RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
Well if you assume that all Musk's projects will fail, then yes I would agree that he's a dead man warning.
Sometimes Musk succeeds and other times he fails. His attempt to make his own Dojo AI chip failed. But he's doing pretty well on AI with Nvidia chips, Grok 3 is better than anything Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon has come up with.
Maybe Starship fails, maybe it succeeds. If there was no Starship wouldn't you say something like 'oh the competition is catching up, how is he going to stay ahead, there's no product on the horizon'? Developing new products isn't easy, rockets have been known to fail. Who even is the competition? The entire Chinese state and private sector? Bezos who just got into orbit in 2025? ULA? ESA? SpaceX makes them all look puny.
What are the odds that all Musk's upcoming products fail? Robotaxis and Optimus will fail? Well then Tesla would be in a bad place. But how do you know that?
What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things? I'm pretty sure you don't fail your way into hundreds of billions of dollars. The media has a skewed perspective on Musk. Whenever Tesla stock goes down we get a morality tale of 'evil never prospers' where you can just sense their glee, yet when Tesla stock goes up (up by 50% since March) there's a mysterious silence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
He does still have an uncontested dominance of spaceflight... Pretty far from dead man walking IMO!
Plus Tesla is by far the largest electric car producer in America, it's not like they'll allow Chinese competition in America. They have one of the world's biggest markets locked down. Europe has always favoured European vehicles, it's understandable that Volkswagen is in the lead there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Hard to dispute. If God wanted, we could live in Winney the Pooh physics where nobody gets seriously hurt beyond saying 'oh bother'. An omnipotent can do anything.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Makes perfect sense to me, AI is a national-level issue. Really it's global, a server farm in Ohio can take jobs off Uzbeks and Bolivians, not to mention Floridians. Makes sense to regulate nationally.
Plus, would you really want California regulating a critical sector of the economy?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
The rather aimless right in the anglosphere fails at attracting young people and successful people. A young highly educated person is simply going to find the aesthetics and the values of mainstream conservatism boring and unappealing.
True, consider the Tories in the UK and Liberals in Australia. Both are ostensibly conservative parties, both are fully committed to mass migration, the energy transition and so on. If there's one thing the Tories are 'for', it's Universal Boomer Income, the triple-lock on pensions subsidizing senescence. They promised to take control of migration, won an election victory and then raised it significantly. And they let the NGO-deep state blob run the rest of society. Hopefully the Tories dissolve entirely, nothing of value would be lost.
I think the problem with Trump is that he needs to be destructive in order to break the power of the NGO-deep state blob, in this case the judges. I was at lunch with an American law professor some time ago who was wistfully imagining a world where the Democrats decided to run on a platform so popular they'd just dare the judges to block them and if so... expand the court! Break them! He told us that he often asked his students about the consequences of their marvellous plans to use state power to achieve some goal, what if the other side got in power and used the power to their ends? Students used to realise this and come out with a renewed perspective on compromise. About a decade ago they started coming to a different conclusion: 'it'll be tough but we'll fight back and win eventually'. Restraint is for suckers. Even the professor seemed to have changed his mind on this.
The same logic applies for Trump. Deporting illegal immigrants is his big thing, he did win the election, he should probably have devoted his efforts to that rather than schizo tariff wars. Break the will of the courts on the most advantageous battlefield you can find, don't fight on unfavourable battlefields.
But as usual with Trump, his destructive energies are not tightly focused on the right targets in order of priority.
You absolutely can have a positive vision of 'safe streets', 'cheap energy' 'nation-state not economic zone' 'peace through strength' and that would be pretty popular. But without the confidence to pursue it, they're just words.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
If Western, white countries are unable to replicate the successes of Asian countries then we may as well give up on politics and civilization generally.
The Chinese didn't go 'oh well they're white and we're yellow, we'd better just accept inferiority, mediocrity and humiliation - we'll just be coolies working for pennies'. They copied what they liked about our civilization and discarded what they didn't want. Lee Quan Yew did exactly that, he went to London and America and brought back good ideas to try.
Low-crime isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Clean public transport isn't impossible because we're not Asian. Crime used to be low. Public transport used to be clean. It still is in many places. If the demographics are bad, adjust tactics to keep them in line or change the demographics. Send criminals to prison or blow their heads off - capital punishment has a long history in the West. You can just do things.
