DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
15hr ago
Thanks, I'll allow @Shakes to be the only one self-immolating this time. In my defense I'd say that obviously every people has a fraction that provokes dehumanization, and often that fraction takes the reins of power. My fellow Slavs these days tend to label me a Jew for what I usually have to say about our glorious Slav leadership they endorse or at least cope with, and by extension about loyalists and passive enablers. Everyone should understand that such disdain is exponentially less directed on fractions further from the causal root of the dysfunction.
I am not bantering about "no culture of merit or human virtue", however. It's a serious, good faith point that Americans do not ask of their political leadership to demonstrate any form of merit or virtue; there is no institutional requirement, and there's no bottom-up demand, apparently. Trump is legitimate, as much as Mamdani or Obama. He didn't have to be smart, or hard-working, or wise, or "presidential", or proven to have met some KPIs in governance, or anything; he just needed to win votes and he's good at that one thing. One can defend this norm (democracy, inclusivity, elite competition, larger selection pool, wisdom of the crowds, I don't care), but I don't believe it should be flaggable to bring it up.
If anything, I only concede I should have scoped it with "among elected politicians" (clearly these notions are often known and honored in other contexts, eg in the US Military below Hegseth level).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
23hr ago
The line about "no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER" is actually the more inflexible line if I have to explain anything away, but I don't think there's very much to explain. All wars aim for surrender and most end with settlement instead
Wut? No, "unconditional surrender" is not a normal military objective, virtually all wars have some limited aims from the start. Maybe that's just American experience because you routinely fight for regime extermination against weak or non-state actors?
You might as well say that all wars aim at genocide and end with limited death. This is not the case, people mostly go to war for, like, a specific finite piece of territory.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
23hr ago
That you put your belief in Christ and in Trump in the same discussion is beyond the reach of any sneer, honestly.
Though much of American Christianity is this kind of bullshit religion, like Russian Orthodoxy or State Shinto, nothing more than morally and theologically vacuous justification of imperial legitimacy. Naturally it's compatible with venerating a Czar.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
I think it's perfectly on point though. Many of Freedom Stans' accusations are best understood as unconscious projection of the authoritarian brownshirt impulse. "Hierarchical and individualistic white males" is considered a Based Type in the culture war, but that "Hierarchical" part has obvious costs that Adorno et al were, frankly, just correct about. You guys want a Koryos and a Great Leader. You waited for one for your entire lives.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
I have never argued that regime change is necessary and neither has Trump
See, that's what I say I hate about you, and what you gleefully embrace: goalpost movement and unconditional defense of anything The Great Leader does and how he contradicts himself. Utterly zigger-like. Speaking of unconditional, we've been over this:
There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER! After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. “MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
1 week into the war.
Does this looks like the MOU and the acceptance of Mojtaba Khamenei?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
There was a mean reply here but it's really adding nothing of value, so let's just say that I appreciate the honesty, and "Donald Trump is the avatar of American Exceptionalism" is very true, more true perhaps than you understand. "American Exceptionalism" is a belief, a vibe, not the quality of greatness attributable to the nation itself. Trump definitely channels that. We mostly disagree on whether it is anything more than parasitic exploitation of the underlying factors of greatness.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
There's a pretty large number of other world leaders for whom each and every one of those criticisms applies
I can't object to that. Plenty of world leaders really seem to be terrible in very relevant and damning ways. Monke. Von der Leyen. Lula. Trudeau. Orban. It's harder to find a truly impressive one than an irredeemable wrecker. One could perhaps argue that Trump's badness is more about the unusually (for the developed world) shameless self-presentation than the content of his character or his political MO. What I'd say is that he's still unusually bad for an American leader, ie I cannot remember a single less competent President over the post-WWII period at least, and this makes him vastly more of a problem than all but maybe 2 other national leaders (yes, Biden or rather the hivemind that effectively was Biden is more competent); he's the first one in the US to build such a solid cult of personality, which is deeply corrosive and divisive because it's a cult of a shitty personality (one decent objection would be that Obama also has a cult of personality, and he's… mediocre); and that yeah, libs and Never Trumpers are correct, his erosion of norms is a great harm unto himself. "We had boats there also". "A whole civilization will die". Making the superpower's policy conditional on his petty personal grievances. Tearing down treaties. Flagrant Middle Eastern corruption and nepotism, cronyism, the first real Purge in the history of your state. Associating the White House with crypto and other tacky/scammy things. Based Intern poasting on official comms. He's not just low, he's bringing America down to his level, kicking down the whole edifice of "institutions", which had apparently rotted enough in the meantime to become precarious.
