RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications
When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage? If people actually want to solve the problem, they have to bite the bullet and get it done even if it makes some people worse off. Now I know that South Korea doesn't want to solve the problem and so they're mucking about with tiny financial nudges and lame govt programs.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Beheading is political while CP is obscene. You might see a beheading on the news, albeit censored or with 'this content may distress some viewers'. You never see a rape on the news.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
A part of me thinks that the high end of AI is now being kept behind closed doors. Surely OpenAI has been doing something other than making GPT-4 smaller and lighter in the nearly two years since they've finished it.
At minimum they have the ability to produce lots of synthetic data to train future models with, now they have this newer and cheaper model. And they have far more compute than before.
Same with Anthropic. Where is Opus 3.5? Hidden from us mere mortals.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Reverend Insanity, webfiction, very long and unfinished due to some unclear spat with publishing. Selfmadehuman liked it.
Levelling up and cultivation, plotting but also a lot of human-condition/character stuff in the allegorical in-universe Legends of Ren Zu. Original, interesting world. It constantly goes in directions you wouldn't expect. Characters have real theory of mind. I think it's great fun watching this amoral sociopath run rings around people who are tied down in social constructs of their own creation such that they can't use their strength. And what edge there is exists for a purpose.
I fully expect you'll look at Chapter 1, see that 'he took my body's purity line' and think 'oh this is degen trash'. That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. I have no idea why the author put that line in since our MC is the least sexual man on that planet (or why there was a random 'hehe gays are funny' side story 2000 chapters in). There's a certain weirdness to it, so be it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I reiterate that we are literally ignorant of what's going on in China. I am ignorant. You are ignorant. This is the kind of comment I was reacting to.
Chinese manhua sucks. Their music sucks. Their games are serviceable at best.
it is obviously impossible that China could have developed Call of Duty, or League of Legends, or Final Fantasy, or any other modern video game touchstone
How does anyone know that Chinese manhua sucks? Have they actually read it? Listened to 'Chinese music' such that they can characterize it? Have they played many Chinese games? How can it be obviously impossible for China to do such things if Wukong is at 96% positive on Steam with 300,000 reviews and FF VII Remake Intergrade is at 89% positive and 24,000 reviews? Don't the stats show that Wukong is as good as Final Fantasy? FF XIV is in that same territory, 87% positive.
Wouldn't I be an outlandish clown if I said that American music sucks? WTF is American music? Rap? Country? Taylor Swift? A philharmonic orchestra somewhere? Metal? Rock? I bet most people haven't heard more than a few Chinese songs. I haven't.
However, I have played some Chinese games. Some are good, some are bad, some are excellent. Dyson Sphere Program is at least as good as Factorio. And the Steam reviews back me up, 97% to 96% in DSP's favour. Gunfire Reborn is also a pretty good game but nobody's ever heard of it. Most Chinese games aren't even on Steam, I don't even know where you'd look to find them. Some Chinese website presumably.
I've read some Chinese novels. It's the same wide range of quality you find in the rest of the world. Some are really good! Most people just haven't read them because they're on weird Chinese websites and have to be translated into English. Plus they have different values and worldview to Western fiction.
People seem to have got it into their heads that China can only copy, or the CCP crushed Chinese culture into paste. It's just not true. They are perfectly capable of producing good entertainment products. People are literally prejudiced in that they have already worked out their opinion and will look for evidence to back it up. They'll say, with no evidence, that China is using bots to prop up the review score of a AAA game. And at the same time, they'll point out that China's been suppressing the video game industry anyway because it's decadent and a distraction for the youth... Come on, the simplest answer is that it's a good game and people are enjoying it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
The last few times they gave away nukes they got burned. China was extraordinarily ungrateful considering the huge amount of technical assistance they were given, they actually fought a border war with the Soviet Union after the split. They also sent tactical nukes to Cuba just after the crisis but Castro was behaving like a crazy person so they took them back.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Kazuo Ishiguro or Haruki murakami then yeah... I'll call you uncultured, at least as far as 20th century novels go
I'm sorry, who has heard of these people? Or authors shortlisted for the Nobel Literature prize, not even getting a Nobel?
