#Train Battery Growth

[techninja]

Train Battery Market Trends and Insights: A Comprehensive Analysis of the Industry's Growth and Future Prospects

The train battery market is a rapidly growing industry, driven by the increasing demand for efficient and sustainable energy solutions in the rail transportation sector. The market is expected to continue its upward trend, with a projected growth rate of 4.6% from 2023 to 2030, according to a recent report by Intent Market Research. This growth is attributed to several factors, including the expanding railway networks, the development of high-speed trains, and the increasing adoption of electric and hybrid trains.

Market Size and Growth

The global train battery market was valued at USD 277 million in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 378 million by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.6% during the forecast period. The market is expected to witness significant growth, driven by the increasing demand for energy-efficient solutions in the rail sector.

Market Segmentation

The train battery market is segmented based on battery type, rolling stock type, application, and region. By battery type, the market is divided into lead-acid, nickel-cadmium, and lithium-ion batteries. Lead-acid batteries are the most widely used type, accounting for the largest market share. Nickel-cadmium batteries are used in emergency power applications, while lithium-ion batteries are used in advanced train applications.

By rolling stock type, the market is segmented into locomotives, metro, monorail, tram, freight wagons, and passenger coaches. The locomotive segment is expected to dominate the market, driven by the increasing demand for efficient and sustainable energy solutions in the rail sector.

Market Drivers

The train battery market is driven by several factors, including the expanding railway networks, the development of high-speed trains, and the increasing adoption of electric and hybrid trains. The growing demand for energy-efficient solutions in the rail sector is also driving the market growth.

Market Restraints

The train battery market faces several restraints, including the high capital costs associated with the development and implementation of advanced train battery technologies. Additionally, the market is also affected by the regulatory environment, which can impact the adoption of new technologies.

Market Opportunities

The train battery market presents several opportunities for growth, including the increasing demand for energy-efficient solutions in the rail sector, the development of high-speed trains, and the increasing adoption of electric and hybrid trains. The market also presents opportunities for the development of new battery technologies and the expansion of existing ones.

Competitive Landscape

The train battery market is highly competitive, with several major players operating in the market. The market is dominated by companies such as Hitachi Rail Limited, BorgWarner Akasol AG, and Toshiba Corporation. These companies are expanding their presence by acquiring other market participants and forming strategic alliances with other companies.

Future Prospects

The train battery market is expected to continue its upward trend, driven by the increasing demand for energy-efficient solutions in the rail sector. The market is expected to witness significant growth, driven by the increasing adoption of electric and hybrid trains, the development of high-speed trains, and the expanding railway networks.

Conclusion

The train battery market is a rapidly growing industry, driven by the increasing demand for efficient and sustainable energy solutions in the rail transportation sector. The market is expected to continue its upward trend, driven by the increasing adoption of electric and hybrid trains, the development of high-speed trains, and the expanding railway networks. The market presents several opportunities for growth, including the increasing demand for energy-efficient solutions in the rail sector and the development of new battery technologies.

[zvaigzdelasas]

China revealed this week it aims to spend more than a billion dollars to bolster manufacturing and domestic tech in a bid to remain globally competitive, while divulging little new support for the struggling real estate market.

Industrial support clearly ranked first on Beijing’s priority list for the year ahead, according to three major plans released this week as part of China’s annual parliamentary meetings.

One of those reports, from the Ministry of Finance, said the central government would allocate 10.4 billion yuan ($1.45 billion) “to rebuild industrial foundations and promote high-quality development of the manufacturing sector.”

While that’s down from the 13.3 billion yuan earmarked for the same category last year, the sector overall gained greater prominence. In 2023, plans to spend on industrial development came second to support for consumption.

“Unlike other economies that went through a wrenching adjustment in their housing market, China’s investment rate isn’t falling,” HSBC’s chief Asia economist Frederic Neumann and a team said in a report Friday. “Instead, [capital expenditure] is shifting towards infrastructure and, importantly, manufacturing.”[...]

Chinese authorities in 2020 intensified a crackdown on real estate developers’ high reliance on debt for growth. Property sales have since plunged while developers have run out of money to finish many projects, cutting into what was once about 25% of China’s GDP when including related sectors such as construction.[...]

Despite widespread attention on whether Beijing would bail out the property sector, real estate got no mention in the finance ministry’s spending plans, and limited attention in a ministry-level press conference about the economy during the parliamentary meetings. Instead, the housing minister was included in the lineup for a press conference about people’s livelihoods.

“Supporting the modernization of the industrial system” came first in the finance ministry’s report, followed by “supporting the implementation of the strategy of invigorating China through science and education.”

Within that second priority, the finance ministry said it would allocate 31.3 billion yuan for improving vocational education. Amid high youth unemployment, especially for university graduates, electric car company BYD and battery maker CATL are among those working with vocational schools to train staff for their expanding workforce.[...]

The report from the National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planner, reiterated government plans to support some developers’ financing needs — under the eighth item on the priority list that called for preventing financial risks. The government work report presented by Premier Li Qiang gave real estate a similar level of prominence.

8 Mar 24

China will improve home sales in a "forceful" and "orderly" way, Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Ni Hong said on Saturday (Mar 9), as weak demand in the country's beleaguered residential property market persists.[...]

Some developers should be allowed to go bankrupt or restructured according to legal and market-based rules, Ni said told a press conference on the sidelines of the annual meeting of parliament in Beijing.

Premier Li Qiang said this week that China will quicken the development of "a new model" for the troubled sector, focussing on building more affordable housing and meeting demand for homes.

But China will insist that "housing is for living in, not for speculation" when formulating a new development model for the sector, Ni said, reiterating an official line against property speculation.

9 Mar 24

[probablyasocialecologist]

Yes, we need innovation to solve the ecological crisis. We need better solar panels, better insulation, better batteries, better recycling, better methods for producing steel, etc. But we do not need aggregate growth to get these things. If the objective is to achieve specific kinds of innovation, then target those directly rather than grow the whole economy indiscriminately and hope it will magically deliver the innovation we need. Is it really reasonable to grow the plastics industry, the beef industry, and the advertising industry in order to get more efficient trains? Does it really make sense to grow dirty things in order to get clean things? We must be smarter than that. Necessary innovations can be achieved directly – through public investment in innovation – while simultaneously scaling down less necessary forms of production. In fact, the former is enabled by the latter. Engineering talent that is presently organized around developing, say, advertising algorithms, can be remobilized instead to develop better renewables and transit systems.

Jason Hickel, On Technology and Degrowth

[sweetie-bri]

Camille Complex [Giantess Growth caption]

There's no way to prepare yourself for being just... bigger. Not that that stopped everyone from trying. Doctors knew for YEARS before it was going to happen that Camille was bound to be taller than most girls. Something about overproduction of HGH and her bone plates having a rare genetic mutation. Camille wasn't a sciency sort.

Camille was put into specific classes from a young age teaching that everyone was equal. Nobody is better than anyone else just because they're taller. The message was instilled in her since she was five. But even so, the effect of far too much power on a young girl's psyche is much too potent to be trained out of her.

Camille's physical aggression was directly proportional to her height. As was her ego, and simultaneously her insecurity. Being so different from other girls was more a danger for the other girls than Camille, who could not be trained to stop grabbing and hitting others. She had no compassion for smaller life forms. Especially ones that weren't ostensibly cute. This continued into her adulthood despite her claims she's outgrown that childish behavior.

She was arrested on battery and assault charges once a month. She couldn't fathom she had done something wrong, going so far as to casually mention in an interrogation about a recent domestic abuse charge. "He was petulant. He needed to be trained. Nobody told him how to behave around me."

This became known as the Camille complex. A direct antithesis of the napoleon complex. One who was born with significantly more stature proportionally loses empathy and respect for anyone born smaller than them.

