RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
UAE certainly can try to strike Iranian water facilities... but Iran is a big country! UAE is a small country. UAE is overwhelmingly dependent on desalination, Iran is not. Iran enjoys escalation dominance.
Secondly, UAE is a paper tiger, they're not capable of serious fighting innately, because of what their country is. It's a cluster of hypercommercialized slave city states, not a real country. No real nationalism, no real seriousness, no sacrifice for a cause, no strong institutions.
They're likely incapable of reaching Tehran with their 4th gen jets, flown by second-rate Arab pilots.
They're barely capable of defending their own country. Brutalizing Filipino workers or funding civil war in Sudan is more their speed, not fighting those who can fight back.
Nothing is made in UAE, they just provide services and extract oil. They can't fight a 'makes things' country.
The actions Trump has taken are so stupid and self-destructive to all realistic or reasonable Trump goals (contrary even to his own statements, ideology and promises), the most reasonable conclusion is that he's under the control of other parties. Object, not subject.
Someone persuaded him that mass deportations are unpopular and should be toned down but Middle East wars, wow, that's catnip for voters! He's left reality behind, some neocon idiot would've told him something like 'no worries about fuel, the Iranians will be dealt with in one swift stroke' and he'll have accepted that because he's a credulous 80 year old.
In what universe would a man dependent on future Republican administrations to escape more aggressive prosecutions invest his political capital in 'predictably disastrous Middle East War' over 'structural Republican electoral advantage'? No rational actor would do that, only a controlled/misinformed actor.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
America is presumed to be acting in all manner of irrational and stupid ways because
they are acting in all manner of irrational stupid ways.
Firstly they started this war thinking that the Iranian people would rise up and overthrow the regime, which was stupid. Then they go back and forth unsanctioning Iranian oil to lower fuel prices, proposing dual control of the straits, now blockading Iran, threatening to destroy Iranian civilization, then constantly rolling back threats.
It's a pathetic display of weakness and stupidity as some very mediocre intellects thrash around trying to escape a self-inflicted blunder. It's exceeded only by cheerleaders dressing up the flailing as 4D chess.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Very convenient how it lets you ignore the 90% dropoff from the first week of the war.
Oh, so the US has done no damage after the first weak of the war, in your view? All subsequent bombing has been ineffectual at further reducing their strike rate, after that huge 90% success? Maybe you're just not aware that the Iranian plan is to fight a long war, which necessitates not shooting their load in the first few weeks.
And the grand idea of what you're saying is that Iran's been totally smashed but the US navy is just too cowardly to secure the straits of Hormuz? They need to do a blockade out of Iran's strike range... for some reason. All those drones and missiles have been brutally degraded... But not so degraded that America can actually protect its bases in the Gulf. Not so degraded that American troops can quit hiding in hotels. Not so degraded that America can actually protect the oil facilities of its allies, protect the basis of the petrodollar.
Fantasy. After losing the last few Middle East wars against vastly inferior opponents, I would've thought the hubris bubble might've been pricked a little but noooooo...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
The US military hasn't dumpstered anything at all. No strategic goals have been achieved. No political objectives have been achieved. The straits of Hormuz have not been secured, nor have Iran's missile and drone capabilities been severely degraded. Their attack rate over the last 30 days before this ceasefire was fairly stable.
The US has the military capabilities a 15 year old gamer would seek: prioritizing K/D and cool explosions and 'ownage' moments like blowing up leaders in sneak attacks. Hegseth exemplifies this dimwitted outlook, obsessing about lethality and violence and devastation: 'back to the stone age'.
The US does not have the military capabilities of a serious power pursuing serious strategic objectives like territorial control, waging industrial wars over long spans of time to outlast and crush enemies. That's mutually exclusive with maxxing out K/D and all these flashy, ludicrously expensive and rare wonderweapons the US likes to focus on.
You don't need to kill your enemies to beat them. Killing helps but disorganized, shambolic killing isn't the key thing. The key thing is to defeat your enemy's plan, not just blow up their soldiers. Iran's plan, using their drone and missile forces to choke the straits, choke energy exports over the course of a long war that saps US political will remains intact while the US is going through plans at a rate of knots.
Trump crows about blowing up the Iranian air force and navy. Who cares? Is the Iranian air force the lynchpin of their plans, like the German luftwaffe in WW2? No. Their conventional navy also is not a big part of their plan. Destroying random bridges or power plants - not going to help.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
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'.
60% uranium is basically weapons grade, it only takes a little further enrichment to reach 90%. Iran easily has the technical capacity to produce nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles are a lot harder technically. This is 1950s technology.
So why haven't they? If they wanted nuclear weapons, with that stockpile of 60% uranium, they could simply acquire them.
