RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
How can modern 'gender roles' possibly be sustainable? Fertility rates below 2.1 mean that civilization itself is unsustainable in the medium-term (let alone the long-term where more fecund civilizations will overcome less fecund peers, ceteris paribus). Either it dwindles to nothing in a kind of evaporative cooling where the few remaining young people leave their many senescent dependants for greener fields. Or you get mass immigration, the importing of other societies. Either the immigrants assimilate and age into oblivion, perpetuating the problem, or the natives assimilate and their civilization is gone.
The universe does have rules - reproducing is rewarded. It's not like worrying about masculinity is a new thing (see all the concerns about the degeneracy of the youth as the article points out). But in this case, we know masculinity and femininity are broken because they're not working at sustaining the population! Anti-social is not a bad thing if society is broken (not in a small way but in a terminal way).
All through this article there's an awkwardness as the author tries to describe a problem without admitting any kind of serious change is needed.
I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.
Then we get some banal, inoffensive, ineffective ideas of what masculinity should be:
We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.
Like people say in the comments, this is just recycling 1950s Boy Scouts rhetoric, the sort of stuff you'd see in a Tom Swift novel. Did it work then? Maybe. Did it keep working? Obviously not. And it's a really facile thing to propose 'finding ways to work with powerful stories like self-mastery'. What does that mean in concrete terms? Nothing at all. WTF is self-mastery? Is the author proposing media manipulation, putting more strong father figures in film? Who knows, maybe we're expected to be mind-readers.
There's a model of how industrial states were run with medium-high fertility - women were not in the workforce at anything near the male participation rate. One option is taking women out of the workforce and higher education (a universally proven sterilizing agent), which entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is mass-scale human cloning, which also entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is rushing for life-extension or AI to bypass the problem entirely, which has problems of its own. Or we could try to found powerful religions like LDS or Islam or Orthodox Judaism. Or we can just wither away talking about pro-social stories of self-mastery and be written about in the history books of others.
But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
The rapid organizational movement toward addressing inequalities was initially exciting for DEI professionals. But in just a couple of years, that excitement wavered as growth rapidly fell apart.
"The honeymoon is over," Cecil Howard, a DEI consultant and former chief diversity officer at the University of South Florida, told ABC News.
"Right after George Floyd's killing, everybody who didn't have a diversity office quickly created a diversity office," he added. "A few years later, they started realizing, 'We checked the box and things are a little quieter now.'"
This might be teaching the wrong lesson, if the rule is 'unrest will be rewarded with jobs, lack of unrest will be punished by the withdrawal of jobs'. Groups respond to incentives after all.
Also, if positions grew 168% but then fell 33%, they're still doing pretty well.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Can something be a culture topic war topic by being culture war free?
I agree that there's a lack of quality in modern film and TV. A family member recently bought Marvel's second Doctor Strange movie, Multiverse of Madness. We watched it and were pretty confused. I hadn't seen any of them since Strange's first movie which we only saw because said relative likes Benedict Cumberbatch. It was staggeringly badly written, even allowing for the fact that it was alluding to events in movies I hadn't seen.
At one point they introduce Reed Richards in another universe, who was announced as the smartest man on their planet, a board member of the Illuminati that led the planet from the shadows. When faced with a life or death battle against an extremely powerful sorceress, he tries to talk her down in person after she annihilates about a brigade of their combat robots! What kind of retard would do that when he's only got the power to be really stretchy? Can't he talk to her via telecommunications or something? Call in an airstrike or use some kind of standoff attack? Research her capabilities and find a counter? Or perhaps coordinate the other combatants so they deal with her in a coordinated way rather than being defeated in detail, one by one?
In addition to throwing his life away, he manages to lose the battle for them. He tells Scarlet Witch 'oh you should surrender since we have this really powerful guy here right in front of you who can kill you if he opens his mouth'. So naturally she melts his lips together so he can't, before killing them all. If you've got a trump card like that, use it! Don't declare it and let it be countered!
I suppose 100 IQ writers can't write 200 IQ characters. Even so, they could make an effort. I was also unimpressed with the hamfistedness of introducing a girl named America Chavez, raised on some idyllic true-communist world by two mothers and no understanding of property. After all the supposedly powerful and skilled combatants manage to lose, she saves the day.
Even if the main attraction of these movies is the pretty lightshow battles, can't they also make a coherent plot with characters who make intelligent decisions?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I think Britain's leaders have no idea what they're doing. Dominic Cummings has been screaming about this for the last 8 years, initially in long, well-thought out essays and more recently in angry, over-capitalized tweets full of made-up technical jargon. He strikes me like a Lovecraft protagonist going mad at the true nature of the eldritch horror.
In this case, the pension funds had decided to leverage themselves on government bonds, using them as collateral to buy other things. When Kwasi issued a particularly blase announcement that they'd borrow even more money, investors freaked out. The price of government bonds dropped since the supply increased.
Since the price of the bonds fell, the pension funds started having to sell their assets, including said government bonds. There was a risk of a deadly spiral. But because it's not a real market, the central bank decided to use its own money (that it freely prints) to buy its own bonds and shore up the price, averting disaster for now. The UK economy is now significantly closer to being an 'emerging market', a place where the currency is really just a piece of paper.