Reasons to Tip Sweetie-Bri

1.) She's not working right now.

2.) She needs it more than you.

3.) She will thank non-anons. (:

[warsamongthestars]

MORE TBB + CT HCS!

Since I didn't chase anyone off the first time, how bout some more? This round isn't nearly a storied as last round.

THE BAD BATCH did not grow up with each other. I know, counter to a lot of HCs. Each BB had a batchsquad that they were given back to (with flagged profiles about being apart of the 99 project--DO NOT DECOMMISSION), and thus, had an original regular clone trooper batch-squad at one point. This is where they got their names and social experience. WRECKER was a apart of KILO SQUAD. His Batchmates, were Chopper (who was later assigned under Sergeant Slick; TCWs), Boomer (Also known as Clone-Sergeant 2207; 501st; TCWs), Basher (the only CT out of the unit to make it into the Empire Era; SW Detours), and Hardcase (who lost his life during the Umbara Campaign; TCWs). Kilo squad were known to be happy-go-lucky destroyers of the training rooms. HUNTER was a part of ETA SQUAD. Three confirmed members of ETA Squad were, Tracker (212th; apart of the Dark Disciple series), Trapper (212th, formerly 91st--saw the battle of Ryloth, and the Zilo Beast incident; TCWs), and Hound (Coruscant Guard, Mastif Handler; TCWs) CROSSHAIR was apart of OMICRON SQUAD. With Hawkeye (91st, died during the Zilo Beast incident; TCWs), Longshot (212th, died during the Lola Sayu Mission; TCWs), Scope (104th; SW:CWA) and Sinker, of the 104th Wolfpack. TECH was apart of a soft-shell tech squad, with two confirmed members--Switch (CP-6824; SW:CW:RH) and Chatter (501st; radiotech).

Unfortunately, thanks to an incident that occurred to CT-9905 (a 99 projector (and original character)), Four of the Six / Seven of the 99-Project clones were finally gathered to be a team. ( CT-9905's fate is unknown. ) ( CT-9902 would be regulated as a Kaminonian Assistant. ) ( CC-9900, the "proof of concept" 99er, whose regeneration abilities served as the genetic-patch to prevent further clones from over-aging in their growth tubes--was already apart of the Republic Commando training, and would not be joining any other 99er. ) The original squads would be broken up and either sent out alone to other legions, or would be assigned to different squads.

HUNTER'S ELECTROMAGNETIC SENSES allows him to know when something has a static charge. So rub against a carpet, and he'll just know you have the charge. He describes it as if the feel of the air became spicy. Basically, he's a living voltage detector. Could probably tell you when your battery is dead.

WRECKER'S BONES are unbreakable. This isn't actually a form of mutation, but a form of later-life augmentation. That same later life augmentation staved his life when a bomb or charge went off near his face, and instead of pulverizing his skull (and thus his brain), it only pulverized the closest soft tissues--like his eye and inner ear.

WRECKER'S ENHANCEMENT allows him to have flexible muscle mass; allowing him to pick up and move objects without prep work, and to with stand any aftermath soreness. Thanks to the later-life augmentation, he has the strongest back in human existence. Unfortunately, a side effect of this is weaker organs, and a weaker heart. His enormous muscle growth has resulted in at least one near full organic transplantation, due to the muscle growing too fast for the organs to keep up. The abnormal strength of the muscle, thanks to be spliced with other-than-human genetics, is also what required the later-life bone augmentation, or risk his very muscles crushing his bones by movement alone.

Wrecker does not remember much of his childhood, due to the sheer growth pains from his enhancements.

TECH suffers from severe nearsightedness, and its been suggested, that as he's been spliced with Kamoninan genetics in order to ensure a "computational brain", that his eyes are more suited to underwater environments. Funnily enough, he does actually see in the water better. Not great, but better.

TECH, having been spliced with Kamoninan Genetics (whom are primarily amphibious), did have a vestigial-tadpole tail in his infancy. It went away as he got older... but he does occasionally have " Nonexistent-tail wiggles" when particularly excited, as a left over response--he finds them quite unprofessional and embaressing, but sometimes, one just gots to wiggle in place to get all that energy out.

Thanks to the Genetic splicing, Crosshair was actually born blind, with his eyelids semi-permanently shut (Not unlike a baby bird). They would open over the course of his first month; but this shows that not only does he have powerful eyes--he has powerful eyelids to compensate for those eyes. Its theorized that, if he had normal human eyelids, he would've seen through them.

The AlphaGens, or the famous 100, were the first clones in existence. They were the proof of concept, the Sparten-2's to the regular clones' Sparten-3, with minor enhancements and power armor--but also with the first severe issues that would come along during the Kaminonian's cloning. 99 was the final "successful" AlphaGen, whose gene-glitch aged him drastically in his growth tude, and whose problem would later be "patched out" with later clones, with the 99 project. ( Most Gene-patch projects were usually named after an AlphaGen's number; for example, there was the failed 17-Project, which attempted to gene-patch out premature white hair--did so with no success, and actually introduced Auburn and Blond Hair into clone troopers, as well as the additional problem of premature balding. ) ( Or the gene-patch project, 24-Project, that attempted to patch out Blue eyes--which catastrophically failed and resulted in blindness. ) 99 Himself, who was aware of the project being based from him, kept an eye out for all the "99ers", in what little ways he could. It is a well known AlphaGen trait, after all, to adopt BetaGen or Regular Clone Troopers. For example; for a young Wrecker, with uncontrollable strength, and great terrible growth pains, he left a small "tooka" doll made from baby cloths and what little fluff he could find. 99 would not officially meet a 99 Team, until after the loss of 9905.

99 himself, as the AlphaGen of Maintenance, knew of the secret places undernearth the Kaminonian Cities. He often worked around where CT-9902 did And he knew of the canceled OmegaGen clones project.

THE OMEGA GENERATION Cloned from a different prime, Arla Fett, the OmegaGen project was an attempt to create force-sensitive clones through "natural incubation" in order to "garden" the growth of midi-chlorians in a clone. Only two surviving clones were the result of the OmegaGen project--Omega-01, who was born via designated incubator (Heavily implied to have been the OmegaGen Prime), and Omega-02, who was the result of the Kaminonian typical method of cloning... and deemed a failure due to lack of midi-chlorian count. The project was deemed a success--but the expense and the time taken to make OmegaGen clones was deemed unacceptable, and the project was canceled after the first successes.

[wreckingtickles]

Bakugo's Overdue Class 1-B Apologies (SFW)

A short sequel of this drabble.

When Shoji and Deku finally give Bakugo a breather, he just. Conks out.

They let him rest. Shoji's satisfied, and besides, he looks kind of angelic when he's not talking. Or yelling. Or awake.

But if Bakugo thought his nightmare was over...

Because Kirishima hasn't received his apology yet. And who does he call to help him cash it, if not his good friend from 1-B Tetsutetsu.

Yes, Class 1-B is now a part of this as well.

Bakugo wakes up in pretty much the same predicament as before, with the two knuckleheads at either side of him.

They pretend they're praising his growth and muscle definition, but really, they're just tickling the shit out of his upperbody: pecs, abs, other muscles that give them an excuse to just make Bakugo lose his mind first thing in the morning.

They both reflexively target their own worst spots first: Kiri goes for his armpits and Tetsu for his chest.

Anyone other than Bakugo would find it comical how they sometimes reach for the same spot at the same time, getting in each other's way.

Instead of doing top-bottom half like the others, Kiri takes the left side and Tetsu the right, so at one point they're both digging into Bakugo's pits and ribcage at the same time.

Yeah, he loses his mind.

If the night's rest regenerated his stubborness, he's quickly breaking again.

Naturally he apologizes, but Kiri doesn't really care, he's just giving his bro a workout.