Americans should definitely stop eating chemical slop and eat more Japanese food - rice and fish. It tastes good and is good. Or they could eat excellent European cuisine. Nothing about being white condemns a country to substandard outcomes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
Yeah, Worth the Candle falls off IMO. After a certain point
There aren't significant problems with race in Australia such that urban centres are very unsafe. But property here is even more expensive than in much of America, compared to income.
Productivity in the construction industry has been falling in Australia. It's been falling in America too. Regulations are partly to blame but the whole thing needs a reboot. There's an entire genre on tiktok showcasing the poor quality of new-build American houses, all this wonky or leaky, shoddy construction work. There are problems with price, quality and quantity.
Housing is the sort of industry where it makes sense for big companies to do it, not tiny little shrimps. Learning-by-doing is clearly needed and not happening. There has to be close coordination with government anyway to build out the infrastructure needed, dams, water, power... It should be managed by the state but in a capable, effective fashion. I realise that last sentence sounds retardedly naive but it is possible in principle.
When in doubt, copy Singapore. It's run with heavy state involvement there, 80% of the housing stock is public housing, they have construction productivity that actually goes up and housing is actually affordable. Per Claude:
Singapore HDB flats rated as most affordable housing in major Asian cities, better than Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing
Singapore's affordability ratio is 4.5-4.7 for public housing vs 13.7 for private property
Key Success Factors
Government Control: Single agency (HDB) controls entire process from land acquisition to completion
Standardization: Standardized methods and designs enable prefabrication and economies of scale
Technology Investment: Continuous R&D and early adoption of automation/robotics
Integrated Approach: Total approach covering planning, design, land assembly, and construction as seamless whole
Economies of Scale: Mass production approach with consistent demand
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
I missed my chance to finish reading Manacled then, probably a good thing. The work is basically an infohazard as discussed downthread in my link, totally alien to the male sensibility. And it holds such power over them too, such incredible desire. Who the hell translated it into WELSH?
Needs industrial-grade shaming. Whatever invective and scorn was poured on the 'I got sent to another world and have sexy adventures with Biccus Tittus and her sisters: now with more hot dark elves' genre should be returned against these people. Hermione is not supposed to be a useless, passive, shrinking violet failing to kill herself. And she's certainly not supposed to be with Draco in a Handmaid's Tale scenario where there's barely any sex, just suffering.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
I wouldn't know, I've been using openrouter. It's a pretty significant shift, should be able to eyeball it if you're doing creative tasks.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.
Naive state interventions aren't great either, regulation is much of the problem. Imagine a big state-owned corporation with the economies of scale and long-term planning to build housing en masse, build whole new cities. No stakeholder engagement, no endless procedural crap, no quotas for pregnant women or criminals, no building substandard housing and then shutting down the company when the cracks show to rinse and repeat later. No expensive consultants who charge by the hour running rings around bureaucrats who have no idea what they're doing, do everything in-house.
State-owned corporations are unfairly maligned by mainstream economics, they do plenty of excellent work. Nobody in the private sector, nobody on the planet can challenge China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Housing is simple, easy to build just like commercial shipping. Build in a factory, assemble on site. It's a perfect sector for a huge state-backed capital investment. Plus government has natural abilities regarding land, it's a match made in heaven. All that's needed is rigour and discipline.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Yeah, Deepseek goes hard. Only big LLM I know where you have to be the moderating agent rather than the provocateur.
I have to say that the new version of Deepseek R1 is very fun to play with. It performs excellently on my idiosyncratic creative writing tests. When I ask Claude, even Opus, for deranged and crazy fun, it's positively sedate compared to R1. The machine's sheer enthusiasm is very charming and it's a decent bit smarter than it was too. Maybe not quite as smart as Opus 4 but still very smart.
When it comes to making dumb Hollywood trailer scripts of video game franchises, or bringing the wildest dreams of 1960s nuclear strategists to life, it's fantastic. Gets increasingly insane in multi-turn though.
There wasn't much romance in the new Top Gun movie either, Cruise spent much of the non-jet parts being dressed down by former lovers which I found a bit irritating and unnecessary. Quite different to the old one.
