The EU disagrees with you after a thorough investigation.

Police investigating themselves inevitably find the people they are policing were in the wrong.

China has been giving its EV manufacturers massive state subsidies for a long time now

Chinese manufacturers benefit from the state investment in infrastructure and the at-cost production of utilities through SOEs. They produce professionals out of universities funded with state tax dollars who do not carry enormous personal debts. They have a large high speed transportation network that reduces delivery delays and mobilizes much of the idle workforce.

In any other country, we’d acknowledge this as capital investments in the economy at-large. In China, we pretend that this is some kind of unfair business advantage.

I don’t believe you.

Honestly, she isn’t wrong.

AI Slop is a sub-optimal replacement that requires enormous amounts of materials and second-order human labor to produce. Like so many other industrial innovations, it’s a waste-production machine that has the added benefit of occasionally producing consumables.

We get to run the AI Slop machine at a profit because the market for slop is heavily monopolized and the consumer base is cash rich and alienated from its laboring peers. But a downturn in the domestic economy, a sudden shortfall in cheap raw materials, a major shift in popular consumption habits, or a higher quality alternative at a lower price point all put AI slop at risk of losing profitability.

It’s a far more fragile industry than any Slop Advocate wants to admit. And it needs an enormous structural investment to function.

the Industrial Revolution was a step forward

A step forward into what, though? Mass overproduction resulting in economy-wide enshitification and a crisis of excess waste all carried enormous tail costs.

Are you really better off today buying furniture from IKEA that won’t last ten years, rather than inheriting antiques from your parents that have endured for the last century? Are you better of driving a car built in a big machine-factory than riding a trolley that was designed custom for the city lines? Are you better of eating individually plastic-wrapped slices of fake cheese than carving a chunk off the giant wheel in your pantry?

Idk, man. Views differ on that one.

AI Spokesmodel: “We built a big machine that steals your work product to plagiarize it, then sucks you into an assembly-level job that pays under-subsistence wages to tidy up all the crap it injects”

Journeymen Professionals: “This sucks! Smash the looms!”

AI Spokesmodel: “Don’t worry, though. Some of you can still become cops!”

Austrian Art School Dropouts: “We’re listening”.

The last industrial revolution turned farmers into factory drones.

Nonsense. It turned farmers into corpses and migrants into factory drones and more migrants into more farmers.

Love to go to my graduation ceremony and get a two hour long YouTube ad.

there’s nothing wrong with for example having tariffs on products that the manufacturing powerhouse china deliberately sell at a loss to gain monopolies

Chinese firms don’t sell at a loss. Western firms operate with oversized profit margins. The labor and materials that go into a Chinese EV or a solar panel or a plastic widget or steel girders are all globally commoditized. What separates Chinese exports from EU domestic products are rents. Enormous, economy-crippling rents.

And that’s what these tariffs seek to protect.

Germany certainly lacks planning that far ahead

Germany has plenty of economic planning. It’s just happening in the Zurich banking industry, not the Berlin parliament. The goal of German policy is to maximize profit per unit of labor, rather than value per unit of materials.

That Germans are revolting at the domestic plan stems from these strangling profit margins.

Unfortunately, they do not. They just yell at you for sleeping at your desk and threaten to take away your bathroom privileges.

The solution to “falling behind China” is to close off our economy from the Chinese economy, isolate the Chinese economy from its neighbors, stir up violent opposition to Chinese government and policies both on its borders and within its interior, and accuse anyone doing business with China of abetting genocide and organ theft and Far-Left Communist ideologies.

If a country continues to do business with China, we will associate it with the crimes of the Chinese government in the same manner. Russia, Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, big chunks of the EU, I guess now Canada - all increasingly on the US shit-list for reasons tangential to the amount of business they’re doing with China.

Eventually, we will need to go to war with China (or, at least, launch a series of proxy wars all along the Chinese border that can bleed the country into bankruptcy). But for the time being, we will content ourselves to vilifying its leadership, sanctioning its trade, and picking fights with its regional allies.