I guess what remains is that it's just sad for a straightforwardly bad, unworthy American leader to have such a large and energetic fan club. It's kind of an indictment of the whole American democracy thing, and startling vindication of the warnings of the Republic's Founders like Franklin and Adams. Trump maximizes objective functions of an elected American politician (chiefly, being electable and capable of running a coalition) and demonstrates that they can be neatly divorced from any virtue relevant to actual governance.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
Yes, I really don't like Donald Trump.
It's worth a top level post though. Generally I think that "X derangement syndrome" can be a productive analytical lens. Here, for example, I use Elon Derangement Syndrome to explain what I see as unreasonable skepticism about Starship. I think Elon is a pretty bad person actually! But that has little bearing on the merits of his space program. He's an extraordinarily capable, visionary industrialist, SpaceX is a peerless global leader, Starship is insanely good. People derive "Starship won't work" from "Elon is a dishonest asshole" and I say that this only proves you don't need to not be one to win in space. Modus ponens, modus tollens.
But "TDS" is a cop-out, it is an assertion that all criticisms of Trump are driven by some instinctive hatred of the man, and not his object level failings or directly relevant priors about Trump's behavior. That's of course nonsense. The problem is that Trump really is an astonishingly low quality leader, in virtually every specific respect, a singularity of INTENSE BADNESS OF LEADERSHIP, as has been demonstrated through his entire career in more meritocratic contexts (shitty developer, shitty entrepreneur… unfortunately American politics is not meritocratic, you don't need any qualifications to rule at all); so every specific reason to disapprove of his actions kind of melds with every other reason, and you end up with the ur-reason "this kind of thing should not have any power at all", which is easy for followers to dismiss as "derangement". But it can also be just… objective assessment. Which it is.
I can praise Trump, though. Behold. He's not a coward, even seems to be personally brave (at least he has the instincts of a brave man). He's damn funny, and occasionally shows that he's a genius wordsmith. He's good at inspiring loyalty. He's kind to his friends. He can, apparently, instill party discipline. For most of his career he hasn't been a warmonger. He is capable of pointing out truths others try to ignore. He is not tribal (which is actually pretty impressive) – this is partially narcissism, but it lets him transcend insecurities and bigotries of his base, refuse to run cover for American deficiencies or problems, because he has his own brand which he holds in higher regard than "America", "White people" or "Republicans" or any other group. There might be more virtues. The best description of Trump in politics that I've seen can only be expressed in Chinese: «真小人 in a sea of 伪君子». 小人 is basically Trump's base; 君子 is what his tribal enemies want to present themselves as. But he's a genuine, exemplary specimen of his type, and they're frauds.
Alas, it does not make up for his deficiencies, and in many ways only exacerbates them. He's ignorant, stupid, impulsive, petty, vainglorious, dishonest, amoral, proud, opportunistic, greedy, corrupt, nepotistic, ungrateful and so on, a 小人 through and through. This influences his every action, and although every action can be deconstructed and traced back to specific failures in his decisionmaking, it's cheaper to just say it's Typical trump.
Thank you for your support and respect of my wishes.
For your info, I really don't live in China, but if I did and cared for the opinion of my new MSS overlords, I'd probably tone it down with political commentary of any kind. Americans and other Free Worlders seem to often have a naive theory of preferences of authoritarian states. Peak Stalinism, Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouge – those make a mark in the media but are abnormal conditions of power consolidation (or reconsolidation). Mature regimes seek apolitical quiescence, not fervor, and suppress overzealous and aggressive Patriots just the same as open enemies, if not harder, because Patriots can deliberately or inadvertently challenge the regime's legitimacy by exposing its flaws by its own standards and constraining strategic flexibility.* Strelkov/Girkin is a good (if extreme) case in point; China is no exception (see their crackdown on Western Pseudohistory Theory – for what it's worth, General Secretary I approve, please continue crushing low-IQ kanging on Chinese social media).