That may be why he breaks out his Quirk and his claws on Bakugo's armpits are just torture.

And Tetsu lets him take care of that spot while he works the rest of Bakugo's upperbody over.

If anyone thought Kirishima would be nice to him... no, he's really enjoying pushing him to his limit, making it an "extended training session".

They only stop when it's clear that Bakugo's stamina has been depleted. But this is far from over.

Kirishima actually prevents anyone from entering the room to give Baku a breather.

When he resumes cursing at everyone (he really doesn't know what's best for him), Kiri lets the next batch in.

It's a friggin' trio: Tsuburaba, Kaibara, and Shinsou.

Now, Shinso may have brainwashed the former two, but I don't think he needed to.

And they come in with a plan, for they have consulted with Deku.

Shinso goes for one of his own worst spots: Bakugo's feet. Kaibara takes his ribcage. Tsuburaba takes everywhere else, skipping from spot to stop, starting at his abs but eventually settling on alternating his underarms and thighs.

Now, when his classmates paired up on him, their Quirks made it feel like there were more than two people wrecking him.

But one of the three people currently intent on breaking him has a devastating Quirk of his own: Kaibara's spinning fingers.

And once they hone in on Bakugo's ribs, it's over. GG Bakugo.

Granted, it's not as bad as Shoji + Deku (nothing will ever be as terrible), but it's an extremely effective Quirk in his death spot, and the other two are going after his other worst spots.

Oh, and did I mention that Kirishima's turn has left him super sweaty, so he's that much more sensitive?

Fortunately for him, this group isn't as into making him pay as some others, so excruciating though it is, it doesn't last too long. In part because everyone is getting hungry.

So everyone leaves to have lunch, but before they do, Awase uses his Quirk to attach electric toothbrushes to every single one of Bakugo's most sensitive spots. He'll get a break if the batteries run out before they're back.

So they just leave Bakugo like that, enjoying a loooong lunch.

Now, everyone is actually for cutting Bakugo loose at this point, but one person protests: he hasn't gotten his turn yet.

When Bakugo sees Monoma darken Kirishima's doorway, he goes straight to apologizing, he just can't take anymore.

Too bad Monoma only wants to see him suffer, and the fact that he's already broken makes it even more fun for him.

Naturally, he's borrowed Deku's notebook so he can reference it at any time. And guess what 3 Quirks he's also borrowed? The obvious ones: Kaibara's, Tokoyami's, and Kaminari's. And he tells Bakugo before he proceeds to make him cry for well over an hour.

Bakugo is voiceless by the end of it, he can't even struggle anymore. And while he will eventually begin to plot revenge, he will be a lot nicer to everyone in the meanwhile.

[mariacallous]

The phone or computer you’re reading this on may not be long for this world. Maybe you’ll drop it in water, or your dog will make a chew toy of it, or it’ll reach obsolescence. If you can’t repair it and have to discard it, the device will become e-waste, joining an alarmingly large mountain of defunct TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, cameras, routers, electric toothbrushes, headphones. This is “electrical and electronic equipment,” aka EEE—anything with a plug or battery. It’s increasingly out of control.

As economies develop and the consumerist lifestyle spreads around the world, e-waste has turned into a full-blown environmental crisis. People living in high-income countries own, on average, 109 EEE devices per capita, while those in low-income nations have just four. A new UN report finds that in 2022, humanity churned out 137 billion pounds of e-waste—more than 17 pounds for every person on Earth—and recycled less than a quarter of it.

That also represents about $62 billion worth of recoverable materials, like iron, copper, and gold, hitting e-waste landfills each year. At this pace, e-waste will grow by 33 percent by 2030, while the recycling rate could decline to 20 percent. (You can see this growth in the graph below: purple is EEE on the market, black is e-waste, and green is what gets recycled.)

“What was really alarming to me is that the speed at which this is growing is much quicker than the speed that e-waste is properly collected and recycled,” says Kees Baldé, a senior scientific specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and lead author of the report. “We just consume way too much, and we dispose of things way too quickly. We buy things we may not even need, because it's just very cheap. And also these products are not designed to be repaired.”

Humanity has to quickly bump up those recycling rates, the report stresses. In the first pie chart below, you can see the significant amount of metals we could be saving, mostly iron (chemical symbol Fe, in light gray), along with aluminum (Al, in dark gray), copper (Cu), and nickel (Ni). Other EEE metals include zinc, tin, and antimony. Overall, the report found that in 2022, generated e-waste contained 68 billion pounds of metal.

E-waste is a complex thing to break down: A washing machine is made of totally different components than a TV. And even for product categories, not only do different brands use different manufacturing processes, but even different models within those brands vary significantly. A new washing machine has way more sensors and other electronics than one built 30 years ago.

Complicating matters even further, e-waste can contain hazardous materials, like cobalt, flame retardants, and lead. The report found that each year, improperly processed e-waste releases more than 125,000 pounds of mercury alone, imperiling the health of humans and other animals. “Electronic waste is an extremely complex waste stream,” says Vanessa Gray, head of the Environment and Emergency Telecommunications Division at the UN’s International Telecommunication Union and an author of the report. “You have a lot of value in electronic waste, but you also have a lot of toxic materials that are dangerous to the environment.”

That makes recycling e-waste a dangerous occupation. In low- and middle-income countries, informal e-waste recyclers might go door-to-door collecting the stuff. To extract valuable metals, they melt down components without proper safety equipment, poisoning themselves and the environment. The new report notes that in total, 7.3 billion pounds of e-waste is shipped uncontrolled globally, meaning its ultimate management is unknown and likely not done in an environmentally friendly way. Of that, high-income countries shipped 1.8 billion pounds to low- and middle-income countries in 2022, swamping them with dangerous materials.

High-income countries have some of this informal recycling, but they also have formal facilities where e-waste is sorted and safely broken down. Europe, for example, has fairly high formal e-waste recycling rates, at about 43 percent. But globally, recycling is happening nowhere near enough to keep up with the year-over-year growth of the waste. Instead of properly mining EEE for metals, humanity keeps mining more ore out of the ground.

Still, the report found that even the small amount of e-waste that currently gets recycled avoided the mining of 2 trillion pounds of ore for virgin metal in 2022. (It takes a lot of ore to produce a little bit of metal.) The more metals we can recycle from e-waste, the less mining we’ll need to support the proliferation of gadgets. That would in turn avoid the greenhouse gases from such mining operations, plus losses of biodiversity.

The complexity of e-waste, though, makes it expensive to process. As the chart above shows, even an ambitious scenario of a formal e-waste collection rate in 2030 is 44 percent. “There is no business case for companies to just collect e-waste and to make a profit out of this in a sustainable manner,” says Baldé. “They can only survive if there is legislation in place which is also compensating them.”

The report notes that 81 countries have e-waste policies on the books, and of those, 67 have provisions regarding extended producer responsibility, or EPR. This involves fees paid by manufacturers of EEE that would go toward e-waste management.

Of course, people could also stop throwing so many devices away in the first place, something right-to-repair advocates have spent years fighting for. Batteries, for instance, lose capacity after a certain number of charge cycles. If a phone can’t hold a charge all day anymore, customers should be able to swap in a new battery. “Manufacturers shouldn't be able to put artificial limitations on that ability,” says Elizabeth Chamberlain, director of sustainability at iFixit, which provides repair guides and tools. That includes limiting access to parts and documentation. “Repair is a harm-reduction strategy. It's not the be-all-end-all solution, but it's one of many things we need to do as a global society to slow down the rate at which we're demanding things of the planet.”

At the core of the e-waste crisis is the demand: A growing human population needs phones to communicate and fridges to keep food safe and heat pumps to stay comfortable indoors. So first and foremost we need high-quality products that don’t immediately break down, but also the right to repair when they do. And what absolutely can’t be fixed needs to move through a safe, robust e-waste recycling system. “We are consuming so much,” says Baldé, “we cannot really recycle our way out of the problem.”

