FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
Problem with this argument is that Israel was blasting away at Iran's launchers pretty well.
Were they? The entire point of my argument is that we don't actually know this, and can't unless you have access to classified information from inside the Israeli government. How many Iranian missiles/drones made it through the iron dome? What are the remaining numbers of Iranian missiles vs Israeli interceptors? Israel banned people from posting photos of missile impact sites, and it isn't like we can trust reports from Iran about what was going on either. All we can do is make guesses on the basis of the evidence we do have, and that's what I based my evaluation on. That said, if you do have access to a comprehensive damage report from within the Israeli or Iranian government, please do post it here!
FirmWeird
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1d ago
This is an extremely difficult question to answer. My personal position is that this was done because US and Israeli interceptor missile stocks were being depleted at far too rapid a pace, and I believe that this is the best explanation for the evidence we have access to. But I don't think it is possible to really make a firm determination on this either way, because the evidence needed to make a definitive statement is classified and/or not available to the public. Given recent reports (of unknown veracity) that Israel promised Russia they wouldn't attack Iran, I find this claim at least plausible - but not enough that I can give an actual answer I would bet money on.
FirmWeird
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2d ago
I agree with that phrasing in general, but "supports" is providing a lot of ambiguity here. From the reports I've seen, the Mossad are both supplying weapons and actively participating in the protests ("walking alongside"). While I'm not going to claim that the protests simply wouldn't happen at all in the absence of Mossad involvement, I think supplying weaponry, communication equipment and warm bodies is a significant contribution to the protests. "Supports" could easily be interpreted as an entirely non-material contribution, when that really isn't the case.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
Ah, yes, another one of those elaborate Jewish deceptions.
No? There's absolutely nothing elaborate about these "Jewish deceptions" (not the phrasing I'd use personally) at all. I could have whipped together the diagrams and "evidence" provided to the UN on this topic in MS paint with a five minute deadline, and even the Obama whitehouse made a version of it to make fun of Netanyahu. They've just been lying consistently on this topic because it is obviously in their national interest to have the US go in and take out one of their regional enemies without them having to do it themselves.
FirmWeird
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2d ago
If you're surprised by CBS news making claims like this are you unaware of their recent(well, a few months ago) purchase and change in leadership? Bari Weiss explicitly attacked the journalistic standards unit at the broadcaster, presumably because the reporting she wants them to focus on and perform would not meet those standards - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bari-weiss-cbs-news-standards-and-practices-b2862631.html
FirmWeird
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3d ago
Ah yes, your inability to reason clearly about a fairly straightforward incentive structure is better explained by the Iranians being fooled by the crafty Jews.
You're being fairly uncharitable here. Mike Pompeo and the Jerusalem post have both made claims that the Mossad is involved in the protests, with Mike specifically wishing the Mossad agents marching alongside the protesters a happy new year and the Mossad explicitly sending a message in Farsi talking about how they were with the protesters and supporting them.
FirmWeird
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3d ago
First of all, even if we just take Libya as the example it serves to make my point by itself. When you compare what Libya was before the fall of Gaddafi to the open-air slave markets that replaced him, I can't imagine that any reasonable person would want that for their country (or even any countries near them).
But the point I was trying to make was that the regimes in those countries did fall and get knocked out by American intervention (or assistance in the case of Syria), which is what is being proposed for Iran. In no case did the American intervention result in a positive change for the countries involved - and everyone else in the region can see exactly what happened.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
No, I was referring to the Bondi shootings.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
Here's another one: Heard much about ISIS lately? Probably not, because we blew the fuck out of them.
ISIS shot and killed numerous people in the city I live in while I was out having dinner with my partner - I actually got to see the police cars leaving to go deal with the active shooters, so I have in fact heard a lot about them recently.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
Toppling the regime may or may not play out in the U.S.'s favor,
Can you please point out any regime-toppling exercises that played out in the U.S.'s favor from the past 70 years? I legitimately can't think of any.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
On the one hand, this seems like a pretty galaxy-brained take; surely, from the perspective of the man in the streets of Tehran or Havana, the more obvious conclusion is, “If our regime fell and we played ball with the Americans, they’d lift the sanctions and we wouldn’t be poor!”
