Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
I am but a humble biologist, and know little of warfare, politics and economics. But I'm surprised to see nobody has mentioned that the majority of US aid to Ukraine was spent with US arms manufacturers. Many Trump supporters (or at least democrat-haters) bemoaned the atrophied state of US/European arms production when Russia was producing more shells than NATO per month. China can kick our ass in drone production. Setting aside all questions of morality (which I obviously find more compelling than your median Trump supporter), why not use the conflict in Ukraine as an opportunity to re-arm? So to answer your question...pretty much anything and everything that we can make that wouldn't enable Ukraine to steamroll the Russian army and march on Moscow. No NATO troops, no air support (just intel), no nuclear umbrella (for now).
As an aside, isn't domestic spending to onshore manufacturing a key goal of the Trump administration? Why the monomaniacal focus on tariffs and not industrial policy more broadly? And particularly tariffs on our allies...but I suppose that's a different discussion.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population.
Hey, all these people were saying the US was following in the footsteps of Brazil and South Africa, but I never believed it until now:
In the fifth chapter of the book, titled "HIV Heresies," Kennedy writes several times that he is neutral on the whether HIV causes AIDS. "From the outset I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS," he says at the beginning of the chapter. Later on, though, Kennedy says in a parenthetical passage that he believes that HIV is "a cause of AIDS" and there are numerous mentions throughout the chapter of HIV infection not being the sole cause of AIDS.
Despite assertions that he is not taking sides, Kennedy spends much of the chapter on HIV presenting arguments made by Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and perhaps the most influential HIV "denier." Duesberg has argued that HIV does not cause AIDS but is a "free rider" common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures.
In "The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy sums up Duesberg’s theory as follows:
“Duesberg and many who have followed him offered evidence that heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency among the first generation of AIDS sufferers. They argued that the initial signs of AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrate—poppers—a popular drug among promiscuous gays.”
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
It's interesting that the cuts are occurring to the "next generation" of incoming talent, although it somewhat makes sense - Penn PhDs are funded, with very nice stipends.
Penn PhDs make about 30k a year, or 24k after taxes. Entry level at costco, maybe 1.5-2x minimum wage. Entry-level for someone with a bachelor's of science in a biotech company in Boston or SF is like 55-70k. 'Generous' is not a word I would use considering that they aren't sitting in class all day, they're spending 8-12 hours a day grinding out experiments so Penn professors (and grad students, to be fair) can publish papers. It's closer to an apprenticeship than what you typically think of as a college degree.
The whole point of the Ivy, I mean, Ivory Tower is to strengthen their own prestige and little robots, so rescinding feels weird. There's also the ability to dip into the endowment, but I know that gets complicated fast.
May be true at Penn, but isn't true at all of the state schools and smaller liberal arts college where the majority of people go. There's also complications around turf wars - the faculty of medicine can't just dip into the endowment when they feel like it. It's also easier to just turn on the taps in a few years if the administration changes than try to keep a constant enrollment.
Are any international future students getting the boot?
Contrary to popular belief, international students at the PhD level are either self-funded or intensely meritocratic. Most of the NIH training grants and PhD student grants that fund a lot of students are unavailable to international students, so most schools cap it at 0-1 international students per year as their costs are harder to cover. Excepting cases like students from Singapore (and China in the past) coming over with a full ride from their government.
Or will academia, particularly STEM, turn to embrace private funding more thoroughly? Private influence in STEM academic research could increase innovation and development, and solve the "funding crisis" presented from the withdrawal of government funds.
If you think private funding is going to increase innovation and development in STEM research, I've got a cancer drug that's going to increase your median lifespan by four months to sell you for 10,000$ a month. This drug was viewed as such a success (see figure 2) that it kicked off an enormous gold rush for radiopharm sweeping the entire biotech industry. None of those drugs are likely to be anything more than incremental improvements.
Philanthropic funding is different, but also harder to solicit. People with funding from HHMI, CZI, Gates foundation, Broad institute, etc. all do great work. Biotech research is just inherently too risky and capital-intensive to be worth it to VCs unless you're coming to them with something that's been pretty well worked out in academic labs already or the modality is already established to work on the market and you're just churning out a new drug for a different target.