[oracleofdiscord]

Can you tell me about what kind of abilities the Masters of celestial elements have?

How powerful are they?

How powerful is Estrella in terms of the Ninja? (-Lloyd)

How powerful is Estrella in terms of Garmadon and Wu?

How powerful is Estrella in terms of Lloyd and the Fsm?

Could the Fsm and Lloyd technically ever master the celestial elements or are the celestial elements they will never be able to master/use.

What is Estrella's relationships with the Ninja like?

Thanks for answering my questions.

thank you for the questions! i actually came up with some new ideas about the celestial elements so this is good timing lol.

okay so the thing about the celestial elements is that they are not tied to the FSM - sort of like water and wind are tied to wojira, the celestial elements are tied to a different being (that i have not finished creating yet) who lived in outer space. so i don't think lloyd would be able to use them, just like i don't think lloyd can use water.

so, the celestial elements. one thing i was thinking about is that starlight, sunlight, and moonlight are all technically the same thing (sunlight is a type of starlight, moonlight is reflected sunlight), so i gave the celestial elements some connections.

any one of them can be used to emit light to brighten up an area or flashes of light to temporarily blind an opponent

when corrupted (with a force like the staff of forbidden spinjitzu or maybe shatterspin), they all basically become radioactive. i don't have any story ideas involving this planned yet, i just think it would be cool.

and then for individual powers, i focused on what sets them apart from each other

moonlight is reflected light, and connected to movement/transformation (changing phases, the moving tide, etc.). the master of moonlight would be able to temporarily enhance their own strength and speed, sense movement in their surroundings without needing to look, and temporarily "reflect" the moves and powers of their opponents - although the last one is a difficult technique to use effectively, and takes a lot of practice.

sunlight is close light - we consider a star a sun when it's close enough to a planet to cause the growth of life, and to burn people who are out in it for too long. the master of sunlight can burn things and also cause plants to grow (although not control those plants). i also thought it would be fun to do a "solar energy" thing where they can sort of work as a battery to power up other magical beings?

starlight is a distant source of dreams and stories, used for inspiration and navigation. the master of starlight can use their powers as a balm, healing physical injuries and temporarily uplifting moods. starlight also comes with a passive ability of a perfect internal compass.

when it comes to how powerful they are, i'll admit that sunlight and moonlight are fairly powerful in comparison to the individual elements of the ninja. this is largely because i had a fanseason idea i'll develop more someday that has the masters of sunlight and moonlight serving as antagonists. i think it's generally good for antagonists to be at least as powerful as the protagonists, and in order to balance 2 celestial masters with the far-more-than-2 ninja, i had to make them more individually strong.

as for where estrella falls on the power scale...well, that's a bit harder to measure, since i feel like the common metric would be "who could she beat in a fight using her powers" and the answer to that would be "no-one; her powers are non-combat." (she does eventually get trained to fight, so her physical combat prowess isn't non-existent, but she's not an abnormally strong fighter and her powers are pretty much support-based.)

however, i did recently come up with an idea based on the whole "starlight, sunlight, and moonlight are kind of the same thing in different forms," which is a power-up form that the celestial masters can use called the "zenith form," wherein they temporarily gain the powers of all the celestial elements. in this form, estrella would be pretty powerful (probably not at lloyd's level, but in a similar range), but like. in addition to requiring training that estrella doesn't even have the opportunity to get until after crystalized, and being hard to get the hang of, and being difficult to maintain for long, she can only activate it under very specific circumstances (like cole's spinjitzu burst in the master of the mountain). so it's not something she gets the chance to use very often.

also, regarding estrella's relationship with the ninja - generally positive! i feel like she's not super-duper close to them because she's a bit socially awkward and joined the team late, but she does care about them. i think she's probably closest to nya and lloyd (most similar in age) and zane (autism to autism communication). i think to a certain extent, since she met the ninja through avery (an oc who belongs to @destinysbounty), there's kind of a "friend of a friend" vibe for a while, which does eventually turn into regular friendship. also, kai's the one who taught her to fight, so there's a bit of a bond there - i don't think she's quite as close to kai as she is nya+lloyd+zane, but she does to some extent look up to him as a mentor.

[theculturedmarxist]

SHANGHAI — Over the past generation, China’s most important relationships were with the more developed world, the one that used to be called the “first world.” Mao Zedong proclaimed China to be the leader of a “third” (non-aligned) world back in the 1970s, and the term later came to be a byword for deprivation. The notion of China as a developing country continues to this day, even as it has become a superpower; as the tech analyst Dan Wang has joked, China will always remain developing — once you’re developed, you’re done. 

Fueled by exports to the first world, China became something different — something not of any of the three worlds. We’re still trying to figure out what that new China is and how it now relates to the world of deprivation — what is now called the Global South, where the majority of human beings alive today reside. But amid that uncertainty, Chinese exports to the Global South now exceed those to the Global North considerably — and they’re growing. 

The International Monetary Fund expects Asian countries to account for 70% of growth globally this year. China must “shape a new international system that is conducive to hedging against the negative impacts of the West’s decoupling,” the scholar and former People’s Liberation Army theorist Cheng Yawen wrote recently. That plan starts with Southeast Asia and extends throughout the Global South, a terrain that many Chinese intellectuals see as being on their side in the widening divide between the West and the rest. 

“The idea is that what China is today, fast-growing countries from Bangladesh to Brazil could be tomorrow.”

China isn’t exporting plastic trinkets to these places but rather the infrastructure for telecommunications, transportation and digitally driven “smart cities.” In other words, China is selling the developmental model that raised its people out of obscurity and poverty to developed global superpower status in a few short decades to countries with people who have decided that they want that too. 

The world China is reorienting itself to is a world that, in many respects, looks like China did a generation ago. On offer are the basics of development — education, health care, clean drinking water, housing. But also more than that — technology, communication and transportation.

Back in April, on the eve of a trip to China, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva sat down for an interview with Reuters. “I am going to invite Xi Jinping to come to Brazil,” he said, “to get to know Brazil, to show him the projects that we have of interest for Chinese investment. … What we want is for the Chinese to make investments to generate new jobs and generate new productive assets in Brazil.” After Lula and Xi had met, the Brazilian finance minister proclaimed that “President Lula wants a policy of reindustrialization. This visit starts a new challenge for Brazil: bringing direct investments from China.” Three months later, the battery and electric vehicle giant BYD announced a $624 million investment to build a factory in Brazil, its first outside Asia.

Across the Global South, fast-growing countries from Bangladesh to Brazil can send raw materials to China and get technological devices in exchange. The idea is that what China is today, they could be tomorrow.

At The Kunming Institute of Botany

In April, I went to Kunming to visit one of China’s most important environmental conservation outfits — the Kunming Institute of Botany. Like the British Museum’s antiquities collected from everywhere that the empire once extended, the seed bank here (China’s largest) aspires to acquire thousands of samples of various plant species and become a regional hub for future biotech research. 

From the Kunming train station, you can travel by Chinese high-speed rail to Vientiane; if all goes according to plan, the line will soon be extended to Bangkok. At Yunnan University across town, the economics department researches “frontier economics” with an eye to Southeast Asian neighboring states, while the international relations department focuses on trade pacts within the region and a community of anthropologists tries to figure out what it all means. 

Kunming is a bland, air-conditioned provincial capital in a province of startling ethnic and geographic diversity. In this respect, it is a template for Chinese development around Southeast Asia. Perhaps in the future, Dhaka, Naypyidaw and Phnom Penh will provide the reassuring boredom of a Kunming afternoon. 

Imagine you work at the consulate of Bangladesh in Kunming. Why are you in Kunming? What does Kunming have that you want?

