RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
Wow, this is genuinely brave, independent thought from a US presidential candidate! Rapprochement with Russia, strategic clarity on Taiwan, actual realism in foreign policy... He's clearly read some Mearsheimer or Ebbridge, he understands the jargon.
Yet the power he faces is so overwhelming. Recall how he got bodied by the Israel lobby for heresy, like not providing Israel with billions of dollars of military aid. This will make a lot of people very angry. Better to keep this kind of plan hidden, like Nixon did. But Vivek clearly needs to grab attention, it's an unenviable position to be in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
What kind of liberties do you have in America?
Seriously! The Christian baker does not have a choice, he MUST bake the cake for the homosexual couple, regardless of what he thinks or wants to do. Go near an airport - oh that's a liberty-free zone. Privacy? Not if the NSA has anything to say about it. Don't have the right demographics in your company? Civil rights violation (and a big payout if too many of the right demographics fail your test). Disliked by the government? Get ready to be de-banked.
Be a world-renowned researcher and have consensual sex with someone in the workplace? That's it for your career, the moment she decides it wasn't appropriate: https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher
Stupid, violent criminals get free housing on probation and then a $100,000/year prison cell after they murder productive members of society: https://www.karlstack.com/p/his-name-was-seth-smith?s=w
Under the latest innovation of US 'civil liberties' the parole searches that caught the killer would now be illegal.
And of course drug dealers are at perfect liberty to go around wrecking people's lives with impunity to the state, turning urban centres into massive shitholes?
I don't see how getting rid of drug dealers has anything to do with policing dissent (which we know the US already does a great deal of, thanks to the Twitter papers). It's pure, textbook anarcho-tyranny. The way the US constitution is implemented in practice today works primarily to protect and patronize the scummiest and most worthless oxygen-thieves, at the expense of ordinary (and especially productive) members of society.
And society does affect you. If you're paying taxes, some of it will go towards the costs of overdoses and drug crime, social, economic, medical, political. If you're enjoying public services, they'd be better if the US didn't have this problem. If you enjoy the fruits of industry and labour, you'd be better off if those people were working jobs as opposed to doubled over in a ditch.
It's possible that one single Jew- Fritz Haber- saved more lives with one single invention, than the sum of all lives lost to every single "bad Jew" on the planet.
Ah yes but somebody would've figured out synthesizing nitrogen eventually. If it wasn't Haber, it would've been the next-best, next-luckiest chemist. As guano prices rise, more money and brainpower is brought to bear on the problem. Someone was always going to figure out quantum mechanics, eventually. In a world without Jews, people might've figured out nuclear weapons somewhat slower but it would still have been achieved. Likewise with polio vaccines.
Politics and culture is vastly more important than science since culture and politics are one-shot things. If you lock in feminism to the Japanese constitution and the birthrate plummets, never to recover, then that's brainpower that is forever lost, it cannot be rediscovered. If you (Trotsky, Zinoviev and the rest of the gang) impose a horrendously bad form of government on a huge swathe of Eurasia (then get overthrown by Stalin and Beria who do their best to match and exceed in terms of brutality and waste), then that can never be undone. Let's not forget galaxy-brain Von Neumann's plea to immediately wage nuclear war against the Soviet Union and kill tens of millions more. If he'd been listened to, if people had trusted his game theory over their own common sense... Well someone else can invent computer architecture - nobody can bring the dead back to life.
Over the last few years, how many people weren't born because of Ehrlich and co's overpopulation meme? How much wealth has been squandered? Nobody can be sure but the amount of brainpower we lost to communism and bad politics (which is admittedly multi-causal but heavily influenced by ideas promulgated by Jews) is immense. My bet is that it outweighs Jewish contributions to science by far.
It seems particularly insane to me in the present moment for any White identitarians to dare to make themselves seem like a threat to Jews, when so many Jews are playing crucial roles in AI development. There are an almost infinite number of ways in which unnecessary enmity could turn out horribly for White anti-Semites during this phase of history!
Good point. But the key thing hinges upon the necessity of the enmity. If you have a neutral, then you should not offend them unless necessary, especially if they're powerful. But if there's an enemy on the verge of attaining total power over the world? If protesting at the sinister entrenchment of political bias in GPT, for example, is making a threat, so be it. It's rather similar to the adage 'When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression'.