In either of the Mission Impossible 'Dead Reckoning' movies there wasn't much romance.
Not sure how you can have romance in the modern era where there seems to be so much emphasis on men being denigrated. Traditional James Bond style romance is too rapey, Roger Moore's Bond is right out. Even soft wooing can still give the ick to some extent. The male can't pursue the female without being humiliated it seems,. And if the female is pursuing the man it seems like male wish fulfillment fantasy, the Japanese trope where a very passive guy ends up with a harem of 10/10s because he's 'nice'.
So how do you have a romance then if neither party can pursue? Ironically, lots of women want Roger Moore x10, they want a billionaire werewolf lumberjack cowboy with a massive cock. The 50 shades of grey movie made 570 million on a budget of 40 million, it's a clear success. As in my previous post, many many women want the alpha male version of Malfoy: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
But directors and high society/PMC feminists absolutely refuses to permit the alpha male version of Malfoy, Rowling wrote him to be a wimp and a loser. I saw a funny thread on /gif/ the other day where the premise was 'feminists/liberals fucked hard' and so naturally all these commenters joined in a pointless political debate on 4chan's third most degen pornography board: 'you guys are incels posting this garbage', 'its so cringe, trump supporters don't have sex' and nobody realized that the clips were all from the reddit forum, fuckingfascists. It was leftwing and liberal women who were into this stuff, getting fucked by trump supporters, getting turned into tradwives. Femgooners were to blame. You can tell this instantly because none of it or the stuff from fuckingfascists was anime. Clearly it wasn't authentic right-wing content. There's a huge gap between the roles and expectations that society tries to project and what's actually happening, at least in terms of masturbation fantasies.
I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like. The femgooners can have their dangerous alpha male. I can have an antiwoke, fun, action movie. Everybody wins except the directorial class who've been pumping out all these terrible marvel movies.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
30d ago
If unemployment rises to 70%, then AI can also be used for combat power and war economy work.
Imagine a swarm of AI-equipped drones, faster and more coordinated than anything in Ukraine today. Imagine the ground-based robots they're trying out but with a machinegun on top: https://x.com/XHNews/status/1921201829066797357
Automated trucks for logistics, all coming from automated factories. That's all eminently possible with 70% unemployment, plus more exotic stuff like satellite swarms spying on everybody in real time, decapitation strikes with novel nerve agents we can't even detect.
How is a human military going to fight that, especially when AI is going to be deeply embedded in their communications? Perhaps a government or sections from a government will merge with a leading AI company or nationalize them earlier in the game but I can't see how they'd successfully shut them down without rendering themselves globally irrelevant. If they wait until 70% of people are unemployed, they might just get crushed.
What do you do if 70% of people are made obsolete? Shut down AI and send them to do useless work? Put tariffs on AI-made products overseas? Seems like delaying the inevitable.
Neither superpower wants to slow down, Trump's America explicitly wants to win the AI race with Stargate while China has allocated considerable effort to developing AI. It's bipartisan in America, Biden was also keen to restrict GPUs leaving the US. I don't think there's any anti-AI faction in China at all, I'm not aware of a single evil AI in the entire Chinese cultural corpus. We haven't even stopped the 'randomly develop gain of function megadeath viruses for no good reason' arms race after a megadeath virus leaked, so what are the chances of stopping the 'immense power and wealth' race after it gives out immense power and wealth?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
30d ago
The shameless Han Chinese even boast that the Manchus were benevolent masters
They did keep taxes low. The administration was actually underfunded, causing considerable corruption as officials found ways to supplement their paltry incomes.
Anyway, pre-British India was also under foreign rule and had been for some time, when it wasn't a fragmented mess.
China is a rare exception for not getting smashed by Europeans, never being part of a non-Chinese empire. Yuan, Qing - sounds pretty Chinese to me. They weren't Han dynasties but they were Chinese. They took their administrative practices from Chinese tradition: exams, meritocracy, eunuchs, they used Chinese language, they were Chinese in character.
India got conquered by much more foreign foreigners, firstly by various Muslims and then by the Mughals, then by the British. None of them are significantly Indian in their origins or nature. Islam isn't Indian and Britain is almost as far from Britain as you can get in civilizational terms, in religion, language, customs, everything.
