Readit NewsThat's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.
Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled.
It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts.
As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.
It’s a lot easier to juice the profits of your megacorp when the power of government is vested in a single, friendly individual. Of course ten seconds of thinking exposes the fragility of such a system (they may turn on you, they may be replaced, they may destroy the entire country, etc). But Capitalism itself encourages short term, winner-takes-all all thinking. If you don’t cozy up to the wanna be autocrat and help them attain more power, you will be outcompeted by someone who does.
The path of a greedy corporate executive is practically pre-ordained in such a situation. The only question is whether the wanna be autocrat succeeds to become the real deal.
Just the cost to get my garage outfitted with a charging port is about to be in the thousands because it requires me to replace the entire breaker panel. Now this is a me problem because that panel is ancient but it does add to the total cost of "doing this" and going EV.
I have a much better time in my EV than my ICE car but to each their own.
Only 70% of the incident sunlight enters the Earth’s energy budget—the rest immediately bounces off of clouds and atmosphere and land without being absorbed. Also, being land creatures, we might consider confining our solar panels to land, occupying 28% of the total globe. Finally, we note that solar photovoltaics and solar thermal plants tend to operate around 15% efficiency. Let’s assume 20% for this calculation. The net effect is about 7,000 TW, about 600 times our current use. Lots of headroom, yes?
When would we run into this limit at a 2.3% growth rate? Recall that we expand by a factor of ten every hundred years, so in 200 years, we operate at 100 times the current level, and we reach 7,000 TW in 275 years. 275 years may seem long on a single human timescale, but it really is not that long for a civilization. And think about the world we have just created: every square meter of land is covered in photovoltaic panels! Where do we grow food?
To very TL;DR things: solar and tidal energy (and their derivatives like wind) are essentially the only sources of energy we can rely on as our energy requirements grow. We are shockingly close (~300 years) to measurably raising the equilibrium temperature of earth's surface through purely thermodynamic effects if energy use trends continue. This is completely independent of greenhouse gases, and assumes that Earth is a perfect blackbody radiator. Once we exhaust our energy budget from these sources, that's it. No magical unobtanium source of energy can solve the fact that producing additional energy on the surface of the Earth will raise its temperature. We will stop increasing our energy use one way or another once we hit this wall.
If we want to continue using more energy we'll need a whole second Earth to do it on. Great, we've colonized mars! What does that get us? Based on a 2.3% growth rate and the Rule of 70[3], we'll use up that second Earth in thirty years. We'll now need two Earths to keep growing for the next thirty years.
[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/07/galactic-scale-energy/#:~...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&pp=ygUodGhlIG1vc...
> If we want to continue using more energy we'll need a whole second Earth to do it on
Or we make like Niven's Puppeteers and move the Earth out into a further orbit with less insolation.
The ideal big dam is Hoover Dam. Large, deep canyon in a desert. Narrow, deep canyon dam site. Hard rock geology. No major towns or agricultural areas in the area to be flooded above the dam. That's the best case.
Most later dams are at worse sites.
Cadillac Desert is a great history of American dam building and the Bureau of Reclamation
https://github.com/swiftlang/swift-evolution/blob/main/propo...
Imagine that every time an airliner landed its cockpit was destroyed and you had to build a new one. A fully reusable airplane would be a transformational improvement. That's the level of achievement we're talking about here.
That seems like a stretch. What is the actual turnaround time for Starship? fwiw the Shuttle had a lot of lofty promises of reusability that were technically true as long as you didn't consider how long the turnaround time was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos