In French this seasonal movement is called “transhumance”. And funnily enough, I have seen people here confused by the whole “transhuman” theme by thinking it was related to sheepherding.

As someone tangentially involved in similar projects, it is almost impossible to sell something legal to run on roads for less than that. There is a missing legal category for self-built low cost low power vehicles.

I can make a 500 euros electric scooter from a second hand bike. It will be safe, but it won’t be legal.

Absolutely, I only commented on the scarcity aspect.

The local pollutions of mining is a subject I never dived enough into and I wonder how much of it is really necessary and how much hinges on the fact that you always go to the lowest bidder who is often the one with the lowest environmental regulations.

Minerals are very fungible. Even if it is possible to mine one in an environmentally friendly way, in a socially acceptable manner, the person undercutting you by 10% by using slavery and dumping toxic waste in the environment is going to win.

When I started looking into that, I realized that this was much more than a simple technical and environmental discussion but a broader criticism of the global trade system.

“relatively” does a lot of work here. Lithium is not going to be a scarce ressource any time soon: https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2025/mcs2025-lithium.pdf

I have had so many debates about so-called minerals depletion that I ended up giving people quick advice:

If you think a mineral is problematic, do two things:

1. Find the appropriate report of the USGS on that mineral. Here is the link. Note that “rare earth” is a report of its own but some of the minerals called that have a separate report.

2. Go read their definition of reserves and resources. This is not an optional step because that’s where a lot of misunderstanding comes from.

3. I said step 2 is not optional, but in case you skipped it, here is a dumed down version

Because to some extent we still have won some fights. Right now, even a cyberpunk setting is not realistic to imagine that we are still burning fossil fuels in 50 years.

The fact that even Texas nowadays, a nation that considers that burning coal is a synonym of masculinity, is installing more and more renewable capacities. Tell you that this is something that even in a hyper-capitalistic society is going to happen.

Even with cartoon villains in power, they don’t manage to prevent that trend.

Let’s be real, judging from the picture of the dress, I think they made the dress because it was impractical to do anything else than basically a poncho. I suspect there are strong limitations in terms of how you can arrange and sew things like pockets.

I see it more like a proof of concept for a new sort of textiles, not necessarily everyday clothes, but things like disposable hygienic clothes.

Who is the ownership class?

There’s a class I think appears more clearly when you are looking at it from the perspective of who needs public infrastructure? How detached are you from the public good? If you are rich enough to have bodyguards, you don’t need police. If you’re rich enough to have private teachers and doctors, you don’t need schools and hospitals. Economy of scale predicts though that the service that you will get is of much lower quality, but many ultra-rich don’t realize that.

I would say you are in a different class when you have no interest in the public services working correctly.

Some people say that you’re not in the working class anymore if you have sufficient income to just stop working.

But to be honest, that’s the core question that made me leave the Marxist ideology. I still remain far left, but I consider myself an anarchist more than a Marxist. Vague undefined enemies is a populist tool and I’ve only seen it used as such, never as the theoretical tool it pretends to be.

I find a clearer tool is to look at exploitation mechanics. You usually have two sides to oppression. You have the oppressor and the oppressed. Problem: It does not draw two clear populations to oppose to each other.

Many employees will receive oppression from other employees who are not necessarily company owners. Poor male workers will often oppress their own wives while being themselves oppressed by their employers. Ethnic minorities receive a lot of racism from other ethnic minorities.

In my perspective, oppression at work starts with any sort of hierarchy. As soon as you have people who have to obey your orders, you are part of the oppressors. The good news is that it’s not really an inescapable class. That’s just a system you’re playing a role in and you can refuse, reject and break.

Desire to oppress the others is a much stronger differentiator in my opinion. I usually walk with Marxists because it is almost impossible to find an ultra-rich that isn’t also an enthusiastic oppressor. But as soon as you get down in the revenue brackets, things get blurrier.

I’d rather be with a rich doctor who thinks that we need to break oppression at work than with a minimal wage worker who has only one desire, it is to climb the hierarchical ladder in order to oppress his fellow workers. And from what I have seen, there is not a very strong correlation between poverty and benevolence. It is a bit random.

There is a reason why education of the working class has always been a concern for the left and why it has always been fought by the right.

You don’t change class when you become educated. You may change income brackets though. College education can turn you into a lawyer or into a doctor, but it is very unlikely to turn you into the inheritor of a multi-million company.

The thing is, too often I meet militants who confuse the different meaning of bourgeois, thinking that anyone with a bit more income than the median person is from the dominating class and an enemy of the working class. That’s a self-defeating mentality.