There's plenty of reform in the life sciences that could be worthwhile. I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to let Harvard skim a bunch of money for overhead costs, but as I mentioned, many of the scientists out there are working at places with much smaller/no endowments who need the overhead. Or if they had said we're capping overhead costs at X% and compensating by increasing the size of the grants by the same amount, then great. There's a real possibility that Tsinghua and Peking university are the global STEM centers for the next generation. Ten years ago Chinese universities were paper mills shilling unoriginal research in garbage journals, today I'd guess about 1/3rd-1/2 of Cell/Nature/Science papers are from entirely Chinese labs situated on the mainland. A popular new business model in the USA is just licensing drugs that were developed in China; it's hard to see this as anything other than outsourcing domestic talent and expertise the same way we did in so many other industries.
Cutting NIH funding isn't going to bring back manufacturing or balance the budget. It's just going to cripple the next generation of scientists and hand China a win.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Last April, you said:
Israel cannot survive unless Iran is destroyed now. There’s basically no scenario where the tit for tat won’t escalate into an unending front of infinite Iranian resources in Lebanon, Gaza, and/or the Golan Heights,as well as constant back and forth air and rocket fire.
And Iran can't be destroyed unless the US implements a draft of millions of Americans which would start a civil war and end the US.
...
So after this move, basically the only thing that can save them from a death spiral is a major US invasion, which the US would lose militarily without a draft...
Such A draft that would cause a violent revolution/civil war in the US... A civil war that would quickly become ww3 as Chinese and Russian Assets egged on the US collapse and the US military tried to reply in kind.
...
This is probably WW3 Friends. stock up now. End of the age.
Do you think this was wrong? If so, how did you learn/update from the last 7 months?
You have also repeatedly predicted WWIII as well as a major civil war with >1,000,000 dead in the United States following the election. While you still have 50 odd days left for some assassination scenario or Biden to nuke Moscow, do you think the lack of violent protests (or serious protests at all, really) or the general acceptance of Trump's victory mean this was also a bad prediction? Is the point to be edgy clickbait or...do you genuinely believe the things you write?
Here's to hoping that the next four years do indeed make America great again, again. And we manage to dredge some unity and goodwill out of our desiccated corpse.
For all that we complain, I always ask people: if not the United States, where would you go? And where would you invest? Whatever my family and friends say, they're still investing in American securities. They're mostly still working in the USA. The opportunity here in most fields is unrivaled.
And to paraphrase Curtis Yarvin, I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo.
Hoo boy, do I have some bad news for you.
Molecular biology works fine for messing around with neurons in a tissue culture dish, but it provides remarkably little insight into a complex system like the brain. It's good for saying if I knock this gene out we lose action potentials, therefore this gene is at least required for that process (how it fits in with the 1000s of other genes involved in that process? Often much less clear).
Anytime you zoom out to a broader systems-level view, or anytime you disconnect your work from some ground truth we're inevitably left with woo. If it weren't for clinical trials enforcing some measure of 'woo' colliding with reality, probably the entirety of the life sciences wouldn't be that far off from phrenology-level fMRI experiments.
Anyways. Sure, the social sciences are a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. I'd argue they have other uses, but that's a bit beside my point - the majority of research in the life sciences as a whole is largely subjective bullshit. It's always a shock to fresh students coming in how arbitrary and ineffective a lot of what we do is when they're used to textbooks having all the answers and making science out to be some dispassionate, objective endeavor.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Are any of you using LLMs for fun projects? I've heard Claude makes a decent life-coach substitute but I haven't tried that out yet.
I don't actually know what you do, but perplexity is excellent for sourcing papers from the scientific literature if you're starting in on a new (sub)domain.
This week I had to replace the bottom bracket on my bike. Chatgpt told me which kit to buy, and then I was blown away when it instructed me to go take a picture of both sides of my crank/cassette so it could be certain what we were ordering would fit. Somehow I missed them adding that functionality, but it's mind boggling to me that it can 'see' in addition to just parsing language. I guess I doxxed myself given that my openAI account uses my real name and my ignorance of bike repair/photos of my shitty commuter bike are in their database. Maybe the next SolidGoldMagikarp exploit will start regurgitating all my personal data for the world to see.
