RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
My point is that 'no war crimes' is grossly estranged from reality, as is the 'most moral army' meme. The Egyptian army is not known for its moral rectitude but they don't go around crowing about how they're so noble and civilized for all the world to see.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
I read a long essay about how Stanford was crushing social life, somewhat relevant
https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/
What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.
Unlike Harvard, which abruptly tried to ban “single-gender social organizations” and was immediately sued by alumni, Stanford picked off the Greek life organizations one by one to avoid student or alumni pushback. The playbook was always the same. Some incident would spark an investigation, and the administration would insist that the offending organization had lost its right to remain on campus. The group would be promptly removed.
When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” The building formerly known as Outdoor House was added to Neighborhood T.
Lonely, frustrated students are less safe than happy ones. Within four weeks of school starting, ten students had to be taken off-campus to get their stomachs pumped, a Stanford record for alcohol-related “transports” in such a short period of time. Occasionally, my Row house is rented for parties which are always overrun with freshman and sophomores. They’re not particularly good ones; still, I see freshmen in the corner of the events, drinking until they pass out. Despite the safety rhetoric, the new atomized campus culture isn’t even safer.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
The wage equals the value of the marginal product of labor.
So now you're taking a definition that axiomatically assumes the answer you're looking for? If the marginal product of labour is 0 because machines are doing all the work, the wages offered would logically be 0 but the productivity of the corporation or country would be enormously high! This is the common-sense conclusion, bereft of the economic jargon. If we take Xiaomi's automated phone factory as an example for the future of production, the value-adding is coming from the machinery, not the human workers because they aren't doing anything since they're not even there. Maybe there are a few engineers who fix whatever broken machinery the AI can't handle. They will not be earning a substantial portion of the returns from that factory. The paradigm of productivity you're invoking does not apply to the systems I'm describing, like how Newtonian gravity does not apply at high speeds.
OK, so the EPI graph is wrong and misleading in showing that wages haven't kept up with production. They're only counting production and non-supervisory roles... the easiest jobs to automate. And they ignore the massively overpriced non-wage healthcare that workers receive from their jobs as well, horrible! And everybody ignores the people who were automated out of work entirely, that falling male participation rate...
So what's really going on is that inequality between workers (and the no longer working) is rising massively, presumably due to technology substituting for human labour in value-creation and a shift towards highly skilled, highly renumerated human labour. This doesn't really counter my main point.
Pretty much everything you've absorbed about the economy from the internet is bullshit lefty propaganda.
I don't think you understand me. I am not a leftist. I have invested a large amount of money into NVIDIA, Tesla, Lockheed Martin and various cryptocurrencies. I believe in the market system. But I do not trust that it has my best interests at heart.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
What about rape/grooming gangs in Europe?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
I don't see a law saying that wages must keep pace with productivity:
"2. This means that highly productive workers are highly paid, and less productive workers are less highly paid."
There is a distinction between what I said (where productivity might have nothing to do with the workers personally) and what the statement in your link says. In a world of high automation, one could easily argue that all workers are less productive and deserve much lower wages. Or we could imagine two countries. One where workers get 50% higher wages from productivity rising 100% and one where 20%, that could fulfill what I said and what 2. says. We have observed a general trend in the last 50 years where productivity rises much faster than wages rise: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Housing is indeed restricted by vested interests but it's just one example of an asset that could be bid up by increasing wealth. They could do it to shares or land as well. Pure market competition is not desirable in a situation where power and production is wildly, massively unequal. I am not going to be able to compete with a 200 IQ robot working 24/7 at $0.10 per hour. We have a mixed market economy to balance these competing interests. Now I don't want some govt planning board controlling automation and getting snookered by vested interests but I do want some kind of power/capital redistribution that preserves incentives for innovation without immiserating 90%+ of the population.
