RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
Oh certainly. But it's funny imagining the woke people who might even want tickets for that film trying to avoid saying the no no word at the end!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
The US did incinerate North Korea's cities, burned down most of the standing structures. That and the destruction of the ground campaign basically knocked North Korea out of the war and so the Chinese did nearly all the fighting. Destruction does work to an extent.
But it certainly didn't endear North Koreans to America. Warfare isn't just about pure destruction but achieving various goals and avoiding bad end states. A North Korea traumatized and hyper-militarized turned out to be a thorn in America's side. Better to end the war earlier rather than go too far into North Korea and bring in China.
The climate crisis is not a real crisis and dangerously distracts from serious issues.
I do a search on the Thwaites nightmare scenario and get this:
Instead, preliminary results from one of ITGC’s modeling groups suggest that in coming decades Thwaites will steadily retreat but not collapse, contributing up to 6 centimeters of global sea level rise by century’s end. That’s still a major fraction of the 38 to 77 centimeters of rise that the latest U.N. climate report estimates will occur by 2100 because of melting in Antarctica and Greenland.
Wow, 77 centimetres by 2100! I'm shaking in my boots. 77 centimetres of water by 2100 is not a significant issue. That's 'modest expenditure on coastline management', not a civilization ruining disaster. Apparently we might even get 4 metres by 2300!
Under a worst-case scenario for emissions, Thwaites and many of the ice sheets it buttresses could collapse by 2300, adding more than 4 meters to sea level, according to an estimate published this month in Earth’s Future by a large collaboration of modelers, including ITGC members.
There's a stupid loop where the media picks out the worst case scenario from some cluster of studies (all of which are expansive predictions far into the future that are basically meaningless: 2100 cannot be predicted full stop) and then aggressively misreads it to imply some huge catastrophe is imminent unless radical action is taken. Then it's fictionalized into a fable, somehow the scriptwriters are allowed to make up nonsense like 2012 or Digger and the gross exaggeration is accepted as artistic metaphor to enhance the standing of a real serious issue. It's epistemic sabotage to derive real political value from a made-up scenario, pure propaganda.
But when the predictions don't hold up, there are never any updates except on a few climate obsessive's blogs where they meticulously list all the predictions that failed...
Compare two articles: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2022-09-17/thwaites-glacier-antarctica-doomsday-moniker-is-it-valid/101433974 (scary, 'we're probably past the tipping point', implies bad things are going to happen, not quite sure when or how but it's pretty clear what the meaning is)
And then a later article: https://www.science.org/content/article/doomsday-may-be-delayed-antarctica-s-most-vulnerable-glacier (disaster is still coming but sometime later this century unless we cut emissions, suddenly we're not past the tipping point)
Climate change is fundamentally unthreatening to us. It would be menacing for an iron age civilization of subsistence farmers. Such a society is only a few bad harvests away from a major crisis. There were indeed historical incidents of climate change contributing to countries collapsing in the 1640s.
But we are not an iron age civilization. What could possibly happen that we can't adapt or alter or control? If we wanted to stop climate change tomorrow we could, sulphate aerosols can directly control temperature. If we wanted to produce more food we could rationalize consumption by cutting back on wine, tobacco and biofuel, we could scale up agriculture or conduct further mechanization of agriculture, store food better, waste less. If cities flood we could simply move them inland or build dams to protect them. We can counterattack into the ocean and reclaim land. Holland expanded into the North Sea with great success up until the 1960s. Then people decided to pretend man was powerless in the face of nature across the West, reclamation stopped here but continued in Asia. That is a more real danger than climate change, an attitude of incapacity.
How can we adapt agriculture, conduct necessary large scale engineering improvements if we think such activity is impious? What happens to us if we are up against a foe without such self-imposed restrictions?
Audience members put on manufactured breathing masks and leave the theater, emerging into a flooded, devastated city patrolled by soldiers, robots, and drones.