Anyway, history is second to contemporary affairs where China is absolutely mauling India in every area of competition besides 'influence in Washington'.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
AI is the boot, it's going to be doing all the stomping. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter are some of the most powerful companies in the world, they have a gravity well that pulls everyone else behind them. Shut down AI, what does that do to your stock portfolio? Your pension? What does that do for your reelection campaign, is the other guy going to get the algorithm on his side, millions in his warchest? How do you coordinate against AI when all major internet forums are looking to AI as a revenue source?
Or the 20 million people spending hours a day on character.ai, they're not going to let their wAIfus and husbandos go without a fight.
Not to mention that everyone else in business has some kind of interest in AI. The manufacturers want to automate their factories and improve their logistics, services companies want to boost productivity.
And the arms race, as you mention, DARPA, the Pentagon and leading lights in the Chinese Communist Party. That alone is an insoluble problem for decels, what do you say to the paranoia of American strategists? Without a technological advantage, the US doesn't stand a chance against China. They're certainly not going to let China get ahead. And China is not going to stop, it's clearly identified as a key technology to advance in. The public in China love AI, they're very optimistic about it.
Governments couldn't care less about implementing unpopular policies, mass migration for one. Or ending the death penalty. Or invading foreign countries for dubious reasons. If they see it as a core priority, they'll make it happen regardless of what people think. AI is almost certainly far more seductive than any of these things, with far stronger institutions backing it. I'm very bearish on decels having any success whatsoever. Remember PauseAI? Basically nothing happened. It was a squib, hundreds of billions in capital was redeployed to rapidly advance AI in 2023, the exact opposite of what they wanted.
AI people are similarly nonviolent...
People are hard-coded to care more about concrete issues of killing, status and land as opposed to abstract matters like environment or AI.
Also I bet the more abstract you are inherently, the less violent and dramatic you are. The most violent people are stupid and thus swing towards simpler causes. Bolshevism wasn't built by 'blah blah blah theory' people but 'see landlord, kill him' peasantry and resentful would-be elites running on 'see power, take it'. The West did not see any successful violent Bolshevik revolutions despite an excess of theoreticians and abstractionists.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Exactly, seems like a 'sounds good, does nothing' action.
The Australian esafety commissioner is someone who might be affected, this is the class of person we're talking about. She almost certainly doesn't want to go to America. I've heard unprompted stories from this kind of highly-educated PMC govt worker about how much they don't want to go to Trump's America or America generally. It's not like they're going to be holding any big, prestigious censorship conferences in the US, that's a Davos/Europe thing.
Or Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the one Elon was fighting. Does he want to go to America? Absolutely not.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
I considered that, however he says the J-20 is supposed to be a 5th gen fighter but is actually 3.5, plus I don't think India uses Chinese terminology in aircraft gens.
Maybe the journalist messed it up very badly, either way it's still pretty bad for Indian journalism.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
At least David Axe knows how to write. He and his ilk are fools but they're way better at lying. And they won't make really basic errors in hard fact, they'll just exaggerate the effect of a gamechanger. It's intuitive to a certain extent that if you blow up the Russian ammo dumps with amazing GPS-guided missiles they can't do their thuggish orc strategy of drowning the area in shells. Of course that doesn't actually work since there are countermeasures and their entire model of what's going on is fantasy...
It's stupid to say that Leopards will sweep Putin's Soviet relics aside but they won't actually cite obviously made-up facts like 'the T-90M is merely 1970s technology, on par with an M-60'.
Now I think about it, I think the Telegraph or someone did mix up a Ukrainian drone hitting a Russian tank with a Ukrainian tank getting hit, so I'm probably giving Western media too much credit.
I'm kind of sympathetic to Sunshine, there's a tendency in certain parts of India to write ridiculous lies in quite poor English.
"Rafale is far superior to the J-20, the Chengdu fighter of China. Even though it’s believed to be a 5th generation fighter, it is probably at best a 3.5 generation aircraft. It's got a third generation engine as we have in the Sukhoi," said Air Marshal R Nambiar (retd) who flight tested the Rafale fighter jets for India.
The stealth characteristics of the J-20 are also under suspicion, say experts based on several analysis done by the Indian Air Force. The J-20 was hyped to be a highly stealthy aircraft and that it could conceal itself in operations and not be easily detected.
