RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
There's nothing wrong with preferring easy wars to hard wars ceteris paribus. The costs have to be proportionate to the gains.
There's nothing wrong with focusing on primary threats, as opposed to secondary ones.
There's nothing wrong with seeing a conflict overseas and doing nothing about it since it's not relevant to your interests. Plus it usually causes all kinds of flow-on problems if you do intervene.
Colby is no isolationist, if you read his book 'strategy of denial' he says that the US goal should be to back up frontline allies in Asia to prevent Chinese hegemony over this very valuable and important region. He judges that Russia is not powerful enough to threaten hegemony over Europe, the Chinese are the primary threat to US power and so there needs to be a substantial US presence in Asia, he wants to maintain alliances. It's a judicious, strategically justified rationale.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Front lines are surely relevant in terms of bluffing and prestige. It would be rather obnoxious for the US to suddenly demand that Russia give up its gains in Eastern Ukraine under threat of nuclear exchange, those were hard-won gains. Putin would be a massive cuck if he didn't call that bluff. He who is not willing to send out his tanks for victory is surely not willing to burn his cities for victory.
The reviews within the book include Colin Wight's "Do I agree with it? No." and Jerome Busemeyer's "Some of these ideas may ultimately not be supported".
That's hilarious.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Kursk who he's been unable to dislodge in 6 months being allowed to stay indefinitely
They've basically halved the size of the Ukrainian territory held in Kursk and it's beginning to look rather more like a salient than an offensive (queue the calendar stretching back to 1943 meme): https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/83a2f24901c941d581c0c523ecd2619b
First, if you're going to make that argument, at least acknowledge that Putin is more to blame for all of this than Zelensky. He could end this war right now if he cared to, but he's more concerned about pursuing his revanchist vision of Mother Russia. Second, if you want to do this, don't talk about realism
People on this forum are very confused about what realism means in terms of international relations which is fair since very few actually studied IR. Realism is about modelling world affairs through a framework of rational, power-maximizing states competing for power. Realism has no moral stance, no more than a wildlife photographer has a moral stance about the territorial struggle of two wolf packs.
You can use realism to advance moral ends or immoral ends. It's like a physics model, morally neutral.
The alternative to realism is liberalism and constructivism, which do have a moral stance. The liberals and constructivists believe in crusading for democracy, they won't rest until the whole world shares their ideology, the constructivists think that the struggle for power is just a social construct that can be undone with nagging, sanctions and judicious use of force. They didn't really believe that Russia was using a realist model since they didn't really believe in realism, they don't believe in an anarchic world, they believe in a world policeman suppressing all the baddy countries and enforcing the law.
There are serious downsides to this lack of realism. We now live in a world where Russia and China are closely aligned, undoing the US's most underappreciated masterstroke of the Cold War, splitting China away from Russia. Considerable quantities of munitions have been expended. Air defences that could be useful in Asia have been diverted to Europe. China is getting even stronger in relative terms.
This is what Trump and his people (Colby in particular) are worried about. While the liberals have been starting and losing stupid wars in the Middle East, China has been building industry. While the liberals were bitching about Russian spying or taking towns nobody's ever heard of in Donbass, China has been building ships, missiles and planes. They produce more manufactured goods than the next ten countries combined. Now they're getting ready to go in on places that matter (chip producers, high-tech economies, sea lanes that dominate world trade) and the liberals want to prioritize helping Ukraine keep the maximum number of towns nobody's ever heard of in Donbass? Over the fate of the entire world, the decisive final battle for dominance?
Who cares this much about Eastern Europe besides the Eastern Europeans themselves? Why did anyone ever think that this was a hill worth spending extraordinary efforts on, let alone dying on? And yes, NATO instructors are dying in Ukraine in small numbers, dying nonetheless. What was the point of it all, saying Ukraine will one day be in NATO when a realist could tell you 'never going to happen'? The realists are right as usual, like they were about Iraq and Vietnam.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It says rate limits rise automatically as you deposit more money:
https://docs.anthropic.com/en/api/rate-limits
Your organization will increase tiers automatically as you reach certain thresholds while using the API. Limits are set at the organization level. You can see your organization’s limits in the Limits page in the Anthropic Console.
But I am also trying to build with them, I pressed the contact sales button and they apparently don't accept gmail email addresses, it has to be businesspeople. Their customer service takes ages to respond to you. Their service was been down for about an hour. Everything they do outside AI research is a clownshow.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
They can generate text astonishingly quickly and with unparalleled flexibility in style and capacity for word use. It appears that they are so good at handling this that they are able to pass tests as if they were actually reasoning.
