No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
13d ago
” It’s such a clownish statement you would never believe it actually came out of someone’s mouth, but it did.
You live in clown world. A CRS insider published a book bragging how he and his colleagues have been secretly stage managing race riots, race controversies and so on, in confidence from everyone but maybe some senate committee and president since 1962.
Yes, they only tell congress what they want to tell congress, and they're not subject to FOIA. Book was published in 2020 or so.
Most everyone assumed this crap was managed and CRS was even mentioned because they're not that secret, but e.g. knowledge of this book only came up in 2025.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56253400
In short, it's a clown world so I'm not sure why you're surprised people act like clowns.
No_one
14d ago
The Left has individuals with TV, radio, or podcasts, but they really don’t support each other. Raechel Maddow doesn’t tell the same story as Ezra Klein who doesn’t tell the same story as Thom Hartmann.
No? I recall everyone and their mother calling J.D.Vance, the seemingly most normal guy in politics, ever, weird. There is clear coordination. Back during Trump's first campaign, there was a minor scandal that pretty much every major media sent a high ranking guy to some Clinton event to coordinate campaign messaging.
Also, the TV and newspapers pretty much belongs to the democrats. Not that anyone except those who await death pays attention to legacy media (, but the left has something like 75% of the TV and 90% of the paper market, at least.
No_one
8d ago
Good, interesting write up.
However:
It was an explicit break from the premise of the DNC as a neutral leadership institution for democrats anywhere.
Were the claims by Sanders supporters that DNC essentially sabotaged his chances to win primaries in '16 plain lies?
I have a hard time believing in 'neutral' institutions in the first place.
No_one
27d ago
Elon Musk is too guileless. He says exactly what he thinks is true with little regard for how others will react.
This is wrong. Musk has been consistently serving slop to the masses on twitter. Things he could not possibly believe but that were yet flattering the average 110 IQ twitter user.
I propose that Musk is not guileless, he has guile but is also erratic.
No_one
2d ago
Christ, women must hate her with a burning passion. @Sloot is hitting the nail on the head there. They envy her because she, despite her manifest flaws, age, and rough looks, she locked down the second richest guy in the world. Who is, by most accounts of people who reported to him, one of the most terrifying, ruthless and capable nerds out there. No doubt he smells fakers and gold-diggers before they round the corner. Yet this plastic bimbo somehow got him.
least comfortable in his marriage
Going by the charities his ex-wife keeps donating to, she must be either trying to get back at Bezos or is a liberal NPC. I'm not sure how happy one might be with
No_one
5d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
80% of the people whose job theoretically is to determine the validity of twin studies are psychologically invested into finding them not true.
If twin studies are correct and most outcomes are due to 'lack of abuse' and 'genetics', as theorized by people such as fascists or authors of the 'Nurture assumption', then the bulk of policies liberals like are going to be found wanting. Scientists are generally left of center (won't punch left) and sometimes hard left (Gould, for example, who probably falsified evidence in the Morton case or was deliberately sloppy)
I have little confidence that these studies are being carried out by impartial parties and in good faith.
I'm pleasantly surprised that Scott said this much.
No_one
26d ago
There's some motivation out there. This tweet recently caused some consternation. If someone's younger, they need to be reminded that time is marching on ever faster as one ages.
It's way too late for me to have a real life. I'm not getting married I'm not ever having a real relationship I'm never going to build a house or buy one and make it the way I like it. I don't have the time or energy for any of that. I am an adult adolescent until death now. I got no chance to start any sort of a life that makes sense. You know I'm 40, right? I'm not in great health from stress issues stemming from the pandemic, and I can't handle 100% of my own needs, never mind a family.
Sure there's a lot that I can contribute to the world but I'm not going to get much back for it. No matter how much money I get there isn't much I can do with it. Maybe get a nice place to live or a car but not a real life
No_one
8d ago
Iran's victory condition is avoiding civil war, preserving their strategic forces and forcing Israel to accept that Iran also has nukes.
