No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
7d ago
John Michael Greer is like Zeihan. Someone who says wrong things with great conviction and never apologizes or express remorse at having said that.
If you don't believe me, go back and read his Peak Oil stuff. He has been wrong for decades.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2008-08-31/review-long-descent-john-michael-greer/
I was half convinced that Peak Oil would have required actually investing in coal to liquid and increase oil prices and could cause a slowdown.
Would have been a problem, as it's dirty and investment heavy, requiring coal mining and vast chemical plants of the kind Americans and their provincial subjects aren't really good at building anymore.
Luckily, fracking came into use and Americans turned from net importers into exporters.
This was JMG back in '08
Drawing on the theory of catabolic collapse touched on earlier, Greer next outlines in detail how our predicament is likely to play out during the decades and centuries ahead. Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse—well-known within peak oil circles—shows how civilizations headed for collapse tend to decline in a gradual, downward stairstep of repeated crises and recoveries. They don’t undergo the sudden, catastrophic free fall envisioned by diehard peak oil doomers. This theory makes for truly fascinating reading, and is included in its entirety as an appendix.
How will our own society’s catabolic collapse proceed? Greer sees us on the verge of a couple of decades of economic contraction, chronic energy shortages, declining public health, political turmoil and vanishing knowledge and cultural heritage. This crisis period, he predicts, will be followed by a respite of perhaps 25 years or so, during which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification, climate-controlled buildings, modern medicine and other present-day amenities will buy it a little breathing room. But this respite will, in turn, be followed by another round of crises that will rid our civilization of further layers of social complexity, and so on.
Eventually, the developed world will assume an agrarian lifestyle built around local communities and sustainable resources. But this change will happen so slowly that no one alive today will be around to witness the end result. Thus, Greer maintains, our energies should be focused not on surviving the end of industrial civilization, but on making it through the imminent crisis period that will be but one brief interval within that larger context.
It's hard to overstate how absurd this is.
which industrial civilization’s newfound relief from the lavish energy demands of universal motoring and electrification
Without electricity, everything gets a 100x less convenient and harder. Even if somehow oil production collapsed and we returned back to street cars and trains and expensive EVs, electricity could never go away. Without it you're back in 1850s.
Nobody can afford to stop making electricity.
No_one
10d ago
Thanks.
I hate it. (digital boardgames. It's such a lazy stupid thing to make. You've got a computer that at present can ran entire digital brainlets. Why not use said computing power to have an interesting game)
No_one
10d ago
I skimmed it.
world’s large cities and a vast amount of other real estate, erasing entire nations from the map, forcing mass migrations, crippling ports and other trade facilities
And is that a big deal? 'Erasing entire nations from the map and mass migrations' is just history. Unlike the US which has 300 years of not much happening, we've got like 2 millenia of actual history in Europe. It's pretty much mostly forgotten by everyone normal. People are capable of dealing with history. Worst case they die out and are thoroughly forgotten. Not a problem for anyone involved in said history.
Reason I skimmed it is because I find him to be a noise generator.
He's just another primitivist engaged in wishful thinking about how this stinking complex industry he doesn't understand is all going to end, wholly ignoring that heavy industry is the source of state power and as such, indispensable. Short of some devastating bioweapon killing enough people to prevent sufficient populations to survive until the last book rotted, nothing can end industry. Even a devastating nuclear war would only result in a decline to late 19th century level in the unaffected parts of the world, followed by rapid rebuilding.
Greer's problem is that he is just way, way too pompous and takes himself too seriously. Whatever he says that's novel is wrong. Recently he has ticked off a particularly angry British man and .. yeah.
but from reading the back of the book
Well you should read it. It goes over, in sometimes tedious detail, about how the present-day environmental movement evolved. It's a pretty infuriating book and it makes very clear environmentalism is actually not about the environment.
No_one
10d ago
So there's both a physical and a digital release? Or Steam sells physical objects now?
No_one
10d ago
There are entire countries built below sea level now.
If the sea level were to raise by 50 m over a few centuries, people could deal with that.
No_one
10d ago
I recommend reading 'Apocalypse Never'. The coverage of climate-related injuries to ecosystems in the media is inadequate. Journalists are not neutral at all, nor are they competent.
we're already seeing temperature zones marching away
And? That article itself notes planet used to be much warmer and there were no real issues with that. The fantasies of runaway greenhouse effects are obviously just that- fantasies.
No_one
10d ago
Climate Change policies are a series of scams.
