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RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

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joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

				

User ID: 317

RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

3 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 317

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.

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.

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.

Incidental quibble that if anything supports your main point: Haiti isn't just poor because of bad institutions. It's just a standard-issue West African country but it's in the Americas. The demographic base of the country is West African, the economy is West African, society is pretty West African with bizarre superstitions, political dysfunction, coups and gangs of comically vicious criminals with very silly names (remember the cannibal named Barbecue who was strongest man in the country?). Brazil can't fix West Africans, it has a significant amount of West Africa syndrome as well and associated dysfunction. So if they tried occupying Haiti it would ultimately be pointless. The US occupied Haiti and built infrastructure, ran the place properly in the 1920s when colonialism was fashionable. It doesn't work. Haiti is West African.

Ukraine has real proven potential, it's a fairly well-developed region with industry. They make tanks. They made that gigantic Antonov plane for moving the Soviet Space Shuttle around. They exported military equipment, including an aircraft carrier to China. I saw an anecdote of Ukrainian kids coming to a French school and were bemused by how the French were years behind in terms of maths. They fight like Europeans. They are Europeans.

But Ukrainian governance has been truly terrible, the country has been trapped in this ongoing, spiralling crisis of weakness and foreign influence. The whole sordid affair with Hunter Biden being on the board of a Ukrainian gas firm is indicative of serious problems and excessive US influence. There are ultranationalists running around who really want to get stuck into Russia. There are a bunch of Russians who wanted to get back into Russia. There was the entire USAID/NED/Soros/deep state goon squad taking great interest in the country, their corrosive effect in a poor country is immense particularly when there's lots of highly exploitable history to draw upon. In terms of 'splitting Russia and Europe' - mission accomplished! But as usual there's a lot of blowback and complications that make the whole thing into a net-negative for everything.

In what normal country does a comedian who played the piano with his penis become national leader because he pretended to be an honest politician on television? It's a broken country that really needed someone vaguely authoritarian to crack down on the worst of the corruption and implement sane foreign policy. Alas the US would've probably found ways to suppress a Ukrainian Lukashenko.

Sometimes I wonder whether our world is in the slow lane regarding technological growth, whether we really tapped all the resources we could.

What if eugenics really took off and there were breeding programs for geniuses like how China breeds tall basketball players? What about cloning? Or genetic engineering? Or encouraging high fertility amongst the most productive in society? Or just throwing more of our elite talent and capital into the sciences?

The 'overpopulation' meme hit us really hard.

Also, China was definitely in the slow lane in our timeline, right? How does it go much worse for them than our timeline? By virtue of size and demographics they're always supposed to be one of the strongest powers on earth. Only thing I can think of is Japan going in and wrecking them with gas and/or bioweapons while the Europeans are distracted.

There's a huge distinction between a country invading an ally and a country invading a non-ally. That's the whole point of alliances. Russia doesn't throw a massive tantrum when the US invades or bombs countries that aren't Russian allies, even with borderline Russian allies like Syria they show a level of restraint. They didn't give the Syrian government Smerch or Kalibr missiles and encourage them to kill all the US troops based in Syria. They didn't start handing out Manpads in Iraq and tell them to kill every Coalition soldier they saw.

Nukes are literally just big bombs, the 'nuclear taboo' is a social construct designed to keep the little countries servile before the big powers. The US seriously considered using nukes in Korea and Vietnam, wars that were very far from the US, wars the US could afford to lose. Even then they incinerated North Korea such that the entire country was wrecked and all cities were razed, via incendiaries rather than nukes. They wrecked much of Laos and Cambodia in the Vietnam War. Yet the US is not an international pariah because the US is a strong power and has things people want.

Russia isn't a pariah today outside the world of US allies. Even amongst them trade continues just via Azerbaijan or various stans. It doesn't matter whether you kill people with 155mm shells, drones, small arms or H-bombs, it's the same outcome. Russia still has oil and people want energy, minerals, food - even in China.

There are of course disadvantages to using nuclear weapons and various risks (Ukraine assembling a dirty bomb or launching various radiological attacks amongst other things) but it's not unthinkable that Russia would go nuclear over a high-intensity conventional war right next door to them if they judged that conventional victory was unattainable. They could be used for signalling purposes to compel immediate negotiations or en masse tactically to smash offensives, wipe airfields off the map, destroy command and control or logistics hubs, for the EMP effect... These are the ultimate weapons for a reason.