Likewise, brainpower is needed in a conflict with China. But there are other options - we could abandon our crusade to impose LGBT rights and liberal democracy upon Beijing. Acknowledging China as a legitimate non-democracy would have soothed much of the problems. Or we could've been more disciplined earlier on! Goldman Sachs and co could have not blindly sought profits from the Chinese market... A less Open Society would not have brought in Chinese students and trained them in advanced technology, so they could then leak IP back to China. A West that had a genuinely nationalist policy would not have let its industrial base be carved out and send to Shanghai.
There's a combination of high intelligence and insufficiently high wisdom that is very dangerous. It can make money and innovation - but also bad money and bad innovations like coin-clipping or communism, Middle East regime change, pre-emptive nuclear war, pumping sterilization drugs into the water supply as Ehrlich proposed. Better to match moderate wisdom and intelligence, advance swiftly but not recklessly embrace radical ideas.
Even so, I respect the novelty and refreshing point of view of your argument. But don't you think that it's a very unlikely ideology to work? I've spent a lot of time reading and never come across anything like what you say. People more naturally think in terms of 'threat -> enemy -> weaken/destroy' than 'threat -> cooperate -> ally'. Why else are there wars in the world?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
In addition, Jewish political donations today are considerable and tend towards socially liberal or pro-Israel causes. This is in addition to their massive structural influence throughout media and the world economy.
See my comment ages ago: https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context
Who were the biggest individual political donors to Biden in 2020? Mr Sussman, Mr Simons, Ms Simon make up the top 3. All three are Jewish (Simons is the multi-billionaire founder of Renaissance capital, Sussman founded another finance company and and Simon is a real estate heiress).
Other notable spenders in the election were Bloomberg and Steyer, who ran failed electoral campaigns of their own. Steyer is half-Jewish. Bloomberg is Jewish. On the Republican side we have 'kingmaker' Sheldon Adelson, who was the largest Trump donor in 2016 and probably 2020. Jewish. We've got Uihlein, Griffin, Mellon, Ricketts & Eyechaner non-Jewish. Dustin Moskovitz, Jewish and pro-Democratic. Paul Singer, Jewish (he supported Republicans but also tried to get them to support LGBT). And then there's Soros whose exact donation figures are hard to discern due to it mostly being dodgy websites that discuss it, though probably very large if not the highest of all. Zuckerberg provided hundreds of millions for election offices, which is vaguely political. I can't believe it doesn't buy influence, especially in conditions where the format and methods used were in a state of flux due to COVID.
I observe a general trend where extremely rich Jews support Democrats and LGBT - their fortunes mostly from finance or tech. There's Adelson who's on the other side of course (Adelson was most interested in union-busting, marijuana prohibition and pro-Israel action). In contrast, we have gentiles who usually support Republicans and are fairly right-wing. This is from reading their wikipedia blurbs. Of the twelve 2020 megadonors CNN described as 'white', 7 are Jewish. 6.5 depending on how you class Steyer.
There's also such a thing as the 'Adelson primary'! Basically the top Republican candidates compete to see who can be more pro-Israel in foreign policy so Adelson will give them tens of millions of dollars. It's pretty repulsive, even though it looks legal. With stuff like this going on in broad daylight, who needs Scott's Dark Money? The prospect of offending Adelson by some incredibly minor slight gets these high-and-mighty Republicans to bow and scrape.
The behind-the-scenes wooing of the Adelsons has been underway for months — a graphic testament to the outside influence that one or two fabulously wealthy donors can have on the presidential race. According to an account first reported by National Review, Jeb Bush initially fell out of Sheldon Adelson’s favor after one of his foreign policy advisers, former Secretary of State James Baker, spoke at an event sponsored by J Street, an American Jewish “pro-peace” group that supports Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. The appearance prompted the casino magnate to send word that the move cost the former Florida governor “a lot of money,” while associates of Adelson were quoted as saying that Bush was “dead to him.”
Bush scrambled to make amends. One top GOP donor who is close to the Adelsons told Yahoo News that he quickly got a phone call from Bush distancing himself from Baker. Bush “told me that he [Baker] was just on a list and that he’s never called him for any advice,” said the donor, who, like most others interviewed for this story, asked not to be identified publicly. The donor, at Bush’s request, then passed this along to Adelson. It was “helpful,” the donor said, in mollifying Adelson.