This could and should have been predicted. Lee Kuan Yew wouldn't have done things like this - he was all about fiscal prudency, avoiding the accumulation of debt where possible. But the Brits clearly didn't predict the reaction to their tax-less, spend-more plan. I favour Cumming's diagnosis that the UK political elite lives in its own pocket dimension, only tenuously tied to reality by what the newspapers say, rather than any actual world-modelling ability. They didn't know that they couldn't just borrow more money, they didn't imagine that waging proxy war against Russia might raise energy prices in the UK, a part of the European energy/economic system. They don't understand what causes economic growth, they don't know how to make things happen quickly or efficiently. They don't know.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
Blacks have nothing to do with avoiding the perils of 'social democracy'. It was Anglos who refined and upheld the ideas of limited government and laissez faire faire economics. That's why Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK and the US did very well, even without diversity. The US is simply the best endowed with natural resources - of course a country the size of Europe is going to do well, given centuries to build up in peace. They had enormous amounts of farmland, coal, oil, two ocean access, great river networks and no strong enemies in their entire hemisphere - an absurdly good base for a country. And then there's demographics: majority-black countries do poorly. Countries like Brazil that got even more diversity than the US are mediocre at best. All the richest and strongest countries in the world stem from European or East Asian roots, including America.
The obvious conclusion is 'Europeans and East Asians are the best at running civilizations' not 'a certain proportion of blacks make the country more functional by constantly stressing its economic-political immune system'. Especially when there's huge evidence to the contrary for the second theory! One of America's most prestigious institutions just fired a black president for plagiarism - the harm to meritocracy is clearly severe. Enormous amounts of welfare and affirmative action go into propping up a dysfunctional group, lest they launch massive riots like in 2020. The cores of American cities are blighted and too dangerous for useful work, Americans don't feel comfortable taking public transport (which is normal in countries with less diversity). If America had no blacks, it would be a stronger, richer country.
Just look at the US right now - there is no shortage of redistribution! There's a huge amount of redistribution of both wealth and status flowing to blacks. Consider the discussion about 'reparations' or how Trump of all people promoted this half-trillion dollar platinum plan to give blacks more, better jobs and businesses. The thesis that 'blacks prevent redistribution' is clearly wrong.
And if you want to blame whites for this admittedly significant problem, India does just as badly if not worse. It's absolutely mired in ethnic spoils politics, as self-made-human has pointed out in the past. You can't say "the existence of such whites doesn't mean whites as a class don't cause large scale social damage" when whites have made the strongest and most functional civilizations in all history. Maybe if you were Chinese, you could get away with it, though I'd point out that China has its fair share of social problems and can at best be considered a peer of the Western, European world. China runs rings around India in all aspects of competence - manufacturing, development, military strength, safety, research, quality of life and so on.
Whites invented capitalism and industrialism. The Amsterdam stock exchange is the oldest in the world. Complaining that whites aren't pro-capitalist enough is ridiculous.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves.
China used to have very high fertility. As did Japan, India, South Korea and so on... How did they become so populous in the first place if mistreating women lowers fertility? They used to treat their women far worse than they do now. See footbinding, see women being legally property in Japan until 1945... I got into a big argument with some people over whether South Korea is a feminist country, despite gender equality being written into its constitution and an actual govt ministry supporting it... anyway it's indisputable that it's much more feminist now than ever in the past.
Mistreating women is not the cause of low fertility, indeed it's the opposite. If you look at the literature, female education immediately appears as a primary reducer of fertility.
There's a certain kind of mistreatment of women that results in very high fertility - the kind where there are actually intense, binding social expectations about their role in the family, limited education and serious patriarchal norms. Binding social expectations, backed by credible threats of violence. Label this 'actual patriarchy' - Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, pre-1945 Japan and so on. Actual patriarchies have very high fertility, even in harsh conditions Japan was at 4.0 in 1943 and 1944 despite total war, total mobilization, millions of men at the front...
Then there's a kind of mistreatment of women that results in very low fertility, the kind you're talking about. Men not wanting highly educated wives, or viewing women in their 30s as undesirable, or expecting them to leave the workforce once they marry. These aren't binding social expectations, not like in actual patriarchy. You can see that the women choose to ignore them, like you say they have other options. It's paper-mache patriarchy. There's no actual effort to suppress female education like there is in Afghanistan, not in South Korea. In paper-mache patriarchy you see these materialistic efforts to increase fertility by giving a token payment, you see feminist groups that aren't suppressed by the state, you see lip-service to gender equality, laws against gender discrimination. You see lots of men who are unhappy with feminism and hold patriarchal views yet these views are not actually enforced and implemented.
I also note that fertility is not very high in the richest, most feminist states like Sweden. They're around 1.8 which is better than South Korea but probably propped up by births amongst non-assimilating migrants. Canada is at 1.5, Finland 1.4, Germany 1.6... Feminism clearly doesn't raise fertility.
Real pathways to raise fertility:
- Return or move closer to actual patriarchy
- Mass cloning/AI/eternal youth technical fix
- Return to devout religiosity as with Mormons of old and certain Jewish sects
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Does anyone else really dislike people citing video-essays as proof of their argument? I find them to be a really poor way of expressing information compared to text. The amount of time needed to watch it is very long. No ctrl-F either.