The US doesn't have a monopoly on massacring people and razing cities when easy victory becomes elusive, that's not how it works.

Furthermore, it's unlikely that 'maximum aid' could even achieve that outcome. It takes a long time to train people to use Patriots, tanks, F-16s and so on. Russia could assemble large new formations and try again, just as we've seen in 2023 and 2024.

That remains to be seen, it depends on the peace deal they get and the real casualty figures, which we don't know.

'What actually happened' is still in a state of flux from the point of view of us observers who aren't privy to the secrets of the universe. It may be that the media is broadly accurate arguing that Ukraine enjoyed favourable casualty ratios due to high-tech western weapons and clever tactics. Or it may be that they were drafting men, shoving them into a trench and basically feeding them to Grad, Mista and Kalibr to buy time, that they suffer unfavourable exchange ratios. My suspicion is that the latter is more accurate, considering the preponderance of firepower on the Russian side and strong incentives for the media to lie in favour of Ukraine. If that is the case then Russia has a winning hand, they have suffered non-trivial losses and will be inclined to impose much harsher terms given the costs endured.

Of course retaining independence is valuable but if you're giving up significant amounts of territory where much of the population lived, then it has to be considered a defeat. Finland was probably wise to fight and lose. But they still lost. That should be the expected outcome.

There is a possibility of an unarmed man inflicting significant harm on a big, strong attacker.

But this is not a general rule, it's a special exception.

Many, many, many Ukrainians would be alive if this principle was fully understood by leading figures in their government. Russia is not a totalitarian communist regime. It's not significantly more corrupt than Ukraine.

That Trump wants the war to end with a Russian victory is not in doubt - Trump has said it

Can you back this up with a source? Has he started sending military aid to Russia? Imposed sanctions on Ukraine? Or is he in fact sending military aid to Ukraine, which would suggest that he wants Ukraine to win?

This just isn't how Nazism works. Why didn't they exterminate the French? Because they were not in favour of 'exterminating anyone who is a potential threat to your national safety'.

You can't generalize Nazi anti-semitism out like that. Jews were considered specially, different from every other people. They didn't launch a boycott of French shops in Germany, they didn't enforce various discriminatory laws against people who married French. They didn't mark out French people in public. Jews were seen as subversive and extremely dangerous, in part due to the revolutions that Jewish communist leaders launched in 1919. The Spartacists and the Bavarian Socialist Republic for instance.

You can't understand Nazism without getting to grips with the special place that anti-semitism has in Nazi ideology. Whenever Nazis looked out at the world, they saw a global network of Jewish financiers and media working against them. Paying off Churchill's debts: Henry Strakosch. Behind Roosevelt, Harry White and Morgenthau.

if Putin doesn't take the L and decides to go nuclear ( which he probably won't) , then you implement a no fly zone over Ukraine and merk everything with a Z on it. Sounds too risky? Well then I guess you can take half measures but don't be surprised when it backfires.

Risk management 101:

Strategy A backfires and causes some land in Eastern Europe (not part of NATO or any US treaty ally) to change hands. And some people on the internet will complain about being betrayed.

Strategy B backfires and results in the incineration of Europe and North America, hundreds of millions of deaths by fire and famine. Western civilization is finished. And Ukraine especially is finished, they are at the front line. Zero good outcome for them. There are other delightful possibilities, like a still-bloody war of tactical nukes where Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe gets wrecked but most cities survive more or less intact.

Hmm, which is preferable? How should we reduce the risk here?

Yours is a genuinely dangerous line of argument. No Russian leader would think that the US would extend its nuclear umbrella so far beyond its treaty allies in the fashion you're proposing. It makes a complete mockery of nuclear strategy to signal totally uncredible deterrence and then back it up like this. Why so cavalier about a nuclear exchange? Why should anyone in Dallas or Manchester risk being incinerated over towns nobody can even name changing hands in Donetsk? Nobody promised to do this, there was no treaty, no deterrence.

Normalizing this hyper-aggressive attitude is one of the greatest dangers to civilization on the planet. Just because Ukraine made a fatal error, it does not follow that the entire Western world needs to double down and make an even bigger blunder.

How is it more advantageous to fight the powerful and risk losing more?

If I'm being mugged, I can hand over my wallet or I can fight. If I fight I might get beaten up and still lose my wallet. If the mugger is some 150 kg, tattooed musclebound thug known for his huge gun collection (while I am unarmed and substantially smaller), then it's very likely I'll lose. Getting helpful advice and some second-hand brass knuckles from onlookers isn't likely to change the outcome. It's likely to end with me bleeding out, unconscious on the ground.