If I really were, as accused, a kneejerk America hater in China, I'd probably run some risk of getting (mildly) disciplined for "Picking Quarrels and Provoking Trouble".
Though I don't think they monitor this place in any case. But I do greatly appreciate American doctrine of free speech, and unfortunately the Chinese are not on board. Accordingly there won't be a Chinese TheMotte.
*P.S. That's another reason I get so triggered by Patriotism of @Shakes. It seems there's no consistent belief behind it, it's pure "Let's go Dodgers!" loyal cheerleading for America or even personally for Trump; no matter what Trump/America do it's good and based, even if it's contradictory. He refuses to hold his team to any internal standard at all, can pose no danger to the regime at all, and risks nothing at all (except going down with the ship).
There's personal bitterness too, I guess. I used to call myself a Russian ethnonationalist, and that project, as in, people with the same identification, has on net spectacularly discredited itself by choosing bootlicking, (delusional) prejudice against Ukrainans and the conquest of Konstantinyvka and other ruined shithole villages over the entire space of timelines where Russia was a strong nation and a positive influence on the world. Would be nice if other people took similar risks.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
Yes, the reason you assume so is extremely hierarchical, amoral and anti-aesthetic priors of your psychology, pure lustful brownshirt orientation towards power and impunity. The same reason makes you a Trump supporter to begin with, and incapable of understanding principled disgust. I guess the same reason makes you insist I've moved to China, bizarrely. (I have not, and have no plans to jump through necessary hoops or put up with their own problems).
At this rate I'm more likely to come under American overlordship, if anything (hopefully not). It would be quite prudent to ingratiate myself to this ridiculous regime; and believe it or not, I've turned down some opportunities offered from up high.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1d ago
This is a cartoonish, almost ghoulish understanding of the United States of America
It's not my fault that you have a cartoonish "president" surrounded by cartoonish WWE caricatures, and that people like you seriously demand this freak show be recognized as a legitimate government of a nation. I understand it for what it is.
let alone the country that has made possible the most flourishing
Charitably, we can say that the regime you endorse and feel kinship for is akin to a cordyceps growing out of the United States. Of course, it seeks to identify and legitimize itself with past American achievements.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
They're perfectly consistent though. It's the US policy that's inconsistent, because the US has no culture of merit or human virtue and can elevate a random scammer to presidency.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
You flinch away from self-reflection, which is in character, of course.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
America killed Iran’s leadership and bombed their factories, which means Iran won
We've been over this. Yes, killing people and bombing shit does not constitute a strategic victory, although your culture might be too unrefined to grasp such a sophisticated post-Bronze Age notion. Read the community note here, for example.
You really try to sneer, but it's clear you're mad.
The important point is that Donald Trump is evil, but he lost because he’s stupid, but he’s also too evil to care, but he’s also too stupid to know he lost, but he also refuses to accept that he lost because he’s so evil. It’s a very simple explanation
That's not the only point, but it's a simple and true explanation, consistent with all of Donald Trump's actions over his entire career, from big to small, from wars to his pathetic whiny entitlement; and the reason you're mad is that you don't want to recognize what loyalty to this creature says about yourself. Trump provides you with vicarious fulfillment of fantasies about bullying and revenge, so you're invested in overlooking his missteps.
It's interesting, Shakes, that you regress to this reduced vocabulary and simplistic sentences, essentially triumphalist grunts, when you get excited and angry. Like here:
America is building an economy in space. We have rockets that catch themselves in the air and wifi where there are no cell towers. We revolutionized energy, we export energy now. We are leading the AI superrace. We still have the strongest navy and the strongest planes in the world. Europe is falling behind. China can't catch up. We are building a next-generation tech stack the entire world will rely on and nobody else is close to catching up. It's an American century.
It's… Trumpian. Strongest planes. Winning bigly. Killed their leaders. Have you noticed? Or is it affected?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
A few months ago war critics told me that America lost so badly it would accept whatever terms that the Iranians offered. Now that that hasn’t happened, they say that the US lost so badly it must have changed its mind about surrendering.
