Bogastvo narodov nikoli ni nastajalo v tovarnah tankov, temveč v tovarnah inovacij. Evropa je izbrala napačne politične prioritete. Namesto razvoja je izbrala strah. Namesto razvoja je izbrala vojno. Namesto miru in blaginje je izbrala orožje.

Še dva komentarja na sponji članek o Volkswagnovem zatonu in (napačnih) odzivih evropskih politikov na problem.

Volkswagen, China and the breakdown of unequal exchange

The New York Times has a long, mournful piece about how Volkswagen’s troubles “were made in China”. It’s worth reading, because beneath the corporate detail lies the story of an entire imperial economic arrangement beginning to come apart.

For four decades, VW has been a major force in the Chinese car market, and for many years China supplied half or more of the company’s worldwide profits – profits that, as the Times notes, paid for “high salaries and generous benefits” for its workforce back in Germany. Which is another way of saying that a German corporation has been drawing the bulk of its wealth from Chinese labour and the Chinese market, and repatriating it to fund living standards in the imperial core.

This is unequal exchange: the systematic transfer of value from a poorer country to a richer one, even at nominally “fair” market prices.

The arrangement suited the West very well, so long as China remained where it had been assigned, at the lower end of the global value chain – assembling, manufacturing, supplying cheap labour, while design, profit and prestige stayed in the West. What the West never grasped is that China had never agreed to occupy this position on a permanent basis.

The times they are a-changin’. Chinese firms – BYD, Geely, Xiaomi – have overtaken VW not only in China but across Latin America, Africa, and now the European Union itself, VW’s home turf. The company is slashing its model range by half, and reportedly preparing to lay off up to 100,000 workers and close four European factories.

How did China manage this, with no empire to plunder and no colonies to super-exploit? By leveraging the advantages it actually has: those of a vast socialist country with a fundamentally planned economy. The NYT, almost despite itself, lists them – state-controlled banks strategically issuing low-interest capital; local governments backing the new industries; a decades-long, state-directed bet on electric vehicles that Western firms lazily dismissed. This is the patient, planned, production-oriented development that neoliberalism forbids.

That is the real source of the anguish now emanating from the pages of the Western press. It is not simply that Volkswagen built the wrong cars. It is that the mechanism by which the imperial core has been enriching itself at the expense of the periphery is corroding – and a formerly poor, semi-colonised, blockaded nation has shown that the the economic chains of imperialism can be broken.

Keith Bradsher v članku v New York Timesu analizira, kako so se največje težave Volkswagna, nekoč nespornega voditelja svetovne avtomobilske industrije, dejansko začele na Kitajskem – trgu, ki je bil desetletja glavni motor njegove rasti in dobičkonosnosti. Kitajska je Volkswagnu dolga leta prinašala več kot polovico svetovnega dobička, kar je podjetju omogočalo financiranje visokih stroškov dela in obsežnega proizvodnega sistema v Nemčiji. Paradoksalno pa je prav trg, ki je omogočil Volkswagnov razcvet, danes postal največji vir njegovega nazadovanja.

Bradsher kot osrednji razlog za preobrat izpostavlja strateško napačno presojo vodstva Volkswagna glede elektrifikacije avtomobilske industrije. Medtem ko je kitajska država že pred skoraj dvema desetletjema jasno nakazala, da bo prihodnost mobilnosti temeljila na električnih vozilih ter domačo industrijo sistematično podpirala z ugodnim financiranjem in industrijsko politiko, so evropski proizvajalci ostajali skeptični. Volkswagen se je odločil čakati na tržni signal potrošnikov, namesto da bi sledil dolgoročni razvojni strategiji kitajske države. Ko je Tesla leta 2020 sprožila množično elektrifikacijo kitajskega trga, je bilo za dohitevanje vodilnih domačih proizvajalcev že prepozno.

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Bine Kordež

Za vsake volitve je značilno, da stara koalicija želi prikazati solidno stanje javnih financ, opozicijske stranke pa izpostavljajo precej slabše razmere. Kljub slabemu izhodišču pa so v predvolilni vnemi pripravljene zagristi vanje, seveda v dobro Slovenije, in jih s predvidenimi ukrepi urediti. Potem, ko prevzamejo oblast, pa praviloma ugotovijo, da so razmere še slabše in vseh obljub ne bodo mogle realizirati. In podobno je bilo tudi tokrat.

Bivši finančni minister je navajal, kako so razmere obvladljive, da smo s primanjkljajem pod maastrichtsko mejo, kako ima veliko držav večji primanjkljaj, državni dolg pa se relativno zmanjšuje. Opozicijske stranke so v predvolilnih nastopih opozarjale na katastrofalno stanje, a nudile recept kako bodo javne finance z drugačno politiko spravile v red. Ne glede na povečan državni primanjkljaj kot posledica vseh ugodnosti, ki jih je podeljevala prejšnja vlada, so s takšno politiko celo nadaljevali (interventni zakon). A potem pride ura resnice in novi finančni minister bo po tiho verjetno celo vesel, če interventni zakon pade. Trenutna višina presežnega primanjkljaja ter dodatni učinki interventnega zakona na proračun bodo preprosto omejili prostor za vse dane obljube. Ker je manevrskega prostora pri zmanjševanju izdatkov relativno malo, višina zadolževanja pa omejena, bo vse obljube o zniževanju davčnih obremenitev nemogoče realizirati.