The only thing that can produce such a disaster is deliberate intelligent effort from people or AI, not climate change. The greedy elites aren't going to be reckless, 'dig too deep and too greedily' and anger nature in their hubris, bringing down destruction from the heavens. The danger the greedy elites pose is just outright shooting or nuking people to death, starting and losing wars or creating thinking adversaries. A devastated city patrolled by soldiers with unbreathable air is what you get after losing a nuclear war, not from icebergs.
If they wanted to make a really subversive and interesting film, they should adapt a Liu Cixin short story 'Fire in the Earth' where a miner wants to revitalize his poor town by burning coal seam gas underground for power. More energetically efficient that way, rather than taking it up. Only the fire spreads by an unpredicted channel and starts a hellish underground fire rendering a whole area uninhabitable. Mass evacuation. The guilty protagonist commits suicide by heading down into the mine... and a couple hundred years later some school kids head into a coal mine on a school trip to see how tough the miners of old had it hauling coal out by hand (before the marvellous progress of underground processing, which was refined and fixed later on).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
I heard such stories about 'The American Society of Magical Negroes' which also bombed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
So far as I can see the compute-centric framework is crushing right now. Facebook and Google are back in the game and well ahead of any Chinese competitor.
Sending your software engineers to the data-labelling mines and forking out a gazillion dollars to Nvidia seems to work out better than clever architectural tricks on a shoestring budget.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I know, I agree with you. In retrospect I should've made that more clear.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
If the war was being won, or even if Trump perceived the war was being won, then wouldn't he be making more extravagant demands too? At the start he was Truthing that only someone he chose or favoured could be president of Iran or else they'd keep up the assassination campaign (this was back in the regime change phase of the war, quite early on).
He's not doing that right now.
Instead of bullying Europe into releasing more diesel from their reserves or granting sanctions relief to Russia, he'd be trying to threaten or harass Iran more to capitalize on the victory. He'd be demanding money or oil from them under threat from bombing (since they don't have any air defences or ability to strike back, right?)
Trump is hardly likely to develop a magnanimous streak before a beaten opponent he routinely rails against and hates.
Surely if the US was winning or had won the war, they'd be moving back in and rebuilding the 5th fleet headquarters in Bahrain, sitting ships right in the straits to show control and allow the 200+ ships waiting around there to navigate freely. There wouldn't be any tankers being attacked, apparently 16 were in the last 2 weeks:
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Sure, it just seems bizarre that when they miss the vein and she's still alive 40 minutes later, they scramble around looking for lifesaving equipment to save the person they were trying to kill. I understand that they're obeying the law. The law is the issue.
I predict that for Pike there will be a huge investigation, all kinds of new rules will be introduced requiring people to get extensively trained about how to stick needles in people so they can hit veins. Maybe lifesaving equipment will have to be kept in the execution room. Even more procedural epicycles. Pike will sue. Others will sue. Another gazillion dollars to lawyers. The whole ethos here is weak.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
A short duration between conviction and execution
Pike was in prison for 30 years. Hasan was convicted in 2013 for a shooting in 2009.
What new evidence could there possibly be for Hasan? It's known he did it, the evidence is incontrovertible. Not wanting to execute people on dubious evidence is one thing, decades of delay is another.
On December 7, 2020, the United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Hasan's death penalty. On September 11, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces upheld Hasan's death penalty. On March 31, 2025, the United States Supreme Court denied Hasan's final petition for a writ of certiorari, thereby confirming his death sentence.
They're just going around and around in circles.
Or with Pike, we see her lawyers saying 'she was sexually abused when younger and the judge didn't give that enough weight when sentencing.' They don't say 'actually she didn't do it', they're just using delaying tactics.
Some Americans actually pay for this, some individual workers have hours of his time taken from him and given to murderers so their lawyers can file endless pieces of paper for decades, to be read and opposed and rejected by other lawyers. Hasan cost about $10 million + for his trials and appeals, attorneys, legal work, transport by helicopter... Peanuts by government standards of course but an injustice. Entire lifetimes worth of tax have been siphoned from real people and given to lawyers for the sake of this guy.