And consider people like Pompeo (then US secretary of state) and their tendancy to go on weird tangents about Israel. It's likely that they're selected for high office precisely because they love Israel (or will at least say and act like they do), by politicians who want to look like they love Israel. How else would you get a Secretary of State who says things like this?
"There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."
Or Nancy Pelosi:
"If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are"
Their political prospects are surely linked to how pro-Israeli they are, this is the language of sucking up to the boss.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
First of all, support for Israel is certainly a topic of foreign policy worthy of discussion and debate, but it is not de facto "establishment of religion." Israel and Judaism may be closely coupled, but the U.S. has vested interests in Israel that go far beyond an affection for Jews. We aren't supporting Israel to support Judaism, any more than we are supporting Egypt to support Islam.
America is supporting Egypt to support Israel!
It's pretty clear. As soon as Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel they got a flood of US aid. They got $5.9 billion in US aid in 1979, when the treaty was signed, up from about $1 billion in 1975 when they were signing disengagement treaties over the Sinai. Before, in 1974 they were getting $70 million. When Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, they got $700 million in debt relief from the US and about half a billion in annual aid since, 10x what it was before.
The fact of the matter is that there are enormously wealthy and powerful Jewish billionaires and lobby groups who generously donate to candidates and encourage them to be pro-Israeli. Adelson on the Republican side for example. He gave Trump at least a hundred million dollars, possibly more. Besides funding pro-Israel political candidates, he funds Jewish-Israeli institutes at universities to improve its image and discourse power there.
one of the key goals of Adelson and other advocates of the Jewish center is to moderate the Arab presence at the university." The program's first director, Yossi Shain (who also heads the Hartog School of Government at Tel Aviv University), said it was important to set up such a program at Georgetown "because it's a Jesuit school, because it's in Washington, because it's in the foreign service school."
Besides Adelson (and many other billionaires funding other pro-Israeli candidates who I've left out for conciseness), there's AIPAC which is tremendously powerful.
Former Congressman Mervyn Dymally (D-CA) once called AIPAC "without question the most effective lobby in Congress," and the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lee Hamilton, who served in Congress for thirty-four years, said in 1991, "There's no lobby group that matches it . . . They're in a class by themselves
And there are many other Jewish slavishly pro-Israel groups.
Albert Chernin, the executive director of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC, later renamed the Jewish Council for Public Affairs), expressed this perspective in 1978 when he said that our "first priority is Israel, of course, reflecting the complete identity of views of the American Jewish leadership with the concerns of the rank and file." The historian Jack Wertheimer terms this comment a "stunning admission that political efforts to shore up Israel superseded all other concerns of Jewish community relations organizations in the United States."
as Hyman Bookbinder, a high-ranking official of the American Jewish Committee, once admitted, "Unless something is terribly pressing, really critical or fundamental, you parrot Israel's line in order to retain American support. As American Jews, we don't go around saying Israel is wrong about its policies.
US support for Israel is primarily motivated by this wealthy and influential band of lobby groups and billionaires, who are predominantly made up of Jews supporting their coethnics/religious brethren. There are also Christian Zionists and more dovish Jewish groups but they are in the minority.
Israel gets away with so much - they bomb/invade their neighbors, sell US technology to China, spy flagrantly on the US, supply misleading intelligence about the Iraqi nuclear program, bomb a US ship. They never join in US wars and yet get the most aid, despite being a rich country. The US suffers hundreds of billions in economic damage due to the Arab oil embargo - because they resupply Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Israel delegitimizes the non-proliferation treaty, they motivate Iranian nuclearization. They're a massive strategic deadweight. Only the lobbying can explain such ongoing US support.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
I am once again asking why any Russian leader would believe the Americans might sacrifice Washington and New York for Kiev. If you read the literature the French seriously doubted whether the US would sacrifice New York for Paris during the Cold War, let alone Kiev. That's why they have a nuclear arsenal. Paris >>>>>> Kiev.
Why do you think the US would decide to commit national suicide over Ukraine? It is irrational to make such a bluff. It wouldn't be believed. That's why the US didn't even make it.
If they did, why wouldn't the US say this to the world? If you genuinely think that the US would do this, why wouldn't they say 'if you nuke Kiev we will nuke you'? What kind of madman would decide to sacrifice his country to defend another and not even make a single clear, public warning that he'd do such a thing?