Politically, the European version uses climate fearmongering to push through renewables and energy austerity because the end result was purported to be energy autarky and an end to being easily blackmailable through hydrocarbon blockades.
The American version is the same, except the motivation is more along the lines of keeping people poor because poor people are less likely to build stuff.
The climate modellers of course have their institutes and their salaries and budgets.
It's a harmful policy being pushed under false pretences and is of course wholly ineffective because people will be merrily burning coal elsewhere by the gigaton. Since 2007, world coal use has increased by a gigaton despite all the efforts.
No_one
11d ago
Now that Russia has torn itself asunder
100,000 dead or so the Russians have isn't the end of the place. Arguably the 300-500K dead isn't perhaps even the end for Ukraine, as they're largely older people and they'll be able to preserve their independent western/central Ukraine without a doubt.
No_one
11d ago
Any one of these could have got you anathematized by the 1990's Democratic party,
Yeah, sure. Now guess who said this. Answer under spoiler.
All Americans not only in the state's most heavily affected but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country the jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants the public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers that's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before by cracking down on illegal hiring by borrowing welfare benefits to illegal aliens in the budget I will present to you we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes to better identify illegal aliens in the work face as recommended by the Commission headed by former congresswoman Barbara Jordan we are a nation of immigrants but we are also a nation of laws it is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years and we must do more
No_one
11d ago
Mace has a woman's skeleton, McBride doesn't. Nance would be unlikely to get clocked as trans because of her gracile skeleton and small size. Meanwhile, McBride is one of the reasons being a big boned woman today makes you liable to be clocked as trans and insulted as such in a dispute.
In any case, people like McBride exist to pass strong antidiscrimination laws protecting men who want to pretend to be women.
Making them feel very unwelcome, is it mere grandstanding?
No_one
11d ago
If it hadn't been political it'd never have leaked or even gone anywhere after the grand jury found out about the fake driving licenses. Instead it was talked and hinted about for years.
No_one
11d ago
That has been the state of affairs since.. forever, basically. Iranians showed off quite precise missile back after Soleimani was killed. That should've made it clear Russians have or could have the same thing easily.
Anyone with half a brain understand slapping one more stage on a missile and maybe hardening it a bit against re-entry heating isn't a great deal.
And as to ABM, the mechanics of saturation attacks are well understood, as is the disparity between attack and defense.
No_one
12d ago
BG3 is mid. The game is okay but the writing is crap.
Stellaris is also mid and in many ways more of a role-playing game than a strategy. In terms of depth it has the same sort of 'fake' depth other Paradox titles have, and is not in any way deeper than an ordinary Civ-game from before they got hit by the stupid ray.
No_one
12d ago
So ?
Great men are rarely good men. Gaetz seems to be pretty eloquent and an enemy of the bureaucracy. Until that is purged and once again accountable to elected representatives, you'd do well to ignore any wrongdoing short of large scale fraud, actual forcible rape or murder.
No_one
12d ago
Does this explanation make sense? Or is this just a $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk?
No, there's no $20 bill.
Big companies are woke and will mandate woke BS. People who climb the greasy pole in corporations are socially adept conformists with sociopath traits. Not the kind of people who care about truth or beauty or get disturbed by woke shenanigans. They read the room and act accordingly.
This will change as US business and political elites become anti-woke which they must. According to Thiel, in SV in '16 they thought he was crazy, by '20 people were telling him he was right. People got fired over activism since then. So the tide is turning.
MtF devs, rare as they are, or woke devs in any normal company would simply toe the line or be told to go elsewhere if they acted out.
But then, you're not missing anything because big companies make games for big market shares and big market share require games made for the average person, who are not that interesting.
But could they get devs?
Yes. For example, Factorio devs are anti-woke to the point there was a minor scandal when someone called out one of them for recommending a programming essay by Uncle Bob, he was told to shove his opinion up his ass..
Another anti-woke game is Kingdom Come, whose developer is notorious for talking back at liberals, unapologetically told people to get lost after they wanted blacks in medieval Bohemia and is even mildly politically active in Czech Republic having founded a small NGO called Society for the Defense of Freedom of Expression which has of course been accused of spreading 'disinformation' by the arbiters of truth working for the Ministry of Interior. (for Americans, that's the guys who run the national police, jails and so on )
It's a matter of funding and publishers culture moreso than the raw talent. Factorio was self-funded, Kingdom Come got funding for development from a local oligarch. Not sure how KC2 will be, there were rumors but the guy in charge is not the kind to let himself be overruled, so I expect no wokery even if publisher/funder is no longer local.
