TranscendentalEmpire

Slavery and wage slavery is happening across the globe, but companies with thin margins don't resort to it any more than companies with huge margins (e.g. Nike). If anything, monopolistic corporations have much more power to use and enforce slave labor than the small and medium-sized factories selling at razor thin margins on Temu.

That's most likely not the case. Larger corporations require more workforce stability and require better trained labour to maintain quality control. These needs are better fulfilled by factories who actually hire their labourers instead of hiring temps and auxiliary workers who make considerably less.

Factories that are supplying corporations like temu can only maintain a profit margin if they rely on the cheaper auxiliary labour. Often times hiring and firing them for specific manufacturing quotas. This is one of the reasons temu doesn't have any consistency in quality.

Things sold in the US are way overpriced. Temu is actually pretty normally priced if you consider the average cost of living in the countries it ships to.

If anything they are extremely underpriced, especially when you equate the cost of shipping. The cost of a lot of items on temu are significantly lower than the production cost. As you said it's rare to have a markup that exceeds 50% and a lot of stuff on temu is significantly cheaper than that.

I believe temu operates as a way to minimize the excess of surplus production. Basically in economics it's always hard to balance the size of your labour force to meet the exact level of consumer demand.

Demand could be growing, so we built a new factory. Great, we are now employing more workers and have the ability to supply the increased demand. And then something like COVID happens, exports stop, demand halts, and now you have a factory with no work.

In the west, it's tough shit, pack it up, go home. However, in China local governments can supply local businesses with loans, hoping that demand returns and they can eventually turn a profit. So they pay the factories to produce anyways, well what do they produce if there is no actual demand for export. Well anything, it doesn't matter, it's just about maintaining productivity levels. Just throw the shit in the warehouse and we'll figure out what to do with it later......enter temu.

If you buy it from somewhere else, it's still coming from a factory in China. May as well cut out the middleman.

But you aren't buying from the factory, you're buying from temu, the middle man.

Temu, but economically their prices make sense.

Only if you equate the use of cheap auxiliary labour, the sky rocketing debt of local Chinese governments, and the subsidization of global shipping offered by the Chinese fed.

The problem with this version of robbing Peter to pay Paul is that there isn't actually any profit imported into the country. The loans and subsidies offered by their government were implemented to intice an actual return, where the Fed supports the local government, who support the company, who use the profit to support the workers. When there is no profit, the system is just aquiring debt.

Tbh, I think America in general might be a little too obsessed with personal freedom for us to transfer the entire country over to nuclear energy.

Successful nuclear programs require actual collective work for long term viability. We would need to actually give administrative powers to an agency like the nuclear regulation commission that supercedes the authority of individual states.

Otherwise its just going to be like 30 years of ironing out NIMBY state legislation before anything gets built, just like the deep storage facility we've been "building" since the 80s.

Correct. If there are actually micro plastics in your blood, the plastic is likely relatively small compared to a blood cell. Otherwise we would be witnessing a lot more issues with stroke/heart attacks. Any kind of filter small enough to filter out something that small would also filter out blood cells.

Yeah, but investors really don't care about the price of a stock, they care about how much the price moves once they own it.

It's the inherent problem with publicly owned companies. Even if you perfected a mode of profit, unless you improve upon perfection next quarter you're in hot shit.

You can only squeeze so much profit out of any one gimmick, after that the only way to mimic growth is by cutting labour costs, and eventually diverting investment funding into profit for shareholders.

Same for Phosphor https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

I'm sorry, but I didn't see anything about the nitrogen cycle in the link you posted. What do you mean by "exceeding the planetary boundaries significantly"? I'm not very familiar with "planetary boundaries" as an ecological theory, and the site doesn't seem to expand on their methodology to a significant degree, or maybe I'm just not looking at the right pages.

use about half of global agricultural lands for animal feed. So the nitrogen fertilizers are not needed to sustain nutrition. They are needed to sustain the meat overconsumption in wealthy countries.

Right..... But do we actually expect that to happen? You seem to be focused on the physical possibility and the science behind the problem, when my argument has been entirely policy based.

If we had the political will, or if we were motivated as nations to help our fellow man, I wouldn't be worried in the first place. My concern isnt that this is some unsolvable and inevitable problem, but that governments will respond to this problem in the easiest and most profitable way. By ignoring it and allowing big AG to create a natural monopoly over an artificially inflated scarcity.