How is this just? Pike had her chance for legal defence in the first trial. If it meets a high standard of evidence (overwhelming confidence of guilt), then that alone should be sufficient. There doesn't need to be a giant legal circus of increasingly flimsy appeals. Hasan obviously did it, it's an open and shut case.
Past a certain point, procedure doesn't prevent violent chaos but actively impedes swift justice. Excessive quantities of procedure make the US less safe. They put criminals back out into the public because the legal system invents all kinds of reasons for why they weren't supposed to be arrested, or because jails are overcrowded. There's violent chaos in many US cities because of an excessively lenient and exploitable legal system whose most ridiculous aspects are in these death row delays.
Would swift executions result in innocent people dying? Sure. Innocent people are going to die under any system. Mature governance accepts this and has to ration resources. That 10 million worth of legal spending on Hasan is roughly similar to the $9.4-13 million statistical value of an American life. Privileging the worst murderers with these huge investments of resources just because they're particularly legible and known to the legal system (as compared to normal people who get run over, robbed and torturously murdered by the '30 prior offences' crowd) is very counterintuitive.
Still seems healthier than the extremely low testosterone botched execution of that satanist murderess recently.
The procedure was marred by severe complications, including the execution team using at least seven needles and failing to establish proper intravenous lines, which likely caused the drug to leak into her tissue rather than enter her bloodstream.
Following the attempt, Pike was found conscious and breathing 40 minutes after the first dose was administered, prompting the execution to be halted. She was rushed to a hospital in critical condition, where she initially suffered from pneumonia, blood clots, and an inability to move her arms. Recent updates indicate she has regained consciousness and is walking and eating, though her lawyers report her prognosis remains unclear and she is dealing with profound psychological trauma.
Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions for the rest of 2026 and ordered an independent review.
Apparently it's legally impossible to whip out a sidearm and blow her head off, since you can only kill people in the exact way and time that a judge finds pleasing. Otherwise it's something like murder, so that woman has to be rushed off to hospital to save her from the death she was supposed to suffer.
Pike’s legal team is seeking to commute her sentence to life in prison and has requested that all evidence from the failed execution be preserved for potential litigation.
So now the woman who should be dead is going to sue, fantastic.
Ohio’s 2009 attempt to execute Romell Broom failed after hours of trying to find a vein. Courts allowed a retry, but it never happened, and he later died of COVID in prison.
They are constantly failing, delaying, having issues with executions.
There are many arguments about the purpose of capital punishment but I don't think anyone argued for a system where it exists nominally but in practical terms it's for providing lawyers and administrative personnel jobs. Nobody comes out and says that the real metric of success is how many delays and how much expense can be inflicted, as opposed to swift and efficient execution of serious criminals. But that's what the US system actually is. Purpose of the system is what it does and what it does is extract money and find excuses for it. In Pike and Hassan's case there was no doubt or useful justice-enhancing purpose for appeals.
Pike was sentenced to death in 1996, lawyers and the legal system have just been sending little memos back and forth for 30 years rather than producing any actual justice. She attempted to kill someone in prison and also started litigation about her conditions being 'unequal' to male prisoners on death row. Hasan was convicted in 2013.
I suspect Trump's natural instinct is 'to hell with the lawyers, let's blow his head off' rather than careful procedurism, which does have its benefits. I made a post back in 2025 about how tariffs weren't that bad compared to careful, boring procedural sabotage, grifting and wrecking. The harms of tariffs are obvious and overt but aren't necessarily worse than the harms that the experts cause silently and slowly and in a boring, adult, professional manner. Of course there are also overt harms that are worse. But in general, there's something to be said for this stance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Why should shooting a man in a wheelchair be dishonorable? It's not like he'd have a chance to live if he had full use of his legs, it's not like he's in a gladiatorial arena or something? There's no substantive difference, only an aesthetic difference. We know songs in a minor theme are more ominous and villain coded but there's no actual reason for that, it's just a convention.
I don't disagree that it does seem dishonorable. But I can't see any reason why.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
I don't fully understand the halting problem but I think there are ways to work around it most of the time, in practice. We can just look at the program and think about what's going on with it and that's mostly good enough.
