RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
stronger than ever against all other currencies
All currencies except Bitcoin and gold. Non-fiat ways of storing wealth are all doing very well compared to the dollar. Why are equities priced so highly? Why are houses so expensive? Because the real value of each dollar is shrinking, purchasing power is shrinking.
This may come as a surprise to the 'monetary policy' community but things are supposed to get cheaper, not more expensive. New technology should improve production processes. TVs have gotten cheaper, as have computers. Even if technology is mature like burgers, it should stay roughly the same price, ceteris paribus. But a great many things have rapidly risen in price due to money-printing, which has caused considerable alarm amongst policymakers along with economic stress.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
Solidly Conservative, not solidly conservative. The Conservative Party has enthusiastically advanced mass migration along with the Labour Party, just like the Democratic and non-Maga Republican party, or the Australian Labour Party and the Australian Liberal/National Party.
If you define conservatism as Judeo-Christian values, mass migration, globalization, regime change abroad and so on... then sure, US Jews, British Jews are conservative. George Soros is nearly a conservative, albeit insufficiently supportive of police and dangerously opposed to Israel. If you define conservatism differently, conserving national identity and demographics, conserving national industries, conserving traditional values... then they're absolutely not conservative.
There's a distinction between traditional values and Judeo-Christian values: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian_ethics
The latter is a kind of Orwell/FDR/Lyndon Johnson idea of innate human equality and social democracy pressed into service for the ideological struggle of WW2. The former is far older, stricter and embraces distinctions. Consider the 30 year old single mother on a dating app looking for a real man to support her - Judeo-Christian values would say something like 'man up, we're all equal in God, love your neighbour's children as yourself' whereas traditional values would probably scold you for being on Tinder in the first place and exclude the woman from polite society.
Doesn't Pope Francis routinely attack racism and call for more tolerance for refugees? 4/9 American refugee settlement NGOs are Christian, albeit heavily govt-supported: https://cis.org/Rush/Private-Refugee-Resettlement-Agencies-Mostly-Funded-Government#uscri
Most Christian leaders describe racism as sinful. In the past things were different, yet it looks like Christianity as a whole is committed to antiracism and multiculturalism in the present-day.
I'm more interested in who actually follows or cares about what Richard 'riding with Biden' Spencer says? In 2024?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Quite right. As time passes, cash will diminish. It's more convenient to swipe a card or scan a QR code.
Either we end up using privately run cryptocurrencies or state-run central bank digital currencies. Right now there are some issues with transaction costs, scams and volatility on the crypto front.
However, if we end up using CBDCs, human freedom is caput. CBDCs allow total financial surveillance and total financial suppression. It goes beyond debanking, you could make people impossible to transact with. This is the key technology that allows for totalitarian social credit schemes, the seeds of which we see in China. CBDCs are seductive to governments and central banks - taxes become impossible to evade! Monetary policy can be implemented hour by hour! Criminal assets are easy to seize, money-laundering is impossible. But they also enable the mainstreaming of the debanking tactics we've seen with Paypal and high-profile wrongthinkers. After cash people will probably stop thinking of money as something concrete and physical, it becomes an abstract, malleable concept. Your UBI money can only be spent on the right goods, made by the right people. Maybe the climate means you can't buy more than a certain amount of real meat each week, perhaps you can't fly more than what's strictly necessary for your work. Your stimulus money has to be spent in 30 days before it disappears. Billy might pay different prices on the same good to Aisha or Joe. Your politics are dangerous and unacceptable? Good luck getting a website, accepting donations or doing anything at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier
How would anyone know? We'd be relying on nutritionists. They've succeeded in confusing and/or deceiving the public for decades. Do eggs cause cancer? Reduce cancer? What fats are good or bad? Fat or sugar? The nutritionist consensus keeps changing, they're not doing real science.
