RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Can't they rehire people as a contractor and effectively give them a pay rise? This is standard practice in many bureaucracies, as far as I understand it.
There are all kinds of Yes-Minister style games you can play.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
COVID was a big deal, so were the Floyd riots, so is inflation. The GFC was also a big deal and had correspondingly large media coverage. 9/11 and the global war on terror were likewise.
It's just that more important things are happening now than in the 2010s.
Primary was meh, very disorganized state schools.
Secondary was excellent, went to an expensive private boys school. Nearly everyone was very clever and most were very rich, getting dropped off in Porsches or BMWs by their lawyer-doctor parents. A small fraction got in via networking and were more interested in rugby than academics. We had big exams for every subject twice a year, everyone took them quite seriously. The classes for each subject were sorted from A to F or H based on the results from the exams, there was a very clear and objective hierarchy. I think this was a great source of male motivation: competition and prestige. Latin and Ancient Greek were offered, the teachers were paid as if they were university professors (and some had been). It was like a trip to an alternate dimension, we sang patriotic hymns in assembly. At one point the sports reports were read out as (quite good) poems. At one point they brought in a leading quantum physicist to deliver a speech about their work in quantum computing, it went right over 99% of our heads, faculty included. One boy asked a pretty incisive question, he managed to understand the content.
But you could tell that corrosive modernity was digging into the heart of oak and sandstone. A lot of kids cultivated imaginary mental disorders that got them more time in the important state exams for university entry. The younger generation of teachers were much more wishy-washy and progressive. We started getting land acknowledgements and denunciations of Pizzagate where we used to get hyper-abstract philosophical speeches in Assembly. Rumours abounded that they'd try to bring in girls at some point, though I've seen no evidence that they are. There was female-teacher-on-boy sexual abuse (I got a look at the teacher, definitely not the 'I wish that was me!' physiognomy) going on 2 years above me, they snuffed that story out of the media with a lot of skill.
I got along pretty well with people. Teachers were fine but some took themselves overly seriously, like it was their solemn duty to teach us music, languages or geography we had no particular interest in. Met some great, fun, smart people with the same exotic interests as me - friends for life hopefully. Some people, myself included, got pretty arrogant when comparing ourselves to ordinary kids. Arrogance has its virtues when you are indeed right and everyone else is wrong but it also has social pitfalls.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
In Australia tax bills are itemized in proportion to the budget, they give you a little chart that shows where all your money is going. I didn't even know we still did 'industry assistance' but we do. All the little fish would be put down in 'other' though.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
In Australia we have 18C. Speech is free so long as you're not racist. Plus we have pretty aggressive anti-defamation laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_18C_of_the_Racial_Discrimination_Act_1975
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
In related UK news, the head of Cybersecurity for the treasury earns... 57K Pounds or 12% of comparable positions in business: https://twitter.com/jontafkasi/status/1641193954778697728?s=46
Just the other day the MoD was hacked: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/china-mod-uk-hack-data-breach-b2540489.html
I don't think they're solving their cyber problems any time soon. Joke country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Melbourne is rather leftist and conformist by Australian standards, it's reasonable that they're more feminist than US feminists.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The Australian govt is great at doing things with Indigenous issues, there's no shortage of activity! Only results fail. We shuffle the welfare system around from time to time. Cashless to non-cashless benefits and back again, trying to lower the drunkenness and violence. Every so often we put down a youth curfew in horrible places like Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. When the Right was feeling brave they tried a big crackdown. When Left were feeling brave, they tried for a referendum to enshrine indigenous legal bodies in the constitution. Nothing worked, though I'm sure many public sector jobs were created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Territory_National_Emergency_Response
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Australian_Indigenous_Voice_referendum
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Australian boys make spreadsheet of girls attractiveness, national media, federal minister and state premier rush to condemn them. I'm pretty surprised this got any media attention, doesn't it seem trivial? This all happened on some discord server, it's not like they were parading it around. Does anyone think this would happen in their country?
It reportedly ranked female students from "wifeys", "cuties", "mid", "object", and "get out" to "unrapeable".
