• 408 Posts
  • 465 Comments
Joined 7 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 18th, 2023

help-circle










  • 60 million people is almost no one?

    Geez it’s like you people want poor people to stay poor. There’s more than enough capacity for solar deployments in the nations East - it’s explicit policy that’s put deployments further West. Beijing is happy to build some UHV lines if it means that prosperity can be driven into the West - it’s the same argument as for the HSR line to Lanzhou and then to Urumqi. It’s the same argument as for the HSR line to Hohhot and the HrSR from Chengdu to Lhasa. Beijing knows that these infrastructure projects are inefficient, but Beijing is more concerned with equity of growth than the growth itself - they’d rather see 10% growth in the West and 3% growth in the East for 5% growth nationally than 6% growth nationally, but coming entirely from already established tier 1 population centers.

    It’s not only mutual prosperity, but also an effort to reduce internal migration towards tier 1 cities.


  • I mean, yeah. It’ll be interesting to see if that means that they’ll still pursue those legislative ideals (just without a platform or unifying cry or whatever), or if they’re happy to push the responsibility down to the states.

    My opinion is that the Republicans see the writing on the wall: why make unpopular decisions federally when you can make popular decisions at the state-level? They can maintain a christofascist state in their home ground without having to project onto states that’ll ignore their legislation anyway.


  • The lack of promises with regards to abortion and same-sex marriage is huge. It’s a colossal shift. Trump has always been more of a traditional Jeffersonian Republican than a Federalist - he’s in favour of shifting power from the federal government to the states. This is an increasing indicator that the states will be what decides on these social topics, not the feds.

    That also explains why he’s getting so much funding and support from the elite in Silicon Valley - they would like nothing more than for California to decide legislation rather than DC.

    It’s increasingly apparent that Trump views the role of the federal government as an arbiter of the economy and the role of the United States (as a concept) as a way of unifying the disparate interests of different states with regards to foreign policy. By gutting federal agencies, the only logical result is pushing power down to the individual states.




  • The new platform softened language on abortion, excised old language referring obliquely to gay conversion therapy and culled a section about reducing a national debt that Mr. Trump had increased by nearly $8 trillion during his term in office.

    Mr. Trump made clear to his team that he wanted the 2024 platform to be his and his alone. He wanted it to be much shorter and simpler — and, in some cases, vaguer. He was especially focused on the language about abortion, which he recognized was a potentially potent issue against him in a general election. He wanted nothing in the platform that would give Democrats an opening to attack him, and he made clear to aides that he was perfectly fine with bucking social conservatives, for whom he had delivered a tremendous victory by reshaping the Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority.

    Mr. Trump also stressed that he did not want to define marriage as between one man and one woman. Instead, the document contains a vague statement open to interpretation: “Republicans will promote a Culture that values the Sanctity of Marriage.”

    One person involved in the process recalled Mr. Trump saying privately: “Sanctity of marriage. Don’t define it.”



  • Gansu, the poorest province in China, a province where “almost no one is living.” Qinghai, Xinjiang… Same story. Together, they have almost 60 million people. Many of them are minorities with historically poor job prospects due to their distance from economic centers.

    By building energy installations in the middle of the country, they’re providing jobs to a group that’s been left behind by the rapid industrialization of the country’s East. Providing them with a surplus of electricity. Driving investment in the region. Moreover, this group of people is more than the population of New York and Texas… Combined.

    How about you take your racism and your classism and shove it up your ass?