They are reasoning, it's just that they have inhuman cognitive structures. You can trip up humans with optical illusions or camouflage and we accept this as normal. AIs don't see letters, they see tokens so counting letters can trip them up.
Claude 3.7 is great with code, processing thousands of lines, finding what's relevant, deducing problems from error messages. It's much worse at UI. But it cannot see like we can. How good would you be at making a UI if you had no eyes, if you just read a description of what was on the screen?
It's decent at strategy games. I let 3.6 make the strategic decisions in a game of civ 4 (Duel) and implemented its strategy and it achieved a quick victory over Noble-level 2006 AI. Most children couldn't do that. I spotted a couple of errors but it performed pretty well.
Go try some of the questions they're asking these AIs. This is from the GPQA:
Suppose we have a depolarizing channel operation given by 𝐸 (𝜌). The probability, 𝑝, of the depolarization state represents the strength of the noise. If the Kraus operators of the given state are 𝐴0 = √︃ 1 − 3𝑝 4 , 𝐴1 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑋, 𝐴2 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑌, and 𝐴3 = √︃ 𝑝 4 𝑍. What could be the correct Kraus Representation of the state 𝐸 (𝜌)?
That is a pretty hard question! How many of us could answer it?
How is it even possible in principle to solve code questions, write out hundreds of lines to perform a specific task if you can't reason? How can it write historical counterfactuals if it can't reason? You can RP out scenarios with it and it's capable of advancing strategies, modelling 3rd parties.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
In this world, even if China had won, who would be in its umbrella?
The problem is the sheer size of China. They are bigger than the US and EU combined, by a considerable margin. They are bigger than the entire Western camp in terms of population.
They produce half the world's steel. Their manufacturing is about as large as the next ten countries combined. They've been marching up the value chain, pushing into phones, cars, drones, semiconductors, biotech, everything...
Who needs allies when your economy is so big it has its own gravity well? BRICS is mostly for show, Russia and China are the ones that matter.
It goes to show the ridiculous short-termism and arrogance of Western leaders that nothing was done about this danger back when China was weak. We had Bill Clinton's 'the internet will make them democratic' theory in the 1990s that somehow lasted up until about 2012-14. It's totally unbelievable how stupid and confident they were. Nobody had ever seen the internet make any country democratic in the 1990s, it was an entirely untested theory! But that was the strategy, they literally telegraphed their subversive plan to Chinese leaders in their speeches.
Since then our leaders have been falling into this nightmare as they realize they lack the mental or kinetic power to realize their delusional aims. Joe Biden's hilarious 1990s joke about Russia and China cooperating turned into reality: https://x.com/SonjaEnde/status/1649318054969462788
Zyuganov told me 'we're not happy about this NATO expansion, we may have to look to China' and I said 'lots of luck with that' and I added 'if that doesn't work, try Iran!'
This is what's so broken about America and the West generally, the people manning the wheel are so hopelessly stupid and confused that they do everything wrong. The EU has wrecked European industry with climatism and regulation, Britain is in a continuous crisis. And Trump certainly isn't helping. It's not written in the Art of War 'when facing a strong enemy, raise tariffs and enter disputes with your closest allies'. It makes zero sense. But he's doing it anyway.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
cosying up to the country NATO was founded to protect against
This is called diplomacy. Ten, twenty years ago it was Western Europe that was interested in good relations with Russia, fuel imports and trade... while the US was very keen on NATO expansion and taking a hard line on Russia.
Now it's the other way around as the US is more interested in Asia while Europe seems to be mentally stuck with the old US policy platform.
The mature and sensible thing for Norway and other European countries to do is not throw a tantrum but to adapt to the changing global dynamics and reflect on the workability of their strategy. Maybe it was a poor decision going out of their way to get Russian soldiers killed with military aid? I wonder why there are Russian sabotage operations going on, what could possibly be the reason why these munitions plants keep having anomalous explosions?
If the Russian threat is so great, why antagonize the US? Wouldn't you want to appeal more to the US? If the US is a threat, maybe consider rapprochement with Russia? Or China? There's a massive shortage of strategic flexibility in Europe.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Before invasion in February 2022 certain western leaders offered Zelensky a ride. Basically they told him not to resist to save human lives. The reality was that Ukrainians would have resisted anyway but most probably would have lost.
Everyone who wanted to resist Russia and was brave enough to do so has joined the army by now and a large number of them are dead! Many who didn't want to resist have also been forcibly drafted and died.
Even comparing with the hypothetical 'hundreds of Buchas' scenario Ukraine still comes out worse for resisting, especially if resistance ends with them being crushed. Conventional war is much bloodier than unconventional war.