Nothing about what's happening should be surprising. It is very rare for small states to defeat big states in industrial wars where both sides are determined to win. Observe that the conclusion of the Winter War was Finland losing all the land that the Russians demanded and more. Size matters.

Alright then, Austria and Prussia had been a menace to their neighbors in Europe for hundreds of years, and their union in the German Empire was a greater menace after that. By Hitler's logic, the Allies would have been within their rights to implement a final solution to the German problem while they had Germany at their mercy following WWI.

No, none of that is in line with Nazi ideology. Hitler had no plans to exterminate the French despite them being a massive thorn in Germany's side. He wanted to weaken the French state significantly such that they'd not be able to contest German dominance of Europe but the French people had a place in the New Order. And he wanted an alliance with Britain the entire time. According to Hitler, Western Europeans were basically fine, just misguided. Western Europeans/Aryans were not supposed to be going around exterminating eachother.

It was in the East where peoples were going to be compulsorily removed from their land, enslaved and treated harshly in various ways. And even there there's room for moderation. The Allies planned initially to treat the German nation harshly post-war in the Morgenthau plan but then moderated their stance in peacetime when they concluded it would be unhelpful.

Spending is irrelevant. The Allies won WW2 because of capabilities, not expenditure. Europe already spends a lot more than Russia does, yet this spending isn't translating into Europe performing well. The UK and Germany alone spent more in 2023, according to the dollar figures. But they're not stronger than Russia by themselves.

The problem is not 'Europe is not spending enough', which implies that Russia is somehow outspending Europe. They are not. European NATO is spending about $400 billion a year, which is far more than enough to defend themselves. It makes zero sense that $400 billion is insufficient to defend against a foe spending about $100 billion in wartime. It makes zero sense that an alliance of 600 million could be threatened by 140 million.

The problem is that European spending is being allocated wastefully and that European strategy is muddled. Raising defence spending won't fix anything, what's needed is a plan to achieve specific capabilities and integrate them into a broader political strategy.

But where is the logic in launching such an ambitious invasion?

Why would you invade NATO so you can defend against NATO from mildly more advantageous geography?

Eurofighter

Damn, I did not realise they were only now adding AESA radars on those things, I thought they were half decent! Were they cribbing notes from Indian military procurement? Or did the Indians learn how to design aircraft from Europe and apply those lessons on the Tejas? The Rafales at least have AESA.

Yes tactical nukes are one field where I think there's a real case for further development. Poland's conventional forces won't be much good if Russia starts vaporizing them and demanding unconditional surrender, trusting that France and Britain won't risk their own infrastructure.

But it seems unlikely that either party would take such risks. Does Russia really want to subjugate some extremely unruly and recently irradiated Poles? Why would they so greatly desire to conquer the tiny Baltic states? There are potential strategic gains but huge risks.

And Europe's population is so high that they can afford to buy time with hundreds of thousands, millions of lives in low tech, defensive trench warfare. They might have readiness problems, they might have shortages of this and that. But they're so big that they have the time and space to fix this stuff and fight a long war. Russia does not have the blitzkrieg capabilities to reach the European industrial core before they can militarize. Bombing Ukraine is one thing but Russian PGM production surely isn't sufficient to bomb out the combined military industry of Europe.

Cradle is kind of xianxia but it doesn't capture the full essence of it. It feels like the characters are white, only pretending to be Asian. It's an emulation, a later Cradle scene give me a certain Marvel vibe as the good guys all portal in for a really big fight. That's appropriate, it's a Western book for Western audiences. Wight couldn't get away with race wars, sexism and what would surely be considered transphobia/homophobia like authors can in China.

Reverend Insanity is a different beast, you can tell that they're actually Chinese, playing these weird-to-us mindgames, reciting poems and so on. There's a certain level of sincerity in what happens. It feels a bit more like an open-world game in contrast to Cradle, where our MC is going through set-piece after set-piece, clearing chapter after chapter to reach his goals. For example:

In Cradle the tournament arc takes a whole book, as our heroes march on through to get the mcguffin, training and powering up, developing their character as necessary. They might cheat a little but the other side cheats harder and still loses, they are the bad guys after all.

