No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
7hr ago
I thought we are beyond this already, the same was said before invasion of Ukraine. I
People in the know (Mearsheimer had a talk on this in '14, Bill Burns-the ambassador said as much in his leaked 2008 memo etc) have been saying Ukraine is liable to get invaded if US tries to integrate it into NATO.
US:
- set up a defence treaty with Ukraine,
- vowed to integrate it into NATO at some unspecified date,
- refused to renounce that ambition
- laughed at the Russian ultimatum that sought a decrease in troop levels near its borders, disavowing ambition to integrate Ukraine
So who exactly was saying Ukraine won't get attacked?
No_one
7hr ago
It is not as if NATO will fire nukes in face of conventional assault - so what will they do?
If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
That's almost exactly the disparity in population, GDP between Russia and Ukraine. In any reasonable war, conventional war between Russia and NATO should go far, far better than between Russia and Ukraine alone. After all, the developed West has much better everything. It has rule of law, human rights, less corruption, much better R&D sector, better education. One could go on.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
It is not as if NATO countries will ever muster courage to actually wage full fledged war with the aim to physically oust Putin from Kremlin
I'm pretty sure that's what Oppenheimer meant when he said "lot of boys not yet born will owe their life to the bomb". You know well from history how "waging full scale war to oust the despot in Moscow" usually goes. Especially when he has the support of world's biggest industrial power.
I doubt Putin would try to take Baltics unless there's a WW3 going on. There's nothing there, they barely have any forces worth speaking about, it's not defensible at all (or so was the usual expert talk) and all the forces there are just tripwire forces.
What use is NATO if it's unwilling to use nuclear weapons to defend the territory of its members? Was it all a big bluff or what ?
No_one
7hr ago
My own work is to deterritorialize away from the limitations of the human mode's structure and territorialize somewhere new.
??
deterritorialize
What does that even mean?
No_one
3d ago
There was some flow battery grid storage projected completed in ..Korea?
I looked it up, found the dimensions and then tried extrapolating. You could probably get the ballpark by finding energy density of these cheap grid storage batteries and then doing some calculations.
depend on available volume,
We don't live in zero-gee. Building up is costly, building down even costlier.
terraform's "power -> methane" thing certainly isn't efficient, compared to other forms of grid energy storage, but what it is is scalable. Basically it seems to be a bet on "power prices will be zero / negative some fraction of the time in some locations", which seems likely to happen if solar keeps being deployed at the current rate, or if any country anywhere in the world gets serious about fission power.
..there's such thing as manufacturing and maintenance costs.
You got 8 upvotes while completely neglecting that.
Terraform has some bullshit low price of $100k for a machinery that produces, without taking power into account something like $65 of natural gas per day. With solar it'd take 5 acres to power it.
So, I'm skeptical. Because industrial equipment is extremely expensive.
Look at this here. $100k for that much chemical processing?!
And does 40 tons of methane per year even get you $150k? 1 ton of methane is supposedly 14500 kWh (perverse unit to use).
1 kWh is 5 cents in the US or eastern Europe, .7 cents in Russia etc.
725$ per ton, 29k $ per year.
So how is this thing supposed to be competitive with natural gas in any reasonable place ? You can't hike price of heat up 10x like they did in western Europe and expect to not ruin any real economy. (based on production of actual stuff, not finance bullshit)
No_one
3d ago
That's nonsense and you know it.
Yes, it is probably not fast enough to keep with AI improvements. But that isn't the reason to just give up and accept being lame forever.
No_one
5d ago
Look up what Terraform is promising. Methane synthesis from water and captured CO2
I feel like it can't be real, that the numbers don't make sense, that making and running the machinery in a cost effective manner is impossible
No_one
5d ago
Extremely high voltage grids for thousand km transmission aren't cheap.
They're an eyesore to some. I love them though.
You need a lot more of them with a fluctuating grid like you're proposing.
No_one
5d ago
There's an insane startup promising to crash the methane market with solar powered methane synthesis from directly captured CO2.
No_one
5d ago
That's limited by geography.
Very few places could get days of storage that way, without NAWAPA style megaprojects.
No_one
6d ago
'Always a slum' With the 8-10x rate of homicidal violence between blacks and whites, and a roughly similar disparity in other forms of crime, it's fairly obvious one sort of 'slum' is a much more pleasant place to live.
