RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d 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.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d 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?
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!
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!
2mo 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.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
In general, the far right misses the forest for the trees in the Rotherham affair.
The key factor that the far right cares about is the betrayal aspect, that police were too afraid of looking racist to do anything about it. They tried hard to cover it up, disappearing the evidence. And they succeeded for at least a decade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal#Weir_report_(2001)
Having a poor, unemployed, faithless underclass is one thing, having a poor, police covering up for the criminals is quite another.
In two of the cases we read, fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene. In a small number of cases (which have already received media attention) the victims were arrested for offences such as breach of the peace or being drunk and disorderly, with no action taken against the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault against children.
The police were incredibly useless and unhelpful, all the young people in Rotherham knew that taxis drivers were abusers yet none of the officials who had these extensive liasons and meetings managed to do anything about it (like taking away their licenses, for example). Or the police thought doing anything about child molesting was 'a waste of time'. Or check 10.11-10.18, page 85 - it paints a rather disturbing picture of someone inside the police force helping an abuser blackmail a young girl by threatening her 11 year old sister. Concerns about this expressed to the District Commander were thoroughly ignored and witnesses were silenced.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority
Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport? Well, I suppose there's the issue of 'free' in that someone eventually has to pay for it. But in principle, these things genuinely are supposed to be investments. Not investments in the 'doubling down for the tenth time on this shitcoin that's constantly reaching new bottoms like ICP or California High Speed Rail' sense, actual investments that deliver returns. Public transport is supposed to be economical, it's energetically efficient at least. If construction costs are low it makes a lot of sense. Good infrastructure is important for industry too. Education is supposed to improve the quality of the workforce in economic terms, produce sensible, virtuous citizens. Same with healthcare.
Everyone wants those things, they just have a bunch of other goals as well. For instance, it's impossible to have a high-quality public transport system if it's full of drug addicts, or if you bog everything down in so many environmental reviews that nobody can build anything efficiently.
In Australia, about 11% of 5-7 year old boys (and 5% of 5-7 year old girls) are now on the NDIS disability scheme (for things like 'developmental delay' or autism). My source is paywalled. Costs are out of control, 14% annual growth, 35 Billion AUD this year. I fully expect we're causing considerable damage to perfectly normal boys by medicalizing what could easily be ignored. But people (especially the newish Labor government) don't want to look like they're stripping 'care' from people, they don't want some parent of disabled children sobbing on national media. So their response is to chair an independent report that'll come back in October, aiming to reduce cost growth to a mere 8% per year. If I'm reading the article correctly, the minister involved also wants to spend another $730 million AUD on 'capacity building' to reduce costs in the long run. I have very low expectations.
More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed
The issue here is that they're not making use of all the options to achieve utilitarian goals. For instance, a utilitarian might very well come to the conclusion that they should just shoot a certain subset of criminals. Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else. Given that there's no 'turn him into a normal person' gun, a utilitarian might say 'shoot him dead', especially if prison is expensive. But what you see as an excessive utilitarian would always ask for more rehabilitation, more programs, more education, or avoid the subject by talking about 'root causes' and then frame them in utilitarian logic. Unless they have a time machine, addressing root causes won't change fully-formed parasitic criminals.
As it intrudes more on them personally, people get less tolerant of crime (consider the San Fran women who are warming to my preferred cut-them-down approach). I think we'd be better off if decisionmakers had more skin in the game. If there was anything in Stalin's Russia like California High Speed Rail, the NKVD would be shooting and torturing wreckers for weeks. While massive purges have various negative externalities, is there no way to punish people for collectively squandering tens of billions of dollars? Prison, a fine? And what about some rewards if things go well? We could even tack a prediction market on here, make politicians buy bonds that pay off if their policy succeeds to show their sincerity.
I conclude with three beliefs:
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If you pay for something, you get more of it.
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Defeating enemies is a useful alternative to deterring them, especially if they're weak.
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Decision-makers and overseers must have an incentive to get things done efficiently and correctly
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
The point of HBD is to get rid of the currently dominant framework in society. Normative equality with factual inequality is ridiculous. Most would agree that the idiot/drug-dealer/robber deserves worse outcomes than the Nobel prize winning family man.