Iran seems to want flexibility, they want some kind of deterrent capability without starting an arms race with Saudi Arabia or a disarming strike from Israel or America. But clearly the deterrent capacity of Iran's latent nuclear capability is insufficient to prevent a disarming strike.
This war is a massive own goal even in its backers own terms. It spurs nuclearization.
You go on incessantly about me mischaracterizing a US bomb dropped in an Israeli war as being Israeli as some kind of terrible, unforgettable error that shows the blackness of my heart... when it didn't even affect the main point I was making in the slightest. In my naivete at the time, I assumed the only reason anybody would be interested in the bombs origin is because of the insane Israeli propaganda that 'actually the Iranians blew up their own school to make the West look bad' as mentioned upthread. That would be a meaningful distinction as compared to US vs Israeli bombing, that was what I was most interested in refuting, which I did. So I said it was an Israeli bomb. Damn!
Meanwhile, your main point, that bombing Iran would not affect their likeliness to nuclearize since they already maximally hated Israel and thus Iran should be bombed more aggressively, remains wrong and bizarre and is 10x more bloodthirsty than mine. It is also causing a massive global crisis whose main redeeming feature is that people are going to trust and favour Israel much less in future.
So in conclusion, these kinds of gotchas are neither intelligent nor charismatic, nor particularly likely to make me or anyone else love Jews more.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Are you the Iran Propaganda Minister?
There's clearly a huge gulf between our information sources on this war. You and I are not commentating on the same conflict, at a fundamental level. Maybe you're listening to the mainstream, 'approved' sources. I too saw a little bit of them. On day 1 they were clearly expecting some kind of mass revolution that overthrows the regime. They were clearly delusional. These are the same people who just recycle atrocity propaganda and 'Israeli government sources confirm' or 'US military announces' as news.
If the war was going well, would the Trump administration really be unsanctioning Iranian oil? They're flailing around like a drowning man.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
That is my ought - it would be good for human flourishing if countries expected wars of aggression to not be net positive at the margin
Well to really achieve this, you need true world hegemony where one power is so strong that it can rule the world and prevent any shift in the balance of power. China's plan is to become so strong that they can trounce the US and allies directly. No amount of credibility or 'resolve' can compensate for outright weakness.
Alternately, widescale nuclear proliferation. The non-proliferation treaty is another example where the natural defensive tendencies of various powers have been suppressed by a world of vibes and theory. As the balance of power shifts, states are inevitably going to nuclearize and probably in a more dangerous and chaotic way than if the natural course of affairs developed.
I think people are too fixated on the status quo of the past 20 or 30 years, where the US could wreck weak countries at will while the strong countries were mostly independent inside their borders. It's not natural for only America to have a foreign policy, for American wars to be 'counter-terrorism' or 'police action' or 'pre-emptive strikes' while other people's wars are 'illegal invasions'. All great powers will have their own foreign policies, that's how it works. There is nothing that can be done to persuade China to accept an international system where they can't invade or install friendly govts where they like but the US can. China has armies and fleets, nukes and tech, they are made to be used.
I would be really interested in who you think "ought" to win, who would you prefer, based on what you have written above?
I'm sympathetic to Russia taking Russian-majority parts of Ukraine in abstract but I also think this war is net-negative for Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the Western bloc. We in the West could've and should've resolved it before it happened by making credible promises about our intentions for Russia and Ukraine, by doing nothing with Ukraine, pretending it didn't exist rather than waving a red flag to a bull. In RAND reports from before the war they talk about ways to put pressure on Russia by arming and getting closer with Ukraine, you can sense that it's about point-scoring in Syria and Libya, imposing costs on Russia like they're a naughty schoolboy. We're not in school, there is no police to call and routinely attacking an
I don't think putting pressure on Russia is a good idea, it just pushes them closer to China. Russia can do all kinds of things to impose costs on us if they want.
We should've been wooing Russia away from China. What ought to have happened is that our statesmen should've displayed elementary diplomacy and grand strategy, stopped huffing vibes about Euro-Atlantic integration and the open-door policy, learnt to prioritize and delay gratification.
I don't see any good ending now, only bad and worse endings. The key lesson is to break out of the stultifying prison of vibes that we're still immersed in.