Absolutely nobody is going to think this. They are going to look at what happened when the regimes in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan fell and they played ball with the Americans. Compared to what Libya turned into, the regime is going to look pretty great by comparison.
FirmWeird
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8d ago
This is only true if you assume there are more suicidal police than people willing to run over police officers, which I'm not sure is actually true. It sounds to me like this is just feeding police officers to homicidal car-drivers.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
8d ago
Isn't this approach going to unnecessarily put the lives of police officers in danger? Sure, if you're dealing with a reasonable person who committed a crime of passion or something they're going to think twice about running over a cop, but if you're looking at a career criminal who will already be getting a life sentence if they get caught... why wouldn't they just run the cop over?
FirmWeird
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16d ago
"There's no real academic debate about what might happen hundreds of years in the future" - Okay . I know some academics are prone to dramatic predictions of doom, but you know you don't have to take everything they say at face value, right?
In this particular case, what I'm looking at are the results of paleoclimatology studies which looked at the nature of the Earth's climate and atmosphere in the times when the carbon which we are currently pumping into the atmosphere was already there and hadn't been locked away in the form of fossil fuels. There's no real debate on the topic - when you increase the insulating effect of the atmosphere, global temperatures rise. Do you actually have a reasoned and well thought out rebuttal to that claim? I'd love to see it if you do, but so far nobody has managed to step up to the plate.
How can you reconcile 'all ports being underwater soon' with 'actual sea level rise for a century and a half being 0.2 m'. 'all ports Underwater' to me means 'dozens of meters', at least. How do you get from one to the other, when the straight extrapolation falls far short?
It's ironic that you accuse me of not double-checking anything when you claim that I said "all ports being underwater soon" but when I check my actual post I put that event hundreds of years into the future. Soon on a geological timescale to be sure, but the actual answer to this objection is just for you to stop hallucinating.
Why, if we are on a 'nasty transitory period' is, as always, the productivity of farmland increasing?
Because we're pumping massive amounts of fossil fuels into them for one, and because the nasty transition stage is only just beginning. The key points of this nasty transition are going to be an increase in adverse weather events and shifting climate belts that make the optimal distribution of farmland and farming infrastructure very different to where they are now. But on that note, I also said that some people are going to be winners - Russia especially.
Why, if nuclear energy is 'uneconomical', does France have such cheap electricity compared to 'nuclear-exiting' Germany, and why does it export so much of it?
Because France purchased their uranium for cents on the dollar due to their colonial holdings in Africa, and because their government has since bailed out their nuclear power system because it wasn't able to financially sustain itself. I've had this argument several times before - if you want to learn more, look up Françafrique. When you factor in the declining EROEI of current uranium deposits, solar and other renewable energy sources outcompete nuclear in every way that matters - outside of specific circumstances where nuclear's unique characteristics make it valuable (nuclear submarines, precarious geopolitical situations, production of valuable isotopes, etc).
Why, if EROEI is determinant, were past societies with better EROEI so much poorer than we are?
If a doctor makes more money than a janitor, why is a doctor fresh out of medical school with lots of student debt poorer than a janitor who has just retired after saving and investing for their entire career?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
18d ago
Random audits? You don't even need an advanced AI to simply produce a table showing every single H1-B employee and how much they're getting paid. If I had access to government systems I'd be able to put out a list of every single H-1B getting paid below market rate for their job in five minutes. After that you'd want to go target all the ones working in positions that weren't really advertised to Americans in good faith - the ones that appear on sites like jobs.now. This isn't exactly a hard problem to solve - the actual issue is that the government is corrupt, and everyone in a position to do something about this problem is profiting off of it instead.
FirmWeird
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18d ago
They’re massively tilting their economy and investment towards things like this to the detriment of their consumers and other sectors of the economy.