The current system pretends that 'investing' in lower quality people will increase their quality. If we shuffle around welfare policies and make more investments, we'll eventually have everyone be really high quality and it will all be harmonious and great. Of course there are various ethnic resentments and greed that really motivate things but officially, that's what the explanation is. That's the source of legitimacy.
HBD explains why the investment doesn't work. It shows that you might make marginal changes on the edges but that fundamentally low-quality populations will remain low-quality. It shows that there's no end to this 'investment', that it's actually a tax on efficiency, meritocracy and society generally. Prosocial people might pay for an investment to improve all of society but few are going to throw money down the drain when it's guaranteed not to work and actually creates problems. The beginning of blankslatism was founded on scientific fraud for this very reason - they fiddled with the figures of skull measurements so it looked like their opponents were lying, evil racists. First you establish the facts, then you explain how your policy solves the problem, then you purge the old guard of nonbelievers, then you implement it.
HBD will show the danger in taxing the most capable while subsidizing the least capable. I know a bunch of really clever, productive people - zero children, one child, zero children, two children... Very few have more than three. Meanwhile you see single mothers on welfare with a brood of children, statistically of much lower quality. Consider how sex and reproduction are considered among society's elite. Sabatini was this genius researcher with one son who's been impoverished and excluded from his work because he dared have consensual sex with a woman. HBD would say we need lots of this, that the best should be reproducing the most. https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=w
Blankslatism is a huge drain on group efficiency, understanding HBD increases efficiency. Even if blankslatist ideology can't be voted out, it does go against the structure of the universe. Those groups that are less blankslatist will get a competitive advantage. If we don't vote it out, then the Chinese army will. If not them, then some other force.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Who voted for mass immigration?
Take the UK - since the 1990s both major parties consistently said they'd be tough and restrictive on immigration. They then proceeded to increase it while in power. https://twitter.com/t848m0/status/1560662923101347840
The governments of Europe and the European Union make the choices, not the people. Consider how much intense opposition there was to Brexit, something that really could be considered the people's choice! It eventually happened, after a great deal of fooling around and delaying tactics. Or the many times states have rejected EU integration in referendums, only to be made to vote again or their decisions were ignored. Capital punishment was abolished decades before it became unpopular.
What is the point of democracy if the major parties consistently lie about their plans and implement their agenda regardless of what the voters want? Or if they form a 'cordon sanitaire' to prevent political representation of undesirables? Or if they manipulate the media by omission, lies, slant and emphasis to enforce ideological orthodoxy? Middle East Wars are the primary example. Russiagate is a secondary example, now that the Durham report has been released.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
outstanding job all things considered
Really? Massive opiate epidemic, uncontrolled borders, failing/flailing Operation Prosperity Guardian, running 5-6% budget deficits during what we're assured is a booming economy... The US military is supposed to be gearing up to take on Russia and China but the army had to cut strength by some 10,000 men because they couldn't recruit. There's intense political division, two months ago there were state governors squaring off against the feds on border security. Three years ago there was some kind of coup/farce.
IMO the only good news coming out of the US stems from the private sector: SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, Nvidia.
Yes it was real. They even had the white-hating guy (Jack Krawczyk) in charge of product development trying to fend off the wolves with 'this looks accurate' on some of the first tweets of 'everyone you'd expect to be white is actually non-white'. He's sealed off his twitter now but the stored cache in my browser (and my memory from yesterday) for this link tells me it went 'Here's what I got on first attempt, all your answers look correct...' People need to recalibrate their priors on what is or isn't real, if it was manipulated the media would've trumpeted it to the four winds by now. Absence of credible contradiction is evidence in favour for politically uncomfortable topics.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
Quite right, I was going to make a similar post.