While I was at a startup, I was responsible for all kinds of biology subfields that I had no expertise in. I wonder if they'll ever realize how I did all the modeling, although at least a lot of our data has been validated externally. I advertise myself as a full stack biologist now :)
It's still not really useful for professional things. When I ask it to come up with new ideas or commercial opportunities in [area], it just regurgitates reviews I could read myself or tells me every garbage idea I have is phenomenal. But I haven't had the patience to systematically test all the available models recently, or put serious effort into prompting.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I miss Julius Branson. If only we could coax him back instead of the boring trolls.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
First, I believe you have conflated the budget bill with the debt ceiling. Biden authorized a temporary budget through March 14th to avoid a government shutdown. The debt ceiling is untouched, and we are right up against it. We cannot spend money we don't have anymore.
No, I understand the difference. That's why I asked whether you thought Biden should have pushed congress to raise the debt limit in the last few months of a lame duck presidency.
Second, Biden pushed as much money out the door to the Democratic Patronage Network as he possibly could. I mean look at these headlines. $4 billion for World Bank, $100 billion for clean energy grants, $5.9 billion for Ukraine, as well as "forgiving" $4.7 billion in loans to Ukraine. Since after the election they've emptied the coffers as quickly as they could.
lol, Democratic Patronage Network. If nothing else, I admire your rabid partisanship.
Anyways, the $4 billion for the world bank you linked doesn't get paid until after Trump takes office (and presumably he can, and I presume will, cancel it). Your argument is that Biden went on a spending spree over the last few months - can you explain the timing of how you see that working? The 100 billion for clean energy came from the funds appropriated by congress for the inflation reduction act. Do you think you could also explain how that fits your narrative that Biden went on a 'spending spree' to bankrupt the federal government in his last few months in office? Did you read the articles that you linked?
Your examples don't seem to make your point very well. It's just not clear to me, legally speaking, how a president can go on a spending spree in their last few months in office and bankrupt the government when funding is appropriated by congress.
Now maybe you can frame this in a way where it's all smart politics. One persons "They put party above country" is another persons "The opposition party is entirely illegitimate and we must break off all the levers of power and leave the country crippled before they use the turnkey fascism we set up." Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.
No, I don't think I would ever argue that harming your own country for partisan gain is a good thing. And broadly speaking, Trump won an election, so let him govern as he sees fit (within the bounds of the constitution and short of Watergate-level offenses) and the voters will decide.
All the same, given the situation he finds himself in, why shouldn't Trump close every money spigot he possibly can, regardless of the letter of the law, because we've been left completely broke? When we hit the debt ceiling, we start defaulting on our obligations. That's what this looks like. Complaining about Trump making lemonaid out of lemons, since slashing the budget was part of his agenda anyways and he can spin it as a victory, is just spin.
I'm not complaining about Trump freezing all federal spending. I'm responding to a comment that you made and asking you to explain what you meant.
I'd be making different arguments for USAID or NIH/NSF/DoE or whatever other department.
while the conversation about the current state has certainly been productive, it seems to me that rationalization on either side is always a failure mode, and the cure is predictions:
Indeed. I've seen you post half a dozen times here something along the lines of (and feel free to correct my paraphrasing): 'My model of the world is that the ingroup will consistently choose to harm the outgroup as much as possible. In 2020, protesters burned down billions of dollars worth of homes/businesses to harm the outgroup. When Red-tribe Kyle Rittenhouse tried to defend innocents he was attacked and then tried by the Blue-tribe Justice system that refused to prosecute the crimes of the rioters.
When the pandemic happened, Blue tribe health officials instituted draconian lockdowns that minimally impacted the white-collar laptop-class but wrecked Red tribe laborers and Red tribe parents.
My model of the world predicts these events perfectly! Do you have a better model, and if so, does it accurately predict the world?'
To which I would say, would your model predict:
- Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?
- The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?
- The end of vaccine mandates in public and private spheres and the end of lockdowns?
- The utter lack of any major protests, civil unrest, or loss of faith in the electoral system after Trump beat Harris? (you want comments that aged like milk - look at the people who were claiming election fraud the morning of November 5th and even through that evening)
- The utter defeat of abolish the police and any of the George Floyd era movements?
- The lack of significant stochastic terrorism (remember the breathless doomposting about how easy it would be for disaffected lone wolf Red Tribers to blow power substations and other critical infrastructure?) through a year of electoral campaigning and the actual election?
To be clear, I doubt I could have predicted these events with any accuracy. But my observation is that you couldn't have done that either. If you want to prove me wrong, make some concrete predictions about the next four years. Will Trump incarcerate Biden or some other major democrat? Trump assassinated by an activist? Significant uptick in lone wolf attacks? World War III?
