No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
3d ago
Africa is the exception, really. Sub-Saharan Africa has several attested cultures where being fat was seen as attractive, such also existed in Arab countries at times.
Even today, bigger body size is seen as desirable in US black culture, at least if we go by this NYT opinion piece where a woman is complaining how black men don't want them to lose weight..
No_one
3d ago
but when we look at potential mates we want the thin one
Not the thin one. The curvy one..
Link goes to one of the most stunning examples of 'autism' out there, and it's making everyone from arch-hater 0hp Lovecraft to bog standard SJWs and boomers mad.
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
Yeah, well, look how it's working out for 'The West'.
Absolute shambles. In the 'Great Game' of global hegemony, the 'West' is the drunk guy who thinks he's playing checkers, but he's so drunk he doesn't understand he's actually playing chess, against a guy who's perfectly sober.
Meanwhile, in China, you're only supposed to care about politics if it's literally your job. Any random civilian caring about politics is viewed (rightly) with suspicion, perhaps partly genetic due to the millenia of rebels getting executed.
So, you had an absolutely typically female hysterical reaction to Ukraine war, with sanctions that resulted in exports to Russia crashing, and exports to Russian neighbors booming. Russia is still chugging along with the war, meanwhile European economy doesn't look too hot.
But a less well known example: 1 million 244: The 40 year long rare earth mineral boondoggle.
TL;DW:
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rare earths are crucial for renewables (wind turbine magnets etc) and nice for electric cars.
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processing them is very hard, harder than uranium enrichment actually to be cost-effective at it. It's a whole bunch of chemically very similar elements that occur together.
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China having little energy has a strategic interest in energy production and e-cars that actually makes sense. They went into this in early 1980s
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'The West' gimped rare earth processing companies in 1980s with a nonsensical rule change that put 'thorium', byproduct of RE processing on par with uranium. I'd love to know whether this preceded the Chinese strategic decision to aim for e-cars and so on.
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all the processing was outsourced to China. China stole and improved upon all the IP. They also subsidize RE processing and control the market. RE processing, thanks to their subsidies, is unprofitable everywhere. IF you try to set up your own industry, they'll tank prices just to make every startup go bankrupt.
This is all very funny because:
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rest of the world doesn't really need most RE. Renewables are a scam. Chinese mandate electric cars ( you won't even get a car plate) unless the car is electric, in preparation for WW3 and the naval blockades.
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e-cars don't really need them, but it's apparently mildly easier to make them good if you have ample RE.
No_one
3d ago
You'e talking as if developing replicator technology and getting as far and as fast off from the rest of you humanity wasn't the default position of every person with an ounce of self preservation.
People are insane these days due to being disconnected from actual material reality. It's going to get far, far worse with more wealth. Either we get thought control and become some weird hive mind, or people will be getting ever more insane because they can and because our minds were not designed or evolved to cope with modernity.
No_one
3d ago
But I can’t say I ever expected Ukraine to come out on top.
Given the pushback I've been getting here over the last years, there's a good few people who expected it. One would think so, except it's apparent the entire military procurement sector in the West is vastly more corrupt than in Russia.
No_one
3d ago
Funny, short video from the province of Airstrip one. Savage in that breathtaking way only those people are capable of.
No_one
5d ago
Same thing essentially, there might be some biochemical downside but a tablespoon a day is far below typical intake in a western diet so..
No_one
5d ago
This is an unwarranted response, I think.
I'm generally suspicious of CS_CA but he's right here.
No_one
5d ago
Yes, it's a morass of propaganda. Some things, such as social media casualty counts done by the other side using an open methodology allow us to glimpses of how things are. E.g.
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2023/07/10/bring-out-your-dead
Other things - like pre-war information etc also.
And then you've got the amputee numbers:
upwards of 20k. There's another article saying 'around 50k' by some amputee charity person.
That's 200k dead if we assume Ukraine is slightly worse at casualty care than US in GWOT. (~6 KIA per amputee).
No_one
6d ago
Endgame ?
This or next year, Ukraine folds and accepts territorial loss and permanent neutrality (Finlandisation- no NATO, no EU membership). NATO is ran by idiots simply wasn't able to provide the armaments necessary for victory. Might be some fun (meaning FPVs into NATO political leaders) out of this when Ukrainians with their half million dead are going to be given no rebuilding assistance [1].
EU (specifically the centrist fraction of EU parties) is mulling a union-wide draft law, supposedly voluntary at the start, so recruiting at most 10% of age groups. So there might be remilitarization. It's required in the mid run anyway because America is likely going to go down.
Russia reforms their military procurement in preparation for WW3 (new defense minister looks up to the task) and will probably take over the Baltics out of pure vengeance when US hegemony collapses following the China war. It's nice real estate, but I guess most the young people there will flee and Russian hydrocarbon funds will go to pay for those pensions too.
[1]
"On the question of NATO's role in the reconstruction of Ukraine after the war. The first thing I will say is that first of all, you need to ensure that Ukraine prevails. Because unless Ukraine prevails, there's nothing to reconstruct in a free and independent Ukraine.
