Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Today’s picture depicts astronauts on the Tiangong space station, guaranteed 100% free of Nazis. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
We have a Matrix homeserver at genzedong.xyz. See this thread for information about our Matrix space.
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try marxists.org, Anna’s Archive, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
As a Dutch person I can’t speak about it
Never forget what was taken from you.
This is a Soviet self-propelled atomic power station. In the format of a tracked heavy truck. From the 1960’s.
That’s really cool, but how often do you need to move a power station?
I think the point is to be able to construct it in an industrial facility and then move it to a remote area where it can provide energy for both industrial and civilian use
I want one.
That’s pretty cool. I was looking into nuclear powered cars, and the issue was with miniaturization. Tons of aerospace and defence companies are making something similar currently.
FYI, the Soviet union’s space program cost a tenth of the US’s
Did this really work? I didn’t realize it was possible to safely perform nuclear fission in such a (relatively) tiny space
It did work. The technology was lost alongside the USSR (yes, it is possible to lose technology). Rosatom is currently fiddling with floating reactors, in the format of a cargo boat
that’s amazing and tragic
Don’t give the dolphins access to nuclear power. We’ve been warned about this already!
Can you share some sources for this? This sounds both amazing and extremely tragic.
https://hexbear.net/comment/3789012
Someone else posted an authoritative looking PDF that says that the technical plans for the thing were declassified a few years ago. I don’t see any basis for describing the tech as lost, actually kinda concerning nobody else called that claim out.
Like don’t get me wrong I share the sense of grief for lost potential (esp wrt space exploration) but let’s stick to reality
For the reactor itself? The link is in the post. For the floating one? I can offer wikifedia
If u read the link it says the whole generator takes up 4 separate platforms like the one in the picture. So not that tiny.
This would be great to power small villages and outposts in Siberia.
Not just there. Think about every town and city in the global south suffering from water shortages, electricity shortages. You could power water desalination plants with these. Heck, if you have a small, modular reactor (small enough to be put onto a tracked chassis), you could just make them stationary and have a lot of them. The potential is immense
water shortages
Have you read the article you cited? IT NEEDS 320 TONES PER HOUR OF WATER. OVER. THREE. HUNDRED. TONES. PER. HOUR. And because of the horrible thermal efficiency of this thing (~17%) the heated coolant water will be some ~20K hotter after the cooling cycle, so you can’t reuse it that much, and will lose it to evaporation.
That is a horrible idea but i love it so much
Why do you think it’s a horrible idea?
It’s a nuclear reactor on wheels. That is kinda doomed to cause problems. I also do have questions about how it would be economically viable when compared to other available means of mobile power generation. It takes some really well trained people to safely operate this thing, and a natural gas/diesel generator can be used with barley any training and is both safer and cheaper, and on top of this has more capacity. That’s not to say that this was a bad thing, the fact that they managed to build this thing, and at least according to the source i found it was also very stable and reliable, it was simply always doomed to not be very useful. But well, nuclear reactors use a lot of water, and well, mobile reactors on ships make a lot more sense, both because of this and because putting shielding on those is a lot easier. Ship based mobile reactors also can handle far higher capacities then land based ones. The only places where something like this might be useful is after natural disasters that destroy large amounts of infrastructure. That is mostly A) Earthquakes B) Tsunamis. Both of which also damage the streets that this thing would drive on, and well, after quakes and further flood waves would block practical operation for both of these. And well, there is diesel. It might not be as eco friendly as a reactor, but that just doesn’t really matter here. You can carry a small diesel generator and anyone can use them. They are also a lot cheaper to make. And those are just things seen from the perspective of back then. Today we have mobile solar and wind generators, better batteries, and if you really want that mobile multi-megawatt power plant, use natural gas or hydrogen generators. Mobile nuclear reactors are just to expensive to make sense on a scale you can fit on a car. On a ship? sure. that works, that’s why swimming nuclear plants exist. On land? no. It will always loose to other methods of power generation, both because you certainly can’t make that thing very efficient power wise, and it will be pretty expensive as well.
There is also the problem that this thing probably, i can’t find any non-Russian sources on this and don’t speak Russian, this thing needs a lot of water for cooling. At least all other reactors do, and i don’t see a way they could have gotten around that. This makes this thing useless in a lot of environments.You can also simply consider this: The soviets agreed with me, they gave up on it.