Plus looking at youtube transcript is a very user-unfriendly experience. I'm happy with video for visual things like 'Shanghai is a really pretty, advanced looking city from the perspective of people walking through at night' or 'this is how some criminal accosting happened'. But for expressing arguments it's not in the same league as text.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
“I cannot guarantee the future. I am not a prophet. I said that if things don’t change, there will be a revolution affecting all of us – and that will include me and black people in suburbs. Those rising up from townships will accuse us of abandoning them in squalor and in poverty. We will all be in serious trouble.”
“It may not be me [calling for the slaughter of white people]. But it could be me. What will necessitate such a thing? I can’t guarantee I can’t or won’t call for the slaughter of white people. But why would I make a pledge to say I definitely won’t call for that? I won’t do it.”
Imagine looking at the state of South Africa and thinking 'what this country really needs is more brain drain, capital flight, international isolation, even more intense ethnic conflict.' I suppose this goes to show the power of nationalist feeling - it can override all other considerations.
I think this also highlights the importance of HBD. Some people on this forum have disputed its value, saying 'so what do we gain in the real world from this knowledge'? We'd gain useful information about the destiny of states that go from white rule (indigenous fighter jet programs, first heart transplant, nuclear program) to black rule (mass unemployment, constant power outages, ludicrously high crime/murder rate). We'd know it was unlikely that South Africa, along with Brazil, would be a meaningful part of BRICS, the source of future world economic growth. Useful investing information! And we'd know that since the situation in South Africa was very unlikely to markedly improve, future racial conflict is likely as the economic gap between black and white remains.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
From the article:
In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths.
This is actually one of my hobbyhorses - that the US Surface Navy is staggeringly incompetent. You don't see the Chinese Navy crashing into civilian freighters by accident. Nor do their warships burn down in port like the Bonhomme Richard in 2020. Most recently a Chinese Type-075 had a fire during construction - but this was dealt with pretty quickly and the ship was commissioned shortly afterwards. They didn't lose a small aircraft carrier like the US did! Forget about high-end naval warfare, shooting down hypersonic missiles, AirSea battle... if your ships can't reliably survive in open seas or in your own ports you're in dire straits.
The US investigated the Fitzgerald crash and found all kinds of astonishing details. Apparently bridge crew were using piss bottles. It's like a 4chan greentext:
When Fort walked into the trash-strewn CIC in the wake of the disaster, he was hit with the acrid smell of urine. He saw kettlebells on the deck and bottles filled with pee. Some radar controls didn’t work and he soon discovered crew members who didn’t know how to use them anyway.
https://features.propublica.org/navy-accidents/uss-fitzgerald-destroyer-crash-crystal/
The warship’s state of readiness was in question. The Navy required destroyers to pass 22 certification tests to prove themselves seaworthy and battle-ready before sailing. The Fitzgerald had passed just seven of these tests. It was not even qualified to conduct its chief mission, anti-ballistic missile defense.
A sailor’s mistake sparked a fire causing the electrical system to fail and a shipwide blackout a week before the mission resulting in the crash. The ship’s email system, for both classified and non-classified material, failed repeatedly. Officers used Gmail instead.
Its radars were in questionable shape, and it’s not clear the crew knew how to operate them. One could not be made to automatically track nearby ships. To keep the screen updated, a sailor had to punch a button a thousand times an hour. The ship’s primary navigation system was run by 17-year-old software.
Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin was commander of the 7th Fleet at the time of the collisions. A Naval aviator who fought in the Balkans and Iraq, he made repeated pleas to his superiors for more men, more ships, more time to train. He was ignored, then fired.
Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. They were way behind on maintenance, crew were too junior and inexperienced, the fleet as a whole was overstretched... The admirals were shamelessly yesmanning the civilian commanders who wanted more presence, more 'freedom of navigation' exercises. That's what the Fitzgerald was supposed to do, before it crashed. Their operational tempo was higher than maintenance and crew could sustain - they knew this and ignored lower ranking officers who told them it was idiotic. And there's also the demoralizing emphasis on diversity training, which effectively takes precedence over combat training, which is the article's main point (and is backed up by a congressional report). The US navy is also short of sailors, thanks to all this nonsense.
This fleet is assigned to defend the Asia Pacific from China, the most important theatre in the world. This is the fleet that's supposed to bail out Taiwan, defend Japan and so on. There's a good chance that China will snap them in two like a twig. Nobody has fought a naval war since the Falklands. Nobody has any serious combat experience. All we have to judge capability on is general seamanship, in which the Chinese are superior.
And then there's the chaos and shambles that is US naval procurement. The Littoral Combat Ship was pure garbage from day 1. It isn't even obsolete, it just doesn't have any of the necessary capabilities for a serious warship, at all. The Zumwalt was incredibly expensive even by US standards and was cancelled. So the US is stuck building Arleigh Burke's, destroyers which were designed back in the 1980s (albeit upgraded). China is building warships designed in the 2010s. China has a large and serious shipbuilding industry, with plenty of capacity and talent from the civilian sector, room to grow. China is the biggest civilian shipbuilder in the world, while the US is something like 10th.
Now the US Naval Air and Submarine arms are somewhat better off than the Surface fleet. But the US definitely needs a surface fleet! If you have no capable surface fleet, then the carriers become vulnerable to just about everything, while the subs can be picked off by helicopters and aircraft.