Japan has... two Nobels for literature. China has... two Nobels for literature. Maybe you just haven't heard of them because you're not cultured enough? I'm certainly not, I don't know about Chinese Nobel winning authors because I'm not interested in that stuff. That's my point. Few people know what's going on in China because of the language barrier, they don't even know what there is to be interested in and enjoy.
The three Body Problem series is exciting and interesting, it actually dares to have different themes and theses to the 'environmentalism good, lets all cooperate and get along with aliens' that everyone else seems to be stuck with. It has genuinely alien aliens with totally different ethics and worldview, not Star Trek's humans with fancy make-up and tropey exaggerations of aspects of Earth culture. It looks at trends like 'men are becoming softer and less manly' and dares to say that isn't such a good thing. There's a distinct enthusiasm about science and technology.
Genshin is significant in that lots of people care about it, they draw a lot of art about it, they bitch on twitter that the characters aren't brown enough... There are 300,000 people in the Genshin memes subreddit. People even make beautifully animated songs complaining about the gacha element: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
At the risk of seeming uncultured, I've only heard of Mishima and Kurasawa. And even they are pretty obscure. The average man on the street hasn't heard of Kurasawa.
Compare to Pokemon. Everyone has heard of that. It only got going in the late 1990s. Playstation? 1990s. Sonic the Hedgehog? 1990s. Resident Evil? 1990s. Legend of Zelda? Late 1980s. All of these things started back then and have only gotten more popular.
Let's put to one side whether something is shitty or hacky and look at raw popularity. I could just as well say all those prestigious awards just go to pretentious gibberish, it's a fruitless line of argument. I can't just arbitrarily say that SK has had no cultural output because I look down on kpop soyboys and manhwa. Genshin is popular. The Three Body Problem series is popular and has had a distinct impact on our conception of alien life. Why else would Netflix grab it and pretend all the characters are black or women? Chinese food, Buddhism and Taoism haven't exactly been discarded. Chinese web novels are getting more popular, even non-Chinese people are writing on webnovel rather than royalroad because that's where the readers are. Wukong is popular.
Chinese cultural influence is increasing despite considerable political headwinds.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Men care about this kind of thing platonically, in the 'who would win' sense where it's pure love of the game... Women just like how it looks and what it signals. Idk, maybe it's how women put all this effort and brainpower into looking good, they know all these sewing techniques, foundation and makeup:
According to a survey, if you know that a bandeau is a strapless tube top, you're most likely to be a woman.
And if you know that a howitzer is a large gun, you might be male.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
That's funny because all of the xianxia stuff I've read has been pure male story-telling. Intricate power systems, plot focused, progression fantasy, lots of fighting and tactics, struggle for power and status, accumulation of beautiful girls, open sexism and homophobia.
I guess it's the fanfiction.org vs AO3 divide all over again: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I think most of the commentary on Chinese culture is unironically racist in the old-fashioned sense of prejudice and ignorance.
China is a very populous country, fairly well developed and with high IQs. There is plenty of talent and wealth there. Of course they will produce compelling cultural products. Genshin Impact, Three Body Problem, Wukong, more obscure stuff like Dyson Sphere Program and Reverend Insanity. Plenty of good stuff has already been made.
Do they censor? They sure do. RIP Reverend Insanity, unfinished. Are they behind the curve? Probably. A lot of slop is being produced because China is only recently developed. Japan became well-developed in the 1970s and 1980s but it takes time for one's cultural output to become globally attractive. If we were back in the 1980s we'd be saying 'oh Japan's cultural output is limited, there are just a few gems here and there, they're fundamentally unable to create'. What was there, LOGH and Astro Boy? Evangelion, Dragonball Super, HxH, Naruto, SAO, One Piece and so on hadn't yet emerged. People didn't think anime was cool, it was just weird Jap cartoons. It only became really popular in the 2010s due to time-lag and possibly Western decline. Now Demon Slayer can go toe to toe with the entire US comics industry.