And I think the best chance we have of that is by not totally and unflinchingly embracing automation (even when it makes a lot of sense). We should establish a precedent where the gains of capital and automation are distributed even to wildly unsympathetic people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
I agree that it is bad for ports to be grossly inefficient. These dock workers probably do need to lose their sinecures. But we need a more sophisticated position than 'put it off till tomorrow' or 'make them humiliate themselves providing pointless services (Ubereats and 20 different fast food outlets) to the shrinking middle-class' or 'have them fill out some paperwork and pretend to be disabled'.
Higher productivity doesn't make everyone wealthier automatically, it just produces wealth. That wealth need not be distributed, it might just get turned into another 24/hour automated port, a factory with a few engineers overseeing the machinery, dividends, raising house prices another 20%. No law says that wages must keep pace with productivity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Productivity is the source of wealth. What happens when we, individual human beings without exceptional skills (and eventually them too), are no longer productive in any job? It's going to happen sooner or later, likely sooner.
When we are no longer productive, all we have are legal/moral claims to wealth that is fundamentally controlled by others. That's a precarious position to be in!
Competing states are absolutely advantaged by higher productivity but you and I aren't states or economies or large firms.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
US ports are actually some of the least efficient in the world because of this point-blank refusal to adopt automation, IIRC they were next to Tanzania on the leaderboard. China and Japan are far ahead.
However, we do need to consider a balance between automation and human labour renumeration and leverage. I doubt any of us have worked in a port. Few of us are professional artists or actors, I suspect. I imagine many here would be much more sympathetic to extremely highly-paid software engineering or finance jobs getting axed and replaced by AI.
It may well be that a reasonable balance for ports vs port workers involves this thug and his hangers-on being sent off to prison for economic wrecking, mass sackings and prompt automation. But similarly reasonable balances may be imposed on unruly, arrogant tech-bros by the rest of society. Some level of working-class unity (interpreted broadly to mean all who derive most of their earning from their wage) may be appropriate here. What happens when we automated the dock workers, automated the factory workers, automate the retail workers... who will be left to go on strike when they automate us? And then where is our leverage to negotiate anything in the future?
There was a Liu Cixin short story about an Ancap civilization enforced by AI NAP killbots where one capitalist ended up owning all the parks, all the water and air after winning a completely fair free-market competition. Everyone else was confined to desolate hive cities, rasping away in filthy reprocessed air until their machines failed, unable to step a few metres away and enjoy the beautiful landscape. It is all private property. I am a NVIDIA shareholder and feel somewhat insulated by all of this... but many are not. Who is to say that someone or something won't decide 'oh these little people who bought shares pre-singularity didn't really contribute, off to penury with them! Print out another billion clones of us!'? We need leverage to negotiate and getting into a habit of discarding leverage may not be helpful, despite obvious good reasons to do so.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Israelis were literally protesting for rapists in their military to be freed. There was a televised scene from the Israeli cabinet where somebody asked 'how is it appropriate that we are shoving metal rods up the anus of prisoners' and this other guy shouts 'they're Hamas, we can do anything we like to them'.
Members of their cabinet are practically shouting 'I love war crimes' and enjoy a significant following amidst the public but a good chunk of the media is persisting with the whole 'most moral army' routine, it's laughable.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
How hard is it to keep up military readiness even on a religious holiday? This does not happen to proper armies, they don't lower their guard in predictable annual patterns.
The Israelis have been fighting this war in frankly amateurish ways. They keep clustering up in ways that would get them massacred on a real battlefield in Ukraine - fortunately for them their opponents don't have much in the way of artillery or heavy equipment. Israeli urban combat performance has been pretty poor, they've failed to take and hold ground. They go on these glorified chevauchees into Gaza and Hamas just sweeps back in once they leave. There doesn't seem to be any real plan for victory, only (impressive) tactical ploys like the pager trick.