The importance of this military deficiency is hard to overstate. This fleet is in charge of protecting the AI-chip fabs, trade that the US needs, a good chunk of world trade, Western prestige in the world, deterring WW3... It's like watching a train crash, seconds before disaster!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Black Labour MP Diane Abbot made to apologize for putting Blacks above Jews
Diane Abbot is a Black Labour UK MP, very left wing. The letter she sent is here, titled 'Racism is black and white'
Abbott sparked a backlash on Sunday with a letter sent to the Observer that responded to a comment article that was published the previous week entitled: “Racism in Britain is not a black and white issue. It’s far more complicated.”
Abbott took issue with the author’s thesis, which was based on a major academic study that found high numbers of Irish, Jewish and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people had reported suffering from racism.
Abbott’s letter said that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people “undoubtedly experience prejudice”, but added: “This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.”
She added: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism.”
Abbott compared their plight with others – saying Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required in pre-civil rights America to sit at the back of buses, nor trafficked and placed into manacles on slave ships. She added they retained the ability to vote in apartheid South Africa.
I don't see why slavery in the US is at all relevant to the UK in a historical sense. As a matter of fact, Irish people were enslaved (the Barbary pirates really had a very long range, apparently reaching as far as Iceland) and one could make a case that they were effectively enslaved by English landowners during various periods. That all depends on the meaning of slavery vs forced labour or exploitation.
However, it wasn't the Irish or gypsies that caused her problems. She made the mistake of mentioning Jews, who take criticism extremely seriously. She was quickly expelled from the party (losing the whip) while Labour investigates. She's naturally made a grovelling apology which simultaneously provides a paper-thin excuse and then apologizes for how pathetic the excuse is:
“I wish to wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and disassociate myself from them,” said the Labour MP. “The errors arose in an initial draft being sent. But there is no excuse, and I wish to apologise for any anguish caused.
As if that wasn't already an obvious lie, the Jewish Chronicle reports that she sent the letter twice: https://www.thejc.com/news/politics/diane-abbott-sent-observer-letter-twice-raising-doubts-over-draft-claims-3hCBdkWRfU9P5xJloIPUEa
Adding to Abbott's conceptualization of 'prejudice' vs 'Racism', where the latter is more significant, I propose a third level of 'ANTI-SEMITISM'.
prejudice would be something like when Sarah Jeong says “Oh man, it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.” Or "Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling [sic] goblins?" She can get away with making a lukewarm apology saying it was satire and she 'can understand how hurtful it was out of context'. No job repercussions. Or when the press decides to capitalize Black but not white. On the other hand, this might not even reach the level of prejudice - if it does it might only be by making whiteness invisible, as some Black scholars have claimed in the link above. The debate goes on.
Racism would be when Benedict Cumberbatch inadvertently used the outdated term 'colored people' when he was calling for British acting to provide more opportunities to Blacks. He gave a much more sincere apology: "I feel the complete fool I am and while I am sorry to have offended people and to learn from my mistakes in such a public manner, please be assured I have." There was some speculation this would impact his chances of getting an Oscar that year, sure enough he didn't. Obviously we can't tell if it actually did affect his chances, who knows? I personally can't model the mindset of people who'd get upset over somebody using the wrong language as they call for more Black representation, so I can't tell if this is completely ridiculous or not. Another incident of Racism might be when Quinn Norton was also considered for the NYT tech role but had apparently defended a friendship with a white supremacist - she lost her recently offered job within hours.
ANTI-SEMITISM would be when Abbott says Jews aren't as discriminated against as blacks and has to fight hard for her job and position in the party. Or when Kanye criticizes Jews and gets promptly excluded by his business partners, lawyers, JP Morgan, Kim and so on. ANTI-SEMITISM has immediate and crushing consequences, especially if it's high-grade and unapologetic like the latter case.
I think this threefold distinction is useful, since it distinguishes between de facto and de jure. Formally all three are encompassed within prejudice. Formally, Cumberbatch's slip-up couldn't even be a slip-up at all. But in reality some prejudices wash off and others burn like acid. The British Labour Party's been facing heavy pressure for being anti-Semitic under Corbyn - as if that was the worst of its problems. Corbyn had a wide range of radical policies and proposals: unilateral nuclear disarmament, renationalizing rail and energy, republicanism, calling for NATO to be disbanded. But he wasn't suspended from the party until he dared to play down accusations of anti-Semitism.
Diane Abbot has all kinds of problems - innumeracy for one. Answering questions about Labour policy. Or drinking alcohol on the London Underground, which is banned. Yet she didn't get suspended from the party for clownish incompetence. In short, incompetence or prejudice is trivial, Racism is serious and ANTI-SEMITISM is apocalyptic.
There's a kind of pattern that conservatives fall into when they say 'this is ridiculous, all kinds of civilizations practiced slavery' or 'the British Empire was the first to ban slavery, pay enormous sums to free slaves and conduct anti-slavery operations across the world. It collapsed only after bringing down Hitler and Mussolini, who were not exactly BLM activists' (implying that some gratitude is owed for past assistance), or 'anti-white racism is still racism by this dictionary definition'. Yet it's manifestly not Racism when you attack whites, there are so few consequences. There are no consequences when unis have race-based admission systems that work against whites or Asians for that matter. This is somewhat acknowledged in the 'imagine if the situation was reversed!' meme. I think this is an important and under-appreciated concept, somewhat like a motte-and-bailey except for the meaning of words.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Another Amazon tradition: Only top executives have offices. Until this year, other high-level execs have worked in assigned cubicles. Since January, however, the vast majority have to contend with “agile seating,” meaning they work at unassigned cubbies in designated “neighborhoods,” and are provided with lockers for their belongings.