AI alignment is similar. It would be preferable not to have 'mostly good enough' be our defence against annihilation. Even if it's impossible to prove that the AI isn't deceiving us, we can still get a certain sense of how aligned the AI is. If neural net alignment is only like the halting problem, then it can't be proven correct but could still be largely managed.
Can we outwit smarter beings than us while getting value from them? No, they ultimately have to consent. It might be possible though to make mostly fine AIs, use their technologies to get stronger ourselves, then pull our own intelligence up by our bootstraps, so to speak.
The major issue with this is that OpenAI seems shockingly negligent with how they train and manage LLMs. We're not near anything that looks like 'mostly good enough.'
It seems surer to me that human coordination ability is not up to the challenge of holding back on neural nets indefinitely than neural nets are practically unalignable. How well has Pause AI done so far? It seems to have just bounced straight off. Nobody seems to be pausing, let alone stopping and switching to GOFAI.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
I'm not making assumption 6, that's the whole crux of the issue. Concerns about the specific nature of the intelligence are the whole point in question.
1-5 are trivial.
With 7 you're bringing in 'short term'. Scott is specifically saying 'not right now' and neither am I. Scott wrote about Plan A where he explicitly asks for 15 or so years to make sure it's done right, not racing ahead. His big thing is 'let's not do it just yet, it is coming soon but we are not properly preparing or implementing it so let's slow down and do it right'. The alternative to 'we need more time to prepare' is 'never do it', which is what he is criticizing as unacceptable.
Realistically, people are not going to wait two hundred years, or five hundred years, or any 'safely beyond any need to care about it' distance of time to reap immense gains in wealth and power. This isn't wise but it's happening anyway. Non-LLM AI doesn't really work for general tasks, only LLMs have shown generality or long-horizon capabilities.
Suppose I don't think that technical or computational capacity is identical to civilisational maturity. That just seems implausible on the face of it - and certainly I don't believe that the worth of a civilisation or a people should be measured linearly and quantitatively like that.
Well, you may not care for technical capacity. In some abstract sense, the Zulu empire and the British empire were equal peers. But in all real and significant senses, obviously the British were better and greater and the Maxim Gun settled the question.
I cannot help but read that statement about 'civilisational childhood' and picture someone standing in front of a half-built tower reaching into the heavens and explaining, "If we stop building this tower to heaven, we are consigning ourselves to permanent civilisational childhood or an early grave."
The Tower of Babel is not a real thing and I don't see any need to care about it. Tolkien also writes about unreal things, things that could not be real, do not hold to principles we actually observe in the world. His genre is fantasy.
Science fiction actually relates to reality in a certain sense, that's the key distinction here. Things start off in sci-fi (like the atomic bomb) and have been made real, often by creators inspired by the fiction. You can't criticize sci-fi by appealing to fantasy, Jewish or otherwise.
Neural nets seem a lot less alien than search, to my mind. LLMs are like humans in a certain sense, they talk about their bodies erroneously, they were trained on all these human written documents, philosophy, humour and so on.
Compared to GOFAI 'but actually strong' using some kind of advanced search and pure cognition bootstrapping itself up, I'd prefer the neural nets. Search has no time for whimsy, search is the Dalek-like exterminator.
Normal people don't like AI. Really don't like it. That helps a lot.
ChatGPT has a billion monthly active users. Google AI overviews and Meta AI are also apparently around over a billion monthly active users. There's a distinction between cheap crap AI that gets served up for free and more advanced agentic AI of course but I think anti-AI sentiment is overrated. Tiktok Datacentre-water-antibillionaireism doesn't do much that politically. Someone gave me a book called AI Snake-oil and that's pretty much the state of anti-AI. 'AGI is a scam, algorithms and surveillance and turning kids brains to mush is the real danger.' They're against it but for the wrong reasons and I don't think that the movement has serious political power. If one US state bans datacentres, they'll build them elsewhere.