Zelensky doomed the country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
This stunt is ineffectual but it reveals a dangerous and hysterical attitude. It doesn't help the situation in any way!
Also it seems that Haltbakk Bunkers is a bit of a nothingburger company according to the community note. I get what I deserve for trusting Osinttechnical!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
So Ukraine doesn't settle for this offer and holds out... and it gets worse for them. Ukraine gets bombed more. Their graveyards expand. More territory gets annexed by Russia.
This is just epic-scale sunk cost fallacy among Western leadership and especially Ukraine. If there is one thing the foreign policy elite class really struggles with, it's accepting defeat. But the costs of propping up Ukraine aren't worth the gains. Slowly but surely the message is sinking in and the wiliest rats are leaving the sinking ship.
Who is going to provide them security guarantees that are innately non-credible? Why would the Russians expect the US, Britain or France to risk ruination over Ukraine? Why risk making a bluff that will be called? Ukraine's not a treaty ally and they can't become a treaty ally, the war is about that amongst other things. The gap in determination between Russia and the Western nuclear powers is too great. It's like the reverse of Serbia, Russia didn't guarantee them, they helped Serbia but didn't make bluffs that would be called.
So there aren't going to be security guarantees that bring on a risk of humiliation or extreme danger for the guaranteeing power. That's not going to happen. No matter how impressive Ukraine's stalling tactics are (and they have fought impressively) the logic of size and numbers is against them and the prognosis is very grim.
Stringing along the understandably desperate and somewhat stupid leaders in Ukraine with insincere promises of guarantees at some unspecified future is ignoble behaviour.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It's not bizarre or Soviet style to acknowledge that Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands are no match for Russia, nor is Italy.
Nominal GDP is just a made-up number, it doesn't mean anything significant. It is silly to write off Russia as weak because some economists made up some numbers.
It is also the case that Russia is not nearly strong enough to conquer Europe (IMO, others like Shrike seem to think it's more even and he is at least initiated in these matters). Nor does Russia have the intention to conquer Europe. But Russia isn't weak enough that it's wise or cost-efficient to force Russia from Ukraine, as is now being recognized in the US government. You seem to consider this appeasing Russia.
isn’t going to be nuking London, Paris or Washington any time soon because of a minor regional conflict
The US seriously considered nuclear strikes in Korea and Vietnam, faraway wars without major ramifications at home. The Ukraine war is much more important for Russia and nukes should not be discounted. If as you say the Russians weren't willing to use nukes over Ukraine, then why not simply demand Russia withdraw or face direct NATO intervention backed up with nukes? Easy win since Russia was never going to use nukes! In reality, it's not that simple. There is a certain point at which Russia would use nukes, just like there's a certain point at which they'd give up on diplomacy and invade.
Strange that someone defending Vance’s comment would appear to have a much lower opinion of Russian strategy than someone criticizing it.
I don't even know what Vance statement you're talking about or how this relates to anything I've said.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
How do you think a war between Russia and Italy would play out as a 1v1? How about Benelux vs Russia? According to the economists they have similar sized economies.
These economic figures are just numbers. There's no relation to real world performance and strength, it's pure fantasy. Nominal GDP figures don't even measure the economy, they measure the imaginary value of goods and (imaginary) services in imagined dollars by some arcane metric. 'Imputed rent' is 6% of US GDP - homeowners enjoying their house is not real economic activity but they count it anyway.
Measure the number of workers in arms manufacturing, measure steel production, measure the count of soldiers, measure anything even slightly tangible rather than the 'economy'.
The wage of my job doesn't determine my chance to win in a fight, what matters is my size, skills, environment and weapons. Money may buy those things. Or it may not. There are things that money cannot buy that require time and effort and natural ability. Money does not matter, what matters is capacity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
After yesterday's events in the White House, Haltbakk Bunkers, one of Norway's largest marine fuel companies, appears to have announced that it will no longer refuel American Navy vessels.
https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/1895896267269808193/photo/1
There's some speculation that this has already affected US submarine patrols.
This is pretty obnoxious behaviour IMO. Unlike Ukraine, Norway is a US treaty ally. Good allies refuel eachother!
It also reminds me a little of New Zealand's decision in the 1980s that they were going to be a 'nuclear-free' zone. That meant NZ required any vessels that entered their waters to certify they didn't carry nuclear weapons. The US refuses to declare which vessels are nuclear-armed. The standoff resulted in the US downgrading its alliance with New Zealand for many years, they 'suspended' their obligations under the ANZUS treaty. The treaty remained in force technically but the Kiwis got kicked out of military exercises, less intelligence sharing, less access to technology.
