That may well be, but Elmo has foregone short-term profit to gain power long-term before. Twitter is the obvious example here – you may remember all the headlines in 2022 and 2023 how it didn’t make sense to trash the existing brand, roll out the red carpet for horrible people, offend partners by not paying for stuff, and lose money at the same time. Granted, I can’t say if this behavior stems from a coke-addled mind or thorough planning but whatever it may be, it arguably panned out perfectly. Twitter was in the news all the time and Twitter helped get Trump elected, making Elmo’s investments surge and helping him gain a powerful government position. Many of the advertisers are already back, more will come post-Jan 20, and Twitter will gain (even more) relevance as a communication platform through the new US government.

There also is the incident where Elmo threatened Ukraine with disabling their Starlink access. While yes, that access is free, it shows that Musk may just discontinue service when ideological alignment is no longer a given.

Iow, I would be careful because the guy is maybe not that trustworthy, even if you pay him.

Entrusting an Elmo company with national security would be an interesting choice.

Hi. I removed your submission “China is the world’s sole manufacturing superpower: A line sketch of the rise” from !europe, as it primarily discusses China, with only passing mentions of EU countries and thus does not fit the theme of the community.

Fwiw: ARD has (finally) announced that Mischke is out, so this is old news; random source (German).

a US-based investment company

That seems like a euphemism. “The company that manages 10% or more of almost anything traded on a stock market” seems more apt.

Some people won’t have enough money to buy a new car or will always feel insecure in their cars now.

Psst: English please!

Not really. Older ones are loud, small/underpowered ones are loud but new, larger, correctly sized, modulating heat pumps can be fairly quiet.

I am not confused, although maybe my wording was confusing.

My point is, that generally speaking, you can’t use water from the same tank to heat your drinking water and to cool your home (because it mixes and the resulting temperature will fill neither requirement). There are of course tons of variants of buffer tanks, and in some cases there are bypasses or there’s a physical separation between heating water and (water used to heat) drinking water

I was talking about cooling only.

Caveat: In Europe, heat pumps usually provide either no or less effective cooling though, because our heatings usually use water as the medium rather than air like in the US. And heat pumps are usually connected with a buffer tank, in many cases that’s a combination hot drinkable water + heating water tank.

Water as the medium means cooling is usually less effective. And if you fuck up that buffer tank, cooling doesn’t work at all.

Thanks! In that case, I can delete it here.

Almost like there is a coordinated campaign by gas & oil lobbyists across the globe. Curious.

(Greetings from Germany where the government had the goal of helping 500k heat pumps get installed in 2024. People installed 200k heat pumps, but 500k gas/oil furnaces. This follows a solid year 2022/2023 of concentrated disinformation campaigns about heat pumps.)

This content seems like it would make more sense at !yurop@lemm.ee.

I mean … I do think Ireland is fairly livable (though I’ve never been there). It’s just that in some ways the country has achieved this at the expense of other EU countries.

I was going to stop reading after you said this, lets stay out of hypotheticals and stay in reality

It’s not a hypothetical. The reason why money exists is that humans needed a tool/a system to allocate goods and services in society. I don’t know what’s supposed to be controversial about that.

I find it helpful to keep that in mind. It helps against cart-before-horse notions like money being strictly necessary for us to satisfy needs. Which you appear to espouse.(?)

You can easily search for countries that have gone broke and those that rely on IMF funding, they are poor, they live incredibly poor and terrible lifestyles, they suffer from disease, starvation and abject poverty,

So, is this strictly because of a lack of money? Or is it because of a lack of physical resources or a misallocation of physical resources? I’d be seriously surprised if you could find me a single example where it is the former.

(Not to mention the IMF being quite the neoliberal ideological shitshow.)

Food provides food?

That’s a fun deflection, but I can reword to: Food provides nutrition, money doesn’t. (Money can be a tool to allocate food to yourself though. But food is just as edible if it comes from something you planted yourself. Or if you got a donation.)

As a total percent of the pie sure, however if you were to ask the majority of countries on the planet if they would like to have a 3 trillion dollar company like Apple or Google, they would love it, the benefits for the country are enormous.

Given that we can watch the generative-AI boom change society for the worse and make the planet less livable in real time, I find your examples rather interesting.

Indeed, Ireland appears fairly happy hosting the EU subsidiaries of Google/Apple/Toktok/Meta/[any other company selling digital goods within the EU]. The rest of the EU tends to be unhappy that Ireland is reallocating money from them to itself that way. Especially as in effect, Ireland is only taking a small cut for allowing money to bleed from the EU to random Carribean islands as profits. And yes, given that we use money as a tool to reallocate goods and services across the world right now, that bleeding-off means something.

And as their second USP within the EU, Ireland is also fucking up on oversight of those corporates. Good job, Ireland! Thanks for lending a hand in destabilizing democracies!

You really think that if you were to go to Africa and offer them a trillion dollar company they would decline and say no thanks? We won’t take all that extra tax income, work, productivity, stability, etcetc?

Ah, wafting through my nostrils is a faint odor of colon…ialism!

Also, I never said anything like that. However, the major real bit that company would bring with itself is a reallocation of physical resources. It’s not strictly about the money.

Also, it’s basically brainrot to expect any returns for societies from big corporates unless they’re extremely well regulated.

those big companies pay tax, and that tax pays for things

That seems like a bad take.

• Money is imaginary, literally just a system to bring a certain order into society.
• Money is created by countries (with banks as the middlepersons). It’s not created by tax payments.
• Money doesn’t provide food or shelter – food and houses do that; money doesn’t teach people – other people do. I.e., it’s people and things that create our wealth, not money. All the money in the world is absolutely no use if there are no goods or services to exchange for it.
• Big corporations, especially profitable big corporations tend to pay the least taxes. Corporations are not particularly creative overall, except in avoiding contributions back to society.

Biogas can be largely emissions-neutral — but only if you don’t scale it up. E.g. collecting biogas from municipal organic waste is a good thing. But collecting it from farm animals directly or indirectly from feed production is worse, because you might just be helping factory farms greenwash their ops.

Might also be a drinks-carton-specific government scheme. You never know though when people just write “my country.”

someone who’s spent some small amount of time defending articles which are clearly propaganda designed to make people mistrustful of anything “green”

Fwiw, that’s not the reason I crossposted it. I don’t know the motivations of the original poster.

that’s the goal of the article.

While granted, the headline is baity, the final section of the article seems fairly solution-oriented.