RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8mo ago
Blackrock, Ark and others is enough to make bitcoin price go up
In 21, Elon's tweets were a primary driver of price action. I lost a fair bit of money based on his announcements.
I would advise caution in shorting bitcoin just before the halving too.
Wow, this is genuinely brave, independent thought from a US presidential candidate! Rapprochement with Russia, strategic clarity on Taiwan, actual realism in foreign policy... He's clearly read some Mearsheimer or Ebbridge, he understands the jargon.
Yet the power he faces is so overwhelming. Recall how he got bodied by the Israel lobby for heresy, like not providing Israel with billions of dollars of military aid. This will make a lot of people very angry. Better to keep this kind of plan hidden, like Nixon did. But Vivek clearly needs to grab attention, it's an unenviable position to be in.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Well genocide usually only happens in exceptional circumstances. Massive wars, radical governments that rise to power after economic collapse or defeat in war... The US isn't there yet. And consider how the US fought World War II, publicly outlining their plans for genocide against Germany (Morgenthau Plan and the associated demand for unconditional surrender) and partially implementing them.
Anyway, what about the whites who went around shooting up black churches? Or the blacks who went around killing whites? There's a broad foundation of racial hatred in the US, it's only that broad prosperity and stability suppresses it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Comparing trends, China's growth rate is higher and their total output is higher... and this is in terms of high-value papers not rubbish. Shouldn't that mean their scientific capacity is higher and that they'll pull ahead, once they catch up to all the US's previous gains?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Well, there is a fair bit of slowly going insane and killing eachother, though that's not everything.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
There are a lot of people who believe that a white nation exists, and that they are members thereof, but most white people do not identify as members of that nation.
But can you not tell if someone is white? Say someone has been in a coma their whole life, they've never had a chance to think about their nation. Surely you can see 'oh this person is white' from a glance at their face? Or you might think 'oh this guy is kind of swarthy, it depends upon how you classify Greeks, Arabs, Turks, how eye colour comes into it. Or you could start looking at haplogroups.
I see no problem with someone being French, White, European, Christian, Occitan. Some identities are more prominent than others, much more prominent most of the time. I'm pretty confident most white people have an understanding that they're white and others are not, they just don't think about it often or prefer not to vocalize things that could be misconstrued as demonic white nationalism. And I don't require that everyone in a state only have one nation or identity, just that the more nations and identities you have the worse things get. You lose a certain level of camaraderie between leaders and citizens, it becomes a competition to see which minority can get the most special privileges. There's so much potential for conflict with all these divisions, it's like piling up dry timber in a forest.
But that is not the question we are discussing, right?
Yes it is, because I maintain that empires are innately unstable compared to nation-states. Sure, it's non-standard to absorb new peoples by immigration rather than conquest but it still fits the core definition. Plus the US has done lots of conquest in its time.
if the US is an empire, which nation is ruling over the others?
First and foremost, Jews, as is immediately obvious from a quick glance at who leads the US, who makes up a huge chunk of the media elite and White House staff, including Biden's Cabinet (aside from the dubiously lucid President). It's not a partisan thing - Trump was the biggest Jewish fanboy you could imagine - Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel! It also explains the US's incredibly sycophantic foreign policy towards Israel and intense effort to stamp out antisemitism, whilst anti-white rhetoric is much more tolerable (see Sarah Jeong's tweets about white men for instance, compare to Kanye West's comments about Jews that got him commercially vaporized). I am fully in agreement with you that whites are not in charge in America.
If Russia's nuclear arsenal isn't a threat, what is?
The US has very much been affected by this war (Europe far more so). Aside from inflation, stocks of munitions have been greatly depleted. It turns out that GDP is not sufficient for producing artillery shells, Stingers or Javelins in sufficient numbers to supply a medium-high intensity war. Factories and machine tools are what the US needed, what they're scrambling to put together.
Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the US digging out dregs from fifty years ago - Hawk missiles were pretty good in 1970 but are somewhat desultory now: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4944652
Nor would the US MIC be outperformed by Russia in shell production: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/long-war-in-ukraine-highlights-need-for-u-s-army-to-modernize-ammo-production
“So we’re doing five times less than they do and trying to keep it up. But if we don’t start the production lines, if you don’t warm it up, it is going to be a huge problem,” Ustinova said.
Furthermore, a new Cold War that might escalate into WW3 is precisely what we have. That's the China-US conflict in the Pacific. Pushing Russia towards China was possibly the biggest and most braindead mistake the US has made.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Why is everyone stuck with 'changing the galaxy in an unmissable way' or 'the great filter', when we could just be looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?