V tem duhu bodo najbrž tekle tudi bodoče aktivnosti vlade, ki bo iskala kompromis med obljubami in finančno realnostjo ter krivila staro vlado za neodgovorno politiko. Aktualna koalicija pa seveda kritizirala ukrepe nove vlade brez resnega uvida v morebitne napake prejšnjih politik. In temu narativu bodo sledili tudi  mediji, odvisno na kateri politični pol so nagnjeni. Zato v nadaljevanju predstavljam moj pogled na aktualne javno-finančne razmere z nekoliko drugega zornega kota.

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On 10 July 2026, I was on the “Deep Dive” with Lt. Col. (ret.) Danny Davis, where we talked mainly about Iran, although we did discuss Ukraine in the last part of the show. On Iran, we talked about the tit-for-tat bombing campaign between Iran and the US that has replaced the failed strategic bombing campaign (28 February—8 April 2026) and the failed naval blockade (13 April-17 June 2026). Now, the Trump administration thinks it can employ a tit-for-tat strategy to coerce the Iranians into allowing commercial ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz without Iran’s permission.

Tehran categorically rejects this idea and maintains that any ship going through the Strait has to do so with Tehran’s explicit permission. There is no way that Iran is going to back down from this position and the US has no viable military strategy for getting Iran’s leaders to change their minds. Indeed, the Iranians have just closed the Strait completely, which is bad news for the Trump administration.

Of course, the US will be tempted to escalate the scope of its tit-for-tat strategy. But that will only backfire, because Iran benefits from going up the escalation ladder. This logic explains why the US signed the Memorandum of Understanding — a surrender document — on 17 June 2026. It had lost the war. Nothing has changed since then to reverse that outcome.

 

Razveljavljen gol Egipta 20 sekund po tem prekršku … ki ga sodnik sploh ni pogledal

Nerazveljavljen gol Argentine 20 sekund po tem prekršku

In tako iz tekme v tekmo

“Naravni red stvari”, po katerem so zahodna gospodarstva na vrhu, države v razvoju pa ostanejo večno nerazvite, se je z razvojnim prebojem Kitajske nezaustavljivo podrl. In to povzroča neznosne težave zahodnim politikom.

JD Vance is not expressing a fringe opinion when he says he’s “angry about the rise of China.”

He’s voicing something far more widespread than most people are willing to admit. What we’re witnessing is Western hegemonic anxiety expressed with less and less shame.

And I don’t think this reaction has much to do with China specifically. If India, or the entire continent of Africa, had industrialized and innovated at the same speed and scale, the response from Washington and Brussels would look similar.

China’s rise has simply forced a belief out into the open that many in the West would rather keep buried: a deep discomfort with the idea that “developing” countries might actually develop. That they might compete, might lead, might stop waiting their turn.

Strip away the talk of trade imbalances and national security, and what remains is a simple, unspoken assumption: the West is supposed to be on top. That assumption runs so deep that many people who hold it don’t experience it as a belief at all. It just feels like the natural order of things.

So when a country like China rises, it isn’t applauded as a great feat of poverty reduction or development — it’s treated as a problem. Something to be managed, contained, sanctioned, or tariffed back into its place.

Drago Babič

Spodaj je primerjalna analiza emisij toplogrednih plinov (TGP), prilagojeno specifičnim pogojem delovanja manjših individualnih kotlov in delovanja slovenskega elektrosistema v zimskem obdobju (november–marec) ob predpostavki polne moči TEŠ6.

Ogrevanje z ekstra lahkim kurilnim oljem (ELKO) V HIŠAH Pri manjših ogrevalnih sistemih za individualne hiše je dejanski izkoristek zaradi izgub pri zagonih, prekinjenega delovanja in priprave tople vode nekoliko nižji kot pri velikih sistemih. Upoštevan je realističen zimski izkoristek sodobnega individualnega kotla na ravni 92 %.

• Emisijski faktor za ELKO: 0,264 kg CO2e na kWh energije goriva (spodnja kurilnost).
• Izračun specifičnih emisij: 0,264 kg CO2e/kWh / 0,92 = 0,287 kg CO2e / kWh_th (koristne toplote).

Ogrevanje s toplotno črpalko (TČ) ZRAK-VODA Emisije toplotne črpalke so odvisne od ogljičnega odtisa elektrike v omrežju in učinkovitosti delovanja pozimi.

• Zimski emisijski faktor omrežja: Ker pozimi hidroelektrarne proizvedejo manj, sončne elektrarne minimalno, TEŠ6 (600 MW) pa deluje s polno zmogljivostjo, se delež premoga močno poveča. Zimski emisijski faktor slovenskega omrežja se dvigne na približno 0,390 kg CO2e / kWh_el.
• Zimski COP (grelno število): Upoštevajoč povprečne zimske temperature v Sloveniji in cikle odtaljevanja uparjalnika znaša realno zimsko povprečje naprave COP = 2,8.
• Izračun specifičnih emisij: 0,390 kg CO2e/kWh / 2,8 = 0,139 kg CO2e / kWh_th.

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