I don't usually make traditionalist arguments but we should return to time-tested, traditional diets. Bread, cheese, milk, olive oil, fruit, fish, vegetables, meat, eggs... If it's been around for centuries, that in itself is a good argument for it. The meat/milk loving Mongols demolished grain-fed Chinese armies, meat and animal products have been historically valued despite their expense. Alas, we probably can't ban alcohol and tobacco. Alas, importing Japanese style intensive fat-shaming is unlikely.
But it is possible to prevent the development of synthetic meat. We can rely on industrial agriculture to cut corners and manipulate research to support their profits. That's how we got the food pyramid and a mountain of HFCS, breakfast cereals and so on. We should assume that they'll use this technology in an antisocial way. Drug dealers do the same thing - make the most addictive products at the lowest prices, they prioritize short-term profits over the long-term health of their customers and society. We should strictly regulate drugs and food for that reason. Synthetic meat should only be developed carefully, after we have a really sound understanding of how the body works, after biological immortality IMO.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
Top of her class. Survivor of multiple suicide attempts, because she didn't take biology lessons past tenth grade, and Google wisely doesn't return results for "painless ways to commit suicide". Asked me on the first date how much paracetamol it takes to off oneself, for purely academic reasons.
Apparently paracetamol overdose blows up your liver in a painful and prolonged way, (if quora is to be believed). Seriously though, how hard is it to kill yourself painlessly? Helium's the way to go, is it not? I suppose that's not something you consider with normal rationality.
It strikes me that both women and the US government are very bad at killing people, preferring poison and overly complicated, ineffective methods. In contrast, gas and guns just work.
I don't think we can separate the bad writing from broader quality issues. Take Battlefield 2042 for instance - there was no scoreboard in a team shooter. It was buggy and broken on release. Halo Infinite, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077 itself (though they later improved it), Overwatch 2, Starfield... These are major titles from formerly well-respected publishers yet many had fewer features than their predecessors, released in a shocking state or were heavily and aggressively monetized.
Halo Infinite on release was lacking custom games, no automatic rejoin, had only 10 maps (to Halo 2's 12), no region selection, no campaign co-op, no anti-cheat... I haven't played it, just watched a video ripping into it. The gameplay was apparently good but everything else wasn't: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y-VnT1QNWPg
It's not that Boeing's issues are localized solely to the bolt-screwer-in workers, there are problems in upper management and operations. Likewise in games, it's not just writing but broader issues across companies. Small, talented and motivated teams can and do make great games! Noita, Dyson Sphere Program, Grim Dawn, Ultrakill... Hey, Slay the Princess has a great story and that was 2 people! It's the big players that have been suffering. They are supposed to have the resources, time and experience to make great games yet often seem to fail. Everything about Starfield was bad AFAIK - story, graphics, gameplay, everything.
Bad games and bad writing are like peas in a pod. Go have a look at Hyenas, how everyone was laughing at such a stupid, ugly, cringeworthy concept that apparently cost Creative Assembly/Sega a hundred million. Bad designers had a bad idea and executed it poorly - failure across the board.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
Imperial Germany suffered enormously before capitulating. In the winter of 1916-1917 about half a million people starved to death in the 'Turnip Winter' so-named because that's all they had to eat. The food distribution system broke down completely. By 1918 they were in a famine. Children were running around breaking into warehouses trying to get food and dying in the tens of thousands. This is one of the reasons the Nazis were so fixated on securing agricultural land later on.
In tsarist Russia "Working-class women in St. Petersburg reportedly spent about forty hours a week in food lines, begging, turning to prostitution or crime, tearing down wooden fences to keep stoves heated for warmth, and continued to resent the rich."
It takes a lot of pain to bring down a country in a major conventional war. There's a certain level of stubbornness and sunk-cost that seeps in after serious blood has been spilled and national pride is on the line. Attitudes harden. Ukraine has not experienced anything like the mass suffering of a world war. There is no mass starvation in Ukraine, no massive inflation (7% is not great but it's not 90%), no social breakdown. Lessons have been learnt since the world wars and Ukraine enjoys the support of wealthy backers.