We must be able to help Ukraine prevail because it's important for Ukrainians. But also because every day this war drags on, of course, the more destruction and the more expensive, the more resource demanding it will be to do reconstruction afterwards."
No_one
6d ago
At this point, I don't understand why Ukrainians simply refuse to move when 'recruited'. Unless they start killing them, getting a beating is preferable to getting blown up, and they can't maim recruits because that'd defeat the entire point.
No_one
6d ago
People don't want to talk about the war because
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by and large, the west is losing it because of bad procurement, industrial output and planning
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despite their skepticism about particulars -wokism, governance, I'm betting most people here are in favor of US hegemony and see the countries involved as somehow 'theirs' - something like the nationalist delusion. No, they aren't. The countries belong to people who have power and influence in them - and that ain't you unless you're a billionaire with an entire department of lobbyists and a prominent position in CFR etc.
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it's a rather gnarly affair, entirely possible there's been up to half a milion dead by now, 3/4 of that Ukrainian. I'm basing that claim on the estimates of amputees being 25-50k according to press quoting charities, and the amputee/KIA ratio being certainly somewhere between 6 (GWOT) to cca 30 (WW1).
So, it's perfectly clear why we aren't talking about it.
No_one
8d ago
replica at one’s mercy, an infinite horizon of choice without responsibility or constraint.
What % of people find those games appealing ? That does get incredibly boring, fast.
from a young age I always preferred linear, narrative-driven games as opposed to open world sandboxes. My favorite games were games that were devoid of choice, games that robbed you of the ability to make a choice
I have, at times, suffered what seemed to me like episodes of minor existential horror contemplating the 'world' of narrative driven games like say, Half-Life 2. The protagonist exists in what is, essentially a linear corridor, and he can only move forward. Whatever he may want to do, there's nothing he can do but move forward.
Fuck your art. Games are older than art, and good games are the difference between life and death. Philosophy, meanwhile, is mostly confusion.
No_one
8d ago
In this day and age, shooting someone with the heart attack gun and getting away with it is vastly harder to get away with.
You can do it on journalists, Breitbart looks like a bit sus case perhaps.
No_one
8d ago
Why'd you need to assassinate politicians if you can
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ensure only the right ones get elected
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get rid of them by non lethal means that make them out to be crooks, not martyrs
Spilling blood is way too risky. It's the laziest, dumbest solution.
Lethal chemicals are not that hard to procure and blow darts are not that hard to mount to drones.
Poisoning people isn't easy, blow darts are not very useful, and politicians have security. Modern tech makes a successful getaway hard to pull off.
At the moment, yes, drones and explosives probably afford a fair chance of getting away with it, especially as they can be guided through cell phones unless your target is Putlet, of course or possibly the US president.
However, anyone smart enough to cobble together such a drone understands you don't affect an ecosystem by pinching off a single flower.
No_one
8d ago
Is it real viewership, as on youtube where people seeing 3% aren't counted, iirc you have to view most of it, or fake viewership as on Twitter where a view means someone scrolled past a post or video ?
No_one
8d ago
Eurovision is one of the things I'm definitely going to edit out of my perception once doing so is possible. I'd like to wholly forget it exists.
No_one
8d ago
70% of Europeans believe that there are too many migrants.
It could very well be that people dislike Muslims and Arabs so much that they'd favor Israel just because of the recent very loud and obnoxious activism on behalf of Palestine.
Cold be 3.
No_one
8d ago
pretense of largesse towards compliant minorities.
Pretense? Tuvans and Chechens both seem very favoured, moreso than ethnic russians.
Biden, the dementia case isn't nearly as consequential as people running his administration.
Why are we even talking or pretending a person who needs a chest sheet for a press conference matters??
The people running things aren't sane (the title IX reform) or competent.
No_one
15d ago
Why? He's a Mexican. You think if he grew a beard and went into Mexico and became a normal person with a normal job, he'd be in trouble ? Or you know, that he'd be widely recognized in the US offline if he changed his looks a bit ? Guys can always grow a beard. If it worked for a war criminal who was actually a fugitive, in a country one fiftieth the size of the US, not just out of favor, it should work for Nick.
Or that he couldn't get hired in the US in a red state by someone who isn't affiliated with America's ideological police, the misnamed 'EEOC' ? , so any small company ?
No_one
15d ago
but probably not make national news.
Wasn't there a case of someone merely rating classmates making national news? I have a dim memory of such. At a university iirc.
No_one
15d ago
I doubt he’s consciously repeating what they want him to though.
I think you're not serious.
His followers are effectively a horde of shit-flinging monkeys, a staple of jokes "name the jew" types. He sometimes says sensible things, and then tars them by 'jokingly' talking about holocaust denial, which while might be attractive to lower IQ Americans incapable of understanding human nature, is laughable to people with more experience or people who lived in the region, like Europeans.
Yeah, there's a remote possibility that his ego doesn't prevent him from just fading away, changing his name and not harming his cause, but I rather think he's playing a role for the FBI because they need him to play a role.
It's not aimed at men.
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