If the US weren't constantly bailing them out with weapons shipments, diplomatic and air cover they would be in a very unpleasant position.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Frankly if a country gets sneak-attacked twice on the same religious holiday within living memory they have to give up the mantle of super high-IQ warrior nation. You would've thought that after Yom Kippur the Israelis would've learnt something but apparently not!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
TBH even if they're at war, it still won't be declared. Few countries bother declaring war these days due to the UN charter prohibiting the use of force in international relations. The last time the US declared war it was against Romania in 1942. Russia has the Special Military Operation, America has the police action or authorized use of force.
There's an exceedingly soy 'existence of a state of war' which Israel declared against Hamas on October 7th and Hezbollah did just recently against Israel. The passive voice has even infected warfare.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Turkey produces their own F-16s under license-build, they export drones, they build satellites and they're even working on their own fifth-gen fighter like South Korea.
Turkey isn't Iraq, Syria or Egypt totally reliant on whatever they can import, they build things. Turkey actually managed to beat back France and Britain and escape a planned partition after WW1, they don't just instantly lose whenever Europeans show up like Arabs. They export manufactured goods: televisions and vehicles. They're 8th in steel production worldwide.
Israel has never fought any first or even second-rate militaries like Turkey, they've never fought any serious industrial powers at all and would be reliant upon nukes (in the admittedly ridiculous scenario where the US wasn't bailing them out).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Turkey has the second biggest army in NATO and relevant geography for anything involving Russia or the Middle East.
self-driving cars are here but only in some places and with some limitations, they're just a novelty
So they're here? Baidu has been producing and selling robotaxis for years now, they don't even have a steering wheel. People were even complaining the other day when they got into a traffic jam (some wanting to leave and others arriving).
They've sold millions of rides, they clearly deliver people to their destinations.
I can't think of a single task that AI could replace
Drafting contracts? Translating legal text into human readable format? There are dozens of companies selling this stuff. Legal work is like writing in that it's enormously diverse, there are many writers who are hard to replace with machinery and others who have already lost their jobs.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
They DON'T want the Aschenbrenner plan where AI becomes hyper-militarized and hyper-securitized. They know the US government wants to sustain and increase any lead in AI because of its military and economic significance. They know China knows this. They don't want a race between the superpowers.
They want a single globally dominant centralized superintelligence body, that they'd help run. It's naive and unrealistic but that is what they want.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
There's a lot of talk about this. Apparently he had a history of home burglaries and armed robberies, he had both the laptop and the purse from the victim (with her ID!). The DNA found on the knife was not from a potential alternate suspect but some police officer who mishandled it in the station after testing and finding no DNA could be recovered.
Seems pretty open and shut to me.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Relevant: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/27/spain.arts
Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere, yesterday's El Pais newspaper reported.
The cells, built in 1938 and reportedly hidden from foreign journalists who visited the makeshift jails on Vallmajor and Saragossa streets, were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant garde art theories on the psychological properties of colours.
Beds were placed at a 20 degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft by 3ft cells was scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards, according to the account of Laurencic's trial.
The only option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines and spirals which utilised tricks of colour, perspective and scale to cause mental confusion and distress.
Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving.
A stone bench was similarly designed to send a prisoner sliding to the floor when he or she sat down, Mr Milicua said. Some cells were painted with tar so that they would warm up in the sun and produce asphyxiating heat.
If your artistic output is taken as inspiration for torture chambers designed to inflict psychological damage on prisoners of war, then something has gone seriously wrong. Likewise, if your gymnasium is designed to look like a WW2 bomb shelter that's been riddled with shell holes, then something has gone wrong. There is no need to innovate just for the sake of innovation. We knew how to build beautiful buildings or at least normal, utilitarian buildings. If the goal of your building is mounting high calibre flak guns and resisting high explosives, then it should indeed look like a flak tower - huge amounts of unpainted concrete is appropriate. Otherwise, make it look good. Windows! Air and light!