After all, there are roughly 2 billion people from high-average IQ populations like whites, east Asians where people with an IQ of 120 are likely to become devs. Only cca 500 million of these live in countries where woke is the official culture.
(If you're black with that IQ, you can get paid much, much more by being a businessman etc)
No_one
12d ago
Seeing how few interceptions were visible during the latest attack on Israel, and that the missiles use there were a tier above (SM-3, THAAD, Arrow) and none of them was ever mentioned as being deployed to Ukraine ?
Why'd you expect a single interception? Patriot can intercepts Scuds, missile with vastly lower velocity and predictable trajectories.
No_one
12d ago
neutrality and pretty much openly announced that their satire would only be a means to advance a socially progressive worldview, t
Seeing how rapidly Ireland is embracing migration and progressive causes , is there any.. actual opposition, in Ireland, to the idea of making the country as diverse and consequently as low trust as New York ?
Looking at the 'controversies' section, it does make him look like political material. After all, he's probably not setting those cars on fire by himself, which implies he's part of some sort of organisation, which is definitely not progressive.
No_one
12d ago
He has said it's most of his free time though. And he's not claiming he's best in all of it, just has best performance in some subset of it. I don't think it's that implausible tbh.
The game has cca 80k daily players. War Thunder has 800k. Counterstrike about the same order of magnitude as WT . It's not one of the very popular games, though still fairly big.
No_one
12d ago
Did the guy collect some recent Ukrainian jokes ? They ought to be pretty similar given the common cultural descent.
No_one
12d ago
.. and given how dumb his shitposting it, I really doubt he spends much time on it.
No_one
14d ago
Elon is very intelligent, so he likely learns way faster than other people.
Gleba got us (me & cjet) pretty stumped for the first 3-4 hrs. Eventually I figured out the cursed mechanics and got something going. And yeah, we imported everything to start, power generation, tesla turrets etc.
I deleted everything I built on Gleba that researched the basic tree Ag-tech using stuff, and built a better base that's almost hands off. Took a good look at what I was doing, scaled it up, plugged every inserter into a combinator so resetting the filters on inserters is more convenient, because that's simply a must.
One mistake I made was running nutrients around the base. That's dumb - you run bioflux around and generate nutrients in each module. I feel ideally it should all be run around the base on a loop, I think I'll try that next time I'm rebuilding it.
Apart from that, one needs a really robust spoilage removal system. My second build usually gets clogged on spoilage removal. The nice thing is all the junk or unspent jelly or mash produces enough energy that my nuclear reactor is mostly just backup. The Heating tower has something like 400% efficiency for some bizarre reason. vastly better than boilers.
The one unsolved issue is how to avoid wastage and export only the choicest unspoiled flux. I'm thinking maybe running bioflux in a loop is the way to go so no more than needed gets generated.
As to defenses, we are at evolution 1.0 and spamming 4 rocket 16 normal turret firing positions, spaced 2 pylons apart works fine and stops every attack but gets half-stomped. If you add in a tesla turret that prevents the stomping altogether,just damages it. It's key to not taking losses without having vastly more rocket turrets. Don't think mines do anything to the stompers. Didn't try flamer turrets.
We never had really serious issues with the Gleba wildlife bc of early pruning and artillery.
but I think I'm going to play around with delivering ammo by drone to gun pods and see if that can keep up with threats
They really could've made Gleba way messier by increasing the gravity. I'm even harvesting the fruits with drone, still no issues with power.
Yeah. Going mainstream as a part of the platform of people devoted to preserving American power so it can protect Israeli interests.
Musk's photo-op in Israel after he said something stupid? Him now being close advisor to Trump, the guy with a record-breaking amount of Jewish family for a non-Jew?
I'm not that happy with that term either but it does fits: it's the capable parts of the US deep state, Silicon Valley which can sell them toys and new industrialists who will want those weapons contract to keep the world safe for Israel and democracy. After all, legacy arms industry is almost completely fucked and blinkered, so if US wants a prayer of a chance to win against Chinese, they'll have to do everything right.
What more do people want? A reasonable government and a chance to bend their backs in service to a monumental, meaningful task -saving the planet from Han domination, just as their grandfathers bent their backs and took over the world so communists couldn't do it.
I'm thinking that that won't make you very happy. The Rufo-Reich. It won't make Holocaust denial socially acceptable, though it might successfully clamp down on public black dysfunction.
Most people will be pretty happy with it, I believe.
More options
Context Copy link