I'll tell you what's actually happening. The US makes vague threats of 'catastrophic consequences' if Russia uses nuclear weapons and says 'oh we told them privately'. That means they're not willing to use nuclear weapons, as is immediately obvious - Ukraine is not under the US nuclear umbrella. You don't put someone under a nuclear umbrella and then not tell anyone about it. That defeats the whole point.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
Two sequences of events
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US officials have long hated this pipeline and publicly threatened to terminate it, regardless of what Germany wishes
-
US military forces stage a mine-clearing exercise off Bornholm island, testing their snazzy new drones and technologies. They leave a couple of mines or smart torpedoes behind. If they're somehow discovered, it's an accident from the exercises. These are now a method they can use if Germany starts getting antsy about waging proxy war against their energy supplier or if Russia moves more aggressively.
-
Russia commences partial mobilization, stages referendums on parts of Ukraine joining Russia so it can creep its nuclear umbrella forward into Ukraine
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US blows up the pipeline in response, securing profits for its energy exporters, tying Germany's hands and hurting Russian diplomacy in Europe by removing leverage
Alternately
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Russia spends billions of dollars building a pipeline to Germany so it can make a great deal of money selling gas
-
Russian naval forces, not known for their excellence, lay explosives in their own pipeline (which they control the flow of gas to and could turn on or off at any time)
-
Russian forces blow up their own pipeline to show they can blow up other people's pipelines, like the Norwegian-Poland pipeline that finished just today, which they don't control, didn't pay for and actively harms their interests!
Surely you see that the former approach makes more sense than the latter!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.
Naive state interventions aren't great either, regulation is much of the problem. Imagine a big state-owned corporation with the economies of scale and long-term planning to build housing en masse, build whole new cities. No stakeholder engagement, no endless procedural crap, no quotas for pregnant women or criminals, no building substandard housing and then shutting down the company when the cracks show to rinse and repeat later. No expensive consultants who charge by the hour running rings around bureaucrats who have no idea what they're doing, do everything in-house.
State-owned corporations are unfairly maligned by mainstream economics, they do plenty of excellent work. Nobody in the private sector, nobody on the planet can challenge China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Housing is simple, easy to build just like commercial shipping. Build in a factory, assemble on site. It's a perfect sector for a huge state-backed capital investment. Plus government has natural abilities regarding land, it's a match made in heaven. All that's needed is rigour and discipline.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
How hard is it to keep up military readiness even on a religious holiday? This does not happen to proper armies, they don't lower their guard in predictable annual patterns.
The Israelis have been fighting this war in frankly amateurish ways. They keep clustering up in ways that would get them massacred on a real battlefield in Ukraine - fortunately for them their opponents don't have much in the way of artillery or heavy equipment. Israeli urban combat performance has been pretty poor, they've failed to take and hold ground. They go on these glorified chevauchees into Gaza and Hamas just sweeps back in once they leave. There doesn't seem to be any real plan for victory, only (impressive) tactical ploys like the pager trick.
If the US weren't constantly bailing them out with weapons shipments, diplomatic and air cover they would be in a very unpleasant position.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Israel's the worst ally the US could possibly have, their competence is irrelevant.
Consider the invasion of Iraq. You might naively think that Israel would be really useful, sending troops to help the Coalition in their mutual goal of destroying Saddam Hussein's regime? No, of course not. They didn't lift a finger to help the US. Of course they sent some false intelligence to suggest Iraq actually had nuclear weapons, of course they flexed their influence to encourage the invasion. They just didn't do any fighting.
Why? Because the Arabs hate Israel and it would've let Saddam reframe the war as yet another Arab-Israel war. He tried doing that in 1991 by throwing some Scuds at Israel. Israel's presence would've made things worse for America.
There's no convincing reason to think that Israel would help against Iran, based on past practice. If they did help it would probably be net-negative in creating more opponents for US forces. Dumping Israel would make it much easier to work with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey, Egypt...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
hollowed out by an institutional culture of lying. Of course, China is probably in a similar state,
Chinese ships don't accidentally crash into civilian shipping, nor do their light carriers burn down in port, nor is their fleet actually shrinking year-on-year. When it comes to quality and naval professionalism, China seems to be well ahead of the US navy.
