RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
No, there's nothing in the New Testament... about not having sex slaves. There's plenty in the Old Testament about having sex slaves!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
How does reading the Bible help you understand modern culture, exactly? It can teach you about the values some people profess to believe, it doesn't teach you about what actually happens, about real behaviour in the West. Harry Potter is more relevant.
In the England of King James II people really cared about the Bible, interpreting from the Bible about what the church was supposed to be, they were ready to stake their lives for particular interpretations of that book and the meaning of various rituals. That is not happening today! Nobody is waging war for Christianity in a Western country. They are fighting for oil, for national pride, for security interests, for human rights...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22d ago
International law is based heavily on what actually happens, it's not like real law where the rules are written down explicitly and there are at least attempts to implement them impartially. While Iran controls the straits de facto, opening and closing them as they see fit, 'international law' there bends in their direction. So there may not be a toll on transiting the straits, only administrative fees and insurance regulations. They can whip up some framework to get what they want pass a surface-level legal review.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
Mortgages aren't the issue in and of themselves. Besides, I'm talking about the Anglosphere generally not just America. The issue is whether credit is deployed for new builds or lending to buy existing houses at higher and higher valuations, effectively bidding up the price of land. Banks devoting so much of their lending to mortgages because it's 'safe' is the problem.
People being chained to enormous mortgages isn't ideal either, it prevents people moving around easily, locks them down in jobs with the high debt load. Yes, price to income is important actually!
What's profitable for banks is not necessarily ideal for the economy, which would be better off with more lending to industry and development. House prices could be permanently lowered by redirecting lending from buying up existing housing stock to new-builds but this would necessitate boomers losing some money and is off the cards.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
The claim was ''house prices up only!' lending' is bad, gesturing at the idea that bidding up the price of land is bad and a poor use of credit. Not that house prices only go up. House prices occasionally fall but have been rising as a general trend since financial deregulation. House prices are higher than ever before.
The facts straightforwardly support my conclusions, whereas your claim is misleading in the extreme.
The Case-Shiller index went down (in nominal terms) from 2006-2012. It's roughly flat (again in nominal terms) now. Median sales price went down from 2006-2009, and is dropping now.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
rejection of the frame is still in the frame
So Piss Christ is Christian art then? As far as I'm concerned, it's an insult dressed up as art. Defacing a Koran isn't Islamic art, no muslim would think that, they'd get really angry about it. Marxism may descend from Christianity in some respects but Marxists hate Christianity and work around the clock to undermine and suppress it as shown from when they get any scrap of power and usually start killing nuns and closing churches. It's not really Christian. Is /r/atheism Christian? Many users were Christian at one point. But it isn't a Christian website.
Cultural power is a kind of power, it has an effect on the world. Where is Christianity's cultural power? Are we getting new words from Christianity? Or just a sea of old words, old words that people can barely define anymore? Prelate, deacon, abbott, cardinal - even educated people might not know what they mean. When's the last time anyone went to a conventicle?
Power is about making things happen. What has Christianity made happen recently? You're saying that everything in Western civilization is drawn from Christianity in some respect and alluding to extremely broad ideas like redemption, survival and self-sacrifice (notably shared by other cultures that never heard of Christ). But what specifically has happened recently as a result of this power, tangibly? Gay marriage, pride parades, a tonne of porn everywhere, women wandering around with buttocks visible through some skimpy hot pants, a fountain of materialist greed in everyone's social media, gluttony, envy, sloth, revenge and more aborted kids in the last 60 years than died in every war in human history?
Where is the cultural power going exactly, what is it doing?
There are no live controversies about saying the lord's name in vain, only saying 'nigger'. What does that say about cultural power?
The secular world you might want to see as separate does not contain a lot of mythic alternatives for artists to draw from.
Christianity doesn't even measure up to long-dead religions in this respect. Drawing from pagans today: Age of Mythology, Titan Quest, God of War, Hades, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Jotun, Northgard, and The Banner Saga. Valheim. The Pharoah Series. The Witcher.
Drawing from Christianity today: Darksiders, Diablo and Dante's Inferno + maybe the Binding of Isaac which is anti-Abrahamist.
Both pale in comparison to thematically modern stories about man and technology which gives us huge rich veins of sci-fi, robots, ray guns, flying machines, totalitarian states.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Well if the weapons of war are a laptop the US could save a lot of money by scrapping all those jets and bombs.
Furthermore, there's nothing in the bible about not having sex slaves, not buying sex slaves! Slavery was commonplace in biblical judea, there are parables about sending out slaves to do work for you. That's just in the New Testament. In the Old Testament the appropriate treatment and trading of sex slaves is laid out in black and white. So reading the Bible is quite misleading for this point you're making.
Genesis 30:1–13 repeats the pattern twice over. Rachel and Leah, competing over Jacob's affection and fertility, each give their slaves — Bilhah and Zilpah — to Jacob as wives/concubines so they can claim the resulting sons as their own. Four of Jacob's twelve sons (ancestors of four of the twelve tribes of Israel) come from these unions.
Deuteronomy 21:10–14 covers a foreign woman taken captive in war. The Israelite man may take her as a wife, but only after a month-long mourning period for her family, and if he later doesn't want her, he can't sell her as a slave or treat her as property — she must be set free.
Again, you'd be better off reading Harry Potter which makes more of a critique of slavery than the Bible!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
The most popular movie this year is Project Hail Mary
It's Super Mario Galaxy: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/world/
Project Hail Mary doesn't have anything to do with Christianity thematically, it's a sci fi alien story.
Resident Evil Requiem doesn't seem to have anything to do with Christianity in the game. The word itself doesn't carry much weight.
The most anticipated game of 2026 is GTA 6, which is a pretty unchristian game thematically given it's all about shooting police, robbing people and girls in bikinis. GTA is a 5x bigger franchise than Halo too. The Combat Evolved remake isn't even a new game or a new remake (they already remade it in MCC)
The one part I agree with is that the Bible is needed to understand pre-1900 culture.
The cultural power of an iron age desert cult does not extend to a post-industrialized hyperurban internet economy. We are not shepherds, we don't give servants talents of gold to invest. We pick and choose various interpretations of biblical verses to suit our arguments at any given time, you of all people must be sick of the good samaritan being waved around as a leftist sigil. In that case, it's Christian arguments being made for fundamentally secular reasons, objectification of Christianity as a bludgeon, not actual sincere belief which would probably be smeared as fundamentalism. And it is kinda crazy to try to live by these rules in a thoroughly different society.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22hr ago
Handing over money to strangers by deception is a financial error primarily and only secondarily social. A social error would be a faux pas.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The cost in treasure and lives would be far less than in Afghanistan or Iraq
The Iranians aren't Iraqis and it's not 2003 anymore. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were the US hammering soft targets who were unprepared and ill-equipped. Iraq was open plains, suitable for mechanized offensives. The Taliban in Afghanistan didn't have any advanced weapons whatsoever. Iran has advanced weapons, mountains and marshes plus fairly competent soldiers.
Iran is well-prepared, their whole military strategy is designed to counter America. Plus Iran is just a whole lot bigger than Iraq or Afghanistan. Since Iran is 3x Iraq's population, US casualties should be at least 3x higher even if Iranians were at the same tier as Iraqis, which they aren't.
What is the US military supposed to do? More bombing? The last waves of bombing didn't really work, bombing doesn't really work in general as a war-winner, except as a way to weaken a target for a ground campaign. Only special circumstances make bombing effective.
A ground invasion would be a giant million-man extravaganza. That's the whole US Army, Marines and a good chunk of the national guard. How are they even supposed to get in enough supplies when all nearby US bases are being bombed? First Iran's missile and drone forces need to be suppressed which the US hasn't been able to do. If they couldn't do that during the last few months of bombing, why would they be able to do so now or after the mid-terms?
The US military couldn't do much substantial damage to the Houthis in Yemen a couple years back, they'll just bounce off Iran in the same way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Marxism's root is in Christianity, Wokeness is Christianity that has evolved to the point of opposing itself
How about Islam? Islam is monotheist and spiritual, it explicitly endorses Jesus as a prophet and endorses the general spiritualist ethos that Marxism denies.
Are Muslims then Christian? No. Even though Islam is rooted in Christianity to a certain extent, that doesn't substantially matter, they belong in separate categories not least because of a long history of hatred and warfare between the two. Islam is far more rooted in Christianity than Marxism is.
Wokeness also rejects Christianity and co-opts Christianity to be more like itself. Wokeness has roots in Christianity but it's like I was saying upthread. Humans have genetic roots in mice (about 85-90% of DNA being shared) but aren't really mice in a significant sense. Wokeness --- Marxism ------------------- Christianity --- Islam.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Certainly the Bible is the most influential book in Western thought
Is it? In 1900, sure.
But in 2026?
Do our politicians read the Bible and actually implement biblical doctrine, socially or economically? Is Christianity a major social movement in the West today? The recent pro-life moves in the US only gave individual states the ability to ban or legalize abortion, that doesn't seem Christian so much as federalist.
Sodomy is very fashionable, there are literal Pride parades. Bigamy has made a comeback with polyamory. The less said about usury, lust, greed, sloth and envy the better.
In media, any major new works of Christian art? Film? TV? Video games?
What about the Pope? Any Crusades recently? His powers to excommunicate, have they been relevant in world affairs much? Or does nobody really care if they're excommunicated, what does that say about the Pope's abilities?