The only thing your model has going for it is that nobody pays attention to things that don't happen, even when that's the critical evidence against your argument. But whenever something controversial happens, you pop up and point towards the big flashing sign saying 'EVERYTHING SUCKS.' It's the same sensationalism that governs journalists, wrapped in a Bayesian/rationalist worldview.
Biden family's alleged corruption has evolved over time, here and in the broader public, and the specific events and disclosures that have shaped that conversation. My perception is that many of the arguments made to defend Biden, his family, and the conduct of the investigations into their activities have aged exceedingly poorly.
I admit to being disappointed in Biden, the pardon is deplorable and shouldn't have happened. I remain unconvinced that Joe Biden is particularly corrupt (...pardon notwithstanding), and I'm skeptical that Hunter is particularly corrupt by the standards of DC.
In particular, it seems to me that this saga has been an excellent example of a common pattern of group behavior wherein the facts, as they emerge, consistently break against the tribal narrative. This pattern seems to me to be a good indicator of entrenched tribalism attempting to deny reality, and likewise a good demonstration of the limits and shortcomings of that tribalism, which should guide us to a better understanding of how the Culture War is likely to play out.
One tribal narrative was that Biden was corrupt and abused his office to get rich. The other tribal narrative is...well, that the Bidens aren't particularly corrupt. Setting aside which direction the facts are consistently breaking, one tribal narrative has to be false in order for the other to be true. In your model, since you clearly believe Red Tribers are correct, are entrenched Red Tribalists denying reality?
edit: well, OP changed substantially after I hit post.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2mo ago
overestimated the US mainly because I did not account for the immense capacity for self-sabotage.
I'll wager that if we're still here in 3-5 years, you'll be saying the same thing about underestimating the Chinese capacity for self-sabotage. The United States isn't going to collapse in the next 5-10 year timeframe, and if we lose to China, it will be a long and drawn-out process. Not some knockout punch engineered by whatever the CCP department of foreign affairs is called.
I think they have enough talented people to do this, it's just those people have lost in internal politics.
Did those talented people lose in the 2000s during the GWOT era? Or in the 90s when we let American companies migrate to China en masse? When have these Mycroftian prodigies ever won in internal politics, what decisions did they make with said influence and where's the golden era in American foreign and domestic policy mediated by these people?
Manipulating the world is made much easier when you own major causal factors of that world. It doesn't take 200 IQ, though intelligence helps not to manipulate yourself into the ditch. All of great power politics is such manipulation. Suppressing competitors, strengthening allies, capturing international institutions
Like what, the financial system that proved utterly incapable of regime change in Iran or hindering Russia's ability to wage war? Toothless institutions like the UN, WHO or WTO?
networks of high-agency people, not by vague sentiment of the electorate. Sorry, that's just what we can observe happening.
Sure, the electorate isn't writing policy, nor should they.
That being said, the ability of anyone to influence systems this complex is limited, and related to how well we actually understand them. We designed computers from the ground up, and you can drill all the way down to machine code and circuit diagrams if you like. Mastery over the system makes you a 10x software engineer, or whatever the 10x hardware engineer is called. Diagnosing and fixing problems in a car or aircraft is eminently doable because we designed and understand all the parts ourselves.
On the other hand, reading all the economics textbooks in the world won't give you mastery over the stock market any more than learning fluid dynamics will help you understand the weather well enough to predict it perfectly. Biology PhDs can't even make basic predictions about how the system they've studied their entire career will behave in response to a given perturbation. And this is only partially due to the fact that they aren't very bright or talented in general, but more due to how complex and inscrutable biology is - at least to humans as we are now.
You bring up Russia and Ukraine - in March 2022, was there anyone (including what we can guess the US state department thought at the time!) who confidently predicted the outcome would be >= 3 year grinding war with little movement on the front, dominated by drone warfare? I saw plenty of takes that Russia was about to curbstomp Ukraine, then after the initial offensive failed, plenty of takes that Russia was about to collapse due to American sanctions, all of which turned out to be bullshit. If you can't predict that, I don't believe you when you say that Russia was capable of winning the war if they had just done it rationally, or that you or anyone could have figured out what to do differently in the leadup to reach a significantly different outcome. The outcome hinged on decisions made by thousands, if not millions of people - their morale, equipment, education, talent, weather, luck. If some South African entrepreneur had listened to all the people telling him not to build a rocket company, and the Ukrainian military never had access to starlink, would we be looking at a vastly different map? If Obama had pushed NATO to seriously stockpile arms and could provide Ukraine the materiel (shells, tanks, drones, whatever) to prosecute the war properly, ditto?
