I mean, it’s not like concrete is scraping on the walls going up and down, it’s on a pulley system which would be efficient in terms of doing energy transfer. The article mentions round-trip efficiency above 80 percent, so I’m not sure pumping water could be much more efficient than that.

I’d see this sort of use as more facilitating efficient operation of traffic, but I agree some measure of control by the state is also necessary, and is not inherently a negative thing.

My view is that systemd was a mistake and I disagree with it on a philosophical level. I see stuff like machine-id getting baked in as a direct extension of this philosophy.

managing traffic and rail systems isn’t social control on a massive scale lmfao

I would expect it would be pretty similar, in each case you’re lifting a mass to create some potential energy and then draining it later. I can’t imagine the work involved in pumping up water is all that different in terms of efficiency from lifting concrete. The advantage with concrete is that you can do it in places where you don’t have huge amounts of water to spare though.

sure, there is that

well put

Then this discussion will be valuable to those people since it provides an explanation for that exact question.

I wasn’t asking you a question, I was providing an explanation of why China having billionaires is not at odds with China being socialist which seemed to be the argument you were making in this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urglg3WimHA

I was, our viewpoints happen to be compatible. I’m not sure why it matters to you so much who provides you with the explanation. Are you just here to argue for the sake of arguing, that’s the reason you’re still refusing to engage with what I said?

Yeah, I have a hard time understanding the justification for systemd. The only real argument I’ve seen is that it standardizes the process, but that could’ve been done as a spec where you define a common config format, lifecycle, etc., and then keep the actual utilities decoupled from each other, but behaving in a uniform way.

I mean I just explained that above, and provided you with a longer explanation in a link in the previous comment. You could try engaging with that.

Nobody here is saying billionaires are necessary to exist. They are a product of specific historic and material conditions China found itself in. They chose to accept the problems opening up would bring because they judged that economic relations with the west would outweigh the downsides. It’s impossible to look at how China managed to develop today and argue that it was a wrong decision. Opening up allowed China to rapidly catch up technologically with the west, and to develop peacefully instead of having to devote huge amounts of resources to the military the way USSR was forced to do.

I’m not sure what your argument is then. If you accept that it is a socialist society, then you also have to realize that it must have these contradictions which are the nature of such a society.

A socialist society retains capitalist contradictions by its very nature because socialism is the transitional stage of development when the working class takes power, but existing relations of production have not yet been abolished. This is precisely what we see in China today. There are capitalists, they do exploit people, and that is a real contradiction within Chinese society. However, that’s different from saying that these people run the society the way they do in capitalist countries. Saying China is capitalist because it allows a limited form of capitalism to exist because it’s seen as useful for development, is like saying Canada is communist because it has public healthcare.

A good read on the subject I can recommend https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

fair

I thought it was interesting conceptually even if light on details. In the west, most application for AI has been in the realm for content generation like making images, documents, writing code. Meanwhile, in China AI systems are used for stuff like monitoring traffic systems, maintaining high speed rail networks, and other types of dynamic systems management. I haven’t really heard much about AI being applied in this way in western countries, and it seems like a far more practical use to me.