RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
New Turing Test - get a 100% AI-written post into Quality Contributions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Who put Two-face in charge of the criminal justice system - let's kill everyone who commits a serious crime.
I don't want the lucky 35/36 of the El Salvedoran 'Drug, Murder and Satanism 5000' gang back on the street.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
According to HRW the problem is due to understaffing and overcrowding in prisons (often poorly designed older ones) and a lack of consequences. De facto, lawyers don't want to prosecute prisoners or prisons, they don't feel like there's any good payoff there (especially if they're basically telling prisons they don't know what they're doing). They want to have a cordial relationship with prisons apparently.
Prison guards basically outsource social control to prisoners because they're lazy and don't care. They'll line up 20 people in front of the victim and go 'alright which one was it' - marking the victim as a snitch who recieves worse treatment. It's indirect corporal punishment, like anarcho-tyranny but for prisons (maximum anarchy and maximum tryanny). If they don't like you, they can see to it that Wayne Robertson is your cellmate.
In the worst cases, prisoners are actually placed in the same cell with inmates who are likely to victimize them--sometimes even with inmates who have a demonstrated proclivity for sexually abusing others. The case of Eddie Dillard, a California prisoner who served time at Corcoran State Prison in 1993, is an especially chilling example of this problem. Dillard, a young first-timer who had kicked a female correctional officer, was transferred to the cell of Wayne Robertson, a prisoner known by all as the "Booty Bandit."(412) The skinny Dillard was no match for Robertson, a huge, muscular man serving a life sentence for murder. Not only was Robertson nearly twice Dillard's weight, but he had earned his nickname through his habit of violently raping other prisoners.
Before the end of the day, the inevitable occurred: Robertson beat Dillard into submission and sodomized him. For the next two days, Dillard was raped repeatedly, until finally his cell door was opened and he ran out, refusing to return. A correctional officer who worked on the unit later told the Los Angeles Times: "Everyone knew about Robertson. He had raped inmates before and he's raped inmates since."(413) Indeed, according to documents submitted at a California legislative hearing on abuses at Corcoran, Robertson had committed more than a dozen rapes inside Corcoran and other prisons.(414) By placing Dillard in a cell with Robertson, the guards were setting him up for punishment.
Whether as a purposeful act or through mere negligence prisoners are all too often placed together with cellmates who rape them. A Connecticut prisoner told Human Rights Watch how he too was raped by a cellmate with a history of perpetrating rape:
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
"I want to reduce the prison population."
"Great! The Innocence Project is looking for new advo..."
"That's not quite what I meant..."
According to wikipedia (though others dispute this), the US is the only country on Earth where there's more male-on-male rape than male-on-female, there have been some legal changes but no significant practical improvements since 2001.
It's ridiculous that people who commit the worst crimes are practically untouchable since their sentence can hardly get longer.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
It's like this in prison too. I read extracts from this shocking report about what goes on in US prisons. If it were down to me, this alone would get America expelled from the first world, though considering Rotherham and similar the ranks of the civilized countries would dwindle very quickly:
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
Joe Schmo gets into prison for some DUI offence. Unfortunately he has a slightly feminine looking appearance and isn't that big. His attitude isn't sufficiently manly, maybe he's not streetsmart, maybe he's too intellectual, maybe he's white...
Punishment for his crime? Vicious anal rape and forced prostitution, HIV infection too.
Wayne "Booty Bandit" Robertson is in prison for murder - life sentence. But he is big and very strong.
Punishment for his crime? Sex on demand with his cellmate and exciting opportunities in the slave-trading business.
This is the reverse of justice. It would be far more humane and civilized to blow Wayne's head off with an autocannon and let Joe serve his sentence in peace. Wayne is a bad hombre and should be liquidated in a spectacular and intimidating way, to demonstrate that we are not in the stone-age anymore, there are more important things than muscle mass and naked aggression.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Haiti is a small shithole country that, last I checked, was controlled by a cannibal who barbecued people. They're so incompetent and disorganized that the Presidential Palace still hasn't been repaired after an earthquake struck in 2010.