Israel isn't Russia or US, it has limited resources. Iranian victory is possible.
No_one
27d ago
He wasn't too liberal. He is a living fossil, him with his open mind and willingness to talk to people.
Today liberalism stands for western guilt, feelings and self expression over rationality, safety over openness, faith in solving social issues through social engineering, despite half a century of total failure of such efforts.
No_one
2d ago
Cooking is simple. Just read the instructions, then do it. 2/3rds of recipes can't really be messed up in a truly bad way either.
I keep hearing about these guys I can't cook, but looking at my parents I'm pretty sure "can't cook" is just calculation. "If I never learn to cook she can't ask me to cook."
I started cooking for myself as soon as I lost access to subsidized meals. It wasn't difficult at all. Pretty much every single guy I've ever lived with could also cook. Not that big a sample, sure, and they were mostly engineers, but still..
No_one
22d ago
As someone who's pro-industrial policy and also anti-CCP, I think think the supply chain problem is one of those issues with a lot of misplaced attention, wherein globalization gets projected onto various political narratives, to the detriment of analyzing capability.
CPC wants to rule, or at least have veto power in the world by providing quality stuff in quantity at an unmatched price.
Quoting JZ281C from twitter
I used to think that CN will appreciate its currency to help rebalance trade. This makes sense for an economic perspective, but from a geopolitical perspective it would make sense to keep CNY undervalued for now.
My main mental-model recalibration is recognizing that geopolitical considerations increasingly dominate economic calculations.
The big unknown is whether China's end game is co-existence with the US, or destruction of the current US political-economy. If it is the latter, then it will continue to be extremely aggressive with its strategic offensive in the global trade/tech domain.
CNY undervaluation is increasingly concentrating global industry in CN. This is a geopolitical move. You cannot understand this with economic logic.
CNY undervaluation sacrifices present Chinese living standards/consumption in exchange for future geopolitical dominance.
CN is essentially engaged in a war of attrition of national will power against all the other great powers including India. Countries that cannot suppress popular demand for higher present standard of living will lose geopolitical power to CN over time via de-industrialization.
There is no free lunch. Any attempt to compete in industry with China will involve major sacrifices in present standard of living. Any country that cannot out-save China will lose. Competing with China is not about policies. It fundamentally requires national mobilization similar to a total war. Simply printing money to subsidize industry without suppressing consumption will lead to inflation and eventually debt/currency crisis. US didn't have a market economy during WWII, it had wage/price controls and War Production Board to coordinate industrial production at the national level. People planted victory gardens and accepted rationing.
All in all, if you want to fight China geopolitically, maybe you should not have utterly burned out the goodwill of the working classes. Maybe they'd be willing to make big sacrifices then. Asking people you have been trying to replace to accept a 1950s standard of living will be a hard sell.
No_one
8d ago
My interpretation is that Israel is short on interceptors, Iranians are short on missiles bc Israelis almost certainly bombed exits of tunnel storages and possibly generally short. Rumor is Iranian air defenses rallied and made striking Tehran harder.
Both sides have refrained from truly damaging strikes so far. E.g. Israel didn't hit oil terminals at Kharg island, Iranians didn't hit turbine halls of the five Israeli power plants.
American bombing effort, if it wasn't fake (smaller yield bombs dropped) almost certainly failed to destroy Fordow enrichment facility which was engineered to absorb such damage.
Iranians want to withdraw from the NPT and are reportedly more avid than ever for a nuclear program. So, if Israelis are truly dead set on dismantling that, they're going to have to continue bombing until Iran turns into a failed state.
Can they? Do they have the munitions, spare parts etc?
No_one
21d ago
We're All Sitcom Characters Now
Lot of small/middle accounts on twitter are perfectly normal and don't try to engagement bait or make a brand. And something like 80% of twitter eyeballs are allegedly people who barely if ever post.