Nevertheless there are signs of serious problems - the videos of men being forcibly dragged into vehicles by recruiters, desertion and so on. What is that if not ambivalence/non-cooperation? States can do a lot with ambivalent but not-yet-rebellious people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
The Tories are a party of mass immigration, that's what their policies have achieved in the real world. They say stuff like 'we'll be tough on immigration' but they don't actually do it, they flail around paying Rwanda and achieving nothing. Different policies but similar results for the Australian centre-right - Abbott successfully stopped illegal immigration but kept legal immigration very high.
In the UK neither illegal nor legal immigration are combatted. In Australia Labour adopted Coalition border policies, so there's no distinguishing difference there. So on immigration both parties are roughly equivalent to their Labour equivalents. AFD is actually different.
Labour generally promises young people some kind of patronage in uni education, welfare and so on. The centre-right tend to support the old in housing and welfare. Furthermore, young people tend to revile the centre-right parties, it was considered cringeworthy to vote for Scott Morrison (former centre-right PM) in Australia. Labour and Greens parties are more socially progressive and young people care about climate change.
Germany, Sweden and continental countries are also much whiter and more homogenous than Australia, the UK or especially America. Also the German Greens have tarred themselves with the horrendous performance of the traffic-light coalition and their economically damaging policies. British and Australian Greens haven't had much chance to do real damage.
The Australian equivalent to AFD is One Nation, which is much more boomer-skewed (and pretty irrelevant politically). It's run by a woman called Pauline Hanson who's nearly 70 years old. They appeal most to rural white Queenslanders, the whitest parts of the whitest state in the country. Same in Britain, UKIP targeted old rural whites because there were more of them. AFD leaders are much younger, in their 40s. They appeal most in East Germany, which is the whitest part of Germany.
I think right wing politics of the anti-immigration kind has a lot to do with whiteness. Western right-wing politics in general too, to a lesser extent. In the Anglosphere the whitest demographics tend to be the old, so anti-immigration rightist parties naturally evolve to target the old. In Europe there's a broader base of potential supporters and they can target the young, so they do.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
It's funny how the loud and obnoxious groypers got Fuentes back but all the more-sophisticated rightists have been petitioning to get Jared Taylor back on twitter, to no avail as yet. Maybe Musk is trying to weakman the far-right? Fuentes and Tate-tier figures aren't especially dangerous to anyone IMO, they have no political sway. You need to be working with adults, not children, you need a certain level of respectability. Tucker for instance is worth 10 Fuentes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
I believe women think they're safe in situations with many men, yet they say they're afraid of men when they're alone with just one man. Yet many men and 'society' generally is just a clump of single men. If men are bad alone why would they be good together?
It doesn't really matter, I'm overthinking and over-rationalizing this. Realistically there are fundamental differences in the purpose of language and epistemology going on here.
You can kind of see the differences here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cf34fy/wife_asks_husband_would_you_rather_our_13_year/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
The optics would just be terrible
This wouldn't stop Israel. The optics were terrible when they shoot children in the back but they do it anyway and clear it in court. There's no shortage of bad optics on either side.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning
Well they sure did shoot at them before the war: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session40/Documents/A_HRC_40_74_CRP2.pdf
Imagine you're Israeli. All your life you hear about suicide bombings, attacks, rockets, problems all coming from these dirty uncivilized Arabs who belong to a death cult that hates your religion and routinely sneak-attack on your religious holidays. You hate these people.
Imagine you're Palestinian. Israeli troops will knock down your door at night-time and search your apartment. You're not allowed to move freely, they cut power off, they steal your land like they've been stealing it for decades now. You spent your whole childhood punctuated by bombs, assassinations of peaceful protestors, dead family members, dead neighbours, arrests, torture... You hate these people.
This is a war of hatred. They hate eachother (as a collective). Not all of them hate eachother but enough do. We cannot model this war without understanding that there's intense hatred. Trying to model leadership or boots-on-the-ground as calculating, rational plotters is not going to yield good predictions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.
A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
There are distinctions between selective breeding/advanced animal husbandry and synthetic meat.
