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WayeeCool [comrade/them] @ WayeeCool @hexbear.net
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4 yr. ago

  • In California, Oregon, and Washington the state governments stripped cities of most of their powers related to zoning in regards to blocking conversions to mixed use residential. As long as there isn't heavy industry right next door (aren't crazy, no one wants Houston), mixed use residential zoning is hard for cities to deny.

    Los Angeles has the problem (benzene, hydrocarbons, heavy metals) of all the oil wells, pipelines, refineries, crude oil storage, and other oil field infrastructure hidden behind facades all throughout the city. The city and county are an active oil field, something that should never have been approved when there is residential or light commercial literally 25ft away from camouflaged wells, pipelines, and crude oil storage tanks. Then again people over a century ago probably shouldn't have looked at the natural tar pits and thought to themselves "this is a great place to build a city".

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/09/oil-wells-in-la-nearby-residents-grapple-with-health-problems.html

    New residential arguably is unethical in this situation, especially if it's lower income housing. Btw, this is the reason building new public schools has been almost impossible in Los Angeles and existing schools all have soil that if there were alternatives would mean shutting them down. Los Angeles and Houston are more alike than anyone likes to admit. Can't do the type of super fund site remediation (clean up) at the scale actually needed because it would mean tearing the city down to the bedrock to replace all the soil.

  • As long as no one hits one of the two US carriers on station in the area there should be no worry about the US resorting to nukes. It's something like an aircraft carrier getting sunk that would cause the kind of psychic damage required for US leadership to have an irrational knee jerk response involving nuclear weapons.

    on a side note: does anyone else hate how because the people of the US are uniquely fkd in the head and have enough nuclear weapons to leave the earth lifeless, the rest of the world has to keep in mind what kinds of events might cause the US to have a complete collective freak out? In recent years I keep thinking about how throughout all of human history hegemonic empires would rise and fall but never before has the decline of an empire come with the very real danger that as they destabilize it could result in them killing everyone on earth rather than just themselves and their neighbors. It feels like being locked in a room with another individual who is experiencing deteriorating mental health and is in possession of a hand grenade no one can take away from them without risking setting it off.

  • For real. The majority of the price difference isn't materials or workplace safety but privatized vs state enterprise. A sizeable chunk of the $5000 price difference is the cut that goes to the shareholders of General Dynamics. It's the same reason the Chinese J20 costs so much less than the F35 and had dramatically less production issues.

    Russia only had a privatized defense industry from the early 1990s until in 2007 they decided privatization of certain industries was a mistake. They undid the privatization of their aerospace, defense, high tech manufacturing, and key heavy industries. It's taken almost a decade to repair the damage of privatization and rebuild capacity but we are now seeing the fruits of those efforts.

    In Russia their 155mm artillery shells are currently manufactured by KBP Instrument Design Bureau, a wholey owned subsidiary of the Russia state owned Rostec holding corporation.

    In the US all their 155mm artillery shells are manufactured at the US government owned Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, which is operated by the private sector defense contractor General Dynamics. That same facility used to be able to produce over a million 155mm field artillery shells per month back in the 1940s before modern factory automation and even today claims to have the ability to ramp back to that capacity (at a cost) with only a couple months notice. As part of the US propaganda blitz, BusinessInsider recently did a PR and tour video of the plant.

  • This is too fkd up and the news article really avoided talking about who is doing this:

    You will find no better expert. Your guide is an urban policy professional, card-carrying City Commissioner overseeing a municipal department with an annual budget over $500m, and cofounder of San Francisco's largest neighborhood association.

    It's a PR stunt by a political action group to stoke even more of the reactionary policies that made SF into the dystopian libertarian shit-hole it currently is.

  • It really depends on the quality of benefits package. For example my brother and father are white collar types working for organizations with extremely strong unions. Their compensation includes full medical/dental insurance (no out of pocket) for them and their dependents that their employer pays $6,500 a month for. Their employer contribution to the agreed upon pension plan is also thousands a month. They have showed me the itemized documentation and I'm always jealous since they get a $130K salary then their employer spends almost as much on their benefits while I'm stuck in a job where I have to pay for things like dental or major hospitalization out of pocket.

    I'm not claiming you are cheaping out on your employee benefits as a business owner but if you are paying so little I have to assume you are making your employees pay half for things like medical insurance and it's the type of medical insurance that doesn't cover full dental. I also have to assume you aren't providing your employees with a full pension but instead doing the 401K match scheme employers in the US pull to avoid actually providing a robust pension plan. Most employers in the US skimp out on dental coverage and for anything other than preventive care people are expected to pay tens of thousands out of pocket for basic things like braces for their children or dental surgeries.

  • Even that is giving too much credit to the US government narrative.

    There literally are all the US mainstream news outlets like CBS News who actually had reporters there at the time: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

    Also from classified US communications with assets on the ground: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/89BEIJING18828_a.html

    Funniest thing is that "tank man" photo idiots spam on Reddit all the time. Most people in the west don't realize there is video of it, that the guy didn't get run over. Furthermore they assume he was blocking tanks heading towards the square, infact those tanks were at the time headed away from the square to avoid engaging with armed agitators (people with guns and grenades that had killed police) in a crowded environment. Dude was trying to make them go back.

    The deaths that day were people who got gunned down by the "protestors" or the police who were killed when the "protestors" threw grenades (military ordnance) into police vehicles. People that were armed by the CIA as part of a color revolution operation, one that failed because it didn't actually have any support and more importantly because the PLA commander on the scene ordered his units to leave the area rather than responding in kind. The only actual protestors that day were communists having labor protests happening nearby and not the dancing libertine youth acting as the face of the US color revolution operation involving armed groups trying unsuccessfully to provoke the PLA soliders into responding to deadly attacks with deadly force in a crowded urban environment.