No_one
25d ago
East Asians are severely underrepresented in gang criminality, religious motivated violence and the like.
East Asians do organised crime so well organised and so quietly that they basically never cause enough outrage for a democratic government to do anything. No bodies found, no shootings, no nothing.
No_one
5d ago
Iain McGilchrist comes across to me as a religious mystic and obscurantist. Yes people find it exceptionally easy to delude themselves for entirely explicable reasons (see e.g. Hanson & Simler's book) and science is hard, but entirely mechanical phenomena can create incredible complexity without major problems.
McGilchrist is very ready to make sweeping conclusions that veer into outright hallucinations (metaphysics etc).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Matter_with_Things
In Part III, "What Then is True?", McGilchrist asks and attempts to answer the question "what is truth?", before turning to a wide-ranging exploration of the nature of reality: the coincidence of opposites (the idea that at a deeper, higher or transcendent level, apparent opposites may be reconciled or find union); the one and the many; time; flow and movement; space and matter; matter and consciousness; value; purpose, life and the nature of the cosmos; and the sense of the sacred. McGilchrist further argues that consciousness, rather than matter, is ontologically fundamental.[5]
That all seems like someone who doesn't understand that 'believing you are the center of the universe and somehow matter' is an adaptive psychological mechanism you'd expect to find in any vital organism, but unlikely to be actually true in the sense that 'the universe came into being to create humanity'.
No_one
10d ago
Don't worry about Taiwan war.
American magazines of anti-missile interceptors are so low they'd never even get carriers in range to help Taiwan.
The war would be, perhaps, a blockade of Malacca straits and some posturing/cyber warfare etc.
No_one
15hr ago
I'm skeptical of the accuracy and/or probative value of the psychoanalyses of the people involved, more generally, and it's unclear if it's Psmith's own interpretation or him relaying that of the original author
A foreign policy guy I sometimes reply to recommended to me that I read this book. So I picked it up. Couldn't finish it.
The whole thing seems like an exercise in exculpatory back-scratching, ..all these fine people, operating on the best intentions, reasonably well informed fucked up.. a story they really need now because the then neoconservative view - that Americans have the right to intervene whenever they need to preserve US primacy and interests - came to dominate the entire foreign policy establishment and it'd simply not do to allow the monumental failure of the conquest of Iraq to keep spreading bad smell.
What I remember about the time seems different. More along the lines of 'the war was a pet project of very specific people (PNAC alumni), they were saying they'd invade Iraq in october of '01 before they even got the dodgy evidence they needed to sell that war.
Zephon (2024)
Intro:
Is another C-tier(budget wise) 4x game using some crap Unity implementation(I guess, loading time 20s on a PC capable of 4K Cyberpunk 2077) that gameplay wise is easily on par with Civ V or earlier 4x games in most graphic stuff but the combat AI is actually not that bad and will punish you for fighting fair. Trailer here.. I get good frames but I feel a worse PC would probably suffer.
It's by devs who previously made the Gladius WH40K 4x game. This is a refinement of that game with their own post apocalyptic setting, that of a 22nd century some decades after first contacts came in the form of a surprise genocidal attack that was supposedly self defence. So it is a 4x with all the features of a typical 4x games, and is combat oriented. Even if you don't fight any player faction, the unplayable NPC factions will definitely fight you eventually and at quite the scale.
Overall, I like the gameplay and combat, the setting and writing of quests and characters is interesting if not that well executed and overall while I like the outline of the writing and the themes, in execution I am mildly annoyed there's that stench of Netflix/tweet chatGPT over some of it and they could have done so much better. But unless you're a literate right winger you may not even notice the annoying crap, I think. The most 'cringe' part for me is the 'forced diversity' part on which I'll elaborate later in the 'factions' section.
