Image is of Jeff Daniels in The Newsroom, giving a speech (parodied below) about how - gasp - America sucks. But in a patriotic way.
And you - general megathread poster - yeah - just in case you accidentally wander into the news megathread one day, there are some things you should know, and one of them is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we're the greatest megathread in the world.
We're seventh in citations, twenty-seventh in accurate predictions, twenty-second in effortposts, forty-ninth in non-mainstream article posting, 178th in guessing when wars will start, third in powerusers, number four in dialectics, and number four in megathread exports. We lead Hexbear in only three categories: pointless infighting, number of adults who believe Putin is based, and copium manufacturing, where we produce more than the next twenty-six lemmy megathreads combined, twenty-five of whom are full of delusional liberals. None of this is the fault of any Hexbear user, but you, nonetheless, are without a doubt, a member of the WORST-period-GENERATION-period-EVER-period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest megathread in the world, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about! Jokes about whether they got a Zionist's semen in time?!
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I have been doing quite a bit of deep dive into China’s labor market and I thought I’d share the notes that I’d written down for BYD Zhengzhou and Tesla Shanghai. Not sure if this will be interesting to the audience here but I’m gonna dump the info here just in case someone is interested.
This website is an excellent resource that aggregate crowd-sourced and media reported labor news in China (pay structure, layoffs, work conditions, lawsuits, scandals etc.) and this week, separate articles came out on BYD Zhengzhou and Tesla Shanghai. I am also including another article that compares BYD and Foxconn in Zhengzhou since the two megafactories are closely related.
TL;DR:
BYD (and Foxconn) Zhengzhou Factory
Source:
Foxconn workers are migrating to BYD, August 2024
BYD Zhengzhou production line soars, December 2024
Zhengzhou Airport Economic Zone (ZAEZ)
spoiler
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Employment
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Recruitment center:
Hostel:
Nearby restaurants:
Short term employment model
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Aging population - manufacturers all across the country are competing for labor
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BYD and Foxconn scheming to each other’s lunches
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Workers’ interviews
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Fu Juan
Hu Jun
Li Dan
they really organize for more hours. kinda sad. ik they get paid overtime but still.
They also need to organize for more base pay, upping the wage to 35-40 yuan would alleviate the need for overtime. And make overtime more enticing for those who can work it.
Not going to happen.
First of all, the right to strike is not constitutionally protected in China (removed from the Constitution in 1982), so workers organizing is actually very difficult in China compared to Western countries. With an unemployment of 6% and nearly 20% youth unemployment right now, there is no shortage of workers who would be happy to take their jobs.
This is only going to become more difficult moving forward with an aging population, as a smaller slice of young workers have to work even harder to sustain the welfare of a growing slice of retirees. This is why China has recently increased the retirement age in order to maintain the growth.
Second, and perhaps most important, until China has decided to not become a global net exporter, the low wages is the ingredient for cheap Chinese export goods and services, without which they’d be less competitive, and less revenues lead to production downscaling and subsequently loss of jobs and wealth for the workers. This is the price you pay for integrating into the neoliberalized global market.
That's just not true anymore. Productivity gains through high capital investment & highly integrated supply chains are crucial. Otherwise China wouldn't still be an export powerhouse despite this rise in wages.
Of course labor cost goes up as China continues to develop.
But China still has huge advantage compared to, say, ASEAN countries. For example, Vietnam has stronger labor protection law that does not allow more than 40 hours per month, and no more than 200 hours per year. You don’t have this kind of limit in many Chinese companies. Together with a more complete infrastructure and supply chain as you mentioned, China is still the mainstay country for its sheer manufacturing scale.
However, it is also true that foreign manufacturers are starting move away, as is evident from China’s GDP growth declining below double digit in the past 15 years:
Your first points are helpful for painting a broader picture, but I don't know why you'd use lower GDP growth stats as proof of manufacturers leaving & causing reduced growth. That's an independent statistic you can track! No need to imprecisely use GDP growth as proxy.
Number can't go up the same percentage all the time obviously
Would you say Xi is the leader of the faction within the party most willing to reverse these conditions? And are there other movements in the country with this aim? I'm just curious if there's an explicit timeline to transition away from the need for these kinds of special economic zones and the practices that come with them.
It’s helpful to think of it this way: most Chinese people see the Government (国家 lit. Country) including the head of state as the mediator between Capital (资本) and the People (人民). On the one hand, the Government relies on Capital as the driving force behind China’s tremendous economic growth, which then allows them to alleviate poverty and improve living standards; on the other hand, the People’s welfare has to be taken care of but is often dependent on the economy. The Government walks a fine line balancing the needs of both parties, and unfortunately for far too long in the past few decades, exploitation and corruption have been rampant. Many local officials establish their own fiefdoms and collaborate with capitalists to squeeze on the people. Things are changing, slowly, though.
I have written elsewhere that one of the main reasons behind this is that China, ironically, has been the best student of Chicago school neoclassical economics. I have another effort post on China’s monetary system that I haven’t finished writing yet, but the upshot here is that China still hasn’t fully assumed control of its monetary sovereignty and continues to create money based on the accumulation of foreign reserves (the yuan itself is soft-pegged to the dollar) and more recently, after the twin surplus era ended in 2014, re-financing through issuing various government debt instruments.