In RI there are two tournament arcs. In the latter our MC is called in as back-up for his partner-of-convenience, ignores the call for a few weeks and only shows up (on his 4th fake identity) with a sneaky, devious, obnoxiously dishonourable plan to kill this one guy and make off with his soul and looted corpse, even if he has to get kicked out of the sect to execute the plan. The tournament wasn't over a mcguffin, it was about relieving political tensions from an earlier crisis and the big players giving lip service to Longevity Heaven's Edict. Our MC is not developing his character and heroically trusting in the power of friendship, he's an assassin ruthlessly optimizing his chance at success. Then he decides to strike while the iron is hot and ambush a few more people elsewhere before heading off to kill and impersonate someone on the other side of the world.

There's also a thematic level too with the Ren Zu interludes, it's not without literary merit IMO. Later on there's a big struggle over fate, whether the natural order decreed by fate is good, whether it inhibits freedom or protects humanity/the world, what sacrifices are needed to uphold it... It's a reflection of Cradle in that respect, though our MC takes the matter into his own hands.

IMO it's more like the British and the French but worse in some respects.

Germany wanted land, demanded it and then took it when Poland refused to hand it over. Russia wanted land, found a pretend excuse, went in and took it. The straightforwardness of the robber.

Britain and France promised to protect Poland and launched the lamest offensive imaginable, into the Saar, before retreating back to the Maginot line. They clearly had no plan to save Poland from Germany and refused to even declare war on Russia (which was a wise move). They made promises that they couldn't keep but never even dreamed of demanding Polish resources as recompense for military assistance.

According to the Telegraph, the US is planning to turn Ukraine into a colony: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/02/17/revealed-trump-confidential-plan-ukraine-stranglehold/

Donald Trump’s demand for a $500bn (£400bn) “payback” from Ukraine goes far beyond US control over the country’s critical minerals. It covers everything from ports and infrastructure to oil and gas, and the larger resource base of the country.

The agreement covers the “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine”, including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure (as agreed)”, leaving it unclear what else might be encompassed. “This agreement shall be governed by New York law, without regard to conflict of laws principles,” it states.

So Ukrainian courts are no longer in control. Reasonable from a certain point of view but well into 'unequal treaty' territory.

The US will take 50pc of recurring revenues received by Ukraine from extraction of resources, and 50pc of the financial value of “all new licences issued to third parties” for the future monetisation of resources. There will be “a lien on such revenues” in favour of the US. “That clause means ‘pay us first, and then feed your children’,” said one source close to the negotiations.

It states that “for all future licences, the US will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals”. Washington will have sovereign immunity and acquire near total control over most of Ukraine’s commodity and resource economy. The fund “shall have the exclusive right to establish the method, selection criteria, terms, and conditions” of all future licences and projects. And so forth, in this vein. It seems to have been written by private lawyers, not the US departments of state or commerce.

Now it is the Telegraph, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. Still it's extremely obnoxious behaviour from America. First it's "You have a bright future in the West. Come on, we'll totally let you into NATO. Just draft a few million more men, victory is near!". And then it's "hand over all your resource wealth, quickly now. Trusting us was a fatal mistake." If this is the case, then America doesn't even have the straightforward dignity of stabbing a man in the front and robbing him, it's pure villainy: trick him into an unwinnable fight, then demand he empty his pockets.

Talk about debt trap diplomacy!

Why is everyone so obsessed with military spending, especially as a % of GDP?

We constantly hear complaints that Europe isn't meeting its 2% defence spending targets. Or Trump wants them to reach 5%.

Defence spending is a basically meaningless number that has only a very tenuous relationship with capabilities, which actually matter. The Taliban did not outspend America in Afghanistan. North Korea could thrash Australia (our defence budget approaches 60-70% of North Korean GDP according to those who invent these numbers) in a war. They have ICBMs and H-bombs, we could barely reach them and couldn't do any damage. Russia has a smaller economy than Italy according to the GDP calculators. But in terms of capabilities...

What is it that Europe needs that they don't have? Ammunition? Then build ammunition factories. Shell factories should be cheap, this is WW2-era technology. Drones? Then build drone factories. Defence spending seems to usually translate into ludicrously expensive purchases of equipment from the United States, which is why the Americans want it constantly raised.

In reality Europe doesn't need any additional militarization. The European half of NATO has about 2 million troops, a population of about 600 million. If Russia is struggling to burn through Ukraine's male fighting age population, how are they supposed to cut down 20x more? How is Russia supposed to man a frontline from Turkey to Finland? How is Russia supposed to contest huge navies with submarines and aircraft carriers? How is Russia supposed to deal with large and powerful air forces, Eurofighters and F-35s? Why would Russia attack such a gigantic, powerful, nuclear-armed alliance?