That's exactly what had happened, though. The US accepted and signed very unflattering terms. You don't get to change history by having a temper tantrum. All you attest to is that the US is even less trustworthy than was commonly believed, and Trump is basically not the kind of creature capable of representing a state with a consistent policy and commitments, but just a dude doing whatever. As I've said 2 weeks ago:
Operation Epic Fury had been declared Over in early May already, by the Secretary of State, who doesn't have remotely Trump's reputation. The US and Iran have signed - not announced, not "leaked" – an MOU which is clearly an admission of defeat relative to any claimed early-war objective of the US, and a bunch of obvious Ws for Iran. Could Trump ignore it all, restart the war, and actually beat Iran this time? Quite possibly. Such things happen in history. But that'd be another, separate war. The terms accepted now suggest the US was pretty desperate for an off-ramp.
This seems as true as it was then.
that the global supply chain was more resilient than critics supposed
The point I'm making is that the global supply chain's resilience, which your war is dependent upon, is subsidized by the PRC, and the US had no reason to assume this goodwill at the start.
The much more plausible explanation, which I have not had to alter over the past few months
Ok? What was even the point of the MOU then, in your opinion?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2d ago
This is an incredible shitshow and, yes, seemingly the standard for modern wars. I've said before that the MOU is a sign of the US accepting the failure of Epic Fury and military defeat and cutting losses (contra my initial expectations; tbh that was impressive, if anything – Russia also miscalculated, but can't even cut losses). But well, nothing (except self-respect and reason, perhaps) could prevent the US from retroactively revoking this acceptance and just relaunching the war. Opening the Strait by force is going to be as hard as before, the oil supply crunch won't get any better, interceptors and standoff munitions didn't magically regenerate in the meantime, but it didn't become any easier for Iran either. Will the Regime finally Collapse under the pressure? Doubt. Will it accept less favorable terms of peace, now that American resolve is reaffirmed? More plausible but I think their payoff matrix is unchanged (they need to secure and fund post-war military deterrence in the presence of Israel, they can't trust the US or Israel), and that dominates their analysis. Will we see escalation, maybe even ground operation? Seems remote…
I suspect one big factor of why Trump feels like he can afford this (and why he doubted that enough to authorize the MOU before) is that the oil demand is proving to be sustainably low, and that's mostly due to China sharply dropping their oil imports and thus not competing for a volume to the tune of 5.5-6 millions of barrels per day, roughly 2 Japans' worth, vastly more than what they were getting from Iran and Venezuela combined. For all of Trump's gratitude, this is not charity from his "friend" Xi, of course. The best analysis of what's happening that I've seen is here, in short:
- cost-sensitive private refineries
- end of stockpiling
- some private drawdowns
They may also be releasing their SPRs, but that's not clear, nor is the volume of this buffer; I've seen numbers from 1.2 to 2 billion barrels. Combined with domestic production of ≈4.3mbd and some 6.4mbd of remaining imports, they can presumably keep this up for years. Their strategic objective is removing oil import dependence anyway (much to the chargin of Malacca blockade enthusiasts). There may be backchannel verbal agreements too. So Trump can assume that there won't be a sudden spike to $150+ per barrel, gas pump voter outrage and other externalities of the closed Strait.
Another factor is that there's a planetary bull run driven by AI and upstream HPC hardware supply chain, where oil-importing Asians are all winning massively, the US is getting huge capital inflows, and that's papering over bad war news. American dominance in AI, demonstrated with Claude Fable release drama, is also being rapidly converted to diplomatic leverage over the squeezed NATO allies.
So if Trump's thinking is dominated by things like midterms, he might just figure it's better not to be a loser.
Still, energy inflation is really bad, already 15.8% year-on-year in OECD. The war will continue to function as a tax on global growth, worse for some (Europe) than others, for the foreseeable future.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3d ago
Personally, I just don't share the optimism of these guys in either direction.
I don't know what you mean by optimism. They expect Plan D to be the most likely path, and one of the crappier ones. Plan A is just an incredibly weird scenario they've built around their assumptions, that prevents both violent ASI takeover and Total China Victory. Given that alignment is probably easy and introduces modest capability tax, their whole paradigm is wrong.
Full automation of labor is a technical reality within 10-15 years.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
Optimus is great. Very good hands (some Chinese stole them), powerful, iterates quickly, and more importantly I can trust Elon to mass produce it, as he mass produces lots of things. Sure it's a bit quaint compared to the Chinese robotic supply chain and scaling potential of Unitree and UBTech and others. But regulatory barriers will all but ensure that Western markets heavily go to Elon.
