I only remember a segment on Democracy Now: https://youtu.be/AqyHzePx3ew?t=440. It must have been an article instead (EDIT: This one: El Salvador’s ‘cool dictator’ boasts country would be ‘a one-party system’ after election win)
You can find more with this search
But they also reported on the "civil war" where many poor people seem to have been unjustly arrested: https://youtu.be/A4Cw0KtkzWg https://youtu.be/fvDFFRA6HmI.
Thanks for the links, sand sounds interesting. I believe gravity batteries outside of pumped hydro just need too much "structure" to store energy and then just have too little capacity. Unfortunately there is sometimes a little bit too much hype about cool ideas that don't pan out. There is also an idea I think for an electric train / rail cars full of ballast being driven up a rail on a hill and then moving down to release electricity. Just a lot of effort.
And yeah thermal batteries should solve one of the biggest consumers, heating. Lots of possibilities. Molten salt works also. I think if you just use water to store heat for the winter you need about the size of a big Olympic swimming pool under your house. But with wind instead of solar you don't even need to store that much.
An important thing I believe is that we have nearly unlimited access to energy with solar and wind turbines / kite power. It requires massive production efforts but you can extract so much energy from sunshine that efficiencies of batteries aren't even that important. Just that you can use cheap and sustainable materials, can recycle them, and can have enough energy density.
So the possibilities are definitely there, but we really neglected to push R&D and massively fund multiple startups for each technology. And we need to suspend patents or drastically shorten their lifespan to like 4 years or so.
We need the equivalent of keeping the phone lines and phone numbers compatible though. So that all the vendors that are on amazon can use a commonly shared internet protocol to also sell on other platforms, otherwise the network effects are lost and make splitting them up and true competition impossible.
Haha oops! Yeah he's just an example though. Well I'd say they grew up and lived in a time where the economy had real growth so there were opportunists and they got wealthy - so they fundamentally don't understand the power of fascism as material conditions deteriorate. They are stupid and that is dangerous.
Yeah, check out the other detailed answers.
Yeah. I think social media should be seen as virtual worlds that created new types of "alternative nation" that are controlled by these "cloud capitalists". They decide the rules of conduct and eCommerce and the shape of society.
Cloud serfs and cloud proles pick up your digital pitchforks and techno-rampage!!! 🤑
Interesting, it seems so, but the DMA isn't "marketed" as such or explains the problem and doesn't suggest plausible solutions. What is needed I think is a kind of federation for marketplaces, so they need to use some kind of open protocol that allows others to use the same network of vendors etc. But it seems you could build on top of the DMA.
I do think a new term makes sense because these platforms both scale ultra large so "explode" in market power, and also can't just be broken up using anti-trust laws because then the network effects of large network effects vanish (this is true for amazon and social media). So it is something different because of those new properties. I think federation and open protocols might be the answer to this.
Federate Amazon! Imagine a kind of protocol / standard to exchange prices, descriptions, images, sale conditions, guarantees etc similar to activity pub. then you could use the same network of vendors as amazon.
But it probably needs more regulations because amazon is so huge and powerful to destroy competitors.
Maybe also federate / split up fulfillment warehouses.
Have you read his book? I'd be curious what he suggests. I've just thought that if you could legislate to make marketplaces use some kind of "activitypub" protocol, you could federate them similar to social media. A protocol and open standard to exchange prices, descriptions, order conditions etc. So people could use alternatives to amazon/ebay and still have access to the large network of vendors. That would break the digital fiefdom. Is that something he discusses?
The new EU payment directive also finally created instant wire transfers, so it's now possible to directly and instantly pay vendors without having to pay a tax to paypal.
Maybe the next thing is going to be delivery services with drones or self driving "micro vans".
I believe / suspect that robotics could help reduce pesticide and herbicide use. There are many examples of "high intensity agriculture" or a more traditional hands on agriculture can have higher yields.
There are now robots that use computer vision to see herbs and then just push them back into the earth. Basically just robotic weeding. I'm sure you could do something similar with insects and pests with an "robotic rat catcher".
Ideally those robotic designs would be open source and easy to build and maintain with something like 3D printing.