The school flagged notifying police about the list and looking into whether using the term "unrapeable" constitutes a threat, The Age reported.
I can't see how 'unrapeable' could possibly be a threat. Saying someone is vulnerable could be a threat, calling someone invulnerable is not... OK it's very rude, suspend the ringleaders - do police need to be involved? There's a certain level of hysteria here, you get the sense that the male principal fears for his job unless he takes this as seriously as humanly possible.
Allan said her thoughts are with the young women, who have received counselling at Yarra Valley Grammar.
It would be pretty crushing to be labelled unrapeable or 'get out' by your male peers, though I don't see how a counsellor could help.
Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.
The Yarra Valley Grammar incident comes as the federal government last week announced nearly $1 billion of funding towards tackling violence against women, which has been labelled a "crisis" of "epidemic" proportions.
Additionally, there has been a lot of concern about Tate corrupting the minds of the youth. So this lets the media hit two talking points at the same time.
Merry said Yarra Valley Grammar holds "respectful relationship" classes but because of mixed messages on social media, "young boys get it wrong".
A related matter - youtuber argues that ranking women's attractiveness upsets the Byzantine system of female intrasexual competition, where every queen is praised as a 10/10 regardless of ugliness. I found the video pretty decent albeit a few minutes longer than it needed to be. It features the infamous Gorlock the Destroyer claiming to be a 10/10 (sarcastically?), which does make you think. There might be something to it - ranking women by attractiveness seems more dangerous than one might naively imagine.
In the male-dominated patriarchal society of the distant past, accusing men of being bastards or having incorrect lineage was a very serious matter. Legitimacy and preventing cuckoldry was deeply important to men, it informed the whole structure of European politics, inheritance and succession. Perhaps in the emerging future it's female sexual dynamics that will take priority and we'll see more of this kind of thing.
Premier (woman): "This pattern of violence against women — not only does the act of violence have to stop, but these displays of disrespecting women. Like, it's just disgraceful."
Lèse-majesté: an offence or defamation against the dignity of a ruling head of state or of the state itself.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I guess I am pretty short-termist: AI and a looming showdown in the Pacific may well decide the fate of the world soon. If everyone's pieces aren't developed soon, they might as well be taken off the board.
I just don't think Tate and Fuentes have such a big effect. Some groypers embarrassed some Turning Point USA event IIRC, that was Nick Fuente's claim to fame. But who are the key players, which are the most valuable pieces? Adults: policymakers, policy enforcers, officer corps, party cadres, elite businessmen, academics. They also have the power to beat down the youth, they can force you to put your pronouns on a badge or make you affirm your commitment to DEI. They can take your job prospects away if you support unapproved movements. Where is Tate right now? In jail. The way to achieve political change is to demoralize enemy elites and mobilize friendly elites, growing a power base, rewarding supporters with sinecures and power... Popular opinion is important but secondary to the key actors.
Furthermore, Tate and Fuentes aren't team players, they're bad pieces. Fuentes had this huge feud with BAP, I don't really know the details. That's not really productive from the point of view of the rightist world-spirit. Neither of them are prophet-tier activists like Muhammed, Hitler or even Trump. Trump's a deeply, deeply flawed prophet but he does have the power to rally armed men, he has serious pull with charisma alone.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Solidly Conservative, not solidly conservative. The Conservative Party has enthusiastically advanced mass migration along with the Labour Party, just like the Democratic and non-Maga Republican party, or the Australian Labour Party and the Australian Liberal/National Party.
If you define conservatism as Judeo-Christian values, mass migration, globalization, regime change abroad and so on... then sure, US Jews, British Jews are conservative. George Soros is nearly a conservative, albeit insufficiently supportive of police and dangerously opposed to Israel. If you define conservatism differently, conserving national identity and demographics, conserving national industries, conserving traditional values... then they're absolutely not conservative.