You say this like the US isn't massively tilting their economy in even worse and more unsustainable directions. The US has been privileging financial fraud, outsourcing, private equity vulture capitalism and a whole host of other social ills. The USA would unironically be better off if they directed all the investment currently being placed into gambling, sports betting and outsourcing into high tech manufacturing and research.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
18d ago
Apologies for the delay! I've been very busy with Christmas and the like - seeing family ranks a bit more highly on my priority list than the culture war.
How do you figure every port city will be underwater? Total sea level rise since the 19th century is estimated at 15-25 cm. It's a joke.
There's no real academic or scientific debate on this subject - I'm not saying that we're going to have to start building Noah's Ark tomorrow, but the projected sea level rises over the next few hundred years are going to do this with ease. Complicated systems like the global climate are also vulnerable to sudden shocks - if something causes a large glacier or ice-shelf to drop into the ocean we could be seeing those levels rise faster than predicted. Again, this won't be a problem for us - but it will have our descendants cursing our names in the future.
Heat and CO2 have resulted in greater agricultural productivity for our plants already,and it's only going to get better from here. Gigantic areas of canadian and russian tundra are going to slowly become available for crops and human habitation.
You're right - Russia is a big winner of climate change. But what you're missing is that the increase in global temperatures is also going to drive a massive increase in adverse weather events. While the equitable climate on the other side of climate change is going to be very nice for a lot of people, the transition period is going to be rather nasty. Existing farming infrastructure will have to be moved and there are going to be a wide variety of extreme storms, floods and other natural disasters.
France has had cheap electricity thanks to its nuclear power plants for decades now.
France had to bail their nuclear power system out because it wasn't economical - and up til now they got their uranium for a 50th of the price thanks to their colonial holdings in Africa. If you scroll back up I've actually had this conversation before, in this very thread even.
The 19th century english and americans had access to cheap, high quality fossil fuels - why weren't they richer than us?
Do you think this is an actual argument? "If a doctor earns more money than a janitor, why is this doctor fresh out of medical school with tons of debt poorer than a janitor who is retiring after saving and investing for their entire life? Checkmate, liberals." I am legitimately struggling to understand the argument you're making here. Ultimately, they were richer in the sense that they had potential to do a lot more than we did. Personally I think going to the moon again would have been a better use of those fossil fuels than vastly inflating the American population then rendering a vast majority of that population clinically obese - a society that did NOT make that choice would actually be unironically richer in my opinion.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
23d ago
This is just throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks. The (also false) ecological destruction argument is entirely separate. If we run out of energy and resources, the ‚destruction‘ will cease.
Incorrect - the "running out" of resources means that we will have completely shifted the Earth's climate and seen immense changes to global temperatures and environments. The environmental damage is only just goin to get started when that happens, and the human infrastructure damage will be immense. Every single port city is going to be underwater and new ports will have to be constructed. Shifts in climate means that the areas which receive rain and the areas which are habitable for humans are going to be very different to what they were in the past - which is going to be a big problem, given that our farms and other infrastructure are located in places where they are most efficient right now, as opposed to the world we're going to be living in once all that carbon is back in the atmosphere. Not to mention the terrible weather events we'll get during the transition - and which are already starting to show up.
Fusion? What about fission? We already have hundreds of years of proven uranium reserves, and it‘s a small part of nuclear energy generation cost.
I'll believe that nuclear fission is a viable answer to our energy needs when you show me a nuclear plant capable of generating energy at a profit without government subsidies of one kind or another. Good luck! Nuclear fusion has been twenty years in the future for the past eighty years, so you'll have to forgive me for not being too excited for it.
According to your EROEI math, the romans, and then the 19th century english, were richer than we are, since they had access to high-grade resources they could mine for less energy.
No, they didn't have access to fossil fuels. Technically they were richer in the sense that they could have chosen to use those fossil fuels responsibly, but we already know that in reality they didn't.
FirmWeird
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24d ago
What the plebes want is not even a relevant factor in the equation, because the plebes refuse to exercise any discretionary funding over anything or hire any good lobbyists.
This by itself is a serious issue and one of the major contributing factors to the rise of politicians like Trump, who made it into the office on the basis of broken promises to rein in this corruption.