In other words, to create more yuan for the private sector, China needs to sell more stuff to foreigners to accumulate their foreign reserves, or to attract more foreign investments, or through issuance of various short, medium and long term government bonds to the private sector and collateralize their existing assets. It is not creating new money directly through central bank money creation (simply print new money).
To actually raise the wages of the citizens, China can simply create new money and inject it into the economy. This will, of course, end China’s export competitiveness as its labor cost becomes more expensive. The increased wages will instead strengthen its consumer base, allowing more spending to import from other countries. In turn, China will export its productive capacity to the rest of the Global South while it focuses on building high tech sector, delivering free healthcare, education, social welfare, public utilities to raise the living standards of its people (none of which is currently free, by the way).
But China isn’t ready to do that because it is still the most faithful believer in the neoliberal dogma. You have to balance the budget, deficit cannot go over 3%, foreign investment is good to get you out of the middle income trap etc. In other words, market socialism is about not violating the sanctity of the market principles.
And nobody - absolutely nobody, especially the “nothing is wrong with China’s economy” gang - has been able to convincingly argue on why China has to keep exporting cheap goods and services to Western countries in order to finance its own internal development. This argument may be convincing 20 years ago, but China already has the world’s largest productive capacity and more than adequate to provide for itself - yes the transition of a heavily export-oriented economic structure is not going to be easy, but please don’t tell me it cannot be done. It’s simply absurd to think that the world’s most industrialized country building hundreds of high speed rail lines have to keep depressing its wages to keep Western finance capital happy.
I didn’t go into some of the details from both articles, but most employees don’t see it as a long term employment except for the senior employees who are experiencing their mid-life crisis and just want to have a permanent and stable employment until retirement. Many see this as a stepping stone and an opportunity “earn big money” for a few years and then bail - some are already contemplating on their “next stop”, some want to save money to start their own businesses etc. So more overtime means more pay within the same time frame.
In general, turnover is high. It is not a job that demands specialized skills. As one interviewee said (I didn’t translate but it’s in the second article), “as long as you have hands and feet, you’d be able to get the job done.” The entry barrier is low.
The Tesla structure is more different, and in some ways a hybrid between Western and Chinese models. Employees get 12 rest days per month on a 4-day on (12-hour shift) and 2-day off cycle with far less overtime, but still get similar pay (of course, living expenses in Shanghai is also higher but you get some rest days as compensation, and it’s still twice as good a pay than most smaller factories can afford).
That 10k rmb a month is similar to what many Americans make
Yeah it’s not a bad pay if you’re willing to work 80+ hours per week (I’m sure it takes physical toll on the body), especially considering that it’s a mostly low skill labor job. I’ve said elsewhere that there is no shortage of people willing to work hard in China (and many Global South countries).
Yeah, considering the perks that come with some of these factory jobs plus over time it's not too absurd. I know plenty of people working 60+ hours a week in the US between multiple gig jobs meaning no over time pay, no benefits, and losing a large chunk to taxes as independent contractors. Grinding for some months or years to save money is pretty typical, and when the purchasing power is as good as it is in China, it goes a lot farther than the US.
That's slightly above federal minimum wage. However, even the 150 rmb Foxconn barracks is 100x cheaper than most housing in the US. The cheap stuff, like a converted motel room, goes for the equivalent of 5k rmb
Cool and good and healthy country
Isn’t this what most highly industrialized countries had to go through?
The only exception I can think of is the Soviet Union. Happy to be corrected though.
Yeah except I'm pretty sure China is already a highly industrialized country
They just barely got there in the last 10 years, and even with what they have, it might be a stretch to call it highly industrialized. The development has been maybe but it's not equally distributed. There are still significant problems in less industrial areas (hundreds of millions of people) that need to be solved. Unless there is a grassroots activism movement I would expect it to be another decade before the government makes these sort of issues affecting industry a main focus point.
I think I have to clarify the meaning when I used it. In terms of industrialization and productive capacity, China is already far ahead of any other country. However, for high tech industrialization, we are adequate in some but still catching up in many areas especially in semiconductor and advanced jet engines, for example.
There weren’t good planning by the central government especially for semiconductor in the decades prior and allowed Taiwan’s TSMC to leap far ahead of Chinese semiconductor industries, which have been a bit of a shit show with rampant corruption until very recently when the government decided to take it seriously (after Trump launched a trade war against China in 2018) and started cleaning up on the corruption.
What I had meant in my comment above was the path for many industrialized countries on their way towards high income, high tech (first world) countries, as was the case for Great Britain, the US, Taiwan, South Korea etc. had mostly involved their citizens working laboriously to gain a competitive advantage in the industrial sectors. Such was the case that takes place under capitalism, and China has decided to join the fray with its Socialism with Chinese characteristics, or market socialism i.e. socialism that adheres to (Western neoclassical) market principles. See my “brief history of China’s post-Mao economy phases” that I wrote the other day.
The only country that I can think of that avoided this fate was the Soviet Union, and that’s because they ran a completely different model to the Western capitalist system (probably the closest we ever have to socialism) and thus not dependent on the global market to develop their economy.
Tesla Shanghai Gigafactory
Source: A preliminary peek into Tesla’s “Secret Kingdom”, January 2025
Geography
spoiler
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Living Quarters
spoiler
2.1 ”Tesla Hostel”
2.2 Lingang-Park Residential Area
2.3 Nichengzhen
2.4 Areas around Pengping Highway covered by temp agency companies
2.5 Small wooded area
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Employment
spoiler