The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore lyrically described Asia’s communities as organic and spiritual in contrast with the materialism of the West. As Tagore spoke of the liberatory powers of art, his Chinese listeners scoffed. The Chinese poet Wen Yiduo, who moved to Kunming during World War II and is commemorated with a statue at Yunnan Normal University in Kunming, wrote that Tagore’s work had no form: “The greatest fault in Tagore’s art is that he has no grasp of reality. Literature is an expression of life and even metaphysical poetry cannot be an exception. Everyday life is the basic stuff of literature, and the experiences of life are universal things.” 

“Xi Jinping famously said that China doesn’t export revolution. But what else do you call train lines, 5G connectivity and scientific research centers appearing in places that previously had none of these things?”

If Tagore’s Bengali modernism championed a spiritual lens for life rather than the materiality of Western colonialists, Chinese modernists decided that only by being more materialist than Westerners could they regain sovereignty. Mao had said rural deprivation was “一穷二白” — poor and empty; Wen accused Tagore’s poetry of being formless. Hegel sneered that Asia had no history, since the same phenomena simply repeated themselves again and again — the cycle of planting and harvest in agricultural societies. 

For modernists, such societies were devoid of historical meaning in addition to being poor and readily exploited. The amorphous realm of the spirit was for losers, the Chinese May 4th generation decided. Railroads, shipyards and electrification offered salvation.

Today, as Chinese roads, telecoms and entrepreneurs transform Bangladesh and its peers in the developing world, you could say that the argument has been won by the Chinese. Chinese infrastructure creates a new sort of blank generic urban template, one seen first in Shenzhen, then in Kunming and lately in Vientiane, Dhaka or Indonesian mining towns. 

The sleepy backwaters of Southeast Asia have seen previous waves of Chinese pollinators. Low Lan Pak, a tin miner from Guangdong, established a revolutionary state in Indonesia in the 18th century. Li Mi, a Kuomintang general, set up an independent republic in what is now northern Myanmar after World War II. 

New sorts of communities might walk on the new roads and make calls on the new telecom networks and find work in the new factories that have been built with Chinese technology and funded by Chinese money across Southeast Asia. One Bangladeshi investor told me that his government prefers direct investment to aid — aid organizations are incentivized to portray Bangladesh as eternally poor, while Huawei and Chinese investors play up the country’s development prospects and bright future. In the latter, Bangladeshis tend to agree.

“Is China a place, or is it a recipe for social structure that can be implemented generically anywhere?”

The majority of human beings alive today live in a world of not enough: not enough food; not enough security; not enough housing, education, health care; not enough rights for women; not enough potable water. They are desperate to get out of there, as China has. They might or might not like Chinese government policies or the transactional attitudes of Chinese entrepreneurs, but such concerns are usually of little importance to countries struggling to bootstrap their way out of poverty.

The first world tends to see the third as a rebuke and a threat. Most Southeast Asian countries have historically borne abuse in relationship to these American fears. Most American companies don’t tend to see Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sumatra as places they’d like invest money in. But opportunity beckons for Chinese companies seeking markets outside their nation’s borders and finding countries with rapidly growing populations and GDPs. Imagine a Huawei engineer in a rural Bangladeshi village, eating a bad lunch with the mayor, surrounded by rice paddies — he might remember the Hunan of his childhood.  

Xi Jinping famously said that China doesn’t export revolution. But what else do you call train lines, 5G connectivity and scientific research centers appearing in places that previously had none of these things? 

Across the vastness of a world that most first-worlders would not wish to visit, Chinese entrepreneurs are setting up electric vehicle and battery companies, installing broadband and building trains. The world that is looming into view on Huawei’s 2022 business report is one in which Asia is the center of the global economy and China sits at its core, the hub from which sophisticated and carbon-neutral technologies are distributed. Down the spokes the other way come soybeans, jute and nickel. Lenin’s term for this kind of political economy was imperialism. 

If the Chinese economy is the set of processes that created and create China, then its exports today are China — technologies, knowledge, communication networks, forms of organization. But is China a place, or is it a recipe for social structure that can be implemented generically anywhere?

Huawei Station

Huawei’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party remain unclear, but there is certainly a case of elective affinities. Huawei’s descriptions of selfless, nameless engineers working to bring telecoms to the countryside of Bangladesh is reminiscent of Party propaganda and “socialist realist” art. As a young man, Ren Zhengfei, Huawei’s CEO, spent time in the Chongqing of Mao’s “third front,” where resources were redistributed to develop new urban centers; the logic of starting in rural areas and working your way to the center, using infrastructure to rappel your way up, is embedded within the Maoist ideas that he studied at the time. Today, it underpins Huawei’s business development throughout the Global South. 

I stopped by the Huawei Analyst Summit in April to see if I could connect the company’s history to today. The Bildungsroman of Huawei’s corporate development includes battles against entrenched state-owned monopolies in the more developed parts of the country. The story goes that Huawei couldn’t make inroads in established markets against state-owned competitors, so got started in benighted rural areas where the original leaders had to brainstorm what to do if rats ate the cables or rainstorms swept power stations away; this story is mobilized today to explain their work overseas. 

Perhaps at one point, Huawei could have been just another boring corporation selling plastic objects to consumers across the developed world, but that time ended definitively with Western sanctions in 2019, effectively banning the company from doing business in the U.S. The sanctions didn’t kill Huawei, obviously, and they may have made it stronger. They certainly made it weirder, more militant and more focused on the markets largely scorned by the Ericssons and Nokias of the world. Huawei retrenched to its core strength: providing rural and remote areas with access to connectivity across difficult terrain with the intention that these networks will fuel telehealth and digital education and rapidly scale the heights of development.

Huawei used to do this with dial-up modems in China, but now it is building 5G networks across the Global South. The Chinese government is supportive of these efforts; Huawei’s HQ has a subway station named for the company, and in 2022 the government offered the company massive subsidies.

“For many countries in the Global South, the model of development exemplified by Shenzhen seems plausible and attainable.”

For years, the notion of an ideological struggle between the U.S. and China was dismissed; China is capitalist, they said. Just look at the Louis Vuitton bags. This misses a central truth of the economy of the 21st century. The means of production now are internet servers, which are used for digital communication, for data farms and blockchain, for AI and telehealth. Capitalists control the means of production in the United States, but the state controls the means of production in China. In the U.S. and countries that implicitly accept its tech dominance, private businesspeople dictate the rules of the internet, often to the displeasure of elected politicians who accuse them of rigging elections, fueling inequality or colluding with communists. The difference with China, in which the state has maintained clear regulatory control over the internet since the early days, couldn’t be clearer. 

The capitalist system pursues frontier technologies and profits, but companies like Huawei pursue scalability to the forgotten people of the world. For better or worse, it’s San Francisco or Shenzhen. For many countries in the Global South, the model of development exemplified by Shenzhen seems more plausible and attainable. Nobody thinks they can replicate Silicon Valley, but many seem to think they can replicate Chinese infrastructure-driven middle-class consumerism.

As Deng Xiaoping said, it doesn’t matter if it is a black cat or a white cat, just get a cat that catches mice. Today, leaders of Global South countries complain about the ideological components of American aid; they just want a cat that can catch their mice. Chinese investment is blank — no ideological strings attached. But this begs the question: If China builds the future of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Laos, then is their future Chinese?

Telecommunications and 5G is at the heart of this because connectivity can enable rapid upgrades in health and education via digital technology such as telehealth, whereby people in remote villages are able to consult with doctors and hospitals in more developed regions. For example, Huawei has retrofitted Thailand’s biggest and oldest hospital with 5G to communicate with villages in Thailand’s poor interior — the sort of places a new Chinese high-speed train line could potentially provide links with the outside world — offering Thai villagers without the ability to travel into town the opportunity to get medical treatments and consultations remotely. 

