Since communism is, by definition, classless, you cannot both be classist and communist.

Racism is, again by definition, incompatible with abstraction.

My conclusion is that you're pretty shaky on definitions.

I don't trust the manufacturer, either. That's what the UL listing and certification is for. UL I trust as much as possible. And installing anything like that will require it to be to State electrical code, which is fairly picky on battery storage.

I'm biased. The house I currently live in had the oil burning furnace explode in 2011. It was located in the basement and the fire gutted the kitchen above it. I'm surprised the whole house didn't burn, but there was significant damage.

Where I live it is common for 120 gallon propane tanks to be strapped to the outside wall of the house. Granted, I'm in West Virginia and this place isn't know for intelligence. Safety regulations are for them liberal hippie communist types.

Sigh...no. From the website:

People have heating oil, propane, and kerosene tanks next to their houses all the time and rely solely on the fire-rated tanks. Batteries aren't special in this regard, unless you consider they aren't a liquid that can spread or a gas that can expand so they're safer.

That really isn't their concern, because they're not marketing to the automotive sector, where weight is an issue. Their focus is for stationary storage like data center, grid scale, etc. Weight is no longer a major concern when you aren't hauling it around.

According to this page, energy density in Wh/l is 1/2 to 1/6 that of Lithium. On the other hand, significantly better maximum sustained power and recharge times.

They do mention EV fast charging, but they aren't talking about the car batteries but rather battery storage at the charger so charging stations can level out their power draws and reduce their utility bills.

It's entropy, plain and simple. Sooner or later, no matter how secure an organization may be at any given point, skip ahead a few cycles, and attention to detail wanes. Managers stop asking questions, project leaders reprioritize thinking the problem is solved, staff do a "monkey see, monkey do", and then new gaps open up, get taken advantage of, management go into a state of denial, project leaders can't get their teams to give a damn, and then the inevitable breach or audit reveals the extent of the vulnerabilities, and management sends out the big press release that's always "We're reprioritizing security because we take security SERIOUSLY!"

Rinse, repeat, endlessly until the heat death of the universe shows entropy is always king.

Motional worked with Hyundai to create fully autonomous (SAE Level 4) Ioniq 5 robotaxis that are currently operating in Las Vegas.

Oh? Do you mean it's a mere coincidence everything the Russian government is doing follows, almost step-by-step, the recipe provided in "Foundations of Geopolitics"? My, how I love coincidences! One may even start believing there's a higher power directing destiny, be it a God or the Laws of History, so impressive those are!

Nods. It shows.

No, it doesn't. Please provide a quote, any quote, in which Marx says Communism emerges naturally. You won't be able to, as he never said that. He believed the collapse of Capitalism was inevitable due to what he believed were its internal contradictions. Capitalism collapsing does not entail Communism naturally emerges afterwards. For him, Communism must be actively constructed by the proletarian class. If they construct Communism, then the world arrives, so he believed, to a system without internal contradictions, thus reaching an end to the period of self-contradictory economic system replacing one another. If they fail at constructing Communism, then Capitalism still collapses, still gets replaced by something else, and this something else in turn goes on having its own internal contradictions that will eventually lead to its own collapse, etc.

To quote the man himself, here's him explaining this in that convoluted speech style of his. I emphasized the relevant sentences and words:

"Communism differs from all previous movements in that it (...) consciously treats all natural premises as the creatures of hitherto existing men, strips them of their natural character and subjugates them to the power of the united individuals. (...) The reality, which communism is creating, is precisely the true basis for rendering it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals, insofar as reality is only a product of the preceding intercourse of individuals themselves. Thus the communists in practice treat the conditions created up to now by production and intercourse as inorganic conditions, without, however, imagining that it was the plan or the destiny of previous generations to give them material, and without believing that these conditions were inorganic for the individuals creating them.

(...) Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness (...) the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution (...) become fitted to found society anew."

Thanks for confirming my point, as your just restated what I had said: that the URSS had as its nominal goal to bring about Communism. You may continue to play with the words if you like, and I'll just keep poking fun at it when you do.

He never believed, much less predicted, any natural evolution of those traits. And it didn't happen naturally either, it was all deliberately made. There's no determinism in History, in any direction.

I guess you don't understand what "nominal" means, hence the confusion. See here for the full definition and examples. Also check the de jure vs de facto distinction. Afterwards, if you re-read my replies, my meaning will become clearer.

No, I said it was Socialist and Marxist, but not Communist, and that it had as its nominal goal bringing about Communism. The inheritance Socialism -> Marxism -> Leninism -> Stalinism isn't disputed by any scholar, at most they discuss how much Russian political traditions influenced the way the latter two' approached Marx's ideas (example), so I'm not sure what your point is. A contrarian position, maybe?

They'd disclosed it but the first one hadn't finished testifying under oath about it. And that matters. The latter has status as evidence in court.

Therein lies the issue. I don't doubt your experience was between really bad and horrible, but you're doing a different comparison than the one I'm doing.

Your perspective is contrasting a) the Socialist system you lived through versus how b) democratic societies of the time were. This is a fair comparison, and it's undoubtful the first was, in comparison to the later, bad. Really, really bad.

What I'm arguing is different though. I'm doing a comparison between what your reality was (or, more precisely, what the URSS reality was) versus c) what it would have been had Tzarism continued, by extrapolating from the later based on how other feudal societies historically developed over similar timespans.