The map/game itself:
Unlike in common 4x games, the 'NPC empires' are an important part of the game and an inextricable part of the story. There's three of them, a retarded Skynet (did not cause the apocalypse, claims to want to help, not that good at R&D), survivors of the of the alien invasion fleet( definitely did cause the apocalypse), and your basic post-apocalyptic barbarian cannibal federation who somehow survived a few decades in a world of constant warfare between said mildly retarded Skynet and the aliens who while looking only mildly disgusting themselves employ biotech instead of most common machinery that looks like something puked up by a particularly sick cat and animated with voodoo.
Aliens and Skynet are perma-hostile to each other, Barbarians try to shake you down constantly. These factions don't really improve and apart from barbarians, don't colonize much and start with relatively strong cities.
Economy:
The economic part is not that complex, mostly standard 4x approach if a bit refined: all facilities in a city are physically visible on the world map and, at 3 per hex, a city of 7 hexes can only have at most 21 of them, though you're going to want multiples of each for later game units of course. Each facility has its own production and its own building queue, so there are large tradeoffs to make. You can't make planes in a tank factory or barracks and so on.
A city good at expanding itself can easily put up military factories and mothball the productive ones.. but building up that capacity means you delay your military production by quite some time. There's sadly no fun strategies based around slaving or causing refugee waves to exploit! All construction costs minerals, running everything takes energy, and people need to eat too. Late game units require stable transuranic elements and antimatter, sometimes in ludicrous quantities.
Combat: There's line of sights, terrain effects on cover, but mostly only for small unites (e.g. tanks or most planes don't benefit from forests or ruins providing cover and concealment much).
Weapons have damage, armor penetration, range and number of attacks, whether they're direct or indirect fire. Most units can overwatch so you need recon to avoid running into enemies and getting hit. Or if you move into a concealing tile (forest), they may not see you unless they're directly adjacent.
Units have experience level, morale, armor value, movement speed, evasion, vantage point (e.g. planes see over most obstacles etc but are also seen), number of subunits in each formation and a lot of less common properties. (e.g. basic human soldiers does 2x more attacks at close range, reflecting the difficulty of hitting anything with a rifle further out)
Most units (infantry) are composed of multiple small entities each with its own HP pool that each attack, so an attrited infantry unit delivers far less damage.
No_one
12d ago
You're Indian and raised there. To the British and many central/northern European guys, 15°C is shirt-sleeve weather when doing anything more active than sitting outside. If it's 15°C and sunny, I often just go shirtless because after the bloody winter it feels so nice to feel the sun on your skin once more.
Temperature sensitivity is bound to where you were raised, I think. I have seen black people wearing puffy jackets in a thirty degree weather, the kind of jackets I unzip when it's >10 °C because I'd sweat otherwise.
Autonomic nervous system just gets used to some particular temperature..
No_one
14d ago
For a system to last young people have to be able out maneuver the old. First past the post makes this hard.
Given the cohort size disparity, no one is ever 'outmaneuvering' boomers in Germany. They'll keep voting CDU till they can't. Clear eyed people I know are saying they can only imagine things changing for the better after the boomers die out as a group.
No_one
18d ago
Enforcing borders is not at all arbitrary as that famous wolfpack range map shows. It's as arbitrary as childbirth.
No_one
5d ago
Has anyone ever described the motivation for watching fights, or what people get out of it ? I greatly respect anyone who is crazy enough to get into such a fight, unless they're obviously crazy and unprepared.
But watching the fight itself is completely different to being in a fight, which to me is a very exhilarating experience judging by serious grade school fights or some kinetic sparring I've done a few times.. but that's sadly too risky and I generally prefer to avoid doing it- especially the 'real' fights with hot blood. There's just nothing there, sure it's somewhat more interesting than the fake fights in films, but it's only a very 'academic' interest.
Clearly, that's not other people's attitude so I'm wondering what's going on.
If people healed like in computer games, I'd probably be very much into MMA, but we sadly don't.
