great, we are now employing more workers and have the ability to supply the increased demand. And then something like COVID happens, exports stop, demand halts, and now you have a factory with no work.

In the west, it’s tough shit, pack it up, go home. However, in China local governments can supply local businesses with loans, hoping that demand returns and they can eventually turn a profit. So they pay the factories to produce anyways, well what do they produce if there is no actual demand for export. Well anything, it doesn’t matter, it’s just about maintaining productivity levels. Just throw the shit in the warehouse and we’ll figure out what to do with it later…enter temu.

If you buy it from somewhere else, it’s still coming from a factory in China. May as well cut out the middleman.

But you aren’t buying from the factory, you’re buying from temu, the middle man.

Temu, but economically their prices make sense.

Only if you equate the use of cheap auxiliary labour, the sky rocketing debt of local Chinese governments, and the subsidization of global shipping offered by the Chinese fed.

The problem with this version of robbing Peter to pay Paul is that there isn’t actually any profit imported into the country. The loans and subsidies offered by their government were implemented to intice an actual return, where the Fed supports the local government, who support the company, who use the profit to support the workers. When there is no profit, the system is just aquiring debt.

Here is a decent explanation.

People forget that from the time Christopher Columbus arrived to when Europeans began expanding past the Appalachia is a span of 300 years. That’s longer than we’ve been in a country.

American expansion would not have been possible without hundreds of years of what is basically a Continent wide apocalypse. Culture just doesn’t survive that level of sustained trauma unchanged.

Unfortunately, not really for the majority of tribes. What we so know is that by the time Europeans had made real efforts to expand westward in North America, The Great Dying had already killed 75-90% of the native population.

Basically, North America had already endured around 200 years of civilization and population collapse starting in 1450. So even what the tribes know about themselves has to be viewed in the perspective of a people who had just lost 90% of their population in a few generations.