What's the point of being an executive if you don't even have your own office? Sounds like an unpleasant company to work in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
I have a fear that it's now impossible to ban Gain of Function. If it's banned, then that tacitly admits that it was the cause of COVID. China doesn't want to lose face and nor does America. In China, the party line is that it came from somewhere else, possibly America, Wuhan wasn't the origin.
You can sort of see a similar tendency in how US media tends to portray it, it's primarily the fault of lax Chinese biosafety, possibly bioweapons research. And they can summon up a host of bioresearch scientists who don't want to be reviled for the rest of their lives. They can enthusiastically promulgate sophistry about how there really was some Laotian bat-pangolin-human farce in a wet market that coincidentally replicated the results of grant proposals sent by EcoHealth and researchers in Wuhan.
The blame falls on a perfect combination of Chinese and American scientists and policymakers, neither of the superpowers wants the truth to emerge.
Quite right.
“He has failed to advocate for the autonomy and dignity of transgendered persons,” the complaint said.
Defining autonomy and dignity in this case is 90% of the battle. We could imagine the chad Peterson thundering back 'No YOU'RE the one who's sabotaging the autonomy and dignity of men and women, creating and encouraging transgenderism, irreversible mutilations, inflicting wretched half-lives upon children by deception and manipulation. I'VE defined the words, now you are to pay homage to ME, paying for your own re-education and attending hearings where you will show homage to MY beliefs." Yet in reality they'd probably get him for a hate crime of some sort if he said that, because of the balance of power.
I think he would've been wiser to defy the ruling and counterattack, calling them politically motivated. He has plenty of money, no need to practise psychology.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
The major contractors and subcontractors (CB&I, S&W, Westinghouse, etc) have all gone bankrupt and the people who built our original fleet never properly transferred their knowledge to the next generation of workers.
IMO, they were forced into bankruptcy. After Three Mile Island, the regulators simply refused to allow any new nuclear plants to be constructed. See the wikipedia list of US nuclear plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_reactors#United_States
There's about five US nuclear plants started every year, up until 1978. Then there's a little excitement at Three Mile Island in 1979, where nobody is hurt. No nuclear plants begin construction until 2013.
How would Ford survive if the US government decreed that they could not produce any new cars for 30 years, they could only go on with cars in production in 1979? What use is there in having skills for nuclear power plant design and construction if they're de facto illegal to use for 30 years? And that doesn't include the insane forced cost overruns regulation imposed, requiring nuclear plants cope with physically impossible engineering failures, amongst other abuses:
Another example was the acceptance in 1972 of the Double-Ended-Guillotine-Break of the primary loop piping as a credible failure. In this scenario, a section of the piping instantaneously disappears. Steel cannot fail in this manner. As usual Ted Rockwell put it best, “We can’t simulate instantaneous double ended breaks because things don’t break that way.” Designing to handle this impossible casualty imposed very severe requirements on pipe whip restraints, spray shields, sizing of Emergency Core Cooling Systems, emergency diesel start up times, etc., requirements so severe that it pushed the designers into using developmental, unrobust technology. A far more reliable approach is Leak Before Break by which the designer ensures that a stable crack will penetrate the piping before larger scale failure.
Regulation was the assassin, gun and bullet while Westinghouse was the corpse on the floor.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
There are many examples of technology coming before its time. The Puckle Gun was an attempt to make machine-guns during the 1720s, the era of flintlocks. People mostly sneered at it: "they're only wounded who hold shares therein" went one satirical pamphlet. There were also the Kalthoff Repeaters in the 1630s, they had a good rate of fire but were difficult to maintain since they hadn't figured out interchangeable parts yet. If there were any problems with the powder fouling, if a single part breaks, you had to take the whole thing back to a master gunsmith to be fixed. For over 200 years attempts to make rapid-firing firearms all failed!
But then people figured out interchangeable parts, rifling and smokeless powder. There were improvements in machining and metallurgy. Unlike all its predecessors, the Gatling Gun was pretty decent. Another few decades of refinement and we got the Maxim Gun. Machine guns became practical and extremely lethal. They dominate infantry combat to this day, every infantryman has some kind of automatic weapon. If you go out on the battlefield with a flintlock musket, you'll be sneered at as it's totally pathetic, totally impractical (imagine spending at least 30 seconds reloading and you can't even go prone, you have to stand up!)
Transhumanism is the same. Right now it's dominated by weirdoes and a very impractical, forceful approach. Its full potential has not been seen. We're talking about people doing pretty primitive surgical procedures. We're talking about people doing weird roundabout manipulations of existing biology. We're not talking about emulating the brain progressively, neuron-by-neuron, ensuring continuity of consciousness. We're not talking about the speed, strength and power machinery can give you. At this stage it all seems like science-fiction, airy abstract words thrown around by people who have no proof to back it up, no concrete knowledge of all the myriad problems...