The IMF has proposed that Asia’s developing belt “should prioritize reforms that boost innovation and digitalization while accelerating the green energy transition,” but there is little detail about who exactly ought to be doing all of that building and connecting. In many cases and places, it’s Chinese infrastructure and companies like Huawei that are enabling Thai villagers to live as they do in Guizhou.

Chinese Style Modernization?

The People’s Republic of China is “infinitely stronger than the Soviet Union ever was,” the U.S. ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, told Politico in April. This prowess “is based on the extraordinary strength of the Chinese economy — its science and technology research base, its innovative capacity and its ambitions in the Indo-Pacific to be the dominant power in the future.” This increasingly feels more like the official position of the U.S. government than a random comment.

Ten years ago, Xi Jinping proposed the notion of a “maritime Silk Road” to the Indonesian Parliament. Today, Indonesia is building an entirely new capital — Nusantara — for which China is providing “smart city” technologies. Indonesia has a complex history with ethnic Chinese merchants, who played an intermediary role between Indigenous people and Western colonists in the 19th century and have been seen as CCP proxies for the past half century or so. But the country is nevertheless moving decisively towards China’s pole, adopting Chinese developmental rhythms and using Chinese technology and infrastructure to unlock the door to the future. “The internet, roads, ports, logistics — most of these were built by Chinese companies,” observed a local scholar. 

The months since the 20th Communist Party Congress have seen the introduction of what Chinese diplomats call “Chinese-style modernization,” a clunky slogan that can evoke the worst and most boring agitprop of the Soviet era. But the concept just means exporting Chinese bones to other social bodies around the world. 

If every apartment decorated with IKEA furniture looks the same, prepare for every city in booming Asia to start looking like Shenzhen. If you like clean streets, bullet trains, public safety and fast Wi-Fi, this may not be a bad thing. 

Chinese trade with Southeast Asia is roughly double that between China and the U.S., and Chinese technology infrastructure is spreading out from places like the “Huawei University” at Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology, which plans to train 100,000 telecom engineers in the next five years. We’re about to see a generation of “barefoot doctors” throughout Southeast Asia traveling by moped across landscapes of underdevelopment connected to hubs of medical data built by Chinese companies with Chinese technology. 

In 1955, the year of the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, the non-aligned world was almost entirely poor, cut off from the means of production in a world where nearly 50% of GDP globally was in the U.S. Today, the logic of that landmark conference is alive today in Chinese informal networks across the Global South, with the key difference that China can now offer these countries the possibility of building their own future without talking to anyone from the Global North. 

Welcome to the Sinosphere, where the tides of Chinese development lap over its borders into the remote forests of tropical Asia, and beyond.

[quirkwizard]

Do you think that you could do an expansion on your OG Quirk, Buffer? Training, evolutions, support items, etc?

Could we get more info on the quirk “Buffer”? Like what would be the awakening or some techniques or etc more info In general?

Training "Buffer" would boil down to hitting the user a lot. As one of the biggest downsides of it is the battery life of the power, it'd help to try and expand the user's reservoir as much as possible. So training would just be a bunch of people trying to beat the user up. This would force the user to not only take the attacks and stress out their power, but also try and move the mass around the barrier in order to best handle the various attacks coming their way. That aside, as the power is so close-ranged, the user learning close-quarters skills would help as well. Especially with them learning to redistribute their attacks right before hits to do as much damage as possible.

For evolving, there are the obvious bits like the user having more weight in the barrier, the barrier lasting longer under stress, and generally being better at moving it around. That aspect could even grow to have it be entirely reactionary, like instinctively blocking an attack before it lands. I think it'd be interesting to see the user get more control over how they distribute the weight. This could be stuff like being better at shifting the weight around, but the more notable bit of growth would be the user growing it out over stuff the user is touching. Now, this wouldn't reach the extremes of "Flight", but it could let them interact with objects they are holding.

For a costume, I think it'd be useful for the user to have various weapons on them, specifically blunt ones. Since the user isn't exactly using super strength, they could apply the weapons without damaging them, making them capable of doing far more harm with them than normal. Specifically, I think some metal padding would be useful, letting the user better focus their damage at specific points and giving them some protection in case their barrier falls over. And this is one of those rare examples where a cape would be both cool and practical, using it as a larger shield to protect someone or throwing over other people in order to smother them in the immense weight.

[ultimate-worldbuilding]

Creating a Space Station

Name and Location:

Name of the space station

Orbital location (e.g., around a planet, moon, or in deep space)

Any unique features or characteristics of the location

Background and Purpose:

Brief history and reasons for the station's construction

Primary purpose or mission of the station (e.g., research, colonization, defense, trade, mining, etc.)

Key organizations or entities involved in its establishment

Design and Structure:

Overview of the station's architectural design and layout

Different modules or sections of the station (e.g., living quarters, research labs, docking bays, etc.)

Key engineering feats or technological advancements used in its construction

Size and Population:

Dimensions of the space station (length, width, height)

Estimated population and demographics (humans, aliens, robots, etc.)

Capacity for expansion and accommodating future growth

Systems and Resources:

Life support and Resource systems: Air generation and filtration, Water purification and recycling, Waste management, Artificial gravity, Temperature and air pressure control, Radiation protection, Fire suppression systems, Medical supplies and tools, Food production, Maintenance and Repair tools and facilities

Energy source and storage: Solar power, Nuclear fusion, Advanced batteries, Fusion reactors, Harvesting solar flares

Living Quarters and Facilities

Description of residential areas (individual quarters, communal spaces, recreational facilities)

Water block

Medical facilities and healthcare services available

Education and training facilities for residents and their families

Scientific Research and Laboratories

Different types of laboratories and equipment available depending on the stations’s mission

Astronomical observatories, Biological Laboratory, Climate and Environmental Studies, Planet observation and Research, Rock Analysis Facility

Transportation and Docking:

Docking bays for spacecraft and shuttle services

Transportation systems within the station (elevators, maglev trains, etc.)

Maintenance and repair facilities for visiting spacecraft

Security and Defense:

Security measures and protocols

Defense systems against potential threats: Shielding technology, Defensive satellites & space drones, Cloaking Technology, Countermeasures (flares, countershots, etc), Intruder Detection Systems, Surveillance and AI protection, Protection by AI or Hacker from outside hacks, Self-Repair System

Security personnel and their roles and ranks

Communication and Information Systems:

Communication technology used for inter-station and interstellar communication

Data storage and retrieval systems

Access to networks anddatabases

Trade and Economy:

Types of goods and resources traded on the station

Cargo of the space station

Economic systems

Currency used

Marketplaces within the station

Social and Cultural Aspects:

Societal norms and cultural diversity among the station's residents

Recreational and entertainment facilities (cinemas, sports arenas, etc.)

Events or celebrations unique to the station's culture

Governance and Administration:

Station hierarchy and governing bodies (administrators, council, etc.)

Laws and regulations specific to the station

Interactions with external governing entities (planetary governments, interstellar alliances, etc.)

Exploration and Discovery:

Expeditions or missions launched from the station

Discoveries made during exploration and sample gathering efforts

Spacecrafts and vehicles associated with the station's exploration activities

Environmental Considerations:

Measures taken to mitigate the effects of microgravity or radiation on residents' health

Environmental controls and simulations for recreating gravity and natural environments

Preservation of ecosystems and biodiversity on the station (if applicable)

Emergency Response and Crisis Management:

Protocols for handling emergencies (fires, system failures, medical emergencies, etc.)