The US is a huge, highly developed country with aspirations to world hegemony. They produce plenty of advanced technology. Why can't they find the physical or human capital to build ships efficiently? How hard can it be?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ship_exports
The Italians can do it. The Germans can do it. The Finns can do it! White people spent about 500 years clobbering the rest of the world because we had better ships, the US relies on its navy for relevance in world affairs. This planet is 75% water. Shipbuilding is not something that can be sacrificed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The US had a healthy shipbuilding industry in 1940, such that it could produce the biggest fleet in the world, fight and win huge wars against rival great powers on the other side of the world. 20 years of Jones Act protection didn't do much harm. I think the Jones Act is a symptom, not a cause. High US wages were already making it difficult to man a large US merchant marine back in the 1920s, hence protection. The problem is not enough protection, not smart enough protection, insufficient and inefficient subsidies, insufficient automation.
Why don't companies move into shipbuilding on the basis that there's huge latent demand? Is a wholly protected US domestic market seriously too small to support shipbuilding? The US has the second longest coastline in the world, a bunch of islands and hundreds of millions of consumers! Does the US lack the capital to build shipyards? Is there a shortage of skilled labour? Is there some huge thicket of laws preventing efficient shipbuilding? Unions? Some combination of these?
I doubt the root causes of the problem will be resolved by killing the Jones Act. All that will happen is political backlash from massive job losses and a modest increase to economic efficiency. But without protection, there is no chance of competing against North East Asia (who have the capital, economies of scale, labour and best practices already established). Without protection, there is no chance of ever revitalizing US shipping since there will be nothing to revitalize.
Shooting the patient in the head does reduce medical costs but it's not really a cure.
I'm going to take a very controversial stance and support keeping the Jones Act. If the goal is to develop US shipbuilding for security reasons, there needs to be an actual shipbuilding industry. US shipbuilding is currently so horrendously inefficient that it will be instantly vaporized by Korea, Japan and... China most of all. US shipbuilding is not 50% less competitive, they're 500% less competitive. Instant loss. And if you nuke your shipbuilding sector who is going to build warships? Why would you want to make your warships within the Chinese missile death zone? Real great powers know how to make their own ships.
It makes zero sense to do all this onshoring and neo-mercantilism in microchips, strategic materials and leave out shipbuilding. There are all kinds of things you could do to introduce efficiencies and market discipline without razing the industry to the ground. Shock therapy is not the answer, there needs to be careful, judicious reform. Import technology and best practices from allies, reform regulations, bring in technical experts, break up cartels or cozy price fixers. Nationalize - China State Shipbuilding is the biggest shipbuilder in the world and is profitable too.
How is it that the US can build rockets, jet fighters and cars but ships are beyond them... because they protected their own market? The Chinese protect their own auto industry - lo and behold they produce huge numbers of cheap cars. The Koreans protected their auto industry for decades and turned it into a competitive export industry. The EU protects its agriculture and isn't a famine-stricken wasteland. Americans aren't some alien race that has an inherent -500% to Shipbuilding, there must be other problems than protection.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
If US policymaking is at the level of random forum discussions, there are serious problems.
I really think it's dangerous if there are crazy people in the room when important decisions are being made, especially with regard to nuclear strategy.
If you think about it for five minutes, it opens up such a big can of worms... Do we say we're giving nukes to Ukraine and warn Russia? Do we hope they don't see them until they're set up (like Russia hoped during the Cuban Missile Crisis)? What do we do if they pre-emptively nuke them and take them out? What are the second-order effects if this strategy 'works', does Russia hand over nukes to Yemen and Venezuela? That'll raise oil prices! What if Russia continues the war anyway, daring Ukraine to start a nuclear war with a nuclear superpower?
There's such a deficit of sanity. We spent years fighting in Afghanistan, on a nation-building campaign, trying to win hearts and minds. Meanwhile our Afghan allies were raping children on a huge scale and some group of officers or officials decided that this wasn't worth cracking down on: cultural practices, just ignore it soldiers, leave it to the Afghan government... How the hell do you win hearts and minds when the friends you're arming, funding and training are raping children? This isn't just an isolated error, there's a whole host of monumentally retarded things we were doing there - that's why we lost the war.