"How Czech Republic managed to get its Ministry of Justice investigated for money laundering of cca 4000+ bitcoin from a darknet drug marketplace"
“It was so ultra-legal that it couldn’t be more legal,” the justifiably former Minister of Justice Pavel 'Don Pablo' Blažek. [1]
Finally, some a bit 21st century news. I put this into CW and not 'fun' because 'populists might benefit'.
In march of '25 , the Ministry of Justice in Czech Republic accepted about $40 million gift in the form of 864 bitcoin. I briefly remembered the news item: MoJ is selling bitcoin in auction.
Now, the justice minister has resigned, the ministry is being investigated for money laundering, the minister is being investigated for abusing his position and Tomáš Jiříkovský, who gave the gift is missing.
The timeline, so far, seems to be something like:
2013/3: Tomáš opens Sheep Marketplace (SM) opens. Initially scarcely used and amateurish, it gets a lot of users after Silk Road collapses.
2013/10: Silk Road closes. People flood to SM
2013/12: SM hacked, 5400 client bitcoin stolen according to its admins. Real amount is unknown, possibly up to 96,000.. Tomáš closes the market and pockets the rest of the bitcoin clients had there.
2014-2016: Tomáš runs 'Nucleus', another darknet marketplace. He tries to launder the stolen money and attracts NCOZ (kind of like Czech FBI without counterintelligence duties).
2016/4/12 Tomáš is arrested by the Czech police.
2016/4/13 Nucleus marketplace stops responding and again, client bitcoin go missing. It's obvious Tomáš was running Nucleus. Police never investigate him for this.
2018: Tomáš is sentenced to 9 years for drug trading, embezzlement and illegal weapons to 9 years. His electronic devices areconfiscated. State intends to wipe it to prevent the perp from benefitting from the proceeds of a crime. The perp's lawyers contest this.
2021: Tomáš is out due to good behavior. He starts to petition the courts, first to prevent data destruction, then to return his seized devices.
2025/1 The courts finally rule that he can get them all back.
2025/3 For no ostensible reason, Tomáš proposes to gift the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) about $40 million in bitcoin that's supposedly not stolen. There's going to be an expert witness present to attest to that it's not stolen darknet bitcoin, the transaction will be overseen by a notary too. This happens and is covered in crypto news, who are of course unaware of who is involved.
2025/5/30: this hits the news, perhaps due to Tomáš, who seems to be an ADHD guy with a vocational school degree only, making the list of richest people in Czech Republic. Revelations soon follow: the expert witness was paid by Tomáš. The wallet was opened 10 hours before the notary got there - they did not want to waste his time while dealing with the encrypted wallet. It's determined up to 4000 bitcoin were sent from the wallet to various addresses before the notary got there to witness the gift to MoJ.
2025/6 Tomáš departs for parts unknown - probably because people missing their bitcoins are are offering bounties for his whereabouts. Minister of Justice resigns. FBI gets involved.
Some important notes: most everyone involved in this case is connected to Masaryk univerzity in Brno (~750k), the second largest city in Czech lands, much hated by people from the capital.(1500K). Tomáš's grandfather was a professor there. The prime minister and the justice minister both studied there. Tomáš lived in Břeclav, a town close to it.
My suspicions: based on the lot of Czech language info I've read on this case, it looks like the justice minister ensured the courts ruled to not wipe the devices, and some of the other bitcoin were likely gifted to people backing the staunchly pro-war and pro-American government parties. The courts obliged but in their verdicts strongly protested and said the bitcoin were proceeds of a crime. Of course, this implies the prime minister knew about this too. But the it's believed is the justice minister is more influential than the PM, and claimed to be ' regional godfather',
If you want to know more, some sources in Czech:
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoinov%C3%A1_kauza
https://zandl.substack.com/p/97-jak-tomas-jirikovsky-a-ministr
[1]: the two time justice minister is suspected of being a grey eminence / involved in many shady influence deals. https://www.idnes.cz/zpravy/domaci/pavel-blazek-ministr-spravedlnosti-rezignace-profil.A250530_165132_domaci_ikul
More options
Context Copy link