I'm also skeptical of the 'always a slum' claim, as we have basically no slums in Czech Republic apart from the few Gypsy areas. Slums are not an inevitable part of life. They disappear once people have enough money to keep buildings repaired.
No_one
6d ago
It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
No_one
6d ago
The Axis powers were not the weaker party in WW2.
They absolutely were. In territorial extent, in manpower, in resources, in number of factories.
No_one
6d ago
Who ?
The GAE. The Gay American Empire. All the Christians who could surely find theological justification for selective breeding if the wanted to.
choose your biomods for you?
Stop living in computer games. The reality is the biggest risk factor for being childless is educability. Our policies are literally geared to makes us incapable of maintaining high technology.
No_one
6d ago
Yeah, I got pwned by Khan who for some reason claimed steppe herders caused a dark age and my sleep-deprived self messed it up.
There was nothing worth writing about going on in Europe before the classical era except maybe Minoans who probably haven't even noticed anything having happened. Nevertheless, it must have been traumatic, getting conquered, enslaved and cucked for generations. Still, not a dark age.
The various invasions by steppe herders were finished mostly in the early bronze age.
No_one
6d ago
This is not chronic, they do it once or maybe several times a year.
But I mean go read up on it, there's probably some papers out there on sci-hub on what the Italians are really doing.
No_one
7d ago
Things have changed. Industrial revolution, science, you ever heard about those ?
It's all irrelevant now. The bleeding edge of humanity is close to fulfilling their purpose which is bringing into being a mechanical civilization that's going to replace our own. Logic of economy and competition will then ensure our gradual deprecation.
especially given our advancements in biology
Bro, our gene pool is mostly decaying. Accumulating mutations. People who were pre-adapted to modernity aren't even breeding at replacement levels! We-on a societal/species level don't understand anything and don't want to understand anything.
We can't even safely rewrite a fertilised egg's DNA at more than single digit spots because of the error rates.
There have been no successful eugenic projects. Human nature is largely fixed because we're too pussy to do anything about it. All your mushy-headed idealistic bullshit is just putting lipstick on a week old stinking corpse of a pig.
Thanks to the religious, and by that I mean communists with their infinite malleability due to material conditions we're pretty much screwed. There's no good policy, most 'intellectuals' are deluded etc. Only animal instincts of people liking healthy partners are preventing total insanity.
it's that adaptability and change are at the heart of what it means to be human.
That's only true on a timescale of centuries and with very high losses involved.
Yeah. That's why Australian Aborigines after getting unceremoniously yanked from their stone age are now deeply involved in Australian's Aerospace industry and not being subjected to PSA's about the inadvisability of sleeping on the road or sniffing petrol.
Another shining example of 'human adaptability' were Norse in Greenland going extinct because they refused to eat fish, sticking to increasingly desperate farming until the bitter end.
No_one
7d ago
Why not just try the insomnia cure ? Apparently Italians are keeping severely depressed people up for like 3-4 days straight and it resets their brain to factory setting or something.
Or the botox cure?
So many fairly low-risk therapies out there.
No_one
7d ago
Uhh, a stable configuration of stars close by ?
I don't know about that. Even just two stars rotating around each other lose energy and end up in a gamma ray burst inevitably.
No_one
7d ago
That's all irrelevant because groups that lucked into right beliefs thrive, those that had bad luck die out.
Thus over time, the rules of the groups that survive start to look pretty wise.
No_one
7d ago
I read the book but I didn't notice any major mistakes re: history, physics. Was very disappointed by a few technology and arms related idiocies. McMeekin clearly was never into weapons or has not even a layman's interest in nuclear energy etc.
Considered writing him an email, offering to at least proof-read his next book so that he avoids such embarrassment in the future.
Can't say whether the book is true, as I'm not a period historian, but given Stalin's personality as portrayed by respected historians, it all hangs together pretty well.
Swedes tried to conquer Germany, mind you. And paid an extremely heavy price for that.
You're talking about small countries.
Large countries, with the exception of China, which just keeps sitting there, have a strong record of expansionism. Spain. France. United States. United Kingdom. Japan, once it modernised.
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