A third possible comparison is between what Russia became versus d) what it would have become had it gone through a Liberal revolution in 1917, rather than a Communist one, that is, a revolution that had embraced Classic Liberalism in economy, Representative Liberal Democracy in politics complete with multiple political parties, full freedom of the press, full free speech rights, full human rights with a comprehensive bill of rights, limits on central power with a fully enforced Constitution government branches couldn't ignore, pulverization of power via federalist mechanisms of governance, and so on, and so forth. It doesn't matter much if it'd have turned Republican or remained as a Constitutional Monarchy, as the long as the remaining of the list had been adopted and kept running.

Hence, what I'm arguing, basically, is that, in terms of best to worst, we have this hierarchy:

i) Already established Western Liberal societies (case "b") would have remained better in comparison due to already existing, already working, and already having established self-reinforcing mechanisms, to continue doing what they were doing.

ii) A hypothetical Liberal Russia (case "d") would have been the best possible scenario had it happened. Liberal 1950s' Russia would still be behind older Liberal democracies, but way ahead of what Socialist Russia achieved, all without so many deaths and misery.

iii) Actual Socialist Russia (case "a") was bad, but better than a straight continuation of Tzarist Russia would have become.

iv) Lastly, a hypothetical Tzarist Russia that continued into the 1950s would have been the worst possible scenario. It'd have failed to industrialize and would have become a producer of grains and of raw minerals. A small industry would exist, but by and large it'd have turned into an importer of added-value goods, with little hope of turning out better due to an ever-widening gap between its low technological reality and the high technological one of Liberal countries.

Hence, as before, it isn't as much that we're disagreeing, but that we're focusing on different sides of the same issue.

True. Probably much longer, but the seeds already existed in the welfare system implemented by Bismarck in Germany in the second half of the 19th century.

Interestingly, Marx himself was intensely opposed to such welfare systems, and argued bitterly against reformist, anti-violent revolution group that departed the then workers' movement to eventually become Social-Democracy. His argument, in his "Critique of the Gotha Program", was that providing such welfare for workers would make proletarians comfortable enough in their lives that it'd defuse their revolutionary spirit, perpetuating Capitalism.

Most ignored this argument until the Russian Revolution happened. Then everyone went back, looked at it with much renewed interest, looked at what Bismarck had done, noticed how the later had shown increases in productivity, noticed how Germany hadn't gone through a Communist revolution despite everyone but the kitchen sink believing the first big one would happen there, put 2+2 together, and began implementing welfare programs all around, which really did dampen that revolutionary spirit and prevented Communist revolutions from popping up everywhere.

Too bad modern Neoliberals, Libertarians and US-style Conservatives seem to have forgotten the lessons of 100 years ago, and are doing all they can to break apart the welfare system. The growing inequality is reigniting that very revolutionary spirit, as wished by Marx. If this idiotic anti-welfare impetus isn't quelched ASAP, the next few decades will see Communism returning in force. After all, what will the dispossed have to lose by embracing it?

a) Agreed.

b) I mostly agree, but I think you exaggerate the lack of development for civil uses and the impact of imported technology (and of internally developed technology) on the lives of the population. Generally speaking, and this applies there as well as elsewhere, the existence of an industrial complex, with the linked need for urban living, with the mass migration of peasants from the fields to the cities to work in those factories, itself meant a huge improvement in the standard of living for those former peasants turned factory workers. The West did that process much better, over a longer timespan, and with a huge dose of freedom in the process. The URSS did that in the worst way possible, but also much more quickly.

c) I mostly agree, but I'd say Leninism isn't that much of a departing from what Marx wrote. Young Marx defended, in his 1848 articles, imposing a dictatorship of the proletariat and the use of terror techniques to bring down the bourgeoisie. Lenin added to that the idea of the vanguard leading that process, but the notion of forcing things with extreme violence was definitely part of Marx's original notions. Similarly, Stalin's idea of doing it via conquest isn't that dissimilar from original Marxist ideas, in that Engels, also in 1848, or maybe early 1849, stated that eliminating entire classes and even entire conservative populations would be a good step forward. Stalin embraced that genocidal concept and ran with it.

Both Lenin and Stalin put a lot of emphasis on things that in Marx's own works were relatively secondary, but that they were there, they were.

a) Your first point is dependent on semantics. I mean superpower in a narrow sense of a country that's powerful and can get its way beyond its geographical sphere of influence, as distinct from a regional power, which has similar power locally. If we add to the concept a delimitation of needing to hold that broad influence via soft power, then yes, the URSS wasn't a superpower. But those are two different definitions of the word.

b) This is another instance where we're using the same word with differing meanings. What I meant was access to technological developments. Russia advanced from a mostly agrarian society to a technological power in those 30 years. It took the US to get to the same level about 200 years. But yes, all you said also happened too.

c) Socialism isn't Communism. In Marxist jargon, Socialist policies are temporary measures that are to be dropped once Communism proper starts. The URSS never attempted to start Communism, it just kept circling around variations of Socialist policies. Failing for almost 4 generations to bring about Communism, despite layers upon layers of totalitarian policies designed, in theory at least, to bring it, is a pretty clear indication it cannot be done, which is the core critique one can develop against the worst of Marxist delusions.

Of course they were. There was no concept of this moment being "intimate", to the point guests watching a couple have their first sexual intercourse was part of the wedding. And see also this reply of mine to another commenter.