The problem with Optimus and with Tesla taxis is the same: it's a bet on the exponential, and you don't know your exact location. Elon's theory of victory for FSD is that good enough AI will make do with human-level sensorium; arguments about lidars being expensive are of course nonsense, the costs of lidars can fall like costs of any other component. He's obviously correct on the substance; the question is what does it take for "good enough", how much more data, pretraining and onboard processing? He keeps discovering that the answer is "more than you have". But at some point, very likely it just works and Waymos become overengineered toys.
Well, but if it's not time for robots, why is he acting like this is the very thing that will take the entire company to an entirely new level? Transform human society, even. Shouldn't his car company focus on cars, and leave humanoid robots as a niche R&D project?
I can't muster the outrage. His corporate governance experiments have trivial explanations, and he'll have the cash to burn on it all.
but V3 will be able to take 100t
I think you miss other variables changing.
and how far they already got with their own rockets of similar class
The problem is they haven't gotten far. If rocket reliability requires exploiting Wright's law, Elon is very much ahead.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
We have an ASI benchmark, courtesy of ByteDance Seed. Or rather, a framework for one. https://edge-bench.org/ has no ceiling.
Though what does it matter? The steam hammer won.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4d ago
It's difficult to have a discussion about this when you ignore the details from the actual proposals in favor of advocating for stuff they aren't doing when it's convenient
You know what, fair enough. Let's ignore Starcloud since this is primarily about SpaceX. They've just issued a concrete design: Starmind
• 150 kW peak compute payload
• 120 kW average compute payload
• 70 kW per ton
• Wingspan: 70 meters
• Deployed height: 20 meters
• 110 m² deployable liquid radiator
• Redundant pumping loops
• Integrated micrometeoroid shielding
• 150 kW solar array
• 250 W/m²
• High-speed laser links interconnect satellites and beam AI results back to Earth through Starlink. Low-latency, high-bandwidth connection
• SpaceX-manufactured solar technology from Bastrop, Texas
So, that's 917 square meters of radiator per 1 (sustained) megawatt, and more importantly 70 kW of capacity per ton, at SSO. I see Starship has the theoretical capacity of 40-60 tons to SSO, let's say 50. At, say, $200/kg that's $8M to deliver 2.8 MW of compute. As per Jensen, 1 MW can go for $100M. There's plenty of slack in this. Even if Jensen is off by an order of magnitude, the "getting it into space" part is almost a rounding error and can make straightforward sense given terrestial/political constraints.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
Elon himself is very well aware of this. I sometimes say that he's spiritually Chinese, which is lost on his greatest admirers in the West, who imagine his success is due to some brilliant insights. No, it's similar to what guys like Lei Jun do, just with American capital scale and more chutzpah. It's maybe the most potent recipe there exists.
Fundamentally, manufacturing is underrated and design is overrated. So people generally think that there's like this Eureka moment of you come up with this idea and and that's it, now it's good. But as good as a design is, it could literally be that a thousand percent, maybe ten thousand percent more work that goes into the production system of the thing itself. So, how much effort we've put into say designing Rapor, versus the manufacturing system? Uh it's ten to a hundred times more effort to design manufacturing systems than the engine.
– Even for Raptor?!
– Oh yeah, absolutely ESPECIALLY for Raptor. The amount of effort that goes into the design rounds down to zero. Relative to the amount of effort that goes into manufacturing. Yeah. If this is not true, great, I'd like uh a thousand Raptors. Uh oh we can't make them? Oh alright. This is like just very fundamentally underappreciated. If people have not been in manufacturing, especially manufacturing of something that's uh relatively new, then they don't understand and they they think the design is the hard part and they think production is like the copier or something like that. This isn't said enough, I'm trying to correct the misconception that design is the hard part, it is not the hard part. Uh, there's been lots of great rocket engine designs. I've spent a lot of time looking at the Russian rocket engine designs. There's some amazing Russian rocket designs. They've been doing stage combustion for a long time, yeah. And they've done I don't know, hundreds of different designs. So the the hard thing is not any design of staged combustion. This has been done. Yeah. Um now admittedly our is higher pressure than before and it is a full flow combustion. But these are, that that's a relatively minor increment relative to what the Russians have already done. Right. What is super hard about Raptor is uh, how do we make a Raptor where the cost per ton of thrust is under a thousand dollars.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
I don't challenge your reasoning for making resolvable bets, my problem is that they don't have much relation to the interesting question. This is the usual forecasting problem.