A vanishingly small number of people would design their house in Minecraft to look like Eisenman's constructions. None would win awards for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraftbuilds/top/
The vast majority of people make houses and buildings that evoke a traditional, cozy style. Or they make them look like a familiar object - a Nintendo Switch or a Rubik's Cube, a sword or an angler fish. Or they make monuments: a big pyramid with a gate, a statue, a dystopian underwater city with skyscrapers rising out of the waves. That's the general principle on which buildings and monuments should be designed - anything but random or deliberately malign assortments of shapes that require a PHD to be 'interpreted'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
https://x.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1838055063073489144
Chinese stocks have been treading water for over 30 years, Indian stocks up 13x, yet even the biggest China doomers have to admit a lot more wealth was created in China than in India over the period.
I understand many of the key businesses are state-owned enterprises - does this mean that state-owned industry is the way to go? Are they all just busy building new factories and selling shares to finance more development? Or have the MBAs who stripmine companies for shareholder value been kicked out of China? Is this what market socialism looks like, capitalism without profits returned to investors?
Completely bizarre, I have no explanation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
I know that you're not wrong but it never ceases to amaze me that genuine Nazis support a man who was literally Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
They can fly so low though! At the treeline, below the treeline, at waist height... At sea you have clear lines of sight and an elevated position to shoot down at surface-skimming missiles.
Countering these things is hard, as we see in Ukraine. The solution may just be to have more drones of your own.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Yeah I saw that exact video. It's crazy to see people literally dodging death in HD on the internet.
Mass production is key, Anduril and co keep producing these shiny anime trailers and marketing gear, China puts out these big drone shows where 6,000 are flying in sync like a next level firework show. That's a real demonstration of ability.
At some point container ships are just going to vomit out tens of thousands of flying bombs and make Pearl Harbour look like a joke.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Why do they need to walk?
The air is the natural domain of the robot, as we see in Ukraine. The Russians and Ukrainians have been toying with ground combat robots but they're throwing industrial quantities of aerial drones at eachother. Some explode, some drop bombs, some are wire-guided to bypass electronic warfare, some have jet-engines for long endurance and long range. They have amazing camera zoom, they can pick out targets day and night.
Flying kamikaze drones are very hard to deal with. You can dodge one dropped grenade or club one away with your rifle. But three? Five? You're going to die. These things are cheap. Onboard AI guidance and swarming will make them even more dangerous.
It's only a matter of time before machines take over high-end airpower too. Humans are expensive to train, need all kinds of life support and suffer under g-forces. We were not made to careen around in the upper atmosphere at 9G or above, that's not where our skills lie. We're ground creatures, I bet that walking around and close quarters will be the last domains that fall to AI.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10mo ago
Unfortunately for Mao, the sparrows that he had killed were really important. I think there's a perception effect where the species that come to your attention are usually important in one way or another. Prominence correlates with importance. So you assume that everything is important - but the species that are lost are mostly unimportant and never came to your attention because they were unimportant.
In the same way, I think we romanticize nature and don't realize the impact of what we've done. I've walked through the English countryside, it's quite pleasant. Completely unnatural. It was all forested, then the forests were cut down, marshes were drained, fences and grassland installed and maintained...
One thing to consider is that the US military just isn't very high-performance at these kinds of logistical tasks. Remember the pier in Gaza? Cost hundreds of millions, took ages to put up, got unmoored several times and then scrapped after dispersing a fairly modest amount of aid.
People may point to the initial invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq as counterexamples - but that was 20 years ago. There's probably been a lot of rot since then, DEI and recruitment shortfalls are a pretty toxic combination. They probably got used to re-supplying well-established bases in the Middle East for continual, low intensity fighting. There's probably lots of procedures and admin they feel they need to do, there's not much sense of urgency. What logistical ability there is resembles an imperial baseline, sending gunboats out to the colonies and manning forts. Sudden campaigns like this mean setting up new bases and supply routes at short notice, a different task.
I'm not saying that it's just incompetence but that expectations should be fairly low.
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