At some point, we'll hit the Gatling Gun stage where the future becomes visible and concrete. Maybe that'll be if or when Neuralink fulfills its promise. Neuralink's bogged down with the FDA over safety concerns before they can start human testing. We could imagine a more ruthless country like China whisking off a 1,000 political dissidents to rapidly iterate testing. They might choose not to do that but it's only getting easier. If not Neuralink then its successors.
But certainly, eventually we'll be forced to throw away our humanity as we perceive it now. Can you imagine walking onto a battlefield with a flintlock musket today? What about walking onto a battlefield in the future at all? Can you fly at Mach 20, withstand 30 G acceleration, react in machine-time, track thousands of objects simultaneously, brave the cold of deep space for months on end? Can you clone yourself 50 times in a month, such that you're all aligned with eachother? Can you design an automated factory, an automated mine, an automated power plant, manage an entire robotic supply chain such that it's durable to full-scale nuclear war?
Maybe there are limits to replication or whatever. Maybe we all get wiped out by machines or a few monopolistic posthumans.
But if you're just a base-human in the future, your life will be decided by others forever. You won't have the brainpower to understand what's happening, the speed to react in time, you won't have the firepower to resist, you'll be completely surpassed in every aspect. And this trend cannot be stopped. Everyone wants to be smarter, richer and more capable. Everyone wants more ______ whatever that might be. Those with better technology will overcome those with lesser technology. Just look at what happened to the pastoral nomads! They might have had great fun, their lifestyle might be more 'human' (out in nature, authentic skills, having fun around the campfire, personally inflicting violence) than industrial city-slickers but industrial armies wiped the floor with them. They have no control over their own destiny but what modern, urban, sedentary civilization gives them. Genghis could never win, no matter what he did. Even if he conquered the whole world, his successors would get moulded and slowly turned by degrees into urbanites and lose their nomadic skills (as they did in China).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
I admitted that winning is the key thing and we are clearly not winning. The kind of 'fairness' I was talking about is lesser to winning.
I was thinking about some kind of right-to-rule mechanism but couldn't quite articulate it. The First Foundation had a better understanding of physics than the fringes who struggled maintaining their atomics, they were better organized than the declining Empire on Trantor. That gave them legitimacy since they were more efficient in using external resources, that's where they got their power from. Because of that strength, they could run society better. They were fairly happy and prosperous, everyone else was declining. The Mule wasn't better at using external resources, he had the power without the legitimacy. If he showed up in Ancient Egypt he could only rule Ancient Egypt, he couldn't improve it significantly. If the Foundation arrived in Ancient Egypt, they could. And the Mule was worsening the Foundation during his brief rule I think, he crushed their creative spirit with his mind control.
That's only a fiction but it captures what I'm trying to say. Winning is the most important thing, but it is not everything. Winning through actual superior strength, through a more advanced understanding of the universe is better than winning because of your wordcel skills and the tolerance of your victims.
Being punctual, precise, professional, rational, hard-working and so on are closer to the universal norms of efficiency. Just because Katz and co pull some mental judo trick that makes good things unfashionable, it does not follow that they're actually worse. There's not some kind of cultural relativism where all values are equal. Some actually do work and others fail. Even if the good values have dysfunctional predators, they're still good and they still work. Maybe all we needed was the ability to ignore all these naysayers and whiners, the ability to say 'compelling argument, now face the wall'. We were 95-99% right, just missing the error-protection code that prevents these cancers emerging.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Can we bring this down to the object level?
I suppose I'm a conspiracy theorist. I think it's ridiculous that President Kennedy, supposedly the most powerful man in the world at the time, was shot dead by a single lone actor, Oswald. Oswald was then murdered 2 days later, after protesting his innocence! Then consider that the next most powerful Kennedy was also murdered in 1968 by another man working alone, just after he won the important California primaries. He was the favorite for the Democratic nomination - he could plausibly become President and unearth whatever was going on with his brother. Putting aside all the weird recordings, ballistics and so on... there were two high-profile political murders in the same family in five years, three if you include Oswald. That's too many deaths for it to be coincidence. There was likely some kind of conspiracy within the US government, a conspiracy that killed JFK and then nipped Robert in the bud before he could become a major threat. The CIA did all kinds of chaotic-evil things during this period, it would be well in character for them to be behind it.
Or take 9/11. They managed to find the passports of the hijackers but not the plane's black boxes. The fire somehow managed to spread its way over to Building 7 and bring the whole skyscraper down. There have been many skyscrapers on fire, many more visibly than WTC 7. So why does WTC 7 collapse? I can't explain why anyone would do such a thing - I'd arrange for another plane, or if I wanted the buildings to come down I'd use bombs like in the last attempt. There were a number of other bizarre mishappenings, NYC was doing a major drill that conveniently took leading many leading officials away from WTC 7:
When the September 11, 2001, attacks began, Operation Tripod was immediately canceled as attentions turned to the real ongoing emergency. Because Pier 92 had been set up ready for the exercise, NYC OEM staff were able to move there and quickly convert it into a large emergency operations center when their original command center (in WTC Building 7) was evacuated and later destroyed. Thus, within 31 hours of the attacks, NYC OEM had a functional facility able to manage the search and rescue effort, just four miles north-northwest of the WTC site.[16] The exercise was later rescheduled and took place on May 22, 2002.[17]
The Epstein thing is shady beyond belief. I refuse to believe you can commit suicide in a room specifically designed to prevent suicide, that the cameras watching for such a thing fail just at the time they're needed for a very high profile inmate. The guy had connections to Mossad via Ghislaine's father. On the other hand, a lot of high profile people were flying around on his aircraft, to his island. I don't know who did it but I'm very confident suicide was a lie.
