TNT has 1162 Wh/kg ratio.

How do you recharge TNT?

We are hitting the limit what is doable with energy density.

I mean, we’re definitely running into a problem of how you build a battery without also building a bomb. But the entire point of TNT is rapid thermal expansion. The point of a battery is very low voltage steady release of electrical charge.

I might also note that C4 has around 6 Mwh/kg. A bit of applied chemistry can go a long way to improving energy efficiency. And that’s before you take advantage of geometry to focus pressure, via a shaped charge.

Point being, there’s a lot of clever ways to juice a lemon. We’re a long way from the end of the road on battery improvement.

Going to need a control ball relative to the variable ball to calibrate your measurements.

But how are people so basic.

I would like a thing. All retail commerce has been monopolized by a handful of big box storefronts. One of those storefronts sucks marginally less than the others, such that I can actually find what I want to buy and expect it to be delivered in a timely fashion.

But I shouldn’t shop there because… ???

Wonder why bad things continue to happen.

Damn, so true. We should never have quit shopping at Target Walmart Sears Woolworths. Now we live in Capitalist Hell and its all our own fault.

Okay, but have you considered that Amazon is the reason prices are high?

Obviously, none of these other retailers had a hand in it.

In fairness, she looks better in it

They won’t be profitable in a few years

I just don’t know where you get these claims from

What are you, Swiss? Australian? Irish?

The same applies.

Planet is choked with guns. They’re everywhere and very easy to get. Absolutely no reason you need one that’s been churned out by a printer you got on Temu.

Housing might, in theory, be guaranteed in your home town.

Idk why you’re trying to couch this as a hypothetical. Imagine trying to talk about Social Security this way - “oh well maybe in theory…” No, brother, the checks are in the mail.

People really do have family housing that really does exist for real in China.

But it’s certainly no Soviet Union

The Chinese Communist system was not organized under the Soviet model. Absolutely true. Maoism-cum-Dengism is not Lenin With Chinese Characteristics.

Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba, and Venezuela also had their own district unique models.

if you go up to local officials and say “I have no job and I want to work”, they’ll find something for you to do pretty quickly.

If you go to your local Chinese jobs office, you’ll get a bureaucratic exam that determines your fitness for entry level positions.

23% of the population works in the public sector. That’s roughly 300M people - China Is Hiring.

But the private sector is also hiring, often with salary and benefits that outcompete public jobs. The idea that you need to be a trash picker to earn an income is flat out wrong.

I do go out to live shows and buy t-shirts and other merch like nobody’s business.

Who doesn’t love a cool band t-shirt?

3D printing your own guns

Just buy a normal fucking gun, this is America ffs there are more guns than people.

Too bad DVDs and CDs will quit being made soon

We’re still making vinyl records. What on earth makes you think we’re going to stop making DVDs?

I’m happy to just pirate this shit.

To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.

The power behind all that hair… Unimaginable.

Now, homeless people collecting rubbish to sell for scrap does also happen in the US, but the US at least doesn’t claim to be a socialist country.

The US doesn’t have guaranteed housing. China does. The major catch is that Chinese guaranteed housing is tied to your municipal “home city” and getting that changed is a pain in the ass. So the homeless people you’ll find in major urban areas are residents who left their rural neighborhoods in pursuit of a better life in the city and fell through the cracks.

That said, the low cost of living in China definitely improves the prospects of even the most desperately poor. What’s more, Chinese policy with respect to “internal migrants” is radically different from the US policy of mass criminalization and imprisonment.

Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.

The domestic policy around perpetual family ownership of property is critical to limiting poverty in China in a way very few other countries enjoy.

So when you say

China has no functional social safety net

I’m genuinely not clear if you know what you’re talking about.

I walked past a location in Shenzhen which was advertising that they were hiring. Their offer of pay: ¥200 a day, for a 10-hour shift, six days a week. In one of the most expensive cities in the country.

Shocking to hear they hadn’t filled the position.

You know, I was skeptical that birds even got up that high.

Turns out this thing is actually far too low.

Incidentally, also why the other wind turbine bird death stories are largely horseshit.

Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.

Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds—between 12 and 64 million each year—are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity.

Except Robocop

Robocop fights his programming at the end.

Outside the cities, the rural areas can be real shit-holes.

One of the more notable achievements of the last two decades of Chinese economic improvement has been the degree of urbanization, particularly in the western end of the country. This used to be a point of criticism among western economists (Chinese Ghost Cities being a popular meme during the '00s/'10s). Now we just don’t talk about Chengdu or Lhasa or Lanzhuo at all.

It’s not the level of rank poverty you see in many developing countries, far from it, but it’s a lot worse than even the poorest parts of Appalachia in the US

In my experience, having done a little traveling through Appalachia and the northern end of the Gulf Coast, urban migration has solved a lot of the back country issues by hollowing out the country’s interior. If we didn’t build a highway through a chunk of the state, people just stopped living there.

Chinese rural communities have experienced a similar hollowing out, particularly in the 80s and 90s when the prosperity on the coasts fully eclipsed the poverty of the western interior. But because agricultural labor was seen as critical to social stability, the state simply refused to let people leave. The end result was an enormous black market population that became a nightmare to manage. And so the late Deng and Hu governments (and early Xi government - although by then much of the work was done) spent a significant amount of resources and labor back filling rural development. Hu, in particular, was a champion of the rural west thanks to his policy of low taxes and high investment.

This didn’t eliminate the developmental black holes on the Chinese map. But the expansion westward was its own kind of economic revolution. One that culminated in a virtual elimination of the poverty the country had become known for during the Reagan Era.

The difference in approach - demanding people move to the cities rather than demanding public spending move to the country - is a critical point of divergence between American Neoliberal and Chinese Socialist domestic policies.