Depends. The ancient Weller that I have has a sleeve you can unscrew but that sucker gets burning hot, and the thumbscrew locks up unless you cool the tip down, which you can do by holding the thing on your wet sponge.
I bet if they wrote a 100 year plan then taking a detour through selling things to Capitalist countries is part of the plan to getting to a Marxist utopia.
If we define "leader" as "someone who commands by force or by some other means the obedience of a group of people" then Anarchy is a society without leaders. It doesn't mean a society without order, but it presupposes that people can behave reasonably and that that is enough to ensure order.
Your "Other means" could almost be an essay prompt.
There's distinctions between power and violence (see Hannah Arendt), between social and structural power (see The Tyranny of Structurelessness).
And then there's this ancient Chinese text that has been slopified for a million management manuals:
The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised.
The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When they have accomplished their task, the people say, "Amazing! We did it, all by ourselves!"
To me this essay was an eye-opener, both because it's well argued and also because it's so obvious once you read it. Even outside the specific niche of feminist groups in the US, who hasn't witnessed this phenomenon in action? Those supposedly flat groups where everyone has a voice, yet it's always the same subset of people who are heard and ultimately influence or direct all decisions? And the unwritten rules who are both invisible and "the law".
I'd be interested to know what happened when this transition took place in Europe and the UK, because we'd have the advantage of hundreds of years of history to inform the outcomes. It's easy to forget that our great grandparents and grandparents experienced roughly the same dichotomy between living on a farm raising kids and going to work for a capitalist owner of a factory for a meager wage. The romanticization of that period paints a picture of choice that I don't really buy. It seems like your desire to find nuance is validated by what I do already know.
I think it's really easy to blame one or another specific group for the "market failure" but the reality is that if there were 100B worth of capital looking for 1T worth of gross over 10 years there would be a lot of places that would welcome that kind of spending. I think it's probable that in specific places there's been push back, and those places are probably where the work was historically concentrated. But if that's the case, you should really be asking "why is there push back now when there wasn't before?" And I don't think the answer is because the entire community has adopted a "degrowth" agenda. Rather, I think it's going to be more about chemical dumping in the water supply or use of scarce resources that the community would rather not spend for the profit of a few people who don't live there.
I think a lot of people will accept industry when industry tries to be a good steward of the community's environment.
It is happening to production facilities across the US. Both new production facilities and expansion of existing facilities. The locale doesn't seem to make a difference.
As with the sudden inexplicable "concern" about data center construction, I don't think this activism is organic.
As with the sudden inexplicable "concern" about data center construction, I don't think this activism is organic.
I don't think it is sudden, there was much of the same concern about Amazon warehouses and anything else that cuts down trees, disrupting wildlife, and human neighbors. The reason it is more of a concern with modern datacenters is because they don't come with a significant amount of new jobs for the communities they are affecting. People will put up with a lot if means their unemployed loved ones can get on their feet.
With AI being a looming threat to everyone's livelihood it is compounding the reaction, not only do these datacenters not provide new jobs, they are actively contributing to people losing their current jobs.
If these new datacenters were going into empty buildings in cities that already had adequate infrastructure, then no one would care. They would still be against ai in general, but the datacenters wouldn't be a problem.
edit:
They could probably get a ton of support if they went into one of the many cities with crumbling infrastructure, took over abandoned buildings, and paid to fix up the roads and stuff. Like if they moved into an abandoned factory in flint, and fixed the water supply they could be heros.
You find populism in the US inexplicable in 2026? Where have you been for the past 18 years? You get instant political capital by framing anything as elites vs the common man, and the tech company billionaires cannot escape that "coastal elite" label, or hide that they want to build more data centers.
This explains why I can't get a decent Honeycrisp anymore. They used to be seasonal but the ones we get in Washington are not good anymore. Usually you get 3 or 4 varieties of which one is Honeycrisp, one is Cosmic Crisp, and one is Granny Smith. Recently the Cosmic Crisps have been good, but you have to look for a skin that is as red as a Red Delicious and a flame that is yellow or white but never green.
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