As for an institutional culture of lying... the Afghanistan War? The defeat against the Taliban with about 1/100th the funding of the US/NATO force, supported by no foreign power at all? Staying on ten years despite it being clear that the US was not going to achieve its objectives, while the Taliban was? Constantly lying to the public and saying things were going fine? Junior officers being ignored when they pointed out the entire thing was a massive farce with zero chance of success, that the 'allies' they were trying to train were drug addicts and pedophiles?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Entertainment? So they're integral to directing and writing the biggest hits in cinema, writing the best selling novels, making computer games? The biggest twitch streamers and youtubers are black?
The places blacks do well are in highly centralized domains like music, acting or sports, not making any kind of sophisticated content.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
Indeed, there's a schism over LGBT between the declining progressive English Anglican Church and its more hardline African branches which now far outnumber the home source: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/church-of-england-crack-up/
“All the evangelical denominations are growing, except for the Brethren,” he writes. “By contrast, all the mixed denominations are declining, with the liberal ones declining the most.
Pretty sad that there's no future for these religions in the countries in which they were born! 1% of UK's 18-24 year olds were Anglican, apparently.
Since I assume most members of this forum are atheists, most would not look any deeper into the motivations or presentation of this ad campaign with any closer analysis than they would any other form of Christian evangelism.
On the contrary, I find the progressive arguments for Christianity pretty repulsive. It's just signalling 'enemy, enemy, enemy'. I'm with AOC on it making fascism look benign, the woke are more correct than the mainstream on this at least.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
The idea is that Russia has an actual claim on parts of the country. It used to effectively be part of Russia. Khrushchev transferred Crimea in the 50s to the Ukrainian SSR for example. There were and are many Russian-speakers in the eastern provinces of the country who were unhappy that their language and autonomy was being suppressed by the government in Kiev. That's why some broke away and started fighting in 2014. The country as a whole is full of Russian speakers.
Because you know, if I wasn’t no kind of expert, if I didn’t know nothing about snakes, I might just of said: the Ukraine was part of the USSR when I was a kid and the USSR is Russia. Ukraine is basically Russia the way Canada is basically America. America is related to the two of them basically the way China is related to America and Canada.
That's what he's implying here, albeit very unclearly and in such a way as it sounds like he's saying the opposite. If you have actual claims on the country in question, then you have a reason to invade. If the country is populated by your co-ethnics who are being mistreated, then you have a reason to invade. If there are enemy powers egging on said country, then you also have a security threat.
The US does not have claims on Moldova and Georgia in the same way that Russia does. There are not actually large American minorities in Moldova and Georgia, the latter of which came under attack (hence the 2008 war). Note that the account you'll see on wikipedia today and the account of the independent EU-commissioned report written in 2009 are very different!
Can anyone explain how US security is threatened by Russia invading Georgia? It's not, as is revealed by a simple glance at a map.
Not a "regime change" type invasion, a la USA vs. Iraq '03, not a "peacekeeping" invasion. A "Russia wants some of the land currently controlled by Ukraine to be controlled by Russia instead" invasion. A good, old-fashioned war of conquest for resources. The kind of war that, since 1945, the industrialized West (or "first world") has tried very hard to make sure nobody is allowed to wage, especially not in Europe.
If you actually have claims on the land and people in question, then you're fine to move in and conquer the area. The land in question was owned by Russia/USSR 35 years ago and it's peopled by Russians today - thus Russia has a claim to it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
Well I did say 'in part'... There are lots of other poisons getting into Western culture and causing different harms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
There's actually a rather interesting Yudkowsky essay in an obscure part of the Sequences, where he unintentially obliterates trans ideology IMO. It's not enough even to change the chromosomes, hips, skin, face and so on...
You'd have to rewire the parts of the brain that do sexual pleasure so you're not hooking up a vagina to the penis-pleasure part of the brain. There'd probably still be some male part of you that wants to penetrate women, you'd have to change that too. There are whole bits of the Y chromosome that aren't found in the X chromosome, so you'd have to take those out. What does taking out parts of your chromosome mean for the brain circuitry relying on them?
What would happen if you had a male-type brain hooked up to a female body? Something bad, probably. I believe male brains have slightly bigger volume, so you've got some practical engineering issues too (though studies differ on this). And how do you design the intermediate stages of transferring the male brain to a female brain (the equivalent of neuron-by-neuron upload)?
What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life's memories distant and alien things? How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?
Sounds complicated, doesn't it? It seems that to transform a male brain into someone who can be a real female, we can't just rewrite you as a female brain. That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person. Instead we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with a novel, non-ancestral architecture that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes the male brainware that laid them down.