We can make nitrogen fertilizers just fine with the Haber Bosch process and Hydrogen electrolysis. All you need for that is water, air and electricity.

The Haber Bosch process is what we currently use...... We can make hydrogen via electrolysis, but it's a lot cheaper and easier to create it via gasification of a high carbon material like natural gas.

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that it will become more expensive, and that at risk communities already have a hard time paying the current price.

There's of course a solution, my fear is that there will be no mechanism put in place by governments to make it economical for the entire globe.

Also crop yields are perfectly suitable to feed all of the global population without using fertilizers.

That's just untrue. "around 175 million tons of nitrogen flow into the world's croplands every year, and about half this total becomes incorporated into cultivated plants. Synthetic fertilizers provide about 40 percent of all the nitrogen taken up by these crops. Because they furnish—directly as plants and indirectly as animal foods— about 75 percent of all nitrogen in consumed proteins (the rest comes from fish and from meat and dairy foodstuffs produced by grazing), about one third of the protein in humanity's diet depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer."

just requires farmin techniques, that are not suitable for industrial farming for profit maximising companies.

The communities that are most at risk do not generally partake in industrial farming, nor do they export a lot of food.

On the contrary the current way of industrial farming destroys the yields as it erodes soils physically, chemically and biologically. If we continue farming like this for another century or two we will face severe global starvation.

Yes, we should refine the way we farm, but we are absolutely dependent on synthetic fertilizers, or at least 1/4 of the global population is. The current population is just too high for the nitrogen cycle to sustain us. There's a reason we haven't seen the levels of famine endemic to the period before the Haber Process, this despite a huge surge in global pop.

Asbestos isn't widely used in brake pads any longer, California and a couple other states banned it a couple decades ago. The market demand of those states pretty much forced manufacturers to change without federal input. It looks like this bill is just making it official.

I don't really think using it as a reagent to make chlorine is very dangerous, so long as factory workers have access to proper PPE.

Fossil fuels can't be banned overnight; I am pro-renewables, but we're just not there for freight/ag/rural/heavy industry.

The largest concern I have as we move away from fossil fuels is the fact that we are super dependent on it for cheap fertilizers. Our current population exceeds the natural limitations imposed by the nitrogen cycle. As we stop fossil fuels production these fertilizers created mostly as a byproduct of refining fuel will go up in cost. Potentially moreso than poorer nations with large populations can afford to pay.

We still have to depart from fossil fuels, but I'm afraid of the consequences it will have on the global south.

question whether VR is generally a good idea based on how our brains learn and do things.

I think the main problem with VR in general is the same problem we see mirrored in the rest of the tech world. Most people in silicon valley fundamentally do not understand the way the central nervous system works.

Because of sci-fi and other media, people tend to perceive the brain and the body as two different things. That the body is just the vehicle of the brain, and that we will someday be able to rid ourselves of these mortal vehicles.

In reality there are no clear delineations that separate the central nervous system from the rest of body in this manor. The more we learn about the brain, the more we discover that it doesn't function like the command center we like to describe it as. That a lot of reactive motions aren't signaled by the brain, but from the spinal cord.

Because of this relation between body and mind, screens will never be as effective as buttons. Things like NueroLinks will never be able to provide the ease of use as a mouse. And VR will never be a pleasurable experience for the vast majority of the population. We simply aren't suited for an environment where our only stimuli is just the visual and audible spectrum.

My theory has always been that the better you try and make VR, the more it's going to negatively affect the general population.

The same thing happens when you try to make life like prosthetics. If you make a prosthetic that's too visually similar to the original, your brain actually tries to communicate with it, and when it doesn't get anything back, it can cause symptoms of dysmorphia.

I think similar things are happening with VR, that the more sound and visuals are able to trick your brain, the more it will conflict with proprioceptors telling you that you're actually just sitting in your room.

Seems to be a case of the ole " I can't see the forest, all these trees are in the fucking way!".

Which is kinda funny considering the books had a lot to do with ecology.

Still do, I have my pager on me right now. Though I feel they've gone down in quality over the years. I usually go through at least one a year, and the buzzer function tends to die after just a few months.

Caring about family members?

You mean the only thing that allowed you to survive into adulthood?

How sad must it be to be so withdrawn from empathy that you can't even realize how dependent you are on it.