It's easier to mod a game than to make a new game from scratch.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
How does that work if they can't make rent? Are they getting kicked out? Are they fat?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
William Luther Pierce of Turner Diaries fame came up with Cosmotheism: Darwinism and German romanticism all wrapped with some early spiritual transhumanism and white supremacy. No slave morality whatsoever, he quotes Nietzsche, Wordsworth, Spengler, Shaw in support of the ethos.
There is only one reality, and it is the Whole -- the purposeful, selfcreating, self-evolving Cosmos, which has both material and spiritual aspects, inseparably conjoined. Thus, Creation and Creator, Cosmos and Theos, Whole and God, are but different names for the same reality. Man is part of the Whole, and his consciousness is one manifestation of a universal, immanent consciousness. Man's ordained or natural purpose is the same as the Creator's purpose, which is self-realization.
Man properly serves his ordained purpose by striving toward ever higher ever more conscious levels of existence, both biologically and spiritually. His ordained task is to advance, generation by generation, along the Creator's path of evolving selfconsciousness. In the past he advanced blindly, driven by the immanent urge toward self-realization, self-completion. Now we must guide his advancement.
It didn't catch on, it withered away when Pierce died. You need a certain kind of prophetic authority and a bit of luck to make new religions, failing that enormous amounts of money and manpower.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Eglin Air Force base was the most reddit-addicted city back in 2013. Narrative control is useful for any state, you want to promote certain causes and shout down opponents.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Electronic cash is basically the same thing as a CBDC, they just haven't added all the AI-enabled fine-grained control and monitoring yet. They can print and freeze money at will, it's just a hassle for them to do so.
Taxes are easy to evade all around the world because the administrative capacity and technical methods are poorly developed, especially in Russia. But they won't be poorly developed forever. China's social credit scheme is pretty benign at the moment, you just can't get certain train tickets if you're a scammer, have to put down deposits to rent an e-bicycle. But it won't stay that way forever, they're testing and developing it over time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
I don't hold any BTC, I only have alts. I was always vaguely worried about the 21 million cap for that reason, plus it's so high market cap that gains would diminished...
On the other hand, if things get bad, the miners will change the rules by consensus. Violating 21 million would make a lot of people very angry but there's no reason all parties can't be satisfied. We had this before in the block size wars. Miners decided they wanted to keep small block sizes with higher fees, thus bitcoin cash and BSV faded away into irrelevance. Bitcoin will persist in some form, in some fork.
If CBDCs take over, we enter the darkest timeline. What good is freedom of speech without the freedom to buy a website, pay for organizations?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Good points. India's fertility is anything but stable though. There's getting old before you get rich and then there's getting old before you're out of poverty. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=IN
I have no problem with Modi personally, running such a big country democratically is a big ask. US democracy is not exactly high performance governance, how is anyone supposed to manage 4x the population with a small fraction of the wealth?
IMO India needs to follow the standard industrial route out of poverty. Special economic zones, foreign investment, light industry -> heavy industry -> high-tech industry and then services. Doing this in a democracy is very difficult, as you point out. Getting the tax and judiciary right is easy for autocracies, hard for democracies. Plus there's an excessive focus on IT and software. Software is all well and good but what about hardware? What about making the solar panels? Without manufacturing there's no firm base for development, skipping from agricultural to service-economy has never been done AFAIK. Vietnam has been on the right path and is pulling ahead.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=IN-VN
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
Article prophesising and diagnosing doom on the Indian economy: https://time.com/6969626/india-modi-economy-election/
Some of it is really staggering - 10 million manufacturing jobs were lost even before Covid. Indian manufacturing employment halved in 5 years (up to 2021 but doesn't seem to have recovered that much, though output is rising). Even in output it's still quite low as a % of the economy, falling as a proportion the 2010s. Meanwhile there are 60 million extra farm workers: deurbanization and deindustrialization. India is at the bottom of the Global Hunger Index, below North Korea and above Afghanistan.