Emergency evacuation plans and escape pods

Training programs for emergency response teams

Relations with Other Space Stations or Entities:

Collaborative projects or joint initiatives with other space stations

Trade agreements or diplomatic relations with neighboring stations or colonies

Conflict resolution mechanisms for inter-station disputes

Notable Individuals or Figures:

Prominent leaders from the station

Accomplishments and contributions of notable residents

Astronauts, scientists, or pioneers who have called the station home

Challenges and Risks:

Environmental and technological risks faced by the station

Political and social tensions within the station's community

External threats and conflicts affecting the station's stability

Future Expansion and Development:

Plans for future expansion and upgrades (where are they gonna get the resources for this?)

Integration of new technologies, scientific advancements into the station's infrastructure

Long-term goals for the station

[landsharkbite]

CHARACTER SHEET REPOST, DON'T REBLOG!

basics !

FULL NAME. rosaline freira cervantes TITLE. Impossible Bitch NICKNAME. rosa GENDER. bigender (barely realizes this if at all) PRONOUNS. she/her HEIGHT. 6'4" (193 cm) AGE. 39 ZODIAC. cancer to the point that it hurts SPOKEN LANGUAGES. sinnoh common, some english, some spanish

physical characteristics !

HAIR COLOR. chestnut brown EYE COLOR. gold iris, black sclera SKIN TONE. tan BODY TYPE. athletic, curvy, muscular in roughly equal measure VOICE. deep and raspy, you can tell she still smokes occasionally DOMINANT HAND. right (the one she lost, ironically) POSTURE. often terrible. straightens very effectively when alert SCARS. her right eye, her spine, everywhere else TATTOOS. a single rose in full bloom on her right buttcheek BIRTHMARKS. none MOST NOTICEABLE FEATURE(S). horns and tail, long hair, patched right eye

childhood !

PLACE OF BIRTH. some very small town in the sinnoh region. rosa doesn't know the name, doesn't wish to HOMETOWN. none. constant travel though childhood and teens SIBLINGS. one older half-brother, evol (haxorus) PARENTS. odin (charizard), elspeth (garchomp). both deceased

adult life !

OCCUPATION. bodyguard (back home. here, n/a) CURRENT RESIDENCE. archimedes penthouse CLOSE FRIENDS. *laugh track* RELATIONSHIP STATUS. single FINANCIAL STATUS. moderate. previous stays and earnings keep her fairly comfortable DRIVER’S LICENSE. lol (lost it). doesn't keep her from her motorcycle though, plus she has her horse-sized dog CRIMINAL RECORD. D.U.I., murder, mass murder, manslaughter, arson, assault and battery VICES. materially: alcohol, cigarettes. personality-wise: irritable, antisocial, vindictive and cruel

sex & romance !

SEXUAL ORIENTATION. demisexual LOVE LANGUAGE. gift giving, words of affirmation, physical touch RELATIONSHIP TENDENCIES. not much of a verbal communicator but quite careful and deliberate when she is. very catlike when it comes to affection. if you actively demand her attention out of habit, she'll be infinitely more likely to avoid you and may even lash out if she feels pressed. be respectful of her boundaries and her time and she'd practically live under your skin if she could.

miscellaneous !

CHARACTER’S THEME SONG. creatures — shinedown HOBBIES TO PASS TIME. working out/training, hiking, camping, drinking/eating, napping PHOBIAS. nothing quite extreme enough to be considered a phobia. SELF CONFIDENCE LEVEL. mixed— confident in her abilities, not so much in the quality of her personhood. VULNERABILITIES. despite her overall growth, rosa's emotional instability is her greatest weak point. she's constantly at war with herself over her conflicting wants and needs and it tires her out, accounting for her lack of energy— when her feelings bubble up past that barrier of fatigue, that's when it's easiest for her to wind up doing something stupid.

[lightdancer1]

I will also note re: Tara and her darker side:

First, we do have Amber Benson herself writing a Tara who'd fit comfortably in a Warhammer Fantasy fluff. The sorceress who reads the wrong book, gets corrupted and possessed by those words, and is casually using her world's Willow as a power battery...while being about as hammy as the Wicked Witch of the West. I do love Benson's voice performance in that, and I enjoy using that version not least because given Amber Benson's protectiveness of said character that she wrote the first new media with her featuring an actually legitimately evil version says something.

Second, if we go with the idea that Tara's power draws from the Earth, there are two relevant points here. Assuming Gaia has connections to Greek myth when Osiris is both real and punked by Willow in one of her darker and more awesome moments equally, this is the Gaia who casually spat out monsters to kill the Gods because she was a murderous wrathful entity. Gaia is anything but a kindly maternal figure, she's more Kali-Durga. Second, at a purely scientific level tsunamis, volcanism, landslides, and the like are all things the Earth does.

Like any other kind of magic it has its more destructive sides and tapping into this is not technically Dark Magic, but it is the shadow-side of Earth magic, and it is one area where Tara is and will always be the 'always someone better' to Willow because Willow is a generalist who can do everything somewhat well, and Tara a very specialized focus in one set of magic in the long term. A lot of fanfics make her equal in power and the canon is very blunt that she is not. Not being equal to the most powerful sorcerer on Earth, or according to the comics, the entire universe of the Buffyverse Earth, does not mean that she is weak.

It only means that she comes short next to the magical equivalent of Silver Age Superman and there are huge gulfs in that. Still further, even when there are mitigating reasons Tara in canon sabotaged demon-location spells in the middle of the search for Adam and almost killed the entire Scooby gang in that one day when all her collective traumas bricked her in the face.

The canon character is by no means an infallible moral figure, and that I think is one of the few areas where the broad sketches of the Season 6 arc still work, Tara made smaller-scale mistakes and more importantly learned from them and learned how not to do it again. Willow makes much grander ones in pursuit of control over her life and a power trip from no longer being the side-kick and coming into vast amounts of power without real means to control it. Dark Lord Rosenberg vs. the traumatized cult survivor who more than most would see Mall Goth Sauron exactly for what she is and take the logical protective root of scooting and doing so too fast to warn the Scoobies of the time bomb in their midst.

Things with her and Willow work better when she is not, in fact, always right and when her behavior which on the whole is the best relationship in anything Whedon wrote (and when I continue this is still true and it tells you about all the others he's written) is one of largely picking fights and dealing with insecurities poorly and in a very human fashion until Dark Willow more than justifies the things she did more retroactively than at the time....is subject to the reminder that she is both abuse survivor, cult victim, internalized her view of herself as a demon and is not in fact always right on major things as she never quite accepted that she wasn't one.

She is not always right, her advice to Willow being a train wreck works better because it's well-meaning, from the POV of someone who sees a problem happening, does what little she can to stop it and when it fails secures herself rather than being forced to always think of others. Equally her growth arc and that of Willow very much complement each other. The neglect victim and the cult victim find their own self-worth and that in each other, and each brings out both the other's good traits and at particular times and in particular ways, their bad ones.

Tara's background is also, as things like the Quiverfull movement and other modern cults show something that can work just as well in a non-supernatural AU. After all that she is NOT a demon is precisely the point, and 'simplifying' things to 'mere' physical and emotional abuse also neglects that cult survivors and the intersections of religions and in particular Christianity in its Protestant (more than Catholic, the Maclays really read like the boondocks of Roll Tide country rather than Catholic) sense with misogyny work in a purely 'normal' world. People raised in insular cults encountering the wider world and escaping them does happen.

Some of them are gay.

That and I also tend to oppose pedestals even or perhaps especially with fictional characters where there are minimal real-world consequences. Allowing people to be truly human, flawed, and the world to be better for the flaws is better than a saintly figure who can do no wrong.

Because what, after all, shows best the growth of an increasingly megalomaniacal and controlling mentality that leads someone to flee for a good reason than someone most equipped of anyone to recognize it for what it is and to refuse to put herself back in the world she fought so hard to escape from? And that in turn spawning out of whether or not it's a metaphor for queerness or heroin that Buffyverse magic is reality-warping with spellbooks and that the power to say to stones 'become bread' and then you have freshly baked loafs of the finest quality is something that would, invariably turn people down dark and destructive paths because there are few people who would be granted such power suddenly and handle it well.