Anyway, my point is that we should be discussing ideas based upon their merits, not trying to psychoanalyze their holders. I'm well aware that there are counterarguments to my propositions. Epstein definitely has a motive to commit suicide - he could only expect prison, a humiliating court process and a complete absence of underage girls. Some people are just very lucky - Hitler for instance dodged umpteen assassination attempts. It follows that others might just be very unlucky.
But we should discuss the arguments and counterarguments directly with regard to conspiracies. If it's bizarre, easily disprovable stuff like the earth not being round, then psycho-analysis is more appropriate. If we're talking about anti-semitism, why not discuss it directly? Is it the case that Jews are harming Western civilization? Or is it not the case?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
So your thesis is 'there's a phase-change after a certain point where organizations become more political/institutional above Dunbar's law but despite all the bad things we know about big institutions it's necessary and fine?'
Or were you opposing that, saying that you deny that recruitment is the best thing people can do, that the human, non-optimized element is good, that organizations need soul to start off with? I don't understand, is it that the strategies like tricking Coca Cola are hyperdunbar and therefore good? Bad? It seems like a really complicated thesis!
I'm guessing we all struggled through university lecturers telling us to give Topic Sentences and Introductions and it was always cringeworthy to read someone's essay that said 'in this essay I will argue that...' But I think it's important to provide some kind of guidance, especially in long essays. I'm hopelessly lost. Are other people lost or am I having a skill issue?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
I think Moldbug said something along the lines of 'if there are millions of casual, part-time witch-hunters and inquisitors all going on about how much they hate and want to kill witches, then the country doesn't have a witch problem. On the other hand, if the moment anyone comes out to complain about sorcery and they're immediately turned into a newt...'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
Swimming pool regulation is out of control in Australia. Friends of mine have a huge rural property with a lake (fish and everything, even a small dam). The council wants them to increase the fencing on their swimming pool lest some child walk for about 10 minutes up to the house, get over an insufficiently high fence or through a fairly substantial hedge and drown. So much easier to just drown in the unfenced, easily available lake!
There's a bunch of passive-aggressive and plain aggressive letters going back and forth. It's a complete waste of everyone's time. We would be much better off with fewer regulations on irrelevant stuff like this - focus all that fire and fury on serious matters like gain-of-function.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
German Greens falsified evidence in order to phase out nuclear power back in 2022. Recently there was a Freedom of Information lawsuit that, despite the best efforts of the government, won and uncovered the documents. Amusingly the govt pleaded 'this needs to be kept secret lest all the countries we're trying to spruke our anti-nuclear, green ideology to realise how silly it is and combat our foreign policy' but failed.
A small group of Green politicians rewrote notes from technical experts to reverse the core message to be pro-shutdown of nuclear plants, fabricating safety concerns and arguing that necessary life-extension upgrades hadn't been undertaken. Despite being told that the message was rubbish they pressed on, lying to the public about why they were pushing what they were pushing.
The Germans turned their nuclear plants back on in a brief life-extension back in late 2022 before shutting them all down in 2023. I've maintained for several years that there's a high-level sabotage campaign against nuclear energy in the Western world. Most of the time it's not as clear as this. Usually it's procedural manipulation, regulations requiring pointlessly complicated and exacting reactor designs, obliterating the industry by not letting new power plants be made and a stubborn refusal to store nuclear waste permanently.
Britain's a deeply broken country IMO, drowning in decline. Scotland has effectively permanent SNP leftist-progressive govt. Traditional heavy industry left, north sea oil is depleted. There's not much growing of the pie, only taking someone else's share - SNP policies lean in that direction.
Real GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locations=GB
You can see the trend line of growth has fallen off since 2007 - and British growth is concentrated heavily around London, I expect things in Scotland are much worse than the country as a whole.
Potemkin villages: https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1761798659396518342
Warships being scrapped: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/britain-to-scrap-two-royal-navy-frigates-say-reports/
NHS spends twice as much on legal payouts due to their horrendous maternity service than maternity itself: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
If you've seen Clarkson's Farm you'll appreciate how hard it is for anyone to build anything, even if they're a global superstar. Everything is very expensive and takes forever, for no good reason. The UK border is totally out of control, despite being an island. Plus there were the Pakistani child rape gangs that operated for years because police were too scared of being racist and covered them up.
If I could buy puts for countries, I think puts on Britain would have the most alpha. Everyone thinks 'oh it's a P5 nuclear power, they invented industrial civilization, it'll be fine'. It's really not fine in the UK. I think it's systemically broken. Every single institution broken, incentives broken. I know Dominic Cummings is a contested figure here but he did work in the British govt for some time and I think he was driven a bit mad by the cosmic horror of it all, he wrote these essays about how everything was broken and the leaders were clowns:
(for the juicy horror stories skip down to four stories in the second link)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
pushing HBD now
That's Steve Sailor, Amren, VDARE, James Watson, Kevin McDonald, Jared Taylor, Richard Lynn, Phillip Rushton... These guys weren't pushing DEI through Bush era, they've been consistent. See the enormous list:
https://www.humanbiologicaldiversity.com/
If anything it's the Joe Biden's of the world that switched camp from 'I don't want my kids to grow up in a racial jungle' to 'white Europeans are going to be a minority by 2017 and that's the source of our strength'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Suppose you have two chip fabrication plants. One produces 97% functional, working chips, 3% are broken. The other plant produces 6% of their chips broken.