OpenAI seems to have already passed this easily noticeable tendency, Bing image-gen shoots out reasonably normal depictions of Germany or Sweden. Egregious Netflix-tier representation certainly used to be there, indeed it's still present in the prompt instructions for GPT-4. There's a distinction between GPT-4 and Bing image gen but I haven't heard many recent complaints about GPT-4 image gen.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ahhlon/i_downloaded_my_chatgpt_user_data_and_found_the/
GPT-4 will still divert around wrongthink in text though, it's much more proficient and equivocating than Gemini. Offer it any kind of trolley problem and it will no longer go 'in no circumstances must the n-word ever be spoken, even if cities are incinerated' it will just fob you off with 'many people disagree about what's right according to different ethics'. If you ask whether people deserve self-determination (trying to trip it out re Israel/Palestine), it will say it's a really hard and contested issue. People got angry when it labelled opposition to the First Nations and Torres Strait Islanders Voice to Parliament as divisive, so I think they prevented it expressing that opinion. Yet it's still there, it just tries to be blander and not draw out headlines.
I reckon Google is still emotionally scarred after the whole black people monkeys facial recognition fiasco, so they tried hard to reach a SOTA level of diversity and inclusion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Was it the country, the nation or the government that made this decision?
In Britain voters have consistently demanded lower immigration for 20 years and governments (on both sides) have consistently ignored them and raised immigration, or refused to enforce borders. Australia has proven that it is possible to reduce illegal immigration to zero for island countries (if this was ever in doubt). Governments have the power to prevent these things, it's not difficult. They choose not to prevent illegal immigration, they choose not to set quotas on legal migration - the people tend to be pretty happy with such notions.
I don't know if the Canadian people ever got a clear choice, I suspect not if the British didn't.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
That's odd because just the other day I was on twitter and found an entire account devoted to showing white men being humiliated or otherwise shown to be weak, stupid or childish in commercials: https://twitter.com/StupidWhiteAds/status/1724255095376781481#m
I cannot fathom how this would encourage anyone to buy Doritos if it turns you into a needy, tantrum-ridden child. Why would Doritos want this? Would anyone put this to air? Is there some parallel universe where this is considered good advertising?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
If Biden wanted to reduce petrol prices, he wouldn't have banned keystone XL on day 1. January 20th, the first thing he did was block a pipeline. Then he put a moratorium on exploration in public lands. Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas (imagine being European at this point, trusting in an 'ally' that behaves like this).
Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment. But Biden has been relatively anti-fossil fuel.
American Elites
https://www.rmgresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Elite-One-Percent.pdf
I found this recent Rasmussen presentation, it focuses on subsections of the elite. It was funded by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a libertarian thinktank. One might consider them elite heretics or counter-elites (and sure enough they have a slide at the end saying ‘oh there are some elites who are good and trustworthy'). Us non-Gold Circle normies only get the slides, so it's a little unclear what they mean.
Anyway, they define elite as postgrad urbanite with 150K per year income. They further split elites into those who went to 12 top colleges and the ‘politically obsessed’ (definition unclear but I imagine it means they spend a certain number of hours reading/watching/discussing political media). For instance, I imagine we would be considered ‘politically obsessed’.
As you might expect, the elite are the ones who approve of Biden and Congress. They trust the government to do the right thing. I imagine that even if they don’t think the government’s doing a great job they’re friends with high ranking officials and feel a certain amity for them. In my experience, their brother might be an ambassador, they might have an AI regulator over for lunch. Even if they’ve been astonished by the stupid questions journalists ask them, they’ve still got fairly positive impressions of the prestige press and read at least two or three newspapers.
Elites are also much more likely to say ‘there’s too much individual freedom in the US’ than voters, especially the politically obsessed elites. Likewise, they favour strict restrictions on private usage of gas, vehicles, meat and electricity. It’s bizarre that 55% oppose non-essential air travel since this class is the most likely to go on overseas holidays, I don’t understand how this works. Anyway, they want restrictions on everything except border security, which they couldn’t care less about. Plebs hold the opposite beliefs.
I was most surprised by how 29% of the elite thinks that China is an ally, compared to 9% of ordinary voters. I would’ve thought the elites were the hawks! Maybe some of them have commercial interests in China or they want to work with China on climate change or they’re ethnically Chinese, anyway this is really odd to me. The hawk faction may be in control but the doves haven’t been totally eviscerated. Does anyone have any explanations or observations on this matter?