So, ultimately, I think that Tara works best less as an unrealistic saintly good plot device and more as an abuse survivor and cult victim whose greatest arc is both learning to stand up for herself and grow into who she is and what she is, and that it is those same jagged flaws and blind spots that stand her so well with the equally jaggedly flawed and blind in critical places Willow, because their flaws both coarsen and complement each other in equal measure. They are never better than with each other, and there is nothing but the two of them to potentially bring out the very worst traits that can and would lead Tara to almost kill off her family of choice in a blunder that to that point was more potentially lethal than anything Willow did in her entirety of bungled reality warping 'fix my life and oh shit I fucked up other people's stuff bad me, cookie time' stuff up to that point in each other as well. And of course Willow's most destructive acts were all out of the fear of doing the very thing they brought on and motivated by her loss and the suicidal grief she was plunged into from it.

And let's not forget, if we say they're soulmates, that the other soulmate duo in this universe is Buffy and Angel. Is that *really* a recommendation that soulmates and one true loves work well for either person involved here?

[beardedmrbean]

1. Belgian Foreign Minister expects 'some' citizens to be evacuated from Gaza

Belgian Foreign Minister Hadja Lahbib has said that she expects "some" Belgian nationals to be evacuated from Gaza to Egypt on Thursday. Read more.

2. Storm Ciarán arrives: Trains and planes cancelled, three people found in Brussels canal

The expected Storm Ciarán has arrived in Belgium and while the largest impact is expected at the coast, it is also causing disruption elsewhere in the country. Read more.

3. 'Attack on the language': France wants to ban gender-inclusive writing

French senators will debate a controversial bill aimed at "protecting the French language from excessive so-called 'inclusive writing'" on Monday evening, with left-wing parties deeming the move "old-fashioned," Belga News Agency reports. Read more.

4. Belgian economy grows despite eurozone contraction

Belgium's GDP growth accelerated in the third quarter of 2023, as the country's economic outlook continues to brighten following the recent news that inflation fell close to zero in October. Read more.

5. What are 'titres-services' and why do we need them?

Domestic tasks are often a chore preferably left for someone else, and indeed, those lucky enough to have the means often seek cleaning and other help with the house. Read more.

6. Indexing rents and saving rates: What changes in Belgium on 1 November?

Wednesday 1 November not only marks All Saints' Day, recognised as an official public holiday in Belgium, but it is also the start of a new month, meaning changes to laws and new rules coming into place. Read more.

7. Hidden Belgium: The Birch Tree Circle

It’s not easy to find this monument. Deep in the forest outside Brussels, 32 young birch trees were planted in a circle in memory of the victims of two terrorist attacks in Brussels on 22 March 2016. Read more.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Scott Horton  · Drew Sheneman, Newark Star-Ledger

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

February 15, 2023

Heather Cox Richardson

President Joe Biden hit the road today to continue the push to highlight the successes of his administration's investment in the economy. In Lanham, Maryland, at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 26, he celebrated the economic plan that “grows the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down.”

He praised union labor and said that the nation’s investment in green energy would mean “good-paying jobs for electricians, plumbers, pipefitters, laborers, carpenters, cement masons, ironworkers, and so much more. And these are good jobs you can raise a family on.” “It’s a stark contrast to our Republican friends, who are doubling down on the same failed politics of the past. Top-down, trickle-down economics is not much trickle down…to most kitchen tables in America,” he said.

He reiterated that he would lay out his budget on March 9 and that he expected the Republicans to lay out theirs, so people can compare the two. Biden maintains that his policy of investing in infrastructure and putting money in the hands of ordinary Americans will nurture the economy and reduce the deficit as growth brings in more tax dollars. Meanwhile, he said, the Republican tax cut of 2017 has already added $2 trillion to the federal deficit.

Good economic news is putting wind under Biden’s wings. The economy continues to perform better than expected in 2023. Retail buying increased 3% in January, and the job market remains strong. The administration today highlighted another series of large private sector investments in American manufacturing: Boeing announced that Air India has contracted to buy more than 200 aircraft; Ford announced it will build a $3.5 billion factory in Marshall, Michigan, to make advanced batteries for electric vehicles; and Texas Instruments announced it will build an $11 billion semiconductor plant in Lehi, Utah.

Biden emphasized that these investments would provide “good-paying jobs that [Americans] can raise a family on, the revitalization of entire communities that have often been left behind, and America leading the world again in the industries that drive the future.”

Biden accused the Republicans of proposing measures that would raise the deficit, which is already rising again. The Congressional Budget Office today projected a much higher deficit for 2023 than it did in May 2022 because of new laws, mandatory spending for Social Security and Medicare, and higher interest rates in place to combat inflation. The CBO notes that “spending substantially exceeds revenues in our projections even though pandemic-related spending lessens. In addition, rising interest rates drive up the cost of borrowing. The resulting deficits steadily increase the government’s debt. Over the long term, our projections suggest that changes in fiscal policy must be made to address the rising costs of interest and mitigate other adverse consequences of high and rising debt.”

This is precisely what Republicans have been complaining about with regard to the Democrats’ recent laws to rebuild infrastructure and invest in the economy, while ignoring that their own tax cuts have also added mightily to the deficit. Republicans want to address the rising deficit with spending cuts; Biden, with taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations.

Biden appears to be trying to turn the nation to a modern version of the era before Reagan, when the government provided a basic social safety net, protected civil rights, promoted infrastructure, and regulated business. Since the 1980s, the Republicans have advocated deregulation with the argument that government interference in the way a company does business interrupts the market economy.

But the derailment of fifty Norfolk Southern train cars, eleven of which carried hazardous chemicals, near East Palestine, Ohio, near the northeastern border of the state on February 3 has powerfully illustrated the downsides of deregulation. The accident released highly toxic chemicals into the air, water, and ground, causing a massive fire and forcing about 5,000 nearby residents in Ohio and Pennsylvania to evacuate. On February 6, when it appeared some of the rail cars would explode, officials allowed the company to release and burn the toxic vinyl chloride stored in it. The controlled burn sent highly toxic phosgene, used as a weapon in World War I, into the air.

Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine has refused federal assistance from President Biden, who, he said, called to offer “anything you need.” DeWine said he had not called back to take him up on the offer. “We will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem or anything, but I’m not seeing it,” he said.

Just over the border, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said that Norfolk Southern had botched its response to the accident. “Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars—in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’—yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders. Norfolk Southern’s well known opposition to modern regulations [requires] further scrutiny and investigation to limit the devastating effects of future accidents on people’s lives, property, businesses, and the environment.”

Shapiro was likely referring to the fact that in 2017, after donors from the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns, the Trump administration got rid of a rule imposed by the Obama administration that required better braking systems on rail cars that carried hazardous flammable materials.

According to David Sirota, Julia Rock, Rebecca Burns, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writing in the investigative journal The Lever, Norfolk Southern supported the repeal, telling regulators new electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT) would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.” Railroads also lobbied to limit the definition of HFFT to cover primarily trains that carry oil, not industrial chemicals. The train that derailed in Ohio was not classified as an HHFT.

Nonetheless, Ohio’s new far-right Republican senator J. D. Vance went on the Fox News Channel show of personality Tucker Carlson to blame the Biden administration for the accident. He said there was no excuse for failing infrastructure after the passage last year of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and said that the administration is too focused on “environmental racism and other ridiculous things.” We are, he said, “ruled by unserious people.”

He also issued a statement saying that “my office will continue to work with FEMA” over the issue, although FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has not been mobilized because Ohio governor DeWine has not requested a federal disaster declaration.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON