I hear you. I don’t want to get shafted either. I’m not a 1% elitist that can light $100k on fire and not care. I want people to get a break too, but we have to use our heads. We need to have a bare minimum level of domestic manufacturing. People still need jobs to eat, and we need to stop putting trust in people who don’t give a damn about us to do what’s best for us.

China, the US, the mega corps, they don’t care about any of us. If you die, if your children starve, if you are marching with pitchforks and torches in the public square, they don’t care. They are a million miles away and have zero skin in this game, they just show up and declare themselves the winner and demand your money.

We need ambition, we need to prove we can take care of ourselves because no one else will. That’s the only way we get a “break” from the relentless BS.

The people are the system. The prices are the product of systemic choices. Your Short Term break will end up costing you a fortune down the road when they’ve cornered the market and either Enshittification or price gouging ends up costing you your shirt in 10 years.

I don’t want to pay any more than you do, but “Screw tomorrow, today we feast” kind of mentality is how we got here in the first place. If we don’t think our way through this, we’re going to end up shooting ourselves in the face.

Mammon was an early Semitic term for wealth and material success and also the name of a Canaanite God. “Christian” denominations that preach things like the prosperity gospel, who idolize grand displays of wealth, political power, corporate or nationalistic apologism and other heretical beliefs seem to have more in common with Mammon than Jesus.

Anyone else horrified by the fact that the only two options are, “objectively monsters”, “Out of touch, out of ideas, out of hope, and out of talent for doing anything but begging for money” and there seems to be no funding for anything else?

There are some justifiable reasons. Mostly responsibilities you can’t just walk away from. That said, anyone doing it recreationally should definitely be considered suspect.

Listen, I’m not a Christian, but I’ve known what I assume you would consider “Good Christians” and I have fewer issues with them than most who abuse the term. The problem is they’re a small sect, and most “Christians”, at least American Christians are Mammonites taking your god’s name in vain. You should be worrying about getting their attention, not ours. As long as theirs is the dominant faith of the US, the term Christian is only ever going to mean gratuitous cruelty, not the man described in the red letters in the bible.

Yes. Could be exciting in the near future. As the article points out, it’s a bit less power dense than lithium, and has a slightly worse power to weight ratio, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad, it’s just better suited for different market niches than lithium. I could see urban cab companies and other short range fleet uses preferring sodium-ion, as they’ll have a higher rate of cycling and wear, and the cheaper cost of a battery will represent a significant net benefit. I think consumer grade vehicles are going to prefer Lithium for the foreseeable future though.

I mean, at this point we could only hope they would start eating each other without their glorious leader. Not sure making a martyr out of him would have the desired effect though. Maybe if a Qannon or a Groyper got him.

The only people abducting people and holding them for ransom in Chicago and Seattle are ICE agents.

Umm… in what country is it people get kidnapped and ransomed every day? I mean, I’m not saying it’s not a thing, it does happen, but it’s actually pretty rare in most of North America. I mean, it’s pretty common in Mexico, but in most of the continent the most common kidnapping is a biological relative abducting a child.

Seems a bit extreme. One can find the Trudeau era immigration program generally harmful, without putting the blame on immigrants or immigration in general. The reality is, it was a bad system. We had a relatively good thing going before he loosened the rules to let many times more new immigrants in than we had the infrastructure to support, for the sake of corporate lobbyists trying desperately to keep wages stagnant. The biggest villain there isn’t the people who arrived expecting a to work hard and earn their pay, it’s the greedy shills that straight up fabricated a labour crisis to get out of paying people a fair wage for their work.

Why are you defending the corporate ghouls who created this problem and lied to Canada and are engineering a conflict between us to hide their own crimes.

Granted, a bad move trusting the lobbyists screaming about a labour shortage, but it seems … counter productive… to jump from the idiots who trusted the corporate shills straight into the arms of the corporate shills themselves. That’s the definition of going from the frying pan into the fire.

She’s engineering a backlash against the justice system. By finding way to defund the justice system, she’s amplifying the already revolving door nature of the courts to justify brutal police crackdowns. By manufacturing a crisis she can engineer public consent for independence.

Harm reduction is good. What BC did though is deeply incomplete and caused more harm than it reduced.

Right now the Sodium-ion tech is still in its infancy. It’s higher priced than it will be as the market scales. I expect it will find more use in stationary storage capacity than mobile devices as it’s power density is a bit lower, but the material cost is much lower and therefore potentially useful for utility grade or home power banks. It’s theoretically able to benefit from a lot of the same technology that Lithium cell batteries use, so cross-chemistry innovation potential is high.

A lot of proposals, but not a lot of approvals. Time will tell if their commitment to decarbonize holds but the fact developers are making proposals does not imply they’ll actually get approved. China is nowhere near as dependent on private corporate interests approval to maintain power and their clean energy export strategy is dependent on demonstrating domestic capacity gains.

Steel and concrete are the only industries that are going to continue to be coal dependent in the foreseeable future. China is already investing heavily in new plasma drilling tech for tapping deep, closed loop geothermal to augment nuclear, solar, hydroelectric and wind capacity. If Chinese battery tech continues to improve sufficiently to increase build out of utility grade power storage facilities, they’ll have more than enough capacity to continue to wean off coal for power. Their power grid makes the North American grid look positively quaint and backward already.

Sure, if you built an AI on your own machine, trained it entirely on public commons and voluntarily obtained data with the active consent, and powered it entirely on solar power and wind turbines, to do jobs without intrinsic value to human development, people would have a lot fewer objections to it. But you didn’t. And you won’t, because it would take resources that exceed anything you have available to do so. Much like genetic modification, there are motives and methods that potentially have real value, but they don’t tend to have significant return on investment and so are simply not done, and what is done ranges from suspect to objectively exploitative. You cannot create an ethical AI in the current environment, if such a thing is even possible.

Excellent plan. I think it’s more essential than ever for people to leverage every organizing tool in the toolbox. We absolutely need to have a coordinating system for focusing the power of the various organizations working to strengthen and protect the people. I can see arguments both ways in terms of whether The Party should be the main coordinating vehicle or whether there needs to be a separate arm for internal coordination, but at this point, any ambition regarding expanding the scope of the movement is welcome.

“Quickly” is relative. We can move more quickly than we are certainly, while maintaining the forethought to prevent unnecessary harm, but we have to take a balanced approach. We don’t want to let perfect become the enemy of the good, but we also don’t need to make mistakes that cost us more down the road than we ever benefit from the development in the first place.

Technically, it’s sedition. In every way that matters, it’s treason.