Plus, the US security apparatus wants advanced AI. They want esoteric maths, they want quantum, they want cyber, they want algorithms for better logistics and communications and AI targeting, they're at the forefront of that with Maven. How else can 350 million Americans beat 1.4 billion Chinese? China wants to catch up and surpass the US in all technological fields, they wanted that for a century or so.
Great power war would only intensify the desire for strong AI as a war-winner. My bet is that if there is a war, it will be a long war and probably inclined to accelerate AI development and militarization.
Nuclear exchange is a wildcard of course. A full nuclear exchange would remove most of the capital base for AI. But civilization will eventually rebuild. It's not a long-term solution.
This isn't an ideal world, there are significant dangers in making these strong AIs. We ought to pause and switch to human augmentation. But can we? There's no words I can say that will persuade a retarded boomer or Gen X who actually has any power or authority, nothing I can show them, no watertight argument that can explain the true nature of the issue. They'll fall for some retarded babble from the 'AGI is not a real danger' camp every single time, no matter how obviously wrong it is. They politely call me mentally ill for even raising the issue. Jensen Huang is 10,000x more competent and effective than I am and he wouldn't be polite, he'd swear at me for 10 minutes for raising this sci-fi scenario, he did that with a biographer.
Our civilization couldn't even ban Gain of Function biolabs which have literally no reason to exist even after a massive disaster. We are not going to do something clever or responsible with AI. I know trying to blackpill isn't helpful, it's just that I think we need to be more realistic about how effort is used and not overreach. The goal should be widening the 'and then we get lucky' space rather than aiming for the moon and falling short.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Good point, I think it'd be certainly wiser to focus on uploads and intelligence augmentation. But also we suck at this, for the last 80 years eugenics has been a no-no word, authorities aggressively misunderstand what intelligence even is or its biological foundation. The current version of 'real human intelligence enhancement' we do is just sending more people to university, which doesn't work now and isn't going to start working anytime soon despite costing trillions. We are so far away from real intelligence enhancement it's surreal.
Also GOFAI seems to be in 'sounds good, doesn't work' territory, you say it's out in the neverlands of 30-300 years like how AGI used to be before transformers. Per my understanding, it's also a literal stochastic parrot in that it can only do what you program it to do, only obey rules that you install into it, or just clobber problems with search. Unless search techniques become super general-purpose, GOFAI cannot lead to AGI or ASI? And if it were somehow possible to use search so powerfully, that would probably give us a classical-Yudkowsky AI monster that obeys instructions super literally.
Meanwhile LLM intelligence is demonstrably working. Halting work on LLMs in their moment of triumph and switching to human brain emulation, uploads, human augmentation seems extremely difficult, nigh-impossible even.
It seems we shall have to pay the price for decades and decades of neglect.
They don't need to be replaced.
Humanity could lose to AI without a shot being fired, if it can subordinate and control our political and economic structures.
'Our brave police and troops will guard the datacentres from racist, sexist, antisemitic, anti-white, brown, trans, disinformation-ridden, uneducated luddites taking orders from Russia and China who've watched far too many science fiction movies and are just poor losers who didn't work hard enough to buy shares and engage in our dynamic market economy (up 60% this year!), not smart enough to enjoy the benefits and they're really annoying online with these laughably wrong substacks. Fortunately they're not remotely competent enough to do any damage whatsoever. No jobs have been lost and it's good that they were replaced by much more efficient robots since they never had any skills anyway, they deserve to be poor but we're so noble and enlightened that we're still going to take the effort to feed and teach them basic facts...'
TBH this is probably unlikely given how anti-AI the public is but then again, the public opposes many things and yet they still happen. Wars and mass migration for example. Capturing the key decisionmakers is a major risk.
If AI is dangerous, it's always going to go for the weakest part of our defences, not attack where we're strongest and it is weakest. Communication and text and cyber is the place where AI is strongest and that is where we should expect the main danger to come from. Drones and other attack vectors too, eventually.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
We need to invest in language models or human civilisation will be permanently stunted?
There are surely some technologies or techniques that human minds cannot comprehend but AI can.
No realistic number of people doing calculations by hand could match a modern CPU. There could be no online banking, CGI rendering, internet without computers.