China is the same. We're looking at the beginning of the growth curve. It takes time for the wealth and talent to circulate appropriately such that they can do great things, develop mature taste and so on. Most people in the West don't know where to look for Chinese cultural output, most of it's still untranslated in Chinese. That's slowly changing and AI should accelerate it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
A general imprisoning a democratically elected president and declaring himself supreme leader would be considered awfully un-American.
It would never be that. It would be the lawfully elected president heroically preventing an illegal, fraudulent coup/stolen election in defence of freedom, democracy and American values. You'd just have two such figures battling it out, possibly followed by more as the economy implodes and militancy skyrockets.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
The US military has proven capable of mostly suppressing insurgents in the Middle East
What? The US managed to beat ISIS (in conjunction with Russia, Iran, Syria and so on). They pulled out of Iraq with a little dignity, having turned Iran's nemesis into an Iranian subordinate. They left Afghanistan with their tails between their legs, having completely failed their campaign objectives.
That's not exactly a great track record! Once serious fighting gets going, the US will fall into a deadly spiral of capital flight, brain drain, financial crisis and increased radicalism. Consider that the economic damage power outages cause is totally disproportionate to the cost of sabotaging substations. There's already vast deficit spending in peacetime. The tax base to pay for social spending and war won't exist, so there will be serious inflation.
Russia and China would send really nasty things to any serious insurgency via the US's gaping open southern border. MANPADs, ATGMs, kamikaze drones, plastic explosives... They'd probably send spooks and advisers too. The insurgents would be far better-resourced than any asymmetrical opponent the US has fought since Vietnam. Al-Qaeda was working with whatever explosives were lying around, they didn't have the latest and greatest from Norinco. Furthermore, many of the insurgents would be ex-US military and could plausibly take things from military bases. Maybe some people within the military are sympathetic to the enemy and are passing intelligence off to the insurgents.
The real advantage of the US is that their media and political power is very strong and they can focus on squashing anything before it becomes a conflict. But if it does come to a conflict then the US government is totally screwed. Very few good outcomes for them. That's why they deployed all those National Guard to Washington after Jan 6th. If they can't squelch it at the beginning, it's all over.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
It takes two to tango! Supply is obviously an issue but so is demand.
OECD population growth average is about 0.6% per annum, Australia is at 2% or higher.
Australia's net migration was 400-500K in the last couple of years, fertility is below replacement so all the pressure on housing comes from migration.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
What about the third world kleptocrats looking to escape to greener pastures with their gains?
I read an essay somewhere talking about how suspicion and hatred of the rich was totally reasonable up until about the last 200 years. Rich people were noblemen (descended from those who conquered lands and secured rents) or schemers who'd found some way to secure the bag in a zero-sum universe. You didn't make money, you took money.
This is somewhat true in much of the less developed world. Does the US need an influx of Saudi royals? If you want high human capital, just make them pass a test to enter.
Plus you'd be bringing inflation and higher house prices. Australian and Canadian real estate has been rendered ludicrously expensive by rich Chinese buying it all.
Anyway, I disagree with 1. in that a country is more than an economic zone, there should be ties of blood and solidarity. When the chips are down, wouldn't elite human capital just leave for safer pastures? What incentive do they have to behave in a pro-social way, why should they behave honourably with people of a completely different race, culture and creed? In-group bias is part of the human condition, that's why we came up with the nation-state. Mass immigration reduces social trust and opens up all kinds of divisions and conflicts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I suspect that the first few AIs attempting to take over the world will probably suck at it (as this one sucked at it) and that humanity is probably sane enough to stop building neural nets after the first couple of cases of "we had to do a worldwide hunt to track down and destroy a rogue AI that went autonomous".
