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Cake day: June 3rd, 2024

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  • The solution is obviously not exclusively from pricing models, we need other energy sources than renewables for the time being, that doesn’t mean we need to have market-based electricity pricing.

    Imagine the state installing as many solar panels as society, guided by experts, democratically decides it wants, basically deciding as a society the energy mix instead of hoping that companies will install enough if we bribe them enough with taxes to do so, and if it’s profitable. Then, it decides a pricing model based on a mixture of subsidy and incentivising consumption during production hours.

    Problem solved, innit?



  • Cheap electricity is great for consumers, but not necessarily for producers. Some people might say, “well, screw producers,” but even if you take profit out of the equation, electric utilities need to be able to at least cover their expenses, and you can’t do that if the amount of electricity you’re generating relative to the demand is so high the price actually goes negative (meaning the utility is actually paying the consumer). Again, that’s good for consumers, but I’m sure you can see how that’s not a sustainable business model.

    Fully agreed: let’s eliminate business from the issue, and create national, for-service electric grids, that produce the cheapest renewables at all possible times in the most efficient way possible, disregarding hourly profit and taking into account exclusively the cost in €/kWh produced over the lifetime of each energy source.

    Suddenly it’s obvious that the problem isn’t with renewables, but with organising the electric grid as a market








  • No, it didn’t “fail” by any historical account. If you look up even on Wikipedia, which has an extremely western bias, you’ll see that the article is called , “dissolution” of the USSR, not failure or crumbling or whatever revisionist word of the day you wanna choose. The USSR was booming, it enjoyed overwhelming legitimacy in the vast majority of its republics (with some notable exceptions in the Baltics mostly) as proven by the soviet referendum to maintain the USSR, and it was only dissolved from the top down by a few party members, not a failure or crumbling by any means. The 90s crisis wasn’t created by socialism, it was created by the newly formed capitalist government which auctioned the country to the most corrupt bidder and created the russian oligarchy that we all hate now. It was literally directed by western institutions like the International Monetary Fund and economists from MIT, you can feel free to study this subject in the slightest if you’re interested and you’ll see that what I’m saying is right (clearly you haven’t done so before).





  • It turned a backwater pre-capitalist empire where 80% of the population were poor farmers, into the second world power in unprecedentedly quick industrialization and development, defeated the Nazis and prevented their extermination of the Slavic people including Poles and Ukrainians, it guaranteed rights to women and to national minorities like Kazakh, Uzbeki, Georgians, Armenians, it established for the first time in history concepts like socialized healthcare and pensions for every citizen which western Europe later emulated… After being dismantled, of which it’s been 33 years, Russia still hasn’t recovered the GDP per capita of the USSR, so what does that tell you about how well liberalism is working in Russia?



  • And access to transport was widely available to the overwhelming majority of the population through trains, trams, buses and trolleybuses. Even if your American mind can’t comprehend this fact, owning a car isn’t the ultimate form of mobility, there are alternatives that are arguably better. City design was centered around walkability, density and public transit; metro systems were luxurious and a predicament all out of themselves, and housing being generally obtained through the worker’s union implied that workers usually lived in relative proximity to their workplaces.

    The soviet economy was a developing, centrally planned economy, not running under the premise of overproduction and surplus but running under the premise of 5-year plans of production. There was full employment, and almost complete usage of the raw materials extracted and industrial goods produced. Making twice as many cars, implied removing all of that labor and those resources from another sector of the economy. When the premise isn’t to “make money selling cars to rich people”, but to “grant adequate material conditions and welfare to every citizen”, you have to make decisions like that. More cars could have implied, for example, fewer hospital beds or fewer trams, but my point is that making more private cars would have NECESSARILY meant making less of something else of which there’s also no surplus (because the premise of the USSR was the non-existence of surplus). It’s very easy to have surpluses in a capitalist economy when you don’t care about 80% of the population not having access to the goods and services available, when you want everyone to have access it’s a different story.


  • For the last time, I’m not the ultimate supporter of themselves Chinese model of Communism, now that I’ve shown you that your position stems from being uneducated about socialism, its meaning, and its history, you resort to “how many gazillionaires” because you’re not trying to have a civilised discussion. You have a preconceived notion that “China isn’t communism”, which is fine, so do I, but when confronted with the discrepancies within the communist movement and how there are legitimate arguments to call it socialist and on the way to communism, you just spout your initial position again with stronger words. I’ll tell you what I said at the beginning: I don’t care whether it’s communist or not, but you saying “hurr durr no socialism if billionaires” is a shitty argument from ignorance.