What if the genius strategists behind the war in Afghanistan (or whoever signed off on hiring them) are in charge of nuclear strategy?
NYT produces a shocker: https://archive.is/4G56L
Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications.
Where does America find these people? Either the officials or the journalists are crazy. It would indeed be very complicated to get nukes that were returned to Russia into Ukraine's hands. Not to mention the delivery systems, you can't exactly slip an SS-25 mobile launcher in a brown paper bag and slip it under the toilet door. And how the hell would it deter Russia, as opposed to igniting a pre-emptive strike against this 'deterrent' before it can be fully established? Does Ukraine have any early warning systems set up for such close distances, against Russia? There's no safe strategic depth in Ukraine to establish these weapons...
People wonder at my scepticism of the official war narratives when this is the sort of stuff we get in the for-popular-consumption media.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Now that Russia has torn itself asunder in Ukraine China is the last source of Great Power conflict.
We are literally in a proxy war with Russia right now and regardless of whatever happens with their conventional forces, they still have thousands of H-bombs.
Though I agree fully with your main point, China does overlap into everything else - tech, energy, trade, politics...
Why is the law so woke?
I have the displeasure of working with a legal textbook, it's full of stuff about destigmatizing prostitution and drugs, getting overincarcerated minorities out of prison, criticizing socially invented 'fear of crime', the neoliberal practice of fining people... This isn't a 'random academic writes law about the plight of refugees that nobody will ever read' (though there are plenty of those), it's a textbook that thousands of students are supposed to study. It's written by a bunch of established academics, it reflects a certain level of consensus that is filtering through to the next generation.
Why are Jaguar so woke? Jaguar is/was considered a heritage British brand for classy and wealthy drivers.
https://x.com/Jaguar/status/1858800846646948155
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1859813947396047075
There must've been a consensus decision that this was the way the brand was headed, that this was the fellow who should be in charge of marketing.
I think it's a mistake to say 'this is one local effect' when we see it in so many places. There is a broader systemic cause, people think that this is good and prestigious so they do it regardless of whether it makes sense in context. There might be many commissars in the Red Army but the root cause doesn't have to do with the Army being particularly attractive to Commissars, it's that the Red Army is part of the Soviet Union.
Some 10%ers will be doing supermarket work of course, they might be perfectly fine, honest and upright people. Others will abuse welfare or spend their entire lives heading in and out of prison.
But on a global level, we see whole countries of the bottom 10% where nothing works: the bureaucracy is a complete shambles and infrastructure is a mess. The characteristic of the bottom 10% as a group is that they erode civilization, they're not merely pawns that do menial tasks.
Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that they do not have alphabetical organization in Haiti - this rather impedes efficient administration. They still have not managed to repair the National Palace where the President lives since the earthquake in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_crisis_(2018%E2%80%93present)
Or from another angle, someone actually wrote this as a story and published it. A real adult thought other people would like to read this. It's pretty bad: https://www.webnovel.com/book/30212039405390805/81118027365538549
I believe that the difference between me and von Neumann is less than the gap between me and this guy. Not in our work capacity but in our general faculties and comprehension.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
I've said before that the 95th percentile human being has a lot more in common intellectually with a 10th percentile human being
Really? How many 10th percentile people do you meet?
The 10th percentile are the ones breaking into bald men's heads looking for gold or deflowering virgins to cure their AIDS. Or they star in the genre of youtube videos exposing how stupid and ignorant American university students are: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AkIUqH498PQ
The more cerebral of this cohort might subscribe to conspiracy theories about how the earth is flat, how everything is actually naval law and most countries are secretly enrolled as corporations in Delaware... They still cannot string a sentence together though, nor can they spell.
Sometimes societies just do crazy things. Consider foot-binding in China. Enormous amounts of pain and life-long infirmity inflicted on young girls for basically no reason other than it being high-status to have these small feet. The origin was in some dancer who the emperor praised, nobody is quite sure. It makes zero sense. The process is actually sickening to read about, wikipedia casually adds that the death rate from gangrene could be as high as 10%. There were full-scale wars less deadly than this 'cosmetic procedure'.