WW1 for sure and WW2 in part happened because states (mainly but not just Germany) were assuming that their limited and focused wars could come out as solidly net positive
WW2 was as bad as it was due to a conflict between vibes-based and realist strategic thought. The UK and France decided to declare war on Germany in 1939 for the sake of Poland, who they had no plan or hope of defending but guaranteed anyway. It makes zero sense to do this. Hitler, quite reasonably, did not expect this insane behaviour. If Chaimberlain understood what he was doing, was prepared to prioritize and strategize, WW2 would've been a quick and easy victory. He could've made an alliance with Germany against Russia, then perhaps betrayed Germany. He could've allied with Russia against Germany, at the cost of Poland. He could've just done nothing, rearmed at home and waited for a better opportunity. He could've worked with Italy if it weren't for some idiot journalists revealing the partition plan for Ethiopia and wrecking the Stresa front (this was before Chaimberlain got into office tbf).
Anything would've been better than 'diplomacy so shit that Russia and Germany (who deeply hate eachother) ally against us' and 'military so weak we can't attack while Germany is conquering Poland' and 'declare war on Germany anyway.'
But Chaimberlain was entranced by vibes and bungled so badly the world's greatest empire was destroyed. And Poland was absolutely wrecked. Another massive failure for the vibes-based school of international relations, which they somehow repackage as proof that you need 'resolve' and not to 'appease'. No, countries need to think strategically and pick between a range of options based on the situation and their capabilities.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
The joke is that the US is already a mess from the perspective of outsiders. Economically and technologically advanced, socially backwards. Any actual improvement is so unimaginable to Americans they come up with these warped eschatological narratives about civil war or apocalypse, or they twist themselves around to see this weird lifestyle as normal and any change as a threat. Like a nation of people who tunnel and dig in refuge from a self-inflicted disaster, only to be dazzled and frightened when they see the sun or feel fresh air, rebelling against surface.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo 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!
1mo 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!
1mo 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!
1mo 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!
1mo 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!
2mo ago
I don't believe in surrendering to sadness, but it's a sign of health to be distraught about a future where a small number of capital-owners live like kings while the rest of us are relegated to the saddest jobs in existence
There is still time to get on the train? I'm not the most well-off guy in the world. But I have my AI stocks, if 'capital' means anything in the future I should be fine. People are still talking about the AI bubble and such. Lots of people are investing in property or value stocks. The singularity is not priced in.
Alternately if we get a 'fuck the shareholders, liquidate everyone who doesn't have a killbot swarm' scenario then you and I won't need to worry about doing sad jobs.
Which cables, the cables in the straits of Hormuz that Iran is busily enacting new rules for the control and maintenance of, mandating that Iranian companies must be selected for work there, fees must be paid to Iran? The cables that carry a huge chunk of global data?
The US can't play cards from the Iranian deck, cables are an Iranian card. The Iranians have the cards here!
Why would you cut off cables to a country that's already under internet blackout? Many have already been cut/damaged by various wars. The ones Iran still has are at a small fraction of capacity right now. Cutting them does tiny damage to Iran and Iran will counter by cutting cables that do a lot more damage to the Gulf and the West.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
No argument from me that the other countries are idiots and would only make a mess - balkanizing Iran and running around pillaging
This seems like a whole parallel universe away from where we are. Who is running around in a balkanized Iran? Who is the victim here? The Gulf depends on desalination. UAE is a city in desert, food is imported. They are the Big Losers if this war goes badly, or just continues on its course. Iran can ruin them and they can't do much of anything. Arab troops aren't going to march out and invade Iran, they lack the motivation to fight Muslims for America and are no match for Iranians in battle.
Nobody is invading Iran, pro-Iranian militias are largely in control of Iraq.
Iran can get aid from both Russia and China by land routes, China is supposedly going to start sending MANPADS shortly, prompting more threats from Trump.
You seem to assume that Iran is a pushover, that the war is in a state of damage control, where humanitarian concerns are in play. Like deciding how much to kick someone who's already in the foetal position. In terms of power, nukes aside, Iran considers themselves to be in a strong position!
After seeing naked hostility from 'back to the stone ages' Trump/Hegseth, who is going to rise against the regime now? They'll instantly get tarred as Mossad traitors and face a very gruesome fate.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
But if those small companies go under, who cares? It won't have much economic effect, startups go under all the time. That's capitalism.
It's the hyperscalers who are too big and rich to go under and Nvidia that matter.
Suppose OpenAI collapses because of all their debt and spending. There'd just be a feeding frenzy as Microsoft just takes over their researchers, Anthropic and Google gain marketshare, maybe Chinese companies also make gains.
I guess that's what you're saying about the tech not going away but I don't see how anything would significantly change. People would just go to Gemini instead of 'Chat'. Kling or Seedance or Grok Imagine instead of Sora. What would the bubble popping actually mean?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
But why is this even the right frame of looking at things? If it looks really powerful and useful, probably it is just really valuable. There might be reasons why it isn't but they should be specific.