Why does everyone assume that we have a firm understanding of the limits on an interstellar civilization with massively powerful superintelligences and stellar-scale engineering skills? Maybe if you build a ridiculously huge particle accelerator you can open up opportunities for expansion that make Dyson Spheres look quaint, harnessing or building with 'dark' materials. Maybe if you have quantum gravity and a lot of energy, you can bypass lightspeed limits with some clever warping of space.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
My point is not that we need to accept aliens based upon our ignorance but that we shouldn't dismiss them based upon our current, insufficient level of knowledge. Above Sliders said his earlier probability was well below 0.001%. He's very confident and I think he shouldn't be.
Furthermore, there are problems with our current model of how things should work. How can it be so improbable for civilizations to develop that we see no evidence within our entire lightcone? Is it that life is improbable, despite the huge number of stars and planets? Or are we looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
A mix of both, I don't know exact motivations.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Because that was OP's claim: That governing a multi-group state is inherently impossible, because look at the Austrian empire! Even it eventually dissolved!
No, I said:
Now some will say that different races can work in harmony under a single state. I agree. They can work in harmony, for a time. Yet there's nearly always someone on top, nearly always tension and an eventual break-up.
Furthermore, nations have always saw themselves as nations. It's not a complex idea. If you have a distinct culture, ethnicity, language, you want autonomy, you want to advance your own interests first and foremost as opposed to be part of foreign empires. Why did nations fight wars against foreign occupation, even before the 19th century? Why did a bunch of Greek states ally together to resist Persia (others collaborated yet the odds were wildly stacked against the Athenian-Spartan led alliance)? They wanted to preserve their independence, their freedom, their rights. The Persians ruled over many nations at the time and were fairly tolerant, yet the Greeks saw a fundamental, worth-dying-for need for independence.
There have been uprisings based on maltreatment, or no taxation without representation, or neglect of local interests, real or imagined ("What have the Romans ever done for us?"), but not on the claim, "all 'nations' have the right to their own state; we are a 'nation'; therefore, we have the right to our own state."
By this logic you could obliterate nationalism entirely. Malaysia might complain about British exploitation of their resources, the Slovakians might complain about economic inequality and Czechs running things, the Norwegians might complain about Swedish protectionism hurting their interests. My point is that you can't separate maltreatment, unfair taxation, neglect of local interests from nationalism. How can the Norwegians know that it's unfair that Sweden gains from protectionism while Norway loses, how are they able to distinguish between them.
Because the inhabitants thereof are of different races? Or because they have different interests?
Two heads of the same coin. People from PNG have a completely different culture and way of life to East Anglians, why would there be any cohesion there? Witchhunts in the UK and witchhunts in PNG carry very different connotations.
you are greatly overstating the scale of the variation in voting by race.
In 2012, 97% of blacks who voted, voted for Obama. The significant differences between presidents Obama, Biden and Trump hardly seems to change these ratios.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
No, this is not what his model suggests at all.
You're splitting hairs. There are three possible outcomes. Technological development and energy use keep going up and we become an interstellar civilization. They stagnate and we get stuck somewhere below where we are now. Or we are wiped out. He clearly dismisses 1 and 3. Therefore he agrees with 2. It's as simple as that.
France's electrical power system is currently about to be nationalised because it has taken on so much debt
So what? Companies take on excessive debt and are restructured from time to time. French electricity prices are low, France exports electricity every year on net. They undertook various manipulations of prices, forcing EDF to sell at artificially low prices to competitors or other countries, forcing them to buy at higher market prices, imposing price caps in 2022 to protect consumers...
EDF was profitable literally every year but 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/279640/consolidated-net-income-of-edf/
And yes, there was corrosion and power outages at reactors because they are old and need replacing (which France simply hasn't done because they too have been drinking the renewables cool aid). You crow at one year of unprofitability but sneer at 15 years of profits?
The most concise summation of Greer's position on nuclear I can find is the following paragraph, from the article "Too little, too late."
Right, we're agreed here, this is what he thinks. He does not provide even a single citation or anything at all to back up his point. This guy thinks he knows more about nuclear energy than the actual scientists who write papers about it (with statistics and everything) and doesn't deign to provide any evidence! He's clearly read none of the literature about the reverse learning by doing that plagues US nuclear energy. He doesn't understand the importance of interest rates, regulation, political risks in prices. Even then it's still profitable: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-14/why-nuclear-power-once-cash-cow-now-has-tin-cup-quicktake-q-a#xj4y7vzkg
This article alone torpedoes Greer's entire ideology, it explains how cheap gas has been outcompeting otherwise profitable nuclear energy, even in one of the most hostile environments for nuclear energy, the US. It also helps shed light on the complexities he doesn't understand, how there's a role for subsidizing long-term energy sources that temporarily aren't profitable for when gas prices rise.