The majority of both plant's products work. If you have applications that need only a few working chips of a certain type, or individual working chips, you can use chips from either company without much bother.
But say you need 10 working chips of the same type, from the same factory. A single failure means the product is worthless. 0.97 x 0.97... = 0.74
0.94 x 0.94... = 0.54
The difference between a 54% chance of success and 74% is huge, way more significant than 94% vs 97%.
The point of this semiconductor metaphor is that small differences matter at large scales. We care about groups as well as individuals. In fact, groups are the most important determinants of state success and the strength/capabilities of the state is the most important determinant of individual welfare. Being poor/stupid in Denmark and poor/stupid in South Sudan are very different concepts. If it takes 10 quality, honest people to make a successful company or to run an electricity grid without blackouts... Or if it takes five stupid, dishonest, violent people to ruin a neighbourhood...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
Forget contrived stories of individuals and look at groups. At the top are East Asians, Indians and Europeans, at the bottom are blacks. There are exceptions and oddities - Appalachians are at the bottom for instance. Selection effects matter. But in general the obvious trend holds, the same trend you see in criminality, in health, science and so on. You see it in different countries - East Asia and European countries tend to be rich and advanced. If they're not, they have excuses.
Do you want a huge population of Afghans, Ethiopians and Sub-Saharan Africans coming to your country? Income of course doesn't tell the whole story - even those we'd expect to be inclined towards refugees throw up their arms with the Afghans we've been getting recently (there's probably a negative sorting effect going on here): https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ive-worked-refugees-decades-europes-afghan-crime-wave-mind-21506
In my country we have problems with Sudanese youths stealing cars and joyriding with them at grossly disproportionate rates. All this without a history of redlining, lynching and so on. And unlike Appalachian Americans, there do not seem to be non-economic gains from these populations - Appalachians have a history of military service.
Putting aside raw performance, there's also great value in homogeneity in itself. You might well say 'well let's skim off the most talented Chinese, Indians, Nigerians, Ethiopians with our high wages and boost our country's GDP'. What happens to your country if you do that? It becomes an empire as opposed to a nation-state and that invites disaster. Some ethnic group will find their way to the top and others will be jealous. What has happened to every empire in history? Nationalism tears it apart! Nationalism, competition for spoils, factionalism, cultural and religious tension - these are the most powerful forces in the world. We saw this quite clearly in Afghanistan. Nobody told the Taliban they needed a high GDP to beat us. They had nationalism and religious fervour, a culture standing firmly behind them, a force that proved stronger than a global superpower.
On all conventional measures of strength, NATO was far ahead of the Taliban. Yet we were trying to do something very difficult (massively changing a people's culture) and we were doing it in a stupid way (without forcibly indoctrinating or concentrating the population). What China did to its Uyghurs, that's how you change cultures from outside. If we're not prepared to do that (and how can we to people we invite to our countries), we will incur a disaster eventually. Few soldiers are prepared to die for feminism, for the political fortunes of the leading political dynasty, for liberal democracy or gay sex in Botswana. Many more are prepared to die for their nation, to make sacrifices for their nation. That's what people fought for in WW2.
Why can't the US fill the ranks of its army if its GDP is so high? Why is US politics such a disaster zone that there's an ongoing culture war? Because each passing day it becomes less and less national, more and more imperial. It becomes a hollow economic zone run by major corporations, media figures and ethnic leaders. Divisions (economic, cultural, ethnic) multiply and leaders start profiting from division, fuelling it for short-term advantage. There's a gigantic racial spoils apparatus devoted to papering over the cracks, trying to retain a modicum of stability even as it further undermines it. Destination: Lebanon.
I don't think men really understand how women think, I certainly don't. I can create models to rationalize behaviours 'oh that handbag is a way of showing status and affirming one's position in the pecking order' but I don't weigh status so highly, so I can't appreciate why they'd spend so much money on them. Designer goods still don't make sense to me.
I suppose women wouldn't understand why I buy Steam games and then don't play them. Anyway, I think their mental state is hard to understand and we should be wary of trying to explain them, given fundamental differences. We're stuck with what they say (not usually too helpful, given incentives) and whatever models we make up. But our models may well be very wrong, since we don't understand their thought process and it's our thought processes that we try to insert on them, since we can't access theirs.
Consider the women on reddit who are like 'hey everyone here is really sex-positive and says it's no problem that I have an Onlyfans but when I bring it up on dates the men get the ick instantly, what's going on'. Their models of men are bad, why would they bring that up? Or the women who get that hideous plasticky Bogdanoff look, they're bad at modelling how men rate attractiveness. Or the highly accomplished 30/40-year old lawyer women who go 'I have this prestigious job and lots of money, why aren't equally prestigious men attracted to me'. Modelling the other sex is very difficult, people fail at it all the time and we should try to do it less.
More options
Context Copy link