The European half of NATO alone has the power to smash Russia's conventional forces and force them to fall back on nuclear weapons, where they Russia has a considerable superiority. No additional militarization is needed. There's plenty of room for defence cuts, unless Europe plans on helping the US fight China, nuclear war with Russia or further wrecking in the Middle East.

Talk of defence spending should be wound down and replaced by talk of what specific capabilities are needed to achieve specific objectives. Is it necessary to build fortifications in Lithuania? Do airbases need to be hardened against drones? Anything but 'lets throw billions of dollars in the general direction of these schlerotic military bureaucracies that consistently fail to deliver success'.

Not everything that comes out of China is tasteless, they produce plenty of good stuff.

Wukong and Marvel Rivals are good, though they're not my kind of game. There's Genshin Impact which is pretty good though again, gacha isn't my thing. How is that not tasteful? They made up a huge original fantasy world that captivates millions of people just like Star Wars. Mechabellum and Dyson Sphere Program are quite strong in the strategy genre, which is my thing. There are a bunch of Chinese mods for even fairly obscure games like Star Sector that got translated back into English for people for people to play here. You can't make game mods without craftsmanship, nobody does that seeking a profit.

And there are plenty of good translated Chinese novels, as mentioned downthread. The Three body problem series for one, how is that not tasteful or sophisticated? It dares to break some conventions and says that treehugging and spiritualism isn't such a great idea, let's embrace technology. It points out that men are getting more effeminate and soft over time and projects this trend into the future in a mildly unsettling way. It has a wide range of original ideas in an expansive universe, truly alien aliens...

China is a very big country! You can't judge the entire output of such a huge country from a single film. It's like watching the highest grossing American movie Avatar, and concluding that all American culture is CGI moralist slop with no deeper meaning or value than 'empathetic scientists good, mining and military bad'. And maybe there are a few exceptions.

If someone came to that conclusion about the US you'd assume they had an axe to grind against America. There is more to American film than Avatar, there is horror, comedy, superheroes, romance, oscarbait... There is more to American culture than one Hollywood film, as we all know because America projects their entertainment all around the world. Plus a huge number of non-Americans speak English.

China doesn't project its culture all around the world, much of it is never translated (especially smaller, niche products). So you see a bunch of slop like Honour of Kings (Chinese DOTA) and some gems and think 'oh it's mostly slop with some exceptions' because you never see the niche products in the first place. They're not vomited out at you by a gigantic global media system. You don't look for them and they might not be in English (or have a lame sounding name like Honour of Kings). You get the equivalent of Chinese Avatar and Call of Duty, never see Chinese Homestuck or Worm or Factorio. And you hear about some Chinese gems but never see a gem in your own preferred areas.

We live in one of two worlds:

  1. The Secret Service was genuinely trying to protect Trump and were so clownishly incompetent that people in the crowd were warning them about a guy with a gun going up onto the roof but still let him take his shots. Men With Guns are supposed to be their forte, this is the one thing they're not supposed to let happen. Why wasn't there a drone or something providing overwatch? How hard can it be?

  2. The Secret Service/Deep State was trying to kill Trump and chose some MKUltra victim who wasn't a good shot, as opposed to something like a drone or a precision mortar strike which would at least be reasonable for them to heroically fail to intercept. Intercepting drones is hard.

Either way they don't come off as very capable.

Quite right, the infamous Salo Thread on HIV has extracts from a book where certain gays compared closing the bathhouses they were using to have lights-out orgies to gas chambers.

We can never criticize the genre-unawareness of zombie movie protagonists when stuff like this happened in real life:

Many members from the gay community were at that meeting. Bobbi Campbell, who was already infected with AIDS, was standing at the back. I remember at least three members of the gay community, nude, just with towels around them, holding signs that said, "Today the baths; tomorrow the ovens." They meant that, if we let you close the baths on us, next thing you'll quarantine us, then we'll be in jail, then you'll destroy us, like a Hitler. It was very, very extreme.

Unapologetic whataboutism is the best kind. It's no good when people say 'I decided the subject of discussion will be something that paints me in a good light and you in a bad light. No it's actually a fallacy if you try and do the reverse'. The rhetorical tool of whataboutism favours those with the bigger megaphone, those with agenda-setting power.