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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • No, it’s not. Not seeing that it’s capitalism is the reductive view. Instead of trying to type down a huge text while I’m tired, I’d like to introduce a 112 year-old text that still seems extremely relevant today:

    Moreover, capitalist production, by its very nature, cannot be restricted to such means of production as are produced by capitalist methods. Cheap elements of constant capital are essential to the individual capitalist who strives to increase his rate of profit. In addition, the very condition of continuous improvements in labour productivity as the most important method of increasing the rate of surplus value, is unrestricted utilisation of all substances and facilities afforded by nature and soil. To tolerate any restriction in this respect would be contrary to the very essence of capital, its whole mode of existence. After many centuries of development, the capitalist mode of production still constitutes only a fragment of total world production. Even in the small Continent of Europe, where it now chiefly prevails, it has not yet succeeded in dominating entire branches of production, such as peasant agriculture and the independent handicrafts; the same holds true, further, for large parts of North America and for a number of regions in the other continents. In general, capitalist production has hitherto been confined mainly to the countries in the temperate zone, whilst it made comparatively little progress in the East, for instance, and the South. Thus, if it were dependent exclusively, on elements of production obtainable within such narrow limits, its present level and indeed, its development in general would have been impossible. From the very beginning, the forms and laws of capitalist production aim to comprise the entire globe as a store of productive forces. Capital, impelled to appropriate productive forces for purposes of exploitation, ransacks the whole world, it procures its means of production from all corners of the earth, seizing them, if necessary by force, from all levels of civilisation and from all forms of society. The problem of the material elements of capitalist accumulation, far from being solved by the material form of the surplus value that has been produced, takes on quite a different aspect. It becomes necessary for capital progressively to dispose ever more fully of the whole globe, to acquire an unlimited choice of means of production, with regard to both quality and quantity, so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realised. From Rosa Luxemburg: The Accumulation of Capital, Chapter 26 - The Reproduction of Capital and Its Social Setting

    This passage is kind of an introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s definition of imperialism. Back then, capitalism was not yet developed in the whole world and she argued that simply because it’s a question of survival for companies, these companies will push for the right to exploit the whole world. And now, 112 years later, I’m pretty sure we can agree that happened. And in the past few decades, when they can’t expand spacially, now it’s all about squeezing every last bit of profit from nature, the workers and the consumers.

    The particular ideology oligarchies are using to justify their rule is incidental.

    Here, we have a point of agreement. The USSR developed into something that was no better than capitalist states. In my opinion, that’s because it’s bureaucracy developed into something very similar to the burgeoisie in capitalism, resource hoarders led by self-interest.

    But I believe your answer built on another false dichotomy here. The alternative to capitalism I have in mind isn’t a one-party state with central planning and communist aesthetics. I’m more of a proponent of decentralized power, dismantling the state and people governing their surroundings cooperatively.








  • Mh, ‘0’ is a nonempty string, so !‘0’ returns false. Then of course !(!‘0’) would return true. I’d absolutely expect this, Python does the same.

    And the second thing is just JavaScript’s type coercion shenanigans. In Python

    bool('0') # returns True because of nonempty string
    bool(int('0')) # returns False because 0 == False
    

    Knowing that JavaScript does a lot of implicit type conversions, stuff like that doesn’t strike me as very surprising.


  • Whoever wrote this has an extremely outdated technical understanding of renewables and energy storage… or wants to push this outdated understanding out of an economic interest/agenda.

    Yes, a stable AC grid needs inertia, which was historically only provided by the generators in gas, coal and nuclear power plants. Yes, inverter-connected systems like batteries and PV plants don’t provide inertia naturally. But there are control algorithms out there which would enable these systems to provide inertia just as well… And they could be going into large-scale rollout at least on new batteries and wind power plants within months if it was required by grid codes or incentivized by a market.

    I agree that, whatever exactly happened initially, led to a disconnect of the mostly photovoltaic generation in Spain (not yet outfitted with such synthetic inertia algorithms) and the central European grid where more natural inertia was available. The high local PV surplus no longer exported to Europe led to an enormous increase in the grid frequency. The PV plants disconnected which led to a just as quick decrease of frequency and an automatic disconnect of loads - boom, the grid is dead. So far, their analysis was also what I presented to my students on Tuesday. But drawing the conclusion that renewables are bad just reveals either incompetence or an insidious agenda.