Yes. It's a stupid trade war and it's highly likely that no Tsinghua graduate will be so stupid. That aside, China has an official policy of not pursuing global hegemony. This certainly has no teeth, but Americans don't even have an equivalent toothless commitment.
I hope we don't see the future that proves you wrong. If Americans were truly hegemonic and held that as their goal, the world would look very different.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
Pretty pathetic. I thought he genuinely cared about the rule of law and his legacy, as you point out, but it seems I've been insufficiently cynical. I suppose politicians will only be honest insofar as voters can punish them for defection.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
And the flip side of this is that as soon as a worker is negative EV or whatever the appropriate metric is, they're liable to be laid off. This is just the equilibrium where neither party can trust the other and there is at will employment. I imagine economists like it and would say that the employee who moves and gets a raise or a company laying off unproductive workers is more efficient, and what do I know, maybe they're right.
I was chatting with a Japanese employee of a large company with offices in both Japan and the US. He says that rather than layoffs, they get put on 'career improvement plans.' In his case, it involved completely retraining his specialty and moving his family to the US, but he kept his job and stayed at the same company. We could probably have this situation if we wanted, but I'm unsure it's actually superior.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
In conclusion, for the moderates and centrists: Your signal is jammed, and only extremism will be boosted on either twitter or bluesky.
So why use it at all? Why use any social media aside from linkedin and a facebook/whatsapp account for messaging? There seems to be a broad agreement in the rat-diaspora that social media is a plague that wrecks attention spans, leads to skyrocketing teenage mental health issues and erodes any kind of political discourse, yet people still seem to use it.
Just read books and build community in meatspace instead of using Twitter/Bluesky. Whatever benefit you derive probably isn't worth the exposure to memes and toxic ragebait.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed.
'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.
Since you're looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.'
Surely the above would just be Tuesday at the Motte rather than a banworthy post, no? I'm fairly confident I can find a number of comments like the above with minimal effort. Posts without any evidence to suggest a conspiracy, things that are inflammatory and boo-outgroup, etc.
The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.
Tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Replace janitorial duty with an AI that flips the political valency of a given comment before someone is asked to judge it. Bonus points if you can train the AI to learn a given user's ideology. If we manage to abstract reality enough, it's the first step towards black mirror!
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I see, thanks for explaining.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
attacking the big tariffs on major trading partners.
Trump announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico in his first week or two. Everyone complained about tariffs on our major trading partners, Trump supporters just don't give a fuck. People here were unironically saying alienating our allies and destroying the post-WW2 coalition was a good thing.
At this point, what's left to do but either wait for congressional republicans to start panicking about their political futures or wait for the midterms? It doesn't matter what the media or twitter accounts focus on, Trump supporters know what they want and they're going to get it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Europe is seriously considering its local defense industry and in talks to trade favorably with China against the US
I get the first half, but why do you think the second half is a good thing?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
Why is it motivated reasoning? My impression is that the GWOT is fairly widely regarded as...not the most successful foreign policy, no? Or are you trying to make the argument that the US state department is competent, but got played by even bigger-brained Israelis?
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already.
The confidence you have in stating these counterfactual alternate histories is just astounding to me, but I guess there's no stakes when nothing is falsifiable. I won't pretend to know what the world would look like had China failed to industrialize, but I'm also not buying your interpretation offered with the barest of rationales and no evidence. I could just as easily argue that a world where China failed to industrialize is one in which glorious America land still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world with no real peers, and the only way to settle the argument would be the floridity of our prose and our imaginations.
Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out.
Ah, that was very generous of them. I'm sure self-interest played no part in it, and it's not even clear what you mean by that - buying treasuries? If so, they bought treasuries throughout the early 2000s at a rate not that different from 2008 - was that also for altruistic reasons?