Experts say if the J-20 was the best, why would the Chinese go for the Russian Su35. But the Russian jets too might not be able to compete with the Rafale.
"Su35 is also no match to the Rafale with its weapons, superior sensors and fully integrated architecture. The capability to super cruise even with four missiles, stealth characteristics all put together make the Rafale far more potent than Su35," Nambiar added.
Firstly, these sentences look like they were written by a child. Extremely awkward structuring and poor grammar.
Secondly, the content is extremely silly. 3rd generation engine in the J-20? The Russian engines they were using at the time in the J-20 were 4th gen and they were introducing better Chinese engines. A 3.5 generation aircraft would be something like a late-model Phantom, around the end of Vietnam, it's like saying China is 50 years behind. The Air Marshal is a fool, there was considerable schadenfreude in some parts of military-aviation twitter when export-grade Chinese J-10s wrecked India's Rafales.
The biggest difference is that Rafale is an omni-role aircraft. It can carry out at least four missions in one sortie while the J-20 cannot carry out multiple missions is one go.
Basic spellchecking failures too. Is one go? This is from the most popular Indian newspaper apparently. I have no doubt that much Indian journalism is better than this but it's easy to see a qualitative gap.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Lab leak is the general consensus, despite great efforts from certain parts of the scientific community to bury it. "Scientists find that scientists (often them specifically) were not responsible" isn't credible at this point, not after a frankly staggering amount of active deception from those who claimed to speak for the scientific community: https://archive.md/8Fsv2#selection-5159.0-5163.1
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
It might be intellectually incoherent but it worked.
Obviously the modern context presents different challenges. Child mortality is not sky high anymore.
However, our society has huge coercive resources. Economically, citizens are coerced by powerful bureaucracies to fund all kinds of programs, wars, welfare. Socially, policing works via coercion. They don't just educate people on what to do, people are coerced by police wielding guns.
There's no reason to drop coercion entirely with regards to sexual relations when it's present in all other aspects of life. In fact there are extremely strong coercive systems set up for underage sex and other scenarios. One might very reasonably say that it's bizarre and inconsistent to have such harshness allocated for relatively minor problems while civilization-ending, nation-ending decline is met with a limp-wristed 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas, bring in more immigrants'. Imperial Japan tried coercion, they restricted female employment, banned abortion and taxed bachelors. There was modest fertility growth in an industrializing, urbanizing society albeit complicated by the war. In 1945 the US changed their constitution to give equal rights to women and Japanese fertility plummeted, never to recover.
https://x.com/SyroJaziran/status/1848973547344928887
This kind of coercion may not be the only solution but it is a solution. There could also be incentives-based solutions. Take the entire pension budget and transfer it to fund parents who raise children to certain standards. 10-15% of GDP should get things happening. But you'd have real political problems doing this, any sufficiently powerful incentive resembles coercion, it would require the same voter-proof political consensus that mass immigration enjoys in many Western countries. There'd need to be a huge, forceful redistribution of political power for this to happen, likewise with largescale cloning or any other effective solution.
I'm still skeptical of 'Musk cooked his brain with drugs' as a narrative. Have any of these commentators actually met the guy? Or are they familiar with him through media only? If we believed the media on Putin, he was supposed to have died of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer and maybe another dozen things by now. But this isn't so. Just because journalists don't like him, he isn't necessarily in ill health.
Plus you're forgetting the brain implants that let a guy play games while completely disabled, Neuralink is state-of-the-art albeit not a revolutionary breakthrough. What about the satellite network that kept Ukraine in the fight? What about nuking Kamala's election chances?
Roughly 1 major development per year is still pretty impressive! At the risk of sounding like a redditor 10 years ago, how is he not the modern Tony Stark? Ridiculously wealthy, unrealistically multi-domain, extremely controversial womanizer with outrageously grandiose dreams, extremely petty and lacking in wisdom, highly idealistic, plus significant but not obviously debilitating drug issues.
What kind of unrealistic standard requires one not to ever fail, or not fail several times in succession? Facebook's AI and VR programs have been failures yet they're successful. Google's past is littered with failures, they're infamous for making and abandoning products. But they're still successful. If the media was constantly constructing a 'Google is really fucked this time' narrative, then lots of people would believe it.
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