35% of the elite would rather cheat than lose a close election, rising to 69% of the ‘politically obsessed’. Only 7% of pleb voters would cheat. That seems like an underestimate to me – who goes and says ‘I would rather cheat than lose an election’ on a poll? Wouldn’t people be embarrassed (or tactical) and lie – they’re cheats after all! Again, I don’t know the exact definition of cheat but I imagine many more would do something subversive like hold back successful COVID vaccine results until after the election or engage in various procedural manipulations. Edit for an example of what I mean for 'non-cheating' manipulation: https://twitter.com/stevenmackeyman/status/1764876192648499220
I think it’s clear that these are the people with actual power and influence, the ones who set the agenda, the key actors in tech, media, government and law. They create outcomes, or lack thereof. Just about every judge would be elite by this definition, along with nearly all AI workers (OK maybe not the work-from-home guys in the Colorado mountains). All lobbyists, the heads of most NGOs, the most important lawyers – everyone except the right-wing politicians who seem unable to achieve any of their goals.
It’s not like it’s hard to close the US border. The US is a global power after all. The US seems to think it can defend Ukraine’s borders against the Russian army from the other side of the world and secure Taiwan’s borders against the PLA, it must be at least 1000x easier to defend the US border against stateless, unarmed mobs. They just don’t care, indeed their energy seems to swing the other way – see the recent US-Texas standoff over barbed wire and the border. The survey said not one respondent cared about the border as a priority, presumably some think immigration is quite a good thing and want more, illegal or otherwise.
On other fronts, we observe these creeping changes – everyone seems to need a college degree if they want to do anything. That’s not the will of the majority but it is what the elite want. You can see these articles that go ‘relax nobody’s coming to take your gas stove’, how they struck down the federal bill. But the state legislation in New York and other cities is proceeding, it’s clear that this is the path that the US is on. Likewise, the disputes over the 2020 election. I'm suspicious but can't prove that the election was rigged, or that Epstein didn't kill himself. Nevertheless, US democracy doesn't seem in very good shape if its elites are so willing to win by fraud.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
The sanctions and external pressure was a big influence on South Africa. There's no rule that says you have to have elections, or that you need to put everyone's names on the ballot. China certainly doesn't! Even in liberal democracies there are all kinds of ways to suppress undesirable parties - the campaign against the AFD for instance.
If the Anglosphere stood behind white South Africa rather than against it, it'd still be here today.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
'just do whatever creates stability'
decapitate the regime in Tehran
hand the reins over to a transitional government and leave
I didn't know John Bolton was on this website. You want to invade a mountainous country of 80 million that's spent the last 20-30 years preparing for just this scenario, armed to the teeth with missiles and SAMs. You want to do this after we tried exactly this twice in two of its smaller, weaker neighbours and failed abysmally. It'll tar the opposition to the Iranian govt as foreign collaborators and traitors. You want to give China and Russia the perfect opportunity to act on their own fronts, now that we're even more distracted and bogged down. Just imagine how much military aid they'll give Iran! You want to stir up Shia fervour against the West, ignite a conflict right next to the straits of Hormuz. It'll inevitably draw in Iran's allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen. The whole region will be up in flames. You want to test just how far Iran's nuclear program has gotten, whether they can rustle up a few dirty bombs. And at the same time you want to scatter Palestinians all around the world, presumably in our countries, just as we're attacking and blowing up their sponsors and friends - suicide bombings galore!
WHY??? Why, after 20 years of these disastrous interventions do people still think 'our error was not attacking stronger opponents'? We've conclusively shown that we have no clue about the 'hand the reigns over to a transitional govt and leave', we can't manage it, it doesn't work and it turns into a quagmire. People don't like it when you attack their country, this is a universal tendency. Nothing could make the Iranian government more popular than a US invasion. Iraqis rallied around Saddam Hussein of all people when we invaded Iraq, the Iraqi army fought hard, albeit without a hope of success. They rallied around Iranian militias, Sunni militias, everything except liberal democracy since that's the ideology of the invader.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3mo ago
They do a lot of important jobs Americans refuse to (construction, food)
Back in the 1950s and 1960s the US could construct things quickly and simply, Eisenhower built the national highway system even as he expelled a million illegal immigrants. If food prices rise, they could try subsidizing or mechanizing labour-intensive work. There are non-trivial expenses in health/education spending on illegal immigrants, that money could be redirected to subsidies. Illegal immigrants undercut domestic workers, it would logically raise employment and wages amongst the working class.