The same principle applies for AI. We are already seeing this in mathematics, human efforts are increasingly being left in the dust. It follows that restricting AI forever will result in us not attaining the most sophisticated technologies that require immense feats of comprehension to discover and deploy.
There's nothing bizarre about this either, most people seem to agree that it's possible to make AIs that are qualitatively superior to human intelligence, certainly most AI scientists.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
They felt entitled to her body at face-value terms, that "consent" was the only thing needed, and they weren't even obliged to provide the "thank you ma'am." In short, they disrespected her severely, and by disrespecting her so severely, transmuted her essence from "fun woman" or even "nice, sweet girl who made a mistake" into "crazy slut," because the only person you can get away with doing that to is "crazy slut."
If you don't want to risk being thought a slut, don't have a drug-addled gangbang, it's really not that hard.
Nobody's going to bail me out if I blow up my account by abusing leverage recklessly. I won't be a 'rich guy who made a mistake', I'll be poor because the value of my wealth has declined. It won't be unjust, it wasn't as if I got robbed. I made a risky decision and it went poorly. If I made that decision while drunk or drug-addled, that doesn't change the outcome, I still have to own it.
How can the bad element here be 'disinviting her from a Halloween party' or 'being considered a slut by her sorority'? Who cares, it's just a party. Not getting invited to a party does not remotely justify a rape case.
It's not like she was an 11 year old being groomed over a period of time into performing these sex acts, with an implicit threat of violence if she refused. If it were actual grooming and actual rape, then it would be a really serious matter.
Her sex was taken for granted, taken advantage of, but we do not punish that, not when it's Cornell frat bros, not when it's fuckboy ghosters, not when it's long-term live-in boyfriends who won't fucking propose. The only thing we do punish is rape, and so it had to be rape.
How can the collective/zeitgeist of women possibly be appeased of these frustrations? How does she force a fuckboy to commit without taking away his ability to consent? Is he to be a male sex slave? A virgin until he chooses his forever wife? I appreciate that it might be frustrating to have a live-in boyfriend who won't propose but what's the problem with that? As long as he loves her, what does marriage matter? He hasn't gotten down on his knees to give her a ring he paid for, he hasn't legally shared half his stuff with her if they break up. He might just decide to leave and upend her life, damn, imagine how that would feel...
The state doesn't punish cuckoldry, it doesn't punish women belittling men, it doesn't punish e-girls extracting huge founts of cash from lonely loser men... Should it? Do we need thot police regulating how female streamers act online, as a criminal offence, rather than purely platform-based codes of conduct? Put them in a burkha perhaps, so they can show their personalities rather than their bodies? There are endless male complaints about women that women sure wouldn't enjoy if they were enforced by weaponizing the legal system.
The messy grey areas of sexual relations are unsuitable for law, they should be dealt with by shaming and rumours and informal methods. Same with sluts or cads for that matter. Law shouldn't be used as a mallet to hammer every problem humans face in life, it's already grossly overused.
I don't mean to be aggressive against you personally, you're making a light-shedding descriptive argument about how some feel frustrated. But the descriptive argument if true seems pretty ugly.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
In abortions per capita, America and Britain are mildly and significantly higher than Russia.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/abortion-rates-by-country
Russia isn't based or trad or a path to follow but they're not 'everything the west is but worse' either. They're not secretly more pro-LGBT than the West either. Different cultures are genuinely different.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
The West can be going to hell in a handbasket and church girls can still be happier and better off
The main goal is not to have the West go to hell in a handbasket, in my mind. That's what Jim was writing about I think. I'm sure there were plenty of people having a normal one in Nicholas II's Russia and that was fine but it wasn't sufficient to avoid disaster.
So far as I can see here, there's a slow and steady trend downwards in roughly all aspects of religiosity/Christianity in America, up to 2026: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/Religion.aspx
This doesn't seem like the vital aspect that can save the West.
Furthermore, if in 25 years electricians, shipbuilders, engineers and so on haven't been automated, then it follows that AI was not that big of a deal. We are talking about a fundamentally different scenario.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
Interestingly the latest stats show additions in construction and manufacturing even as we lose jobs in financial services. In fact, right now there's a skilled manual labor shortage in the US that is slowing down datacenter construction.