And this will work, because it’s never not worked before now.

Trust The Plan.

40 is the new bankrupt

Looks at me brother. I am already in my mid-40s.

Let me know when the Babylon Bee acquires InfoWars AND Tim Heidecker in the same week.

Hey now! Under capitalism, your value as a person is tied to how aggressively you exploit others.

You claim you’re not a capitalist, and yet you use upper-case letters at the start of every sentence.

all those employees making a new company that is unionized private non-stock and does better than Zuck’s Facebook

Facebook thrived because it got access to cheap money through Carlyle Investments. They used that cheap money to buy up a bunch of their competitors (most famously, Instagram, but there’s 108 different acquisitions in the Wikipedia list alone) and either insource them or close them out.

Very real possibility that a gaggle of Facebook refugees form a new company, get some decent Series A or B financing, start to take off on user numbers, and grow big enough to be worth adding to some bigger firm’s M&A list.

But the idea that they’re going to capture the 1B+ user Facebook market share? On what hardware? With what IT support? In partnership with which ISPs? Through which advertisement agencies? Come on, dude. Think about how these businesses function in practice. Setting aside how many “Facebook Clone” companies have flopped, there’s a value-add to Facebook that comes directly from their deplorable business model. You can’t make a “better Facebook” without sacrificing what makes the Facebook revenue play work. That’s before asking how you’re going to win a headbutt fight with a dinosaur.

I wouldn’t work for Facebook if they tripled my current salary.

Okay, tap the breaks. Triple my salary and I’m retiring very comfortably before I hit 50. Would happily take the Zuck Bucks for that kind of cash, especially if I knew I’d be ushered into the Leisure Class ten years earlier.

Also… who else are you working for that’s less toxic? Like, Fuck Zuck, but he’s hardly an outlayer in the world of narcissist CEOs.

Look at what happened in Saudi’s Neom.

They kicked a bunch of locals off the property, diverted a bunch of local waterways, dropped millions of tons of concrete onto a foundation, and then ran out of money, gave up, and walked away.

You got all horror of industrial terraforming but none of the promised payout.

this article is also full of fearmongering trash.

”Turn out, it could create a massive heat island capable of devastating the area’s ecology, said Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University.”

I work in the O&G industry. “Heat islands” are a legitimate concern for both refineries and power plants. Failure to limit the heat emissions in a given area can require personal to wear more protective gear just to get inside the facilities. Alternatively, you have to shut parts of the plant down to get people safely into and out of it for maintenance.

It absolutely has an impact on the surrounding ecology. And you can see the brownfields that certain decommissioned sites create, stretching for miles in every direction.

For a state like Utah, with a relatively low per-capita population and some of the country’s last pristine wilderness, rolling out a bunch of industrial facilities to suck up the potable water and blast the area with vented coolant would have a very real and noticeable impact.

The problem is that we’ve done this cycle of development and decimation so many times in our industrial era that “doing what we’ve always done” gets written off as fear-mongering, because we no longer recognize the impact.

The premise of Office Space was that they were correcting the Y2K bug. And this description of a small, over-managed, haphazardly administered IT company is a very sincere reflection of how the industry functioned in the 90s. The punchline at the end - where you’ve got Ron Livingston shoveling asphalt with zen satisfaction while Diedrich Bader shakes his head in disgust - really does sum up the Dumb Guy attitude towards bullshit-but-ultimately-pretty-cushy office work of the era. But I wouldn’t say they were doing nothing.

The Office was a reflection of dying backwards industry - in this case, the paper industry in Midwest Pennsylvania - that attract a certain assemblage of idiots and assholes and failkids in its waning days. This was more a story of a historically productive industry dying out.

American Psycho is much more about the Wall Street peak of power and the sadomasochistic personalities that populate it. I think its more comparable to Fight Club, in so far as it’s a story of someone driven insane by the higher end business world and left to discover how thin the veneer is between civilization and barbarity.

American Psycho