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Vietnam war and Afghanistan/Iraq were competent policy? What about the inflation of the 70s and early 80s? All the NIMBYist policies that birthed our housing crisis and inability to build anything, falling birth rate, crumbling infrastructure? Contrary to some of the blackpillers, I won't pretend that the last 50 years have unilaterally been failures, but all the available evidence points towards relatively normal people muddling along rather than a cabal of puppetmasters making the rest of the world dance. All the problems that put us on the path to being peers of and/or eclipsed by China were born during the golden age you're gesturing towards.
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world
How do you propose to leverage this? Tariffs?
most of the world's most prized IP
Indeed - Thankfully, China also has a robust track record of respecting those IP rights.
having military presence in all corners of the world.
Maybe.
I'd say you left out immense natural resources (even more so if you include the 51st state), vast oceans on both flanks and (I laugh while writing this) the ability to appeal to talented immigrants from around the world, and integrate them into the social fabric.
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it.
I'll take your word for it. Would you agree that the vast majority of people have gotten it wrong, over and over again? Including (I'd guess we can infer) the US and Russian state departments?
What did you say at the time?
I kept my mouth shut because I at least have the self-awareness to know that I know fuck all about Ukraine and Russia.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
Hardly. It's an argument that we were undeniably the most powerful country in the world and, while we caused plenty of misery, our reign was fairly benign.
I'm under no illusions that America in 2025 is the superpower it was in 2000, or that China is a nation of rapacious peasants riding the coattails of the Master Race to success. There's a fair chance that China destroys my industry the same way they destroyed western manufacturing, with your prized Tsinghua graduates grinding 996 for poverty wages to fuck me in the ass.
But you have a susceptibility to grand, romantic narratives where small numbers of people can leverage their brilliance into enormous influence on the course of history rather than human matters largely being emergent phenomena. If you think I'm wrong, make some concrete predictions about how China will bring about America's ruin in the next three years - should be plenty of time for a couple of Tsinghua galaxy-brains forged in the fires of the gaokao to run circles around some retarded Orange Man sycophants, no?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Ironically, claiming that Watergate was the CIA running a coup on Nixon probably has less bipartisan support than the consensus view that it...wasn't.
Not to mention Nixon was so far in the past that he doesn't even map as Republican or Democrat to me, I'm broadly unfamiliar with his policies and those of his contemporaries, and just used Watergate as the most salient presidential scandal of the last 50 years. If you have an approved nonpartisan example to replace it with, I'm all ears.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
The daily podcast yesterday laid out what they expected would have happened. Senate democrats would have asked Gaetz if he had ever paid women for sex (illegal in Florida and most of the US), whereupon he could have:
- Deny ever having done it. The leaked documents combined with the alleged testimony of the women already show that the vast majority of people would see that as perjury.
- Admit it, in which case you have a candidate for AG admitting to committing a crime just prior to being sworn in.
- Plead the fifth, which would also be remarkable and apparently a bridge too far even for Trump.
Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, but I'm surprised democrats wouldn't hold onto this until Gaetz had been confirmed so they could use it as a cudgel against the Trump administration. Maybe they genuinely think he'll wreck the DoJ in a way that his substitute may not.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Obviously a bit late for your current trip, but the HelloChinese app works pretty well for picking up some basic conversational Chinese. Learning characters is a whole different story, but you can ignore them and just focus on the pinyin. Duolingo for Mandarin is terrible, imo.
I probably understand about 30% of what my in laws say, although in my defense, their pronunciation isn't great and they keep mixing in Hokkien and other dialects.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.
Prior to Trudeau, Stephen Harper was Prime minister for 9 years. There's pretty much an unbroken trendline that started in the 90s between Chretien/Martin/Harper's time in office and Trudeau's in terms of the proportion of the population that are immigrants. Ditto for the fraction of 'visible minorities'. The graphs like this one, which I imagine gets spread in your circles, conflate temporary workers with immigrants. After COVID, the government panicked due to inflation and a labor shortage a brought in a bunch of temporary workers before clamping down on it late last year and announcing reductions in immigration over the next few years.
Am I missing something? Do you have any data showing that Trudeau was significantly different from Harper, Martin or any of his other predecessors in recent history?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
They only way for them to make more money is to let the cost of everything skyrocket, raise premiums sky high, and then keep 20% of a much larger pot. Which is more or less what has happened the last 15 years since the ACA was passed.
Do you have any data to support that argument? I'm not an expert, but 5 minutes on google makes it look like premiums have been increasing in a straight line since at least the late 90s.
See figure 1.12 and also this reference.
Welcome back.
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