I note that the article author wrote a book on Modi despotism so can't be considered unbiased, yet he has a lot of pretty ominous links. Some of them are structured in a deceptive way - 'crude imports' being down 14% goes against the article's overall message of trade increasing, even if goods exports decreased. It's always good to read these kinds of articles with a sceptical eye, economics is so broad that you can paint all kinds of pictures. It looks like India is focusing very heavily on services rather than manufacturing, leaving it rather vulnerable to AI disruption, as self_made_human has predicted. Vietnam exports more manufactured goods, while India's overall exports are much higher.
There's also this fun website that graphs exports by type: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=104&queryLevel=location&product=undefined&year=2021&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined
India is ICT nation, the tech support stereotype. China and Vietnam do manufacturing. Russia and Australia dig things out of the ground. The US does services and manufacturing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
The only one I'm aware of is The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. It's quite interesting, the author got to interview Pierce for many hours at a time, I think he was around for the funeral. Pierce explains a fair bit about his time with Rockwell, about the trouble of forming organizations, selecting recruits, getting the right people... It includes the whole story of his life, his experience with conservatives, the books he wrote.
You can get the book physically or read it on Unz: https://www.unz.com/book/robert_s_griffin__the-fame-of-a-dead-mans-deeds/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Mossad's been gunning down Iranian researchers for ages - you are not proposing a new idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nuclear_scientists
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
The distance from Northern Ukraine to Moscow is significantly less than from the Baltics to Moscow, 460 km to 600 km which is relevant to a decapitation strike. Missile defence based in Ukraine would also complicate Russian nuclear strikes. They would have to defend thousands of kilometres of extra airspace in addition to the Belarus-St Petersburg area.
The Russian Black Sea Fleet is not known for its excellence, they aren't in a position to to lose bases to NATO warships. Given the interest British and US warships seem to have in the Black Sea, it's likely there'd be many AEGIS-equipped ships in Crimea or the Sea of Azov. This obviously limits Russian power-projection abilities, their ability to support Syria or other allies.
And what happens once Ukraine joins NATO? Everyone and their dog has been saying this will happen for years now.
"Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership," Blinken told reporters in Brussels.
You're not supposed to be able to join NATO with territorial disputes - yet NATO training and integration has continued through 2014, through 2022 and continues to this day despite this. Suppose they amend the 'no territorial disputes' clause or strategically ignore it like Blinken does to bring in Ukraine and Ukraine moved on Donbass in a counter-factual where Russia didn't invade. Then Russia would be forced to choose between losing Donbass or war with NATO.
Furthermore, it's a basic strategic principle that great powers don't want their neighbours to be members of hostile alliance groups. Everyone knows that Russia was extremely unhappy with the idea of Ukraine being in NATO, Burns's 'nyet means nyet' cable shows this. We can identify efforts to prevent this in Russian strategy - debt relief and energy subsidies pre-2014 and increasingly intense economic and military pressure since the Special Diplomatic Operation you don't want to call a coup.
I guess I am pretty short-termist: AI and a looming showdown in the Pacific may well decide the fate of the world soon. If everyone's pieces aren't developed soon, they might as well be taken off the board.
I just don't think Tate and Fuentes have such a big effect. Some groypers embarrassed some Turning Point USA event IIRC, that was Nick Fuente's claim to fame. But who are the key players, which are the most valuable pieces? Adults: policymakers, policy enforcers, officer corps, party cadres, elite businessmen, academics. They also have the power to beat down the youth, they can force you to put your pronouns on a badge or make you affirm your commitment to DEI. They can take your job prospects away if you support unapproved movements. Where is Tate right now? In jail. The way to achieve political change is to demoralize enemy elites and mobilize friendly elites, growing a power base, rewarding supporters with sinecures and power... Popular opinion is important but secondary to the key actors.
Furthermore, Tate and Fuentes aren't team players, they're bad pieces. Fuentes had this huge feud with BAP, I don't really know the details. That's not really productive from the point of view of the rightist world-spirit. Neither of them are prophet-tier activists like Muhammed, Hitler or even Trump. Trump's a deeply, deeply flawed prophet but he does have the power to rally armed men, he has serious pull with charisma alone.
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