You certainly wouldn't have the experience of being a woman either, going through high school and gossiping with the girls or other female experiences I don't know about because I'm not a woman. It's an intimidatingly vast problem. One day we might have Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], female body (Made in China), male mind, remastered memories, phase three psychotherapeutics. And yet we might still have TERFs saying 'if you weren't born a woman, you aren't a woman, simple as. No matter how many factory-made memories you buy, you don't have our authentic female experiences.'
I'd rather we took up vast bodies of steel and inhuman power, let's leave all this behind.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Anyone else reading that excerpt and thinking 'Based'? Wouldn't it be excellent to carve out a new artificial world, make better animals and plants according to one's wishes? Live as long as one likes without regard for age?
Not the specifics of perfectly cleaning the world, that could take many angles. One might make a jungle of talking animals, or an endless lived-in leafy suburbia or a Willy Wonka wonderland or all of those things simulated within a ball of computronium. But isn't that the logical endpoint of ever increasing mastery and control of the world? What's the alternative, stasis?
I can sense that many people don't like this vision but isn't this what we're doing, irregardless of objections? Unless you think 'no people mustn't live forever' or 'we mustn't have children' or 'technological advancement must stop' then you endorse indefinite growth in numbers and in power of worldshaping and knowledge ("All stable processes we shall predict. All unstable processes we shall control"), so eventually something like this will happen.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
Walking is better in most circumstances:
Much cheaper.
Also provides exercise. You can run if you want more.
Lets you think and go on autopilot, making up for lost speed.
Syncs with other forms of transport well, no restrictions on taking a non-existent bike with you.
Safer.
Can easily head into a shop without having to tie up a bike.
Can easily navigate stairs and get more direct routes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
Just walk? You can also use a bus, which is complicated if you're bringing a bike.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
There are of course many bigger problems than electric bikes or cyclists in the world or even in New York (crazy homeless for instance). Nevertheless, cycling shouldn't be needed in a rich country. Rich countries should have well-functioning public transport in urban centres which is apparently missing in America.
If you want to go somewhere, drive or use public transport. This is fast and you can use the travel time to read or whatever if you're not driving.
If you want to wander around, or exercise, walk. You can mull things over in your head without needing to be in a high state of alertness.
In between is not a good place to be as people point out downthread. It causes accidents due to there being no good infrastructure for it. And there's no good infrastructure for it because it fundamentally doesn't make any sense, there's no need for this medium speed, low-safety, exhausting means of transport.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Estonia tried to detain vessel from Russia's shadow fleeet, did not succeed
Why is it that these very small and weak countries in the Baltic are so eager to go all in on 'we hate Russia' and make incidents? Estonia does not have any combat aircraft whatsoever. Their military is roughly equivalent to the Oklahomah national guard, who do actually have some aircraft. This is not really a good position to be trying to seize Russian ships. Seizing other people's ships is cringeworthy behaviour whether it's the Houthis, Estonia or America but Estonia's by far the weakest player.
'Scream hysterically and wave a tiny stick' doesn't seem like a great strategy, I suppose that it's popular domestically.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Yes I agree, much of US GDP is nonsense, it's like an inverted pyramid with the manufacturing base too small and services too large. There are of course real services like R&D but there are also more or less fake services, HR training sessions and legal compliance, managing tax... There's real education and fake education, those schools in America where nobody can perform to grade level, useless or negative-value degrees...
Just because money is changing hands, it doesn't follow that it's a good thing. Fentanyl raises the GDP after all. Metrics of production should be prioritized over financial flows.
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.
There was no World War in the 1970s, no Great Depression. It was a time of peace and prosperity and yet fertility went to replacement and then below.
How hard is it to understand this? It's RIGHT THERE in a clear academic consensus, all these sources pointing out that female empowerment and education reduces fertility, how they observe this all over the world. There are all these charts showing what can be easily deduced from common sense - that if women are joining the workforce and higher education en masse they're having fewer children. And yet people still try to confuse this blindingly simple issue. The more empowered women are, the more they choose to do other things than having children. Broadening one's view from the sexual revolution (which neatly arrives right as the post-war baby boom ends), we can look at the whole 20th century. You have female enfranchisement happening all across the West and fertility declining. Countries without female empowerment like pre-1945 Japan lack this trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/
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