But it took on a life of its own. Foot-binding became a kind of resistance movement to the Qing dynasty (who tried to ban it several times but failed). We can only assume it was ferociously popular, a way of marrying up in society, conforming to norms. There must've been very deep and powerful emotions behind it, if it subverts a basic parental conception of 'not torturing your child'. But today it just sounds completely retarded to us and to everyone, especially the Chinese.
I agree it would be kind of hot to be a very attractive girl. But that's not something that's realistically possible. I have heard horror stories no less disturbing than foot-binding about those who try and fail. We should strive to think reasonably and logically before falling into either a collective or individual social phenomenon like this.
Various media outlets have been saying 'just one more year of Maximum Pressure and the hated Iranian Regime will finally collapse!' for at least 10 years now. So if we considered them believable and wanted Iran to collapse, then maybe it was a bad idea. Then again, according to them Iran has been 6 months away from nuclear arms for the last 20 years or so.
Trying to lower tension in the Middle East is a good move. Iran has oil they want to sell, the West (perhaps not America these days) has money and wants oil. There's no good reason why we can't have cordial commercial relationships with these countries (and crack down on Islamism at home). China manages it. Islamic countries line up to say 'we don't care about Uyghurs, cuius regio, eius religio' because the Chinese don't go around invading Islamic countries, they just trade and give the right noises on Israel. China's happy to trade with Israel too, it all works out nicely for them. That's the kind of relationship we should be aiming for.
In as far as the JCPOA was a way to withdraw militarily from the Middle East, it was a good move.
And what have we gotten after the JCPOA? We've gotten more war, more conflict and Iran moving closer to Russia and China. How is that a good outcome? Nobody can prove that it would've been better if the JCPOA remains but it's certainly not good that shortly after removing it, things get worse.
We need to appreciate that regions have their own natural equilibriums. We may not like those equilibriums but they exist nonetheless and often we don't have the power to change them. If we do have the power to change them, let's make sure it's worth the cost and risk.
The equilibrium for Afghanistan is an Islamist warlordist/theocratic state. We shouldered a great burden like Atlas (or the Soviet Union before us) but our preferred equilibrium 'ostensibly democratic corruption/pedophilia/drug haven' was massively unstable and relied on vast infusions of cash and competent Western soldiers. It was a bad idea to keep forcing this, we should've left much sooner.
Why are we trying to prop up a democratic Iraq? Why are we trying to pressure Syria into changing? We got masses of instability and ISIS out of both, yet we still haven't learnt our lesson. Why are we trying to pressure Iran, a turnkey nuclear power? Let's pack up and go home, leave some Ozymandias-style monument to regime-change to waste away in the desert. If Iran tries invading Kuwait, that's a clear problem, we should show up and secure our oil suppliers with a quick defensive war. Otherwise, let's leave it alone.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
What were their formal goals? What did Putin actually say at the start of the war?
Demilitarization, denazification and neutrality. He was saying this in early 2022, they constituted the original peace offer and he's still maintaining these demands today. These three were the primary goals of the war.
Demilitarization looks like it'll be reached at some point if only via attrition and Ukrainian military defeat. Denazification = installing some kind of more acceptable government - still up in the air. Neutrality, still up in the air.
Then there are various formally annexed provinces of Ukraine, some of which Russia has control of on the ground. These were added as goals with the constitutional changes in September 2022.
Russia has thus achieved partial success on 2 of 4 of their primary goals and seems to enjoy the upper hand on the battlefield. This we can observe since the original US-Ukrainian goal (pre-2014 borders for Ukraine) has been largely abandoned.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
But to demand political autonomy in the context of Gaza is where I get off the train. The force of political autonomy in Gaza is called Hamas. Their primary objective is to sabotage any peace process by murdering random residents of Israel. Asking for political autonomy for Gaza is like asking for political autonomy for Germany in 1946.
