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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Sure, no arguments there. I guess it’s the “green” label I take issue with. Carbon-free capitalism is definitely possible as long as there are enough critical elements to produce all of the necessary solar panels and wind turbines (and I guess fusion reactors if we’re really ambitious about printing money 🤑). I do wonder about rent collection long-term though, especially with such decentralized energy sources. Overproduction will also come sooner than everyone thinks. But I guess these are much better problems to have than imminent eco-catastrophe.



  • I was considerably happier before I knew this. Hopefully coal prices will continue to increase, and they won’t end up burning more coal even though their capacity has increased. From what I’ve read, it’s mainly provincial governments trying to boost their economic statistics that are responsible for this building spree.


  • Capitalism can’t do green. If you were to make an accounting of all of the environmental damage that capitalist industry has done to the ecosystem, the cost to clean it all up would dwarf the revenue. Capitalist economists are incapable of calculating such “negative externalities” because they don’t understand basic thermodynamics. I used to work in environmental remediation and am happy to talk more about this if there is interest.




  • ZMoney@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlPolitical mindset evolution
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    5 months ago

    “Massive coal” was twenty years ago. India is “massive coal” now.

    They have an electric car that costs $10,000.

    They are quickly switching from Li batteries to Na, which will not require Ni or Co either.

    They have a mixture of capitalism and central planning, so it’s not entirely fair to call them “non-capitalist”.


  • Neoliberal capitalism is bad at long-term projects. That’s why we’re struggling so much with climate change mitigation. A lot of the gigantic power projects that required such long-term planning were built in the New Deal era and the postwar industrial boom. During this time, corporate tax rates and workers’ salaries were high because the government was genuinely afraid of worker power.

    Building a modern nuclear power plant requires subcontracting it out into what is essentially a builders’ market in which companies compete with each other for pieces of state-level building grants. None of these companies want to undertake risky long-term ventures like a new nuclear reactor because they want to maximize their short-term revenue (profit). So they jack up the prices until the project budget is overrunning already in the planning stage, and it’s doomed from the start.




  • Saturn is a mixture of gases. It has a solid rocky/hydrogen core surrounded by a layer of liquid hydrogen/helium. You could argue that this intermediate liquid layer might have solid particulates, and this would agree with the definition, but overall Saturn is too complicated to be classified this way. A better extreme example would be something like Earth’s oceans.