Perks of working at the Union is that I apparently get to watch the documentaries they make as they launch. In a few weeks I will watch a documentary about Colombian syndicalism and violence against activists. I will see if I can link the doc to here somehow.
Which Union?
The BRICS summit meeting begins tomorrow.
Do they have a streaming page?
Xi is going live in Twitch I heard
lmao for real?
___ after his speech he’s gonna show us how he plays fortnite
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TopXi is live! (Just Chatting, Forkknife, Among USA, Whole Process People’s Democracy)
I hope you all have a nice week
I hope you have a fantastic week
British Tabloids might be even Worse than other Western MSM, Theyre like RFA/RFE Levels of Rhetoric
I like how Republicans completely stopped giving a shit about Hawaii once they found out that it’s a blue state. I guess outrage over poor responses are only for other people in the tribe.
As I remember something similar happened during the winter storm in Texas in '21. Turns out politicians suck.
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You too, Oppo
preemptive youtooing
What if I didn’t do it
I’d cry probably
I went out drinking with my friends a few nights ago and some of them said Meloni was based 💀
Meloni in a few years be like: 🙃
maybe they were just mispronouncing the fruit
I wish that was the case. It was in the context of Italy’s government, and other governments. Apparently Marine LePen is too extreme, and Macron is too left wing, but Meloni is just right.
What kind of world is your friend living in where Macron is “too left wing”?
They live in a predominantly white upper middle class suburb outside of a major city.
Explains everything
They have muh “socialist” healthcare and a couple vacation days. AOC’s always praising them, must be radically leftist.
How bad is french healthcare? I actually no nothing of it
I’m not exactly sure. I heard people speak positively when I went to France, and it’s certainly better than that of the US, but I’m guessing neoliberalism has eaten at it a bit.
God damn liberalism lol. Even when I was a lib I was always like “man I wish libs had more teeth”
“man I wish libs had more teeth”
They do but they always bite left.
While this is true, I grew up just after the so-called “end of history” so didn’t get the full dose of anti-communist fervor, as the soviet union had just collapsed, and China had not had its meteoric resurgence.
Socialism wasn’t really a threat and while there were pockets of uprising in the 90s in the imperial core they were mostly dismissed as anti-white hatred like with the Rodney King riots.
Socialism is once again scratching at popularity over the last decade and so of course the old red scare machine is again firing on all cylinders.
I loved the scene at the end of season 3 of For All Mankind,
spoiler
where they find out that North Korea actually beat everyone to Mars
me irl after going through a federated post and updooting all hexbear commenters
Frans Timmermans, EU figurehead, has decided to lead the Dutch left Green/Labour coalition in order to get Dutch left back on track.
He has already announced that he wants a mandatory 2% NATO budget… So far for Dutch left, I guess.
Left-ish coalition and choosing the right side of the party for leadership is a tradition in Liberalism. He also will do nothing to push for any real changes for the environment globally, just maybe some very Dutch specific regulations that have almost no impact. Not a doom-post, though, because we can work to radicalize more people to the left from ir
The only positive thing that can come out of this is slightly left of center policies for a while and a small hope for an actual marxist movement to rise.
But looking at the state of the Dutch left right now you’d think we will soon have the Dutch Soviet Union under Timmermans. And any criticism is regarded as ‘helping the right’. Because you just have to vote for an outspoken anti communist otherwise it’s your fault!!! Fuck leftist values.
its so fucking bleak
Shit sucks. Just want @neera_tanden@hexbear.net back
I want to read/listen to some theory. The only stuff I’ve read is ‘Principles of Communism’, ‘Wage Labour and Capital’, ‘Value, Price and Profit’ and I’m halfway through ‘The State and Revolution’. What else would you recommend I read?
In this order: Imperialism (Lenin), Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), Neo-colonialism (Nkruma). If you prefer audiobook with context, all three of those are featured in the Marx Madness podcast as well and all are great reads.
Seconding listening to Marx Madness even if you are going to read the stuff yourself, especially if you don’t have a reading group of your own. They were the inspiration for the book club in the r/TheDeprogram server and we have now read over 16 different books (not counting the fact we read Blackshirts and Reds twice!)
I would recommend On Practice and On contradiction by Mao.
Professor Richard Wolff has some great lectures on his YouTube channel about Marxian economics
In addition to what others said “Socialism scientific and utopian” and “On historical materialism” by Engels. Both very short but very informative.