There's a distinction between traditional values and Judeo-Christian values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian_ethics
The latter is a kind of Orwell/FDR/Lyndon Johnson idea of innate human equality and social democracy pressed into service for the ideological struggle of WW2. The former is far older, stricter and embraces distinctions. Consider the 30 year old single mother on a dating app looking for a real man to support her - Judeo-Christian values would say something like 'man up, we're all equal in God, love your neighbour's children as yourself' whereas traditional values would probably scold you for being on Tinder in the first place and exclude the woman from polite society.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
It's funny how the loud and obnoxious groypers got Fuentes back but all the more-sophisticated rightists have been petitioning to get Jared Taylor back on twitter, to no avail as yet. Maybe Musk is trying to weakman the far-right? Fuentes and Tate-tier figures aren't especially dangerous to anyone IMO, they have no political sway. You need to be working with adults, not children, you need a certain level of respectability. Tucker for instance is worth 10 Fuentes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
How does that work if they can't make rent? Are they getting kicked out? Are they fat?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Wouldn't it be funny if beatings, bloodletting, alcohol and prayer actually worked?
Imagine life in 1300s Europe. There's a 30-50% chance your child will die as an infant. You might have chevauchee Englishmen/Frenchmen/Germans running around looting and killing. Sudden illness could randomly kill you. You likely work long days in the fields, famine is an everpresent danger especially if the lord decides to take your food. You might be drafted to fight in some war where you'll wait between bursts of extremely gorey, personal violence and interminable waiting as disease picks your comrades off. If you sin you face a very real and universally accepted penalty of eternal hellfire. Esoteric doctrinal differences to the church? Welcome to a world of blood and fire, brought to you by your local crusaders. Alternately, if you're in range of the Mongols you can experience blood and fire without needing any heresy. The less said about Meso-America the better.
This is a pretty stressful lifestyle! WEIRD people don't have any of these problems, only social alienation and other such high-Maslow issues. I won't dismiss the psychic damage inflicted by Microsoft PowerPoint but it's on a totally different level to ubuiquitous deaths in childbirth. Yet there's loads of anxiety, depression and so on today.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier
How would anyone know? We'd be relying on nutritionists. They've succeeded in confusing and/or deceiving the public for decades. Do eggs cause cancer? Reduce cancer? What fats are good or bad? Fat or sugar? The nutritionist consensus keeps changing, they're not doing real science.
I don't usually make traditionalist arguments but we should return to time-tested, traditional diets. Bread, cheese, milk, olive oil, fruit, fish, vegetables, meat, eggs... If it's been around for centuries, that in itself is a good argument for it. The meat/milk loving Mongols demolished grain-fed Chinese armies, meat and animal products have been historically valued despite their expense. Alas, we probably can't ban alcohol and tobacco. Alas, importing Japanese style intensive fat-shaming is unlikely.
But it is possible to prevent the development of synthetic meat. We can rely on industrial agriculture to cut corners and manipulate research to support their profits. That's how we got the food pyramid and a mountain of HFCS, breakfast cereals and so on. We should assume that they'll use this technology in an antisocial way. Drug dealers do the same thing - make the most addictive products at the lowest prices, they prioritize short-term profits over the long-term health of their customers and society. We should strictly regulate drugs and food for that reason. Synthetic meat should only be developed carefully, after we have a really sound understanding of how the body works, after biological immortality IMO.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
There are distinctions between selective breeding/advanced animal husbandry and synthetic meat.
It's easier to mod a game than to make a new game from scratch.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I don't hold any BTC, I only have alts. I was always vaguely worried about the 21 million cap for that reason, plus it's so high market cap that gains would diminished...
On the other hand, if things get bad, the miners will change the rules by consensus. Violating 21 million would make a lot of people very angry but there's no reason all parties can't be satisfied. We had this before in the block size wars. Miners decided they wanted to keep small block sizes with higher fees, thus bitcoin cash and BSV faded away into irrelevance. Bitcoin will persist in some form, in some fork.
If CBDCs take over, we enter the darkest timeline. What good is freedom of speech without the freedom to buy a website, pay for organizations?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
I believe women think they're safe in situations with many men, yet they say they're afraid of men when they're alone with just one man. Yet many men and 'society' generally is just a clump of single men. If men are bad alone why would they be good together?
It doesn't really matter, I'm overthinking and over-rationalizing this. Realistically there are fundamental differences in the purpose of language and epistemology going on here.