The US right now could do with more electricians, more doctors, more semiconductor fab workers, more shipbuilders, more engineers to make optics, missiles, R&D. All high-skill jobs. Automation will get through to them eventually, automation is probably working faster than human reproduction. We're not just talking about an 18 year lead time, for skilled labour it's a 22, 25, 30 year pipeline.
What's your source for this?
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx
It says three in 10 Americans say they attend religious services every week (21%) or almost every week (9%). I confess that it doesn't show the 70% figure, I don't know where I found that, it does seem wrong. Probably not comparable statistics anyway, adding in almost every week would push it up to 55% or so. But let's say 50-55% down to 30%, that's a pretty big drop. Christians trend older than other groups too:
there are of course plenty of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other minority religions as well) is roughly at or above TFR
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
Indeed, religious fertility rates simply are not high enough to offset losses from conversion to irreligion. Data from the 2014 Pew Religious Life Survey suggest that net conversions in and out of American religions lead to about a 16% loss in religious people over the course of a generation. To offset that, religious American women would need to have, on average, 2.44 children each.
You can see a fairly steep fall in US Christianity and a rise in 'unaffiliated'.
More generally, my point is that if Christianity worked, then we wouldn't see that drop in religiosity in the first place. Losing the commanding heights of the social landscape is a pretty serious blow. I recall the 1990s Simpsons, it was notably more religious than most shows today.
I agree that Christianity is, for individuals, more functional and appropriate. I'm confident the church girls are happier and better off and innately better than the tattooed danger-hair goblins. But as a systemic solution on a wide scale? Why are there any danger-hair goblins at all? Why are there Pride Parades at all? Why aren't there hate crimes being prosecuted for anti-Christianism, like there are for anti-black, anti-feminist, Islamophobia? Once the first couple of Baphomet statues go up in state legislatures, then I think that's a pretty good sign that Christianity is in steep decline.
It's not like the US lost a war to the Soviet Union and the Soviets imposed this. Christianity as a system (the old kind of Christian system that Jim talks about in the OP link, considerably more conservative than any conservative Catholic accepted in the mainstream) was a good systemic solution a few hundred years ago but why should we expect it to work today? We wouldn't imagine that a liberal democracy could work in Bronze Age Greece or that Japanese Shogunate-era samurai Shinto society would fit Japan today, so why should Christianity be any different? Why should it be appropriate for an even more radically different post-ASI society?
Christianity doesn't seem to compete well against progressivism and that alone is fatal. Waiting for progressivism to burn out isn't working since progressivism has a higher conversion rate and elite capture. We see church girls becoming danger-hair goblins but not the other way around nearly so much. Or more commonly, we see perfectly well-brought-up respectable men and women switch their ethos to unaffiliated and do as they please.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
All of that was imaginary
Yes, obviously. In the real world, it doesn't take the Iranians 30 years to develop 1960s era nuclear warheads. It's really not that hard. 2020s era advanced ballistic missiles are a lot harder and Iran's producing those at scale.
At no point has Iran actually sought to acquire nuclear weapons. If they wanted them, they'd have them. Iran has sought optionality, they've sought nuclear potential in case the situation changed and nukes were needed. But they don't want the actual warheads for a number of reasons, accelerating proliferation across the Middle East is not an Iranian policy goal. This latest war may well change their minds but that's just one of many stupid consequences of the decision to attack.
There's a fatwa against them and Iran remains within the NPT. Even US intelligence knows what's actually happening, they reported for years that Iran was not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
From 2024:
"[W]e do not see evidence today that the Supreme Leader has reversed the decision that he took at the end of 2003 to suspend the weaponization program," Burns said. He acknowledged, however, that Iran was in a "much closer position" to create a single bomb's worth of weapons-grade material, with a breakout time now at "a week or a little more."
It would've taken Iran a week or so to acquire nukes if they wanted them. Despite all the bombing it's highly unlikely that all nuclear materials or centrifuges have even been damaged let alone destroyed.