Ultimately of course New Zealand is totally irrelevant to world affairs and it doesn't really matter if the US only sends ships known to be conventionally armed and powered over there. Europe and Norway is quite a different matter, there seems to be a dangerous level of broad-based hysteria over Ukraine.
When is the allure of ineffectual posturing going to wear off? Is anyone really impressed with this kind of behaviour?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It seems like you and the rest of the world are coming around to Mearsheimer's point of view, 11 years late and with everyone in a much worse off position.
This dynamic could have been predicted! It was predicted! He predicted it! Mearsheimer predicted that if there was no sustained and sincere effort to keep Ukraine neutral post-2014 Russia would attack and wreck the country. He said that if we kept on with the 'Ukraine is totally going to be in NATO one day, let's arm and fund and encourage them' approach it was going to end very badly for Ukraine. He said that Russia would wreck Ukraine if NATO integration continued. He said they probably couldn't conquer the whole country but had the power to wreck it such that Ukraine was totally dysfunctional and bereft of the industrial centres in the East. He said that Russia wouldn't tolerate NATO expanding into Ukraine for geographical reasons, plus the large Russian minority that Ukrainian nationalists would feel emboldened to harass.
And based on his analysis of the situation, he proposed building Ukraine up economically as a neutral country without NATO or anything. Now it seems like that's what we're coming around to, after Ukraine has been wrecked, after the Russians have gotten very angry with the West, after trillions in economic damage to Europe, after hundreds of thousands of deaths, after arms stockpiles being depleted, after a message being sent 'if your invasion fails double down and try harder, fight on to victory'. This was predictable in advance!
Imagine if people just listened to the expert as opposed to the 'experts'!
Mearsheimer was right about Ukraine in 2014. He was right in 2023 when he said 'the counteroffensive is not going to work, Ukraine is still doomed'. He was right about not invading Iraq back in 2003. He was right about China becoming a major power with opposing ambitions to the US back in the 2000s.
In the past I had some very snooty, arrogant responses about how Mearsheimer was senile or retarded or some unsophisticated undergraduate-tier theorist. I would like to see how the predictive track record of these people compares with Mearsheimer.
International relations is like economics in that there are many schools of thought. Some are better than others, some actually work and others are popular and sound great but don't work. Realism works. Realists like Mearsheimer actually predict things correctly. There are distinctions within realism, different models of thought that can be applied in different circumstances but realism as a whole is generally superior. This liberal/constructivist 'we have to do the right thing' interventionist camp doesn't work and it's not even moral, it gets lots of people killed at great expense and usually makes the situation worse. If you want to read more about this, check out The Great Delusion by Mearsheimer.
We need to embrace realism just like how a chess player needs to think several moves ahead if he wants to win. You highlight how Option B, the 'most moral' option is unacceptable due to the potential for global catastrophe. It's the least moral option. Once you see that you start to understand why we need realism to achieve realistic goals in the most efficient and least costly way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
The US imports goods from overseas (often China) and exports little pieces of paper. This is an inherently vulnerable position.
If the little pieces of paper stop being considered valuable or reliable, American living standards will plunge. The US has a huge trade deficit, about $770 billion per year.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
They keep their investments though. In principle they could invest in Australia from Shanghai, only now they're investing and getting pensions, possibly bringing in family too if they become permanent residents. And Australia is not short of capital, we have if anything too much capital in the country, pumping house prices up to the moon with our massive superannuation funds.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It brings in a lot of retirees though, looking to exploit the pension system. They don't have to pay 5 million, just invest that money in the country.
The US scheme seems qualitatively different.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It's not obvious to me how demanding snippets from them is outmaneuvering
Musk is shaping the narrative. In the election I heard there were stories about people Trump fucked over by refusing to pay for services, getting them bogged down in legal disputes, wrecking small businesses. I don't know the context, I didn't look into it. But that's not what dominated the headlines! It was Haitians eating people's pets, it was Bidenflation, it was Kamala talking complete nonsense and cackling... Trump shapes narratives very well.
The smartest civil servants want to make their case on the 'look how the cuddly animals are starving and the children are being abused' battlefield, not the 'I don't want to send an email' battlefield.
but sending an email with some bullshit bullet points is a bridge too far to keep the gravy train rolling?
Maybe they missed the 'you need to reset your email password' messages they send out on the fake worker's email account (they don't check it) and end up sending a flurry of reset requests to IT. That's kind of suspicious. It's easy to lose an email address like this.
