RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
This is how we get hundred billion dollar black holes, massive financial crises, wars that go nowhere based on pure fantasy and defiance of reality, 20 years of barking up the wrong tree on Alzheimers research due to fraud...
I believe in regular punishment for regular incompetence but this was above and beyond anything normal. Just doing as you're told isn't good enough for critical infrastructure like this. Any normal person tests updates before releasing them. And in the case of egregious failures where the whole organization has gone badly off the rails, why should anyone trust that they'd do a proper post-mortem? Any investigation should be run by outsiders, that's the most basic step.
Furthermore, punishment enhances public trust that everyone is in it together. The leadership class enjoys prestige and great wealth, they should also accept great penalties if they make massive negligent errors.
So what happens when Elite Human Capital find that they need the consent and willing support of the masses - if say a war happens and they need to Defend Our Values in less hospitable places than Rotherham or Blackpool?
Who is going to fight for them and why? Are they going to offer loot like the armies of old? Are they going to appeal to Our Values? Are they going to appeal to the loyalty of newly imported foreigners - will they fight and die for their new country? Evidence suggests no, roughly as many British Muslims went off to fight for ISIS as joined the British Army.
Elite Human Capital is picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. The materiel superiority they rely upon has been greatly eroded, as shown by a series of failed wars against third rate powers in the Middle East and most recently the Houthis. China and Russia are on a whole other level, they will definitely require a massive effort to defeat. A massive effort requires people who are highly motivated and united with their government whether by nationalism or religion. Thanks to the sublime diplomatic manoeuvres of Elite Human Capital, we will probably have to face both Russia and China plus Iran and North Korea.
The GWOT was a tempest in a teacup compared to any war with China. Bush didn't draft civilians, didn't mobilize industry, he and his successors funded the whole thing with debt. One could calculate that going off to fight was relatively low-risk - you have all the equipment, training, fire support and medivac on your side. You go on patrols and come back to a nice base somewhere fortified. The other guy has an AK, maybe an RPG and some dodgy roadside bombs.
China is a completely different story. That's America's biggest trading partner, Australia's, the EU's. Suddenly stores are empty of all kinds of things. People who thought they were comfortably retired wake up and see that their portfolio is down 30-40% and that the government has taken over much of the economy to regulate prices. Even the US Air Force relies on Chinese parts for its air to ground weapons, everyone else is going to run into massive supply chain problems.
Fighting China and Russia won't be like the wars in the Middle East, it will be absolute carnage. Massive swarms of drones hunting people down day and night, constant shelling, digging trenches, a 'safe' base getting hammered by missiles from thousands of kilometres away. There is no medivac, the other guy has the same tools as you do. One sunk destroyer = one year of Afghanistan deaths. It will be a real test of endurance on both sides even at the conventional level.
A short term burst of patriotic enthusiasm will dry up very quickly when people realize how many casualties are being taken and appreciate that conscription isn't just a joking matter. It won't be happening to other people, it'll be happening to us. All of this pain needs some kind of justification, leaders need to credibly explain why victory must be achieved at any cost.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
He's my favourite poet, constant bangers. 'The Beginnings' is still politically relevant today, in certain circles anyway. Gods of the Copybook Headings, The Hymn of Breaking Strain...
The natives will be forcibly drafted
By who? The Ukrainian 'drag them into the van' approach works because they've been pumping out nationalist and anti-Russian sentiment for years and years, plus they have a very clear threat and plenty of useful history to draw upon. And it only works in that the country hasn't yet collapsed. Huge numbers of people have already fled, they don't want to die for Zelensky.
Trying forcible conscription in a country like America today would be a courageous decision, both amongst politicians and draft officers. The US military was thoroughly demoralized in Vietnam, they could not adequately motivate the troops. A world war against multiple great powers is a much bigger stress-test.
Non-participation is already happening. All across the West, nobody is joining the military. Despite all this geopolitical tension and war propaganda, our armies and fleets are actively shrinking. Elite Human Capital cannot find anyone to die for them, they are lowering physical and mental standards and still falling short as the white population opts out. Qualitative and quantitative decline is already locked in. That's the force that we go to war with, the hard core that the conscripts are supposed to support.