The Church of England? Well the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the King 'protects the space for Faith within the multi-faith nation' per the Palace description of the role of the Head of State. He still holds the role of being 'Defender of the Faith' but it seems fairly clear his heart is not really in it. De facto the King issues milquetoast proclamations that nobody pays much attention to:
His Majesty also has a special role in bringing communities and faiths together, engaging with them across the regions and nations of the UK. The King and the other working Members of the Royal Family recognise achievements and support charitable and voluntary work, serving as a catalyst for civic responsibility and charitable action.
No reference to Christ can be found in the whole 150 page document. Only in Russia, in Africa, in Latin America is Christianity taken more seriously. Defacing churches in Russia and LGBT behaviour is treated very seriously indeed.
Christianity's influence is mostly historical, like how mammals in the time of the dinosaurs were mostly tiny mouse creatures. They had tremendous influence in a certain sense. We are descended from tiny mouse creatures. There are still tiny mouse creatures around. But the tiny mouse creatures around today are not really influential and we are not really tiny mice. Even if most of our DNA is mouse there are important distinctions.
Marx is more relevant than the Bible to Western thought today, there are powerful cadres of communists, true believers (still!) Or the Limits to Growth - degrowthers and climatists have significant influence on the left and especially in Europe. They see datacentres, power plants, industry and development but unlike Christians they don't just murmur or complain about things they're against, they reach out and crush them to death. That's not to say that it would be good to teach people Marx or other bad ideologies but they're certainly more relevant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
The Iranians can make hypersonic missiles, they can easily make H-bombs if they want them. It's really not that hard.
Since Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons, hasn't tested, it's because they judge it wouldn't be too helpful strategically. It would spur Saudi nuclearization and perhaps invite a nuclear disarming strike. That situation may change, so they want some latent nuclear capability.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It's kind of interesting because you can't tell how much is just the author largely ignoring prose after a certain point and how much is the translator. And then there's the weirdness of the language itself, there's a lot going on in Chinese names that we barely even get to see since 'Feng Jin Huang' is just meaningless to us.
Firstly, bombing Iranian industry aggressively means they'll destroy oil industry throughout the Middle East in retaliation, causing severe economic damage via oil shortages. Blockading Iran means they blockade back, they've been doing that the whole time. The whole point of this current phase of the war is to prevent that economic damage, to open the straits, not raze the Gulf oil production.
Secondly, an industrial state is an innately more dangerous opponent. Iran makes things, Iranians are makers. They can rebuild industry, move industry underground, make decoys and so on. At a certain point they'd decide to nuclearize, surely. Or launch strikes against the US heartland with Ukraine-style drone attacks from third countries/special forces against sensitive areas. The US has one factory producing ball powder for munitions and is building one (1) TNT factory, with zero operational. Iran can cause all kinds of problems.
Thirdly, the WW2 playbook means WW2 casualties. WW2 was not a bombing-only campaign, it required a ground campaign or at least the threat of a ground campaign to achieve victory in Europe and against Japan. The US could prevail if it were fully committed I think, if it threw all other concerns aside and focused everything on Iran. But America is not Putin's Russia. Iran doesn't really matter to US interests and the forces that can realistically be brought to bear are not going to get much done.
I don't think that Trump and the US have the necessary political strength to beat Iran, the gulf in will is too great. The strategy just doesn't work given the constraints of geography and capabilities.
He said that would've taken a couple of engineers a few weeks to do, so not a small effort.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The kind of recursive self-improvement the Rats were talking about would be if you could distill Fable just from the output of Opus.
It's not distillation that we're talking about, this is what the guy is saying. The model is actually doing the training process directly. Aidan works at OpenAI on post-training.
https://x.com/aidan_mclau/status/2075328409400738229
i cannot tell you how routine it is for me to have 5.6 e2e do an entire rl run
He also says that it's guided a lot by his taste.
Likewise, it's not Fable distillation that we're talking about but Fable actually directly performing research tasks in machine learning, overseeing experiments, improving utilization. 'How do I get GPU utilization up Fable, look at these stats for me and these logs, should I change the kernel?' is what we're talking about. Anthropic deliberately degrades that ability.
Now I agree that what is being proposed in AI 2040 is very difficult and a little naive. The notion that the US is gonna build all these datacentres in Mongolia so China could feel confident they could capture them is pretty unlikely, that's not really how it works... It has a sense of nerdy 'here's my rules-lawyering to fix the problem' to it. But what is the alternative path? Unilateral racing? A free for all between the most psychopathic/paranoid billionaire and intelligence agency spook for control? This is the best answer they could find, given the constraints of the system. I can't come up with anything better, so even while I have criticisms I think that on the whole they did a decent job.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
I think you really underestimate the difficulty of rocket science! Starlink is keeping Ukraine afloat in a major conventional war. SpaceX has put more mass into space than everyone else combined, even with a 50 year head start!