You can kind of see the differences here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cf34fy/wife_asks_husband_would_you_rather_our_13_year/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Eglin Air Force base was the most reddit-addicted city back in 2013. Narrative control is useful for any state, you want to promote certain causes and shout down opponents.
'Alone' is a key part of this, that's what the forest is there to imply. Obviously women feel safer on a street with 10-20 men than alone with a bear. Presumably they think that if one decides to attack them, the others will help them out or are at least supposed to help them. At least in daytime.
If men are so bad, why would having more of them around help? If a majority of men decided to use violence to subjugate women, it would be easily accomplished since men are more violent, better at organizing violence and are stronger.
Alternate thought from Devon Eriksen - they are humblebragging about being so desirable that men want to rape them while trying to preserve their compassionate credentials: https://twitter.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1785673620729073911
I think this is part of it. As a man, the value proposition of raping a woman alone in the woods seems pretty low. Momentary thrill but what do you do next? Leave her alive to report you? Kill her and bury the body? What happens when people come looking for her and find traces? You'd really need to be very impulsive or intoxicated by beauty to think this was a good choice of action.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Yeah, I reckon people overhyped the halving. It's supposed to be a long term effect, it takes months for the bull run to really start in past cycles.
Nothing could happen for six months after the halving and that would be standard. Of course there have been structural changes, ETFs are now involved.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Good points. India's fertility is anything but stable though. There's getting old before you get rich and then there's getting old before you're out of poverty. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IN
I have no problem with Modi personally, running such a big country democratically is a big ask. US democracy is not exactly high performance governance, how is anyone supposed to manage 4x the population with a small fraction of the wealth?
IMO India needs to follow the standard industrial route out of poverty. Special economic zones, foreign investment, light industry -> heavy industry -> high-tech industry and then services. Doing this in a democracy is very difficult, as you point out. Getting the tax and judiciary right is easy for autocracies, hard for democracies. Plus there's an excessive focus on IT and software. Software is all well and good but what about hardware? What about making the solar panels? Without manufacturing there's no firm base for development, skipping from agricultural to service-economy has never been done AFAIK. Vietnam has been on the right path and is pulling ahead.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=IN-VN
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Article prophesising and diagnosing doom on the Indian economy: https://time.com/6969626/india-modi-economy-election/
Some of it is really staggering - 10 million manufacturing jobs were lost even before Covid. Indian manufacturing employment halved in 5 years (up to 2021 but doesn't seem to have recovered that much, though output is rising). Even in output it's still quite low as a % of the economy, falling as a proportion the 2010s. Meanwhile there are 60 million extra farm workers: deurbanization and deindustrialization. India is at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index, below North Korea and above Afghanistan.
I note that the article author wrote a book on Modi despotism so can't be considered unbiased, yet he has a lot of pretty ominous links. Some of them are structured in a deceptive way - 'crude imports' being down 14% goes against the article's overall message of trade increasing, even if goods exports decreased. It's always good to read these kinds of articles with a sceptical eye, economics is so broad that you can paint all kinds of pictures. It looks like India is focusing very heavily on services rather than manufacturing, leaving it rather vulnerable to AI disruption, as self_made_human has predicted. Vietnam exports more manufactured goods, while India's overall exports are much higher.
There's also this fun website that graphs exports by type: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=104&queryLevel=location&product=undefined&year=2021&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined
India is ICT nation, the tech support stereotype. China and Vietnam do manufacturing. Russia and Australia dig things out of the ground. The US does services and manufacturing.
All currencies except Bitcoin and gold. Non-fiat ways of storing wealth are all doing very well compared to the dollar. Why are equities priced so highly? Why are houses so expensive? Because the real value of each dollar is shrinking, purchasing power is shrinking.
This may come as a surprise to the 'monetary policy' community but things are supposed to get cheaper, not more expensive. New technology should improve production processes. TVs have gotten cheaper, as have computers. Even if technology is mature like burgers, it should stay roughly the same price, ceteris paribus. But a great many things have rapidly risen in price due to money-printing, which has caused considerable alarm amongst policymakers along with economic stress.
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