Unwilling soldiers are not very effective in combat and neither are most immigrants (on both HBD and motivation grounds). We are set to lose and lose badly, which is bad for everyone but especially troublesome for the reigning political elite.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I point out that you won't be doing well in a world where the US takes a major loss. Assuming that you're Israeli based on the hebrew and 'your culture' remark, there will be all kinds of problems coming your way. China might like a bit of Israeli technology but they're ideologically and historically committed to the other side of the Middle East struggle, they've been working with Iran for some time now. It'll be back to '67 borders for you and that's a best-case scenario.
Social shaming, an internal drive to be pro-social
That stuff works in a disciplined, united society where men are actually moved if they get a white feather. It doesn't work today, especially amongst young people from Western Europe and its offshoots where nationalism has been all but stamped out and individualism is the order of the day. Nobody is going to get blown up by a drone so that Taiwan can have gay pride parades, only a small fraction truly believe.
obviously literally losing to a foreign power is a lose condition
China is far away. The biggest effects will be political and economic. Ukraine and Asia excepted, we are not looking at annexations. People are already fed up with how government is run, losing a big war will be the end for Elite Human Capital.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Musk surely isn't doing huge chunks of the engineering by himself. But he clearly is good at hiring the right people. You can only do that if you can tell whether someone knows what they're doing or not. He also seems to have a special talent at making those people work harder, motivating people. Based on the biography I read he has strong engineering skills and takes important high-level decisions about how the companies should move forward.
I suspect that Altman is similar. He may not be the greatest coder in the world but he's clearly a master schemer, outmaneuvering the OpenAI board and tapping Microsoft's nigh-limitless resources on generous terms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Gunn, R. & Marie, L., Jun 2023, In: Global Hip Hop Studies. 4, 1, p. 39-56 18 p.
We need a complete shutdown of academia until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Not a substantial comment but I did see a Romance of the Three Kingdoms meme the other day:
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I saw a long 15-20 minute video of some police officer doing an in-depth analysis (before a few dozen journalists) of why Obama's birth certificate was wrong or copied from someone else's, back in 2016. He showed various anomalies with the handwriting and so on. It seemed perfectly persuasive to me but I'm no forensics expert, how could I tell if that was real or not?
It's totally gone now, there's no way to find it beneath the chorus of 'debunked misinformation'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
That must be it. For some reason I remember it being different but it was 8 years ago. In retrospect it was foolish to look for it on youtube of all websites.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
True. And the story was written by a man. Now I think about it most of the high-profile heroines in fiction are written by men. Buffy, Annabeth, Xena...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Ukraine wants not to be fighting an attritional war, they want to get out of a game that's stacked against them. They want to induce a political crisis in Russia or bring in NATO forces to help them. So they make a big deal out of blowing up warships, sending drones at random refineries, there's a certain fixation about destroying the Kerch bridge. None of this is terribly relevant to the land war. Maybe they hope that getting 30km into Russia will cause the whole rotten structure to come crumbling down? Failing that, they can say that 'oh Russia's "red lines" haven't been crossed when we did this so give us more long-range missiles please'. In addition, they want Russia to react in some way that draws NATO into the conflict. That's what the long-range missiles are for!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Why leave out the part where Musk replied to Breton and told him to go fuck his own face?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Loads of people blamed the Arab Spring (and Syria especially) on climate change. There was a multi-year drought and water shortage in Syria immediately beforehand, food prices rose a lot... Just search up Arab Spring Climate Change and it will come up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Just reform the industries? It really isn't that hard, China did it and they were coming off a poorer base. The Soviets could've cut the astonishing amount of military spending to free up resources for the civilian sector and waited for oil prices to rise again. That alone would've been enough to get out of the danger zone.
Gorbachev was a world-historical blunderer, he had no idea how the Soviet system actually worked and lacked the power to effectively implement his insane reforms. People don't actually know how shambolic he was, they have this vague notion of glasnoist and perestroika but no concrete facts of what specifically he did:
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Yeah Orthodox Marxist economics says that the revolution can only happen in the most advanced capitalist economies, you can't skip stages with this heretical Leninist Vanguard Party nonsense. They were looking to Britain and Germany, not Russia for revolution.