Maybe Musk is also checking who's logging in and is just doing this email stunt publicly for the political effect because it's more attention-grabbing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It sounds like the US government is running pretty inefficiently if performing this simple task turns into a giant legal drama. If everyone is terrified of performing simple tasks in a straightforward fashion because it may violate some unknown body of incomprehensible laws, it strengthens the argument for Gordian-style reform...
Heads Musk wins, tails he wins.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
It's not so much termination as identifying and outmanoeuvring opponents. Their optimal narrative is 'Help evil billionaire Musk is making us cut critical services like kidney machines', not 'Help, evil billionaire Musk is making us explain what we got done last week'. He's forcing them to play his game.
If I were running fake employees, I'd arrange for them to log in on the clock. But it'd be a little harder for them to achieve things and send email. The smarter cheats will create some fake responses quickly but I expect he'll catch out some of the stupider/slower ones who can't access their faked emails or make other errors trying covering it up. He's fishing for anecdotes and political power with this tactic.
Also, you can scan text over multiple context lengths.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
The benefit is sniping the people who kick up a huge fuss, performatively showing themselves as enemies and finding the employees that don't exist (who won't answer). Musk will drag up a few cases like the Spanish guy who never showed up for work in 12 years and was only uncovered when he got an award for dedicated service. It's half publicity stunt, half humiliation/submission ritual.
Also they'll probably run it all through Grok 3 and have it spit out something politically useful that some hysterical fed puts down in a moment of foolishness.
Unpopular opinion: they should've quit bitching and just done it.
Musk is playing 5D chess, demanding an objectively simple task to demand compliance/submission and using it as leverage to secure more power. He knows that a lot of the chronic /r/fednews posters will have a massive hysterical breakdown and is counting on it to give him more political power and make these people look ridiculous and out of touch. A normal person thinks 'that's easy' and has little sympathy.
It should not take even 5 minutes to produce a list of 5 things you've done this week if you've been working seriously. If you're dealing with secret information, you ought to be smart enough to obfuscate a technically correct but secure answer.
The guy working on the top secret AI-powered satellite missile guidance system can say "I helped train a model and adjusted hyperparameters" or "Fixed bugs in the navigation software" and that's of no significant value to any adversary. If they have your email address and you work in the Advanced Aerospace Development department, they're going to expect that's what you're doing. It might break the sacred rules some bureaucrat thought up for individual/collective deflection of responsibility but normal people thinking wisely would not be worried about the Chinese finding out that Americans are designing aircraft or honing satellite guidance systems. They already know a hell of a lot more than that, the US MIC leaks like a collander and Chinese spying has been punching great big holes in it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
a country of crypto grifters, tradthot inflooencers, transgender mixed martial artists, strip club owners, obese Alex Jones fans, feminists horrified by male sexuality, white nationalists with Asian wives, bible thumpers predicting the return of Jesus that never happens and elderly Jews still mad they got blackballed from the country club in 1972. Are "we" supposed to come together and have some reasonable, rational "conversation?"
And what about the other 90% of the population? The existence of fringes doesn't undo the centre. Also this is a great argument against all democratic/discussion everywhere, including on this forum.
Bioethics is generally done badly but it's not inherently a bad idea. We could have bioethics where good, decent research is permitted and 'let me make some lethal bioweapons for no reason' research is restricted. Who wants complete laissez faire in this area? I am confident that you have a bioethics stance, just that it is in conflict with the bioethics community. You, I and many here are likely heretical bioethicists.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
The Dominican Republic is significantly whiter than Haiti, as is Jamaica. Even the Bahamas is only 90% black and relies heavily on tax fiddles for its economy. Wikipedia notes also that white and brown men ran Jamaica:
Jamaica's diverse ethnic roots are reflected in the national motto "Out of Many One People". Some dispute the appropriateness of the motto because Jamaicans are overwhelmingly of a single race. The Jamaican founding fathers were mostly White or brown men and unrepresentative of the views of the country's majority Black population
A study found that the average admixture on the island was 78.3% Sub-Saharan African, 16.0% European, and 5.7% East Asian.
Yanukyovich is a good example of a suppressed politician IMO.
It's Uganda though, the home of Idi Amin and Joseph Kony. It seems pretty reasonable to conclude that women have a tough time there, as does everyone else. Shouldn't our default expectation for Uganda in all departments (and especially the quality of the population) be 'very bad'? I thought Uganda was where they were killing bald men for gold in their heads, turns out that was Mozambique... Anyway, they have plenty of problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_sacrifice_in_Uganda
If there's widespread child sacrifice, why not wifebeating too?
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