Just step back and think about what Greer is saying. Nuclear power plants (all of them, in every country) are commercially unprofitable, not just at some times based on volatile oil prices, macroeconomic conditions or political interference but always and forever! Do you realize how insane this sounds? All these investors just line up to get zero returns? Of course nuclear power is, has and will be profitable, despite the best efforts of a very well organized sabotage campaign.
Take EROEI into account and demonstrate that the nuclear power plant can produce enough energy to be economically viable - and remember to take the various invisible subsidies petroleum supplies into account as well.
This is a meaningless and impossible demand. How am I supposed to know what the 'invisible subsidy' of petroleum is? Even Greer admitted that it just comes down to prices at the end of the day. The price of nuclear energy is low. That's why people spend billions building these plants and operating them. I have already linked papers that show that nuclear is as cheap as fossil fuels if the plants are built correctly at $2000, as in Korea.
You're accusing him of combining ignorance and arrogance while you look at a vanishingly small section of his work
He's a crank that projects his own ignorance on nuclear 'fanboys', making snide remarks about them and refuses to provide any factual substantiation at all for his claims. There's no need to look at his 'work', which is free from any basis in fact or scholarly convention.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Good post, agree. I hope people will realize we've been doing things wrong when it becomes more obvious, as economies fail and wars are lost. Like they said about the Soviet Union, 'it was forever, until it was no more'. If not, death is also an automatic stabilizer, the future will belong to those who do things correctly.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Why can't strong men uphold the status quo? See pic related. Notwithstanding spelling errors or stereotypes, surely it paints a picture of a tough, patriotic, disciplined, brave man (a strong man). In contrast we have a lazy, timid, pacifist (a weak man). Now these are just archetypes, yet there are surely people who more or less match them. I'm willing to bet the Romans who made Rome great were more like the former, Caesar, Marius and so on, leading from the front, risking all for glory and victory. The Romans who made Rome weak were probably more like the latter - the Empire somehow stopped being able to field huge armies, they had to pay for foreigners to fight for them.
There could well be a status quo that revolves around strength, a status quo that rewards bravery and great deeds. Strong men would fit fine in that.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Now, in the articles it is not said that the US will intervene on behalf of Ukraine if it is attacked. It’s says about assistance. Which the US provided so far.
There's a distinction between a security guarantee and security assistance. You are saying assistance, assistance, assistance... I am saying that there was no guarantee, contra your youtuber. These are critical distinctions! These are the reasons we have books, papers, written by people who know a thing or two about what they're talking about as opposed to just regurgitating talking points. Mearsheimer knows things that youtubers do not - hence why he was right about Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Ukraine.
No, he said "Putin is too smart to try that".
When and in what context? It's quite clear from the text that Mearsheimer writes that Putin might try to invade. Mearsheimer said that Putin lacks the power to conquer all of Ukraine, not that he wouldn't invade.
Again and again Mearsheimer states that Ukraine is a core strategic interest for Russia, that they'll withstand considerable suffering to ensure NATO does not have a presence there. It logically follows that Mearsheimer thinks that Russia would invade Ukraine, as I said above. For example, here's a quote:
"The Ukraine crisis points up the other reason sanctions regularly fail in the face of political or strategic calculations. For Russia, Ukraine is a core strategic interest, and the West’s efforts to peel Ukraine away from Moscow’s orbit and incorporate it into Western institutions is categorically unacceptable. From Putin’s perspective, the policy of the United States and its European allies is a threat to Russia’s survival. This viewpoint motivates Russia to go to enormous lengths to prevent Ukraine from joining the West."
If Mearsheimer said something like 'Putin would not invade with a goal to conquer and permanently annex all Ukraine' then that fits with the rest of what he's written and published. If he says 'Putin would not invade Ukraine in any circumstances' then that fits with what you're arguing about Mearsheimer being ignorant.
NATO has no place in this picture, aside from being a potential deterrent.
If this was the case, then Putin would've done something about it earlier and people would've written about it pre-2014. Where are the scholars talking about Putin's desire to conquer Ukraine pre-2008? You don't find it suspicious that the Russo-Georgian war happens immediately after the US says Ukraine and Georgia will join the alliance eventually? How convenient that Putin becomes a Russian pan-nationalist precisely when NATO enlargement gets closest to Russia.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
The capabilities ukraine are already getting are superior to those of russian armaments.