What is Costco doing that Wallmart can't, or many other chains? Where is Costco's true excellence? There are supermarkets everywhere and only one SpaceX.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Well one has to accept risk for future reward. I don't own any SpaceX shares personally, I'm wary of all the locked-up insiders. But in principle, finance should be supporting aggressive moonshots, investment and innovation that doesn't necessarily lead to quick profits. Broad prosperity and technological capability are more desirable than captured profits. I think there's excessive negativity about Musk and AI based purely on these financial factors. There are other valid reasons for negativity about AI and SpaceX as investment, certainly. I just don't think that these companies should be judged so narrowly on profitability when the tech is so powerful. This is not pets.com and it's not 'insanely profitable short form video' either, AI and economical spaceflight are extremely powerful general purpose technologies.
Apparently Costco is worth 400 billion USD. How could spacex be worth significantly less than that? How can the sky be less valuable than a supermarket with a membership fee?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
2 trillion marketcap for Grok does seem high but 41 billion in losses for a massively world leading space launch capability and a few other things seems very low!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
This is pretty poor behaviour. I'm seeing videos of Mexico fans making massive noise, lighting fireworks outside the hotel the English team is playing in in a (failed) attempt to disrupt their sleep. That's obviously crass and bad behaviour. How is this any better, just because it's done behind closed doors?
The US was also using tricks with the Iranian team I recall, making them travel into and then quickly leave the country.
It's just a game, not a trade agreement or a war or anything worth cheating over. What is the point? Why not at least show a little magnanimity or sportsmanship?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
When I go and look at a graph of US house prices vs median income, that's not exactly the conclusion that comes first to mind!
https://www.longtermtrends.com/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/
How about 'home price/median income is at its peak, higher even than the very top of the housing bubble' or 'the salary needed to buy a home doubled from 2017 to 2025'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
The government is responsible for land use restrictions and migration, sure. It's ultimately responsible for regulating and organizing the rest of the economy. But finance is directly responsible for issuing credit, which directly contributes to house building v land appreciation. If they provide more credit, prices will rise! They are creating money when they extend loans.
If an owner lets a dog off the leash and it bites someone, who is responsible? The owner or the dog? Both, to some extent. The owner was unwise to unleash an untrained dog. And the dog's natural characteristics favour biting, that's just what it is. The financial sector pursues profit in the same way. That's fine when profits are made directing capital towards productive development, bad when rendering cities unliveable by ridiculous land appreciation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
A mother whose husband becomes abusive to her or her children will, if she has been denied education, be less able to provide for herself and her children without her husband's coöperation
And how many of those advocating for an end to women's education wholeheartedly support this?
I think that most such people believe that there should be some payout/divorce mechanics for abuse, they just think that the standards for proving abuse are too low. No fault divorce means that there is scarcely any need to prove abuse. Also, there's a welfare state so that even if there were no such payments it's not forced destitution.
having enough understanding of the rudiments of nuclear processes, DNA repair, and exponential decay curves to see through, or at least understand the counterarguments to, the usual array of anti-nuclear canards.
I think it'd be great if the education system taught this but they don't teach it, at least not effectively. Women are consistently more anti-nuclear than men, I guess it's innately male-coded. Women, on average, are more likely to support anti-nuclear Green parties.
According to a YouGov poll, while 74% of men support nuclear power, only 30% of women do; similarly, 64% of men believe it is safe compared to 28% of women
Or consider astrology. Nobody taught astrology in schools but women are a lot more into it than men! It's not to say that men are more rational than women in a global sense, men do plenty of stupid things and die young. But there's a certain kind of rationality that men have and women, in general, lack and I don't see how education can fix this. Can young men be taught not to take risks? I doubt it.
All that is kind of true but how can a country with state sanctioned, state-promoted pride parades even be anything but anti-Christian? Both the medium and the message are pretty explicitly anti-Christian? How can a country with legal gay marriage be considered Christian, never mind divorce rates?
Even if Russia's goal is just vaguely seeming to be against globohomo, that's still way closer to Christianity than the Western countries who are promoting, spreading, directing globohomo.
I don't believe in the 'based trad Russia' meme. But in terms of social vice, it's hardly worse than America or the West generally. Abortions: 13.1 per 1000 vs 14.4 in America, 20 in UK. Russia is number 7 in drug deaths per capita but America is far ahead at number 1 worldwide, 4x Russia.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-rates-by-country
https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/drug-use/by-country
Trying but mostly failing to be anti-LGBT in the military seems a lot more Christian than promoting LGBT and diversity in the military. However cynically Putin may use Christian rhetoric he's 10x more Christian than the average Western leader who's mentally redefined Christianity to mean 'more leftism but with cross aesthetics'.
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