It’s a gigantic library, #1 in the world by visitors by a lot, #4 by number of books, and they’re doing that in NYC in buildings that look like this and a bunch of the books are 600 years old or have George Washington’s handwriting on them, so it’s real fucking expensive.

Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.

If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.

CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.

burned wood in the upper atmosphere also catalyzes ozone depletion That’s why it was bad putting CFCs up there in the first place, almost everything catalyzes these reactions

alarmed social media executives warned the new administration that the Pentagon had been trafficking in COVID misinformation

The military argued that many of its fake accounts were being used for counterterrorism and asked Facebook not to take down the content

Sounds more like the Pentagon did tell them so they could whitelist the Pentagon trolls from getting banned. Then social media companies got nervous that the troll farm was sloppy and going to get caught by someone not under NDA sooner or later, and a new admin was an opportunity to lobby to get out of this bad PR situation.

EX30 is a rebadged Zeekr X which has a normal separate speedometer cluster in front of the driver, Volvo deleted that and put everything on the center screen like a Tesla.

https://inf.news/en/culture/99cd839e359599d0079b82992ff8fe3a.html

They had a Ming-style mosque that was destroyed in a massacre of Muslims during the Cultural Revolution in 1975, they rebuilt a warehouse-looking mosque in 1981, then the Arabic-style mosque was built in 2010.

The Guardian does write the article to make you think it’s a historical landmark, and not a Chinese copy of the Eiffel Tower kind of landmark that’s being rebuilt to look more like the one the government originally destroyed.

Accurate. No extra bucket, alleged “non-voters” guy isn’t actually refusing to grab one, he just looks smug and isn’t praising the Democrats. Dems aren’t doing enough, boat’s still going to sink. Democrats decided to bring two buckets instead of getting rid of the drill or the Republican. If “non-voters” guy stopped balancing the weight and came over to pat the Dems on the back like they want him to, they would just slide to the right and push their end of the boat under without having to wait for the hole to do it.

Same Marx letter: “While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

Unfortunately it wasn’t actually swept off, instead of “at least we aren’t slaves” it’s “at least we aren’t the periphery” that became the boasted prerogative making core country labor feel like it has more investment in the system and more to lose than it actually does, and keeping them demanding anti-immigration and anti-trade and bombs to maintain hegemony.

Sometimes people are assigned progressive by social expectations and start playing that role without really thinking about it. She tried to write an apolitical generic kids book, and everybody’s white, fat people are evil, and bankers are big nosed goblins. Then other people read it and started pointing things out, but she couldn’t detect any of this herself so when she tried to be inclusive she just added Ching Chong the asian and a minstrel slave race. Need to make someone black, I said Hermione has ugly frizzy hair so I guess it’s her. Need a gay, make it the asexual grandpa so it’s not gross. Eventually something comes along that cracks their assumption that they must be progressive and they come out as right wing on Twitter.

The Space Shuttle was also a private company. United Space Alliance LLC owned the Space Shuttles, United Launch Alliance LLC owns the military rockets, Deep Space Transport LLC owns the SLS rocket.

“Privatized” space just means instead of the government hiring Boeing or Lockheed to design a rocket according to their requirements, picking contractors to build it, and creating an LLC owned by all the contractors to pay them, Jeff Bezos hires ex-Boeing and Lockheed employees to build a rocket to his requirements, and then sues the government until they agree to pay him to launch it.

Crypto losers started suing each other about the mine last year

The ones suing Mineone played the China card, but they didn’t try calling them spies, they went with Chinese taking our jobs. Calling the feds seems like it was a long shot after lobbying Wyoming failed.

Even if they built them in a US factory their cars would still be better and cheaper. They just know that once they start the US will ban them like Tiktok, and they’d rather keep the battery and bus factories they already have in the US and avoid competing with anybody politically connected.

DRM plugin and all the built-in cloud stuff is proprietary on the server side

They aren’t exporting them below cost, that’s why they want to export. Inside China every company tried to start an EV division because they heard Apple was doing it and assumed it must be a good idea. Now the market is topped out and the biggest companies are trying to price the smaller ones out of business (which still isn’t below manufacturing cost because China regulates that and is nervous about having tons of cars from bankrupt companies on the road). They export with a huge profit margin to make up for the domestic price war.

The opposite of woke is random shit boomers happened to grow up with. If your politics are based on some principle you can justify, then if you lose you try again later. If your politics are based on a random collection of historical accidents you can’t justify, and you don’t even like most of them except for a couple, but you think the only way to keep the couple you do like is to defend all of them, then losing is the end. You have to fight to the death, and once you do lose you can’t cope by doing better next time, all you have is revenge.

Sometimes liberals also want to defend historical accidents that they think fit their idea of liberalism, and then they adopt the same kind of aggressive deterrence strategy, like pro-Israel liberals with college protests or the English with trans people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/nyregion/columbia-protests-arrest-agitators-israel.html

A lot of the arrests “at Columbia” were on the street outside when people showed up to protest the NYPD, so they’re including those to juice the stats

Relax I’m not fucking with you I’m actually interested in this. There are a lot of contemporary documents, there are a bunch of 1933 SPD newspapers with “Nach Hitler kommen wir!” on the front page, the problem is finding anything that isn’t quoting Holtermann.

Why did the Marxists fail is the closest I’ve found, because he doesn’t explicitly say who he’s quoting. You can read this anthology version of it which unfortunately edits out the actual quote, but Olden is very critical of the SPD for acting like there was an electoral or legal solution to Nazis instead of planning for a civil war, so I really think he’s quoting Holtermann.

I’ve found both of those before, the second one quotes it as “Herr Holtermann proudly predicted” so that doesn’t work.

The first one based on Google Books is an unattributed chapter title, and searching doesn’t find any German words for slogan or motto in it. And Rudolf Olden is prominent enough that I think someone would have cited it by now if he had a KPD attribution in there.

If anybody could find anything at all written in the 1930s saying it’s a KPD slogan, and not just people decades later calling it “well known” with no source and only in English with no explanation what it was in German, that would be really cool.