We're still doing gain of function research on viruses. There's basically no reason to do it other than publishing exciting science in prestigious journals, any gains are marginal at best. Meanwhile, AI development is central to military, political and economic development.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
How is combat fun in 5? Rally points are impossible, so you're actively punished for fielding a large army from many conquered cities. That's why they changed conquest victory to 'secure all capitals' because it was too much of a slog to secure a large chunk of the world.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
I don't know anything about Bangladesh, for some reason I thought you were talking about the general case, I missed the 'this case'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
You keep saying that the Soviet Union had to abandon communism. I agree. Communism doesn't work. Do you know who really believed in communism? Gorbachev, lord of the blunderers. His reforms sought to create a democratic socialist state, to go back to this idealistic vision of what Lenin wanted, what communism was supposed to be. He and his reforms were totally detached from reality.
A bare minimum of what's needed in a reformer of the USSR is someone who can admit the need for a market-based system while retaining political stability and not inviting looters to rob the country. That's not such a big ask. By proper market reforms I simply mean things like 'let state-owned firms reinvest their profits while preventing executives from siphoning off all profits for personal gains'. This is basic stuff that Gorbachev didn't manage to do. A little bit of anti-corruption and party discipline work would've gone a long way!
no American technology transfer
The Soviet Union routinely imported technology from the West and America specifically, all throughout its history. And they routinely created technology of their own. The USSR was not a third world nation like you seem to think, it was an urbanized and industrialized economy. They did not need to get rich with export-led industrialization like China, they were in a far better position than China in the 1980s but completely dropped the ball.
Gorbachev himself imported huge amounts of high-tech goods from the West, causing significant balance of trade problems and debt as he tried to modernize Soviet industry. The problem was never a shortage of technology but a lack of proper market reform.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
The Soviet Union had plenty of capital and technology, they produced their own working space shuttle in the late 1980s. Their capital was just misallocated and inefficiently used due to the socialist system and expansive military posture. If they began proper market reforms conducted in a mature and sensible way, then they could've developed the necessary industries internally, regardless of foreign investment.
There was no voice that came down from the sky that said 'you must let any well-connected official steal directly from your country's capital base', that wasn't inevitable. It was a policy choice.
Gorbachev didn't understand politics, he was dreaming. You have to bring stakeholders onboard if you want to reform the system. He needed to control the military to secure his position before doing anything. Khrushchev was able to reduce the size of the Soviet military by about 1/3 because he had the necessary skills, Gorby did not.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Yeah Orthodox Marxist economics says that the revolution can only happen in the most advanced capitalist economies, you can't skip stages with this heretical Leninist Vanguard Party nonsense. They were looking to Britain and Germany, not Russia for revolution.
China is unclear. They might be trying that. Or maybe Marx comes second to nationalism and development for the sake of national strength. I highly doubt that they want to do away with the state though.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Just reform the industries? It really isn't that hard, China did it and they were coming off a poorer base. The Soviets could've cut the astonishing amount of military spending to free up resources for the civilian sector and waited for oil prices to rise again. That alone would've been enough to get out of the danger zone.
Gorbachev was a world-historical blunderer, he had no idea how the Soviet system actually worked and lacked the power to effectively implement his insane reforms. People don't actually know how shambolic he was, they have this vague notion of glasnoist and perestroika but no concrete facts of what specifically he did:
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Loads of people blamed the Arab Spring (and Syria especially) on climate change. There was a multi-year drought and water shortage in Syria immediately beforehand, food prices rose a lot... Just search up Arab Spring Climate Change and it will come up.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11mo ago
Why leave out the part where Musk replied to Breton and told him to go fuck his own face?
The 2014 slump is an exchange-rate matter. The Russian economy did not actually shrink 40% in a couple of years.
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