Your specific arguments for why Starship can work all sound reasonable to me, but they don't sound different to me from arguments for why Cybertruck could be a good truck, why FSD could drive safer than human drivers, why optimus could be a great humanoid robot, etc.
All of these efforts being meh (so far) is not very informative. Cybertruck is just a goofy car, there's only so much you can achieve by making a big electric pickup with edgy body panels. It adds very little to Tesla's current position. Car people are somewhat insane in paying so much attention to car models. FSD works, Waymo is reportedly great, so Tesla robotaxi also could work. Optimus is a legitimately good robot, it's just not the time for robots yet, and China is way ahead of Elon on the entire robot supply chain except high-end chips (both the brain and external compute). Starship is a categorical breakthrough in space logistics, which is the one area where Elon is far ahead of the competition already. There is no way for others to overtake him on any reasonable timeline.
Didn't he buy Cursor, and these guys were the ones who figured it out?
He did, and no doubt their data has contributed a lot. But the base model is in-house, and I see that RL was done on xAI's stack. This is impressive because the original xAI team has completely fallen apart, there was the impression that xAI has become a mere compute provider for Anthropic. He has crashed and rebuilt a near-frontier lab from the ruins. This suggests at the very least good capability for delegation outside the hardware domain.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
I don't really understand what drives a man to repost second hand all caps claims. I'm not even saying that he didn't say this, but surely you must understand that this is simply not convincing to anyone?
I was too lazy to de-caps it, and I hope that people of this forum will find the issue of the costs of 1 gigawatt of capacity on Earth more salient than the funny detail about all caps.
Problems of space compute have straightforward engineering solutions, the costs of which can be estimated. Whether these solutions are worth the cost depends on the costs of building the same capacity on Earth. So arguments about radiator area, micrometeorite damage or coolant mass are kind of… weightless unless grounded in comparison to the baseline.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5d ago
The orbital centers may look cheaper in back-of-napkin calculations right now, but only because battery prices haven't yet crashed as far as solar panel prices have and chip prices are so high that you want to run everything on a 100% duty cycle
Solar prices are already creeping up as China has ended subsidies and the global demand is surging. The Chinese will do all they can but at the end of the day PV panels have scarce physical inputs (like silver). The lowest realistic price for batteries that I've seen was something like $15/kWh (if Sodium-Ion works out at scale). That's about $300000 for year-round battery+solar 1MWh supply (given seasonality and losses), probably more. Plus immensely more costly solar installation (lower area efficiency, overbuilding due to day-night and seasonal cycles, weather protection, land)…
Might as well just yeet it into orbit.
LBJ knew shame. He was monstrous but self-aware about what he should be doing in his public capacity and what he is. He could at least be hypocritical and not wave his dick at the American voter, the story about reporters is not about a real press conference. If Trump had such a massive dick, he'd probably wave it on air, or at least certainly bring it up, along with his supposedly high IQ.
Nixon was a "problematic" but great man who worked hard, felt sincere responsibility for the welfare of his nation and talked in private much like my peer group does. I can't take Nixon bashing seriously.
Reagan was an empty suit good at reading speeches, I do think he got carried by the momentum of the era. Maybe Trump will be as lucky.
Democrats in your list probably benefit from the sovereign-defining-exceptions Moldbuggian mechanics, where their chicanery is rendered procedural and hard to criticize on norms, separately from its consequences.
etc. It's true that all that can be dismissed as special pleading. I still believe Trump outperforms all them on sum of flaws, but particularly on the shameless nature of it, the innocence of his savagery. He doesn't even seem to know what norms he violates, he's almost like a… normal uncultured low information voter LARPing being a president, which might be why his voters are so loyal to him.
But yes, he isn't a bad apple, he's an output the system permits, maybe even encourages. Just took time to roll such a specimen. And that's why I say what I say about Americans not demanding merit and virtue.
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