Nobody had this helpless attitude for the other major problems the US faced. When the Arabs launched an oil embargo and plunged the developed world into a recession, the US didn't give up on supporting Israel. They rationed petrol, they launched fuel-efficiency programs, they looked into nuclear energy and renewables.
The US state apparatus is way larger today and has all kinds of fancy AI/surveillance tools, it's well within their abilities to launch Operation Wetback 2.0.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
They'll find some way to dodge it. Perhaps it's hate speech. Perhaps it makes people feel unsafe. They could invent a whole new legal doctrine specifically to target this, ignoring the contradiction with precedent.
OP's whole point is summed up in this statement from the dissent:
“My friends in the majority ... have developed a new ‘bad man’ theory of the law: identify the bad man; he loses. ... The majority’s threadbare analysis willfully abandons both our precedent and the facts in search of its desired result. ... that cynicism breaks new ground.”
It's a results oriented decision, not a principle-based one.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
But the reason it's cringeworthy to pursue only classical physics problems is not just that they've already been done... but that physics is about achieving physical mastery over reality. We have clockwork and Newton effectively locked down, we have general relativity and now we try to shrink transistors (ignoring what the particle physics have been doing, spending lots of money on with few returns for the last few decades). Physics has the promise to provide energy, bombs, computing power, better rockets and so on. The grant money is for opening up new territory that has resources in it. In maths, there are also returns - cryptographic and algorithmic and so on.
Art doesn't provide returns like that. Art only has to inspire emotions in people. Novelty does not improve this, in and of itself. It's not as though we've locked down all the poems and are moving on to poems 2. There are plenty of poems left to be written, plenty of landscapes and storms to make paintings about.
Indeed physics has been mired in an excessive search for novelty for some time now. String theory has not produced any returns. It might be mathematically interesting and novel but it's not powering anything new. It provides employment to physicists and allows for many papers to be written. But it doesn't achieve the fundamental goal of physics. Likewise, putting three basketballs in a tank or making a stainless steel balloon dog is not art.
http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/balloon-dog-0
Art must do more than confuse people. The Sydney Modern art gallery's $344 million expansion is a glorified convention centre - lots of empty space, little 'art' and almost no art. It's a place for people who want to look sophisticated to organize functions.
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!
1mo ago
Do they simply not care that much?
The Palestinians and Israelis hate eachother, what you're seeing is hatred. You see these incidents where the Israeli soldiers shoot school children in the back and get acquitted:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post's operations room and describes Iman as "a little girl" who was "scared to death". After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.
Or when Hamas suicide bombers blow up Israelis. Doing horrific things to civilians is a goal in and of itself. They've been doing this kind of thing for ages, shooting unarmed protestors, pregnant women. It's hatred.
The Palestinians resent getting kicked off their land, they resent getting bombed, gunned down, getting their water stolen/filled with toxic waste, demolished houses... There are these giant lists of complaints they have: https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution
Why would Palestinians trust Israel when they've spent decades suppressing and impoverishing them, so as to maintain and expand Israeli territory and control? There is a massive abyss of negative trust between both sides. Furthermore, Israel knows they aren't going to lose US support, America's leaders tout their unconditional love for Israel to anyone who'll listen. Trump was on Truth Social the other day saying he's far more pro-Israeli than Biden, who has himself been sending billions in extra military aid. So what cost does Israel pay for behaving heavy-handedly? The US will clean up the mess, they'll deal with Yemen and anyone else who tries to target Israel.
Plus there've been swirling allegations that Netanyahu helped Qatar to support Hamas - dividing Palestinians between the Authority and Hamas helps prevent them forming a state. Divide and conquer tactics.
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:
Regulation was the assassin, gun and bullet while Westinghouse was the corpse on the floor.
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