Yes and no - some parts of ISR, ATGMs are superior. Tanks like the 2A6 are roughly on-par with Russia, other weapons were obsolete decades ago like Leopard 1s. Furthermore, budgets are not the primary decisive factor in wartime, as our adventures in Afghanistan can attest.
In his view, Ukraine, poland, and the rest of europe are just chips to be exchanged to hopefully recreate the cold war. Even in purely power-realists terms, he didn’t get the memo that the russian federation is far weaker than the soviet union and the EU, and therefore incapable of maintaining the USSR’s sphere of influence. You’ll understand why a european doesn’t find his perspective helpful or convincing.
This is a mischaracterization of what he's saying. Mearsheimer said that the Russians probably weren't strong enough to occupy Ukraine but that it was a core strategic interest to prevent Ukraine joining NATO so Putin would do whatever it takes to prevent it. Even if Russia does not have the power to conquer Ukraine, they do have the power to destroy it.
Mearsheimer has been consistently right about many important topics years in advance: the Iraq War being a disaster, US-China competition intensifying. Ignoring Mearsheimer is precisely how Europe and the US got into this mess, which has left everyone poorer and less safe. It's like watching a blind man running around, crashing into things, scorning the sighted watchers (Kennan and Mearsheimer) who warn him about electrical cables and walls.
https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
no non-European genetic contribution to modern Italians today
What about the Arab conquest of Southern Italy? IMO, that's the moment when Southern and Northern Italy began to be distinguished. In the North, Renaissance, industry, glass, cloth, Ferrari, Fiat. In the South, backwardness, corruption, mafia, clannishness. There was nothing like that back in Roman times, Syracuse (and Alexandria for that matter) were great centres of learning and highly developed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Like most people I expected the Donbass to collapse within days of invasion, but what I saw instead was video after video of Russian-speaking Ukrainians fighting to the death to defend Sumy and Kharkov from their nominal brethren.
This is happening but there are also a significant number of people in the former Donetsk and Luhansk Republics fighting for Russia, plus there's Crimea. All of these places are recognized by the US to be part of Ukraine and those are the territories that Western weapons are formally being supplied to retake.
The European members of NATO
They had grave doubts about NATO expansion eastwards for decades and were pulled along by the US from 2008 onwards.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Point being I can't help but notice that the vast majority of destroyed western equipment posted on Russian media appear to be mobility kills
Do they routinely post gorey videos of corpses? A fair few people don't want to see people who are gruesomely burnt to death and choose not to post it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
If Russia does it to Ukraine, it's fine (or at least standard procedure). If the US does it to Syria, it's fine. But if Poland does it to Russia or Russia to Estonia, then we have more serious problems.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Time after time, I've seen pro-Russians portray the situation as the US dragging a kicking and screaming Europe into an anti-Russian confrontation
The start of this whole loathsome story was with the US trying to bring Ukraine into NATO back in 2008, which was vehemently opposed by France and Germany, the principal European countries. Eventually they got the US to water it down into 'when, not if, not now'. The US was the one providing lethal military aid to Ukraine pre-war, 90% of all aid pre-war.
Because the whole of post-WW2 order is based on countries invading other countries and annexing parts of them - which was the thing that sparked WW2 in the first place
Missing a not, anyway this is just a made up principle. Annexation is beyond the pale but we can bomb various countries into anarchy, set up puppet governments in them, divide countries into smaller parts, place troops in countries without their permission? We can meddle in the internal workings of other countries in ways that make Russiagate look like even more of a joke (looking at you Yeltsin). But as long as there are no annexations, it's fine?
This is like saying you can march into someone's house, shoot the owner, take their property, re-educate their children, give the property to nearby friends, squat on it indefinitely - but as long as you don't write your name down on the deed it's OK. No sane person would stand by this principle. Anyway, if Russia said 'oh we're not going to annex Ukraine, just conduct regime change', there would be no difference in the reaction from the West. Annexation is clearly not the issue here.
Besides, where is it written in the UN charter that countries can't be annexed or that invasions are illegal? The UN charter says nothing about 'no annexations', the Security Council is the highest authority on these matters. Whatever the Security Council decides is binding. If the Security Council can't make up its mind, then there is nothing left to say.
but on what basis would one argue this for the four currently occupied oblasts in their full form?