The Epstein Files fiasco is just a big clown show, much like WWE Smackdown
Au contraire - the Epstein files reveal a major scandal with incredibly far reaching consequences. If you don't think that these files contain information that's extremely relevant to modern politics I don't believe you're actually interested in politics in any real way beyond cheering for your favorite sports team.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
25d ago
You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Actually, you can. The most straightforward explanation isn't that the entire government is completely controlled and co-opted, but that there are multiple competing power blocs. The foreign blackmail operation has leverage and control over several important people, but their control isn't total - the public can influence those portions of the government exposed to the will of the people enough to shift the balance of power between competing groups in the government. This actually explains the behavior of the government better than both the stupid version of the conspiracy theory you're arguing against and the conventional, no conspiracy at all view.
FirmWeird
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25d ago
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
this says 4400 tons of lead are contained in 92GW of solar panels. So that is roughly 4400 tons of lead for 30years92GW of energy.
Lead is actually substantially easier to safely re-use than spent nuclear fuel - to the best of my knowledge, solar panels don't actually do anything to the lead which renders it irreversibly unusable. If you have evidence that you can't actually reuse the components or materials placed into solar panels I'd love to see it.
If we also, say, limit the analysis to Germany where the PV capacity factor is 10% or bias our valuation of baseload energy production more highly, or we include battery waste it's not too hard to get numbers where Nuclear comes out on top.
Except nuclear waste is more dangerous for far longer and less re-usable, which makes the comparison pointless.
I feel like you're refusing to engage with the argument. Lead and spent nuclear fuel have pretty much identical environmental risk profiles after a few decades.
What argument? I'm unfamiliar with any scientific literature that makes the case spent solar panels are as environmentally damaging as nuclear waste. Nuclear waste continues to irradiate anything around it for an incredibly long time, while lead...well, I wouldn't want to drink it or use it in my pipes, but lead is actually a useful metal that can be repurposed safely.
Would it be safe to be in the vicinity of the chemical storage area of the Rotterdam port if civilization collapses tomorrow?
Collapse doesn't actually take place overnight - the US and Europe are collapsing right now, and the collapse of the Roman empire took hundreds of years to play out fully. But this question doesn't mean terribly much because you wouldn't be safe anywhere if civilisation collapsed overnight. If you want to talk specifically about the dangers of chemical storage, then it depends on exactly what's stored there and how. I personally wouldn't want to start growing crops on a chemical storage facility, but I think the bigger danger from a chemical storage area at a port would be that it gets into the ocean after sea levels rise... but that's going to be significantly delayed if civilisation collapses and we stop burning fossil fuels anyway.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
25d ago
Terribly sorry for the delay - I've been busy over the holiday period with family.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796
http://theoildrum.com/node/3877
https://www.stormsmith.nl/Resources/ISA_LifeCycle.pdf
Working out EROI for nuclear is actually really annoying and tough - not all uranium ore is created equally, not all uranium is extracted equally, uranium enrichment costs are varied, etc. You can't actually just go "Oh nuclear has an EROEI of x", you have to say "This particular nuclear power plant has an EROEI of y that will decline over time due to the depletion of high quality uranium ore". Talking about the finances of nuclear is actually substantially easier and more useful when it comes to talking about the viability of nuclear as a power source for society.
There's actually an extremely good reason for why the average American should care - the same actions that the US' enemies hate the US for are hurting average Americans as well. How much benefit did the average American see from the war in Vietnam? How much benefit did the average American get from the 20 year long occupation in Afghanistan? This is to say nothing of the vast sums of blood and treasure wasted in the Middle East to preserve Israel, a country which has sucked up vast sums of US taxpayer money while domestic infrastructure falls apart. The average American has seen almost no benefits whatsoever from the majority of the US empire's actions overseas, and in many cases they've been actively hurt by them. Sure, they got some cheaper fruit from the CIA's shenanigans in Latin America, but when you factor in the other consequences from destabilising and wrecking all those nations in service of the United Fruit Company I honestly don't know if the juice was worth the squeeze.
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