What has tech been doing for the last 10 years besides AI? I can't think of any great improvement between 2012 and 2022. More irritating ads, having to subscribe to Microsoft Office, VR headsets with a handful of good games... Incremental advancements at best.
But now if I want to do something with a computer, I can get an AI to give me precise instructions or just do it outright. That's a genuine improvement. I don't have to wade through forums or oceans of SEO + ads with a search engine. I don't have to learn to code to make and sell code commercially - they seem to enjoy it and find it very helpful. I can just have it output niche, highly specific pieces of writing just for me, on a whim.
The technology sector has finally contributed something positive after about 10-20 years of resting on their laurels and now people are complaining about a bubble, it seems bizarre to me. This is putting aside all the scientific innovation and prospects of superintelligence.
Between 1995 and 2000, the Nasdaq Composite stock market index rose 400%. It reached a price–earnings ratio of 200
Cisco had a P/E of 200 back in the day, Nvidia is in the 30s and is the largest company in the world. Where is the bubble? Is it just isolated to the AI pureplay companies like Anthropic or OpenAI who aren't profitable because of all the R&D they're doing?
I know it's cliched to say 'this time it's different' but if it looks different, then it probably is different? Maybe OpenAI has just gone down too many paths and finds that short-form video is not cost-effective since it caters to a population of poor people trying to game porn restrictions and upsets influencers/artists who love to hate AI video. Whereas selling coding AI actually makes lots of money, so they're redirecting compute for business use. In my experience it's far harder to make a profit selling AI to consumers than it is to businesses.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
The US took Iraq also (including defeating the Republican Guard), and they were supposedly a juggernaut as well.
Iraq was an Arab country, they didn't make weapons and never showed much proficiency in fighting. They just relied on Soviet weapons, US assistance in their unsuccessful war with Iran, who was fighting alone. Iraq was also strategically unprepared for the US invasion, they hadn't built up their military specifically over decades to deal with America.
Consider also that the Iraqis are the ones who quickly collapsed to ISIS and had to be bailed out by the US and Iran.
Iran is bigger, smarter and stronger with much more defensible terrain and decades of preparation.
That Iran's capability to bombard is down doesn't mean it's zero.
They just fired off their big alpha strike at the start and have since switched to a more sustainable firing pattern. Same with the US. The US launched its big alpha strike at the start and since then sortie rates have greatly fallen.
The Houthis were being supplied from Iran.
And now the challenge is fighting Iran... I don't see how that supports your case.
Perhaps it just means Bolton is a reverse weather vane.
What, so he was calling for war for the last 30 years and it was dumb then but suddenly it's smart now, when he starts expressing doubts publicly? What's the mechanic here? I think 'reverse weather vane' is an idea that sounds a lot more clever than it actually is.
Yes, AIs are not conscious. Consciousness is not even a thing, it's a category error. If you can't verify its existence with an objective, external test (even in principle), it doesn't exist. It's faker than GDP, faker than polling, faker than the predictions for world population in 2100, faker than any benchmark on any AI model.
If there is such an idea as a philosophical zombie, a being that has no 'qualia' but behaves indistinguishably from a 'real conscious being', then consciousness is disproven. We can do without the concept if it has absolutely zero implications or meaning in the real world. People are knocked unconscious if you hit them on the head, people and AIs are smarter or dumber, people and AIs are more or less emotional, all of that can be observed and is real while consciousness in the abstract philosophical sense is imaginary and irrelevant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
I'm surprised to find that there are two Project Pegasuses but I observe that the anti-theft Pegasus is a part of Opal, who are also still continuing their work.
https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/14920/html/
So even if my link was wrong, my point still stands. Pegasus is still a thing in practical terms. You are the one who produced the idea that it had shut down, seemingly from nowhere. What source did that come from? How can you legitimately have known this info?
Since the number is actually falling on a rolling average, the AI is quite misleading
But theft is at record levels? What, we have to wait for the nano-top or regurgitate secondary sources like wikipedia? Sonnet could easily observe 'ok I know about past historical theft levels, this is higher therefore its at record highs'.
Then pick out 10 articles of your choice in an area you know about.
When I see some bad journalism I don't add it to a big list of bad articles, same with spelling errors tbh. But you can take your pick from Russiagate, spruking the case for the invasion of Iraq or suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, or this euphemism treadmill where journalists eagerly create a racial narrative if a white does something bad to blacks, whereas they bury the reverse case, mentioning race only at the very end of the article. Those are cases of deception and misleading news from 'real journalists'.
The US intelligence services said there was no imminent threat from Iran, so apparently they believe it.
Attacking and killing the guy with a fatwa against nuclear weapons doesn't seem like a smart idea. If you don't want the Iranians to break out, why not simply refrain from attacking them and incentivizing a breakout?
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