The whole of Ukraine, including Crimea, is officially targeted for NATO integration and has been for years. For example, in 2021 the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership affirmed the territorial integrity of Ukraine and its ownership of Crimea. It said that Ukraine was going to get 'full integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions' which means NATO and EU. The US was helping Ukraine finish the necessary reforms and so on. It's just putting two and two together: full integration into Euro-Atlantic, full recognition of pre-2014 borders, plus weapons = the military support is to retake everything: Luhansk, Crimea and so on. Now maybe the US doesn't quite want to go that far in real terms, yet that's what they're formally saying, that's what is written down in treaties and in their rhetoric.
Russia was already moving towards China way before 2022.
Sure and the US has been egging them on all the way. There's a haunting Biden clip from the early 2000s where, when Putin says that he'll work more with China because the US is overbearing, Biden says something like 'good luck with that - there is no replacement for the US, ultimately you have to come to the table whether you like it or not'. There were opportunities to work with Russia in the war on terror but the US just squandered them, pulling out of the ABM treaty for instance. What is that if not a giant red flag?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
If the US couldn't cover up its torture chambers in Iraq, fake Russiagate stories or spying on the public for more than a few years, how can they cover up a massive psy-op lasting since the Nimitz sightings in 2004, if not longer?
The US military is routinely insane and dishonest but they're not sufficiently skilled at keeping secrets to get away with this.
Have any previous bullshitters been socially annihilated?
This is a fully general argument against anything. Nobody gets annihilated for lying on a huge scale!
I've replied to this again and again: because evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely, so unlikely that our existence is only enabled by anthropic principle. No, saying «you don't get to assert such a low prior, gotta be a mistake in the math somewhere» doesn't cut it if you haven't got a more rigorous one.
Have we swept 200 billion galaxies for life? We barely even have a probe outside our solar system. We do not know what we are looking at, we cannot even categorize 95% of the content. 'For all we know' is totally and completely worthless. Blind children do not get to pontificate on the world of art, they've never even experienced it.
I believe there straight up is no other life in the Universe because life does not work period.
Common sense says that if life works on Earth, it can work elsewhere too. Hanson has a more advanced theory on the basis that we emerged quite early as a civilization, compared to all the times when earth-based life might emerge - this implies that advanced civilizations will make it hard for civilizations to emerge later. Besides, you haven't checked 200 billion galaxies, you have no idea what's there.
The burden of proof weighs overwhelmingly more heavily on your claim than mine! I say that there may be alien life somewhere that has come here (based upon various observations) but that we don't know enough to be sure of anything. You say there is no life at all in the entire universe except here without a shred of evidence.
because evolution is, for all we know, vanishingly unlikely
We've checked... how many planets? We can't even be sure there's no other life in our own solar system. Europa's oceans for instance, there could be life there. We don't know if there is life there, we don't know what advanced stellar civilizations look like. We don't know.
No matter how little we know, we know that this behavior over decades is ridiculous for what we know about civilizations in general
We know nothing about civilizations in general, especially not advanced civilizations. With a sample size of one, we can't differentiate between civilizations in general and human civilization. All we know is that something is part of a civilization, they have some kind of energy-processing, manufacturing, knowledge base. Defining a civilization is different to understanding them.
Obviously by the same token they'd have been able to evade all our observations, even those conducted by the US Air Force of today
The phenomena we're talking about here has never been stealthy in that we're not capable of seeing it. These things are perfectly visible, we just can't interact with them since they shoot around at immense speeds.
Edit: for the recording you can have the Nimitz clips and the testimony of Commander Fravor
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Yeah, the third party apps are great. I rather liked pholder, I even thought redditisfun was their official mobile app.
HOW DO YOU KNOW THIS?
Did the Soviet Union die when Lenin died? Stalin? No. Did the PRC collapse when Mao died? North Korea? Party-states usually survive the death of their leader.
The most relevant example for your case would be Franco's Spain, which was in a completely different international situation to a triumphant Nazi Germany. There are people who just assume that it would disintegrate, this meme has made its way into popular culture based on works of fiction like TNO or Man in the High Castle. In actual fact, much of Western Europe was happy enough to collaborate - more French bore arms for the Axis than against it (and much resistance was really just refusal to get deported to Germany to work in arms industry there). Only the Poles, Yugoslavs and Russians fought hard as partisans, many of the other ethnicities of the Soviet Union were ambivalent or somewhat pro-Axis.
Anyway, the Mongol empire lasted about 40 years after Genghis's death, before splitting into four (after considerable further expansion). The Ilkhanate was first to fall and still lasted into the 1330s and 1340s for about an 80 year lifespan.
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