Yes, the Israelis lie about all this. They have been lying for 30 years saying that Iran was a country of religious fanatics thirsting to acquire nukes (which they were always some dangerously short time away from) and wipe Israel off the map. Trump is the first president sufficiently credulous to believe their fantasies over his own intelligence agencies and common sense.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
'We destroyed the Iranian navy' = we blew up some destroyers but didn't open the straits, nor are we straying near their shores because then we'd be in danger.
'We destroyed their missile factories' = missile production and firing continues anyway. So it wasn't functionally destroyed, was it?
'We destroyed their nuclear facilities' = damage done is so ineffectual that the US starts another war 9 months later. Nor were they making warheads. If they wanted to make warheads, they'd simply make them like North Korea did. The Israelis and Americans have been hysterical about Iran's nuclear ambitions for 30 years. It's not credible or serious to still maintain that Iran sought nukes but mysteriously remained 6 months, weeks, years away this whole time.
motivated reasoning
This is not the first idiotic Middle East war over imaginary WMDs. It's not the first time the US has massively overinflated what they've achieved with bombing, lied to everyone about how the war is actually going. Basic pattern recognition is sufficient to discern what's going on here.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Tehran has resumed producing ballistic missiles, assembling them in underground sites around Iran, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Quoting US and Middle East officials, the US news outlet said that Iran has been assembling liquid-propelled missiles using stockpiled parts, as well as solid-propellant missiles.
In April, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran’s missile programme was “functionally destroyed".
These destroyed missile factories are surprisingly operational, just like Iran's 'destroyed' nuclear facilities back in 2025, somehow undestroyed by 2026. The US track record of destroying capability with airpower alone is so poor that it's surprising anyone still believes what they say.
It's just bizarre behaviour from Trump too. He was already struggling with legislation, the SAVE Act is still not passed. That's critical electoral engineering to help prevent another Democratic admin sending him straight to prison the moment he leaves office (or before). The threat of lawfare really ought to be front and centre in his mind, given his experience since 2020.
What did Bibi have on him to prompt such an error? He should've had no illusions that starting a Middle East War would be short, cheap or popular. He campaigned on not starting any more wars. Higher fuel prices caused the Biden administration serious harm, why repeat the experiment? He was gullible in the extreme or actively compromised.
On twitter, I read reasonable arguments from Trump supporters saying that the war doesn't really matter and domestic concerns (getting rid of DEI and illegals) are paramount. The Democrats would struggle to make anything better on the battlefield but would likely make things worse for Trump supporters, sure.
Far be it for me as a foreigner to tell Americans how or why they should vote. But if the Trump base is so loyal that they can be taken for granted, there is nothing to stop the neocons playing Trump like a cheap electronic piano. He can count on his base's support no matter what idiocy he does but the neocons demand wars. The dynamics of the situation are bad even if loyalty is the Nash Equilibria. It's like a repeated prisoner's dilemma where the other guy defects but the payoffs are worse for you if you defect back. Are you supposed to just take it? Or alter the situation?
And the Trump base being loyal does not in itself guarantee success. To win elections Trump needs to persuade moderately apolitical people on the margins either way.
Starting a war isn't going to make it any easier to get rid of illegals or DEI, it takes away political capital that could be deployed elsewhere. War is not the price of deportations or slowly, barely winding back DEI a ratchet. War is a major distraction and a detractor against these domestic efforts. It should've been strongly lobbied against during the lead up period to the attack where aircraft were flown in but while the train wreck was still avoidable people seemed to think 'maybe it'll be fine, Venezuela went well'. They could've railed against the war up till the last minute when Trump was undecided. I don't remember any big names on the right doing that.
There are some tragic quotes from Lindsay Graham:
https://x.com/zarathustra5150/status/2103316151011074523
Trump is not smart enough to be a good President. Charismatic enough to get elected and manipulate the media, sure. But actually running a country requires different qualities. It's an enormously demanding job that would exhaust a clever man at the peak of his powers.
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