China is unclear. They might be trying that. Or maybe Marx comes second to nationalism and development for the sake of national strength. I highly doubt that they want to do away with the state though.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
The Soviet Union had plenty of capital and technology, they produced their own working space shuttle in the late 1980s. Their capital was just misallocated and inefficiently used due to the socialist system and expansive military posture. If they began proper market reforms conducted in a mature and sensible way, then they could've developed the necessary industries internally, regardless of foreign investment.
There was no voice that came down from the sky that said 'you must let any well-connected official steal directly from your country's capital base', that wasn't inevitable. It was a policy choice.
Gorbachev didn't understand politics, he was dreaming. You have to bring stakeholders onboard if you want to reform the system. He needed to control the military to secure his position before doing anything. Khrushchev was able to reduce the size of the Soviet military by about 1/3 because he had the necessary skills, Gorby did not.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
You keep saying that the Soviet Union had to abandon communism. I agree. Communism doesn't work. Do you know who really believed in communism? Gorbachev, lord of the blunderers. His reforms sought to create a democratic socialist state, to go back to this idealistic vision of what Lenin wanted, what communism was supposed to be. He and his reforms were totally detached from reality.
A bare minimum of what's needed in a reformer of the USSR is someone who can admit the need for a market-based system while retaining political stability and not inviting looters to rob the country. That's not such a big ask. By proper market reforms I simply mean things like 'let state-owned firms reinvest their profits while preventing executives from siphoning off all profits for personal gains'. This is basic stuff that Gorbachev didn't manage to do. A little bit of anti-corruption and party discipline work would've gone a long way!
no American technology transfer
The Soviet Union routinely imported technology from the West and America specifically, all throughout its history. And they routinely created technology of their own. The USSR was not a third world nation like you seem to think, it was an urbanized and industrialized economy. They did not need to get rich with export-led industrialization like China, they were in a far better position than China in the 1980s but completely dropped the ball.
Gorbachev himself imported huge amounts of high-tech goods from the West, causing significant balance of trade problems and debt as he tried to modernize Soviet industry. The problem was never a shortage of technology but a lack of proper market reform.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I don't know anything about Bangladesh, for some reason I thought you were talking about the general case, I missed the 'this case'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
How is combat fun in 5? Rally points are impossible, so you're actively punished for fielding a large army from many conquered cities. That's why they changed conquest victory to 'secure all capitals' because it was too much of a slog to secure a large chunk of the world.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I suspect that the first few AIs attempting to take over the world will probably suck at it (as this one sucked at it) and that humanity is probably sane enough to stop building neural nets after the first couple of cases of "we had to do a worldwide hunt to track down and destroy a rogue AI that went autonomous".
We're still doing gain of function research on viruses. There's basically no reason to do it other than publishing exciting science in prestigious journals, any gains are marginal at best. Meanwhile, AI development is central to military, political and economic development.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
What about the third world kleptocrats looking to escape to greener pastures with their gains?
I read an essay somewhere talking about how suspicion and hatred of the rich was totally reasonable up until about the last 200 years. Rich people were noblemen (descended from those who conquered lands and secured rents) or schemers who'd found some way to secure the bag in a zero-sum universe. You didn't make money, you took money.
This is somewhat true in much of the less developed world. Does the US need an influx of Saudi royals? If you want high human capital, just make them pass a test to enter.
Plus you'd be bringing inflation and higher house prices. Australian and Canadian real estate has been rendered ludicrously expensive by rich Chinese buying it all.
Anyway, I disagree with 1. in that a country is more than an economic zone, there should be ties of blood and solidarity. When the chips are down, wouldn't elite human capital just leave for safer pastures? What incentive do they have to behave in a pro-social way, why should they behave honourably with people of a completely different race, culture and creed? In-group bias is part of the human condition, that's why we came up with the nation-state. Mass immigration reduces social trust and opens up all kinds of divisions and conflicts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
It takes two to tango! Supply is obviously an issue but so is demand.
OECD population growth average is about 0.6% per annum, Australia is at 2% or higher.
Australia's net migration was 400-500K in the last couple of years, fertility is below replacement so all the pressure on housing comes from migration.
I want naming and shaming. If you fail this badly, there need to be very serious consequences for you personally. Fines, public humiliation, prison sentence, corporal punishment... Otherwise why would anyone bother doing things correctly in future?
What if a selection of Crowdstrike executives, coders and management had to have 'moron' tattooed on their foreheads?
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