Did you know that this was basically part of Israeli strategy? Netanyahu approved dividing the Palestinians up between the feckless Palestinian Authority and Hamas. He said that supporting Hamas was a good idea precisely to prevent any single coherent movement for independence and a Palestinian state, at a Likud part conference in 2019. Presumably there's also a desire to play the Assad govt's favourite card: ' we're fighting terrorism!!!'.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
If they throw $800 billion or so around every year for decades and decades, they'll have all kinds of cool toys. Are they getting the right systems, are systems developed efficiently, are wars managed proficiently or planned out properly? Absolutely not. But if you're a big, rich incumbent, even regular blundering doesn't cause that much harm... until strong competitors emerge.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Some of the things she did were just ridiculous:
In November 2013, Mayer instituted a performance review system based on a bell curve ranking of employees, suggesting that managers rank their employees on a bell curve, with those at the low end being fired.[59][60] Employees complained that some managers were viewing the process as mandatory.[60] In February 2016, a former Yahoo! employee filed a lawsuit against the company claiming that Yahoo's firing practices have violated both California and federal labor laws.[61]
It's not as though she made ambitious ploys that might've worked but failed due to bad luck, she had a scattergun approach of random nonsense. "We need to do something" -> "this is something" -> "therefore we must do this" x50. Mayer had a hard task but bungled massively.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
If the state lets fentanyl be sold in supermarkets, prices will fall and consumption will rise.
If the state shoots fentanyl dealers dead, prices will rise and consumption will fall.
If the state subsidizes corn production, HFCS will get added to more things and food will become more fattening...
Each individual choice swims in a sea of policy, that's why policy exists.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
OK, the US military is not well-endowed with the cerebral sort. Many abstract tasks like strategy or military-political coordination elude them. They have produced some real masterpieces of silliness in past years: https://x.com/DefenseCharts/status/1321799395571097601
But the US military do have powerful radars and cameras pointed at the skies. They have lots of space assets, they are very interested in space. There's no way of getting to the bottom of this without their resources.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
I saw a chart that showed the people with huge incomes had high (by first world country standards, so around 2.0 or 3.0) fertility, but they're quite rare. It was a U-curve chart, not a diagonal chart.
And it's certainly not commensurate with Niger's 6.4 TFR.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
And to the extent that this "conflict" does have a basis in reality and isn't purely virtual, it's largely a good thing anyway, as its primary effect is to prevent evolutionarily unfit individuals (largely male) from reproducing, while more fecund and vigorous strains are unharmed.
Max Anders the glasses-wearing nerd makes six-figures at his software infrastructure job keeping the city running. But because he has a nerdy and uncharismatic personality and poor facial structure he will never reproduce.
But Slaggern Thundercock has eight children with three different women because he has strong cheekbones and a violent alpha personality? Vigorous by the definition of the 10,000 BC tribal warrior is not really what we need.
Stacy Smartbook is clever and hardworking - she lives alone, her demanding job, lengthy education and high expectations for a partner leave little room or time for a partner or children.
Salmonella Sarvesian is stupid and abusive, raising her brood of children badly. Many will go on to be crooks. She's on welfare and doesn't care, or maybe she works a few hours at a low-income job.
On a global level this is exactly what's happening. The most talented and proficient are not reproducing. We have the statistics on fertility by region, by demographic, by city. We can read a chart. We can see what's happening in front of our eyes. This is a bad thing, at least for those of us who value a high-quality human civilization. In some places it's worse still, the Korean race will vanish from the South if it keeps on this path of TFR going straight down - no genocidal foe is needed.
It is perfectly natural for nations and civilizations to die out. It has happened many times in history. While natural, it is not very pleasant for those who live in a dying nation. We should take steps to avoid this. It is natural for cars driving towards a cliff to sail off, the driver should swerve rather than burn.
Does this make sense? I had the misfortune to do some university during the pandemic, I can confirm that very little was learnt. Zoom is not conducive to paying attention, there was a perfect storm of technical problems, bad mics, and alt-tab is seductive. My teacher friends tell me there was a noticeable quality decline in this period, from an already low baseline. So the story they're telling is quite reasonable. The pandemic also probably has an enduring effect in blackpilling people on education, it makes it feel like even more of an arbitrary mess to be gamed and engineered.
But do children learn anything in school anyway? You can graduate from high school and then get a degree without knowing much of anything. I don't know if I learnt that much from the unaffected parts of my degree, as compared to reading a few books or doing my own independent research or working. Newton got a lot of great work done during his pandemic lockdown period.
More options
Context Copy link