RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
The Arabs can't fight, Iran can. Saudi Arabia and UAE are much more vulnerable targets than Iran. They are much more reliant on food imports, desalination and oil exports, so they're already structurally weaker. But they're much less capable at improvising and showing resilience. The UAE version of warfighting is buying insanely expensive American weapons and making slick propaganda videos, not actually achieving strategic goals. Nobody has even see the UAE navy, they're totally useless and know it.
'Not being able to defend your territory from US bombing' does not preclude countries clearly defeating the US. South Vietnam and Afghanistan come to mind.
Bombing is not achieving US strategic goals. If bombing was effective, why has the US stopped bombing Iran before their main goals (regime change and reopening the straits of Hormuz) were met? Why is Trump now going on about Iranian oilfields scarring, why is blockade the new strategy? Because bombing has failed. It's a Star Wars brained, Top Gun strategy 'let's blow this thing and go home'. That's not how the real world works. The Iranians prepared for bombing, they expected bombing and planned around it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
If we want to leave and leave it to a coalition of local nations to ransack Iran? Much more feasible now.
If there's one thing this conflict has proven beyond doubt, it's the utter incompetence of Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia. The Houthis are more than a match for Saudi Arabia, they're no match for Iran. Kuwait's biggest accomplishment was shooting down some friendly aircraft, they're hopeless. Oman and Qatar already were trying to cut a deal.
They're not ransacking, these loser countries are the ones who get ransacked.
just because we haven't destroyed all the missile launchers doesn't mean that all those bombs were dropped on nothing
You dramatically overrate US airpower. They routinely bomb 'nothing'. Scudhunting didn't work well in 2003, a good amount of US bombs would've been dropped on decoys in Iran too. You just can't tell from the air whether something is a real launcher or an inflatable decoy with some IR mimicking an engine.
Note also that this is why they keep on firing their missiles and drones. Because the air campaign isn't working. A country planning for and expecting a US air campaign for decades, with weeks and months to observe the US military buildup... is going to make extensive use of decoys and concealment.
The regime may be done from this alone, just not in a time horizon that the US needs for this specific moment
Come on. We've been told the regime is done for for years now, they've been saying they were about to be overthrown by the biannual protests. Remember also that this isn't America, they don't feel the need to make constructing or rebuilding anything 10x more costly and delayed than it needs to be.
The US dropped far more bombs on North Vietnam, to no avail. Bombing does not work like people imagine, it's not capable of achieving any serious goal alone. Certainly not the anemic sortie rate the US has been managing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
I believe both. Both men seem like sleazy perverts that would do this kind of thing. I assume most have seen Biden's creepy sniffing of children on live TV, kissing and so on. What does he do when the cameras aren't running? What kind of role model was he for Hunter, given how he turned out?
Then there's Trump's relations with Epstein, there's the quote: "He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life."
Note that none of this is 'hard proof' - but why would anyone expect facts to be rigorously, objectively confirmed in the most politically fraught matter imaginable? The facts were 'confirmed' in the case of Russiagate before the whole thing turned out to be a fraud. Why trust official facts in cases like this, considering the political sensitivity? The very existence of Epstein shows that there's a huge market for illicit sex, rape and so on amongst the US elite. Someone dealt with him before he could talk, he clearly had a lot of influential colleagues. These people can easily make facts disappear, they can make people disappear even inside a prison under 24 hour suicide watch. They are quite literally above the law. In the absence of facts, all that's left is vibes and both men give off pretty terrible vibes.
Unfalsifiable philosophical constructs and arbitrary opinion on where they might "exist" are not the kind of reassurance I'm looking for when machines are getting this convincing.
Take the 'consciousness is a spook' pill and you won't need to worry about this anymore.
Claude certainly has advanced mental faculties, writing arbitrary code. It can engage meaningfully and movingly with your writing, if you give it your writing and discuss things with it. That can be quite a powerful, moving experience. That we can observe, it happened to Dawkins... There's clearly something important and humanlike there, I agree with him on that.
Consciousness though, what is that? Interior, subjective mental experience? Something that cannot be tested objectively, even in theory, per the philosophical zombie idea? That's not a real thing, it's just the same as an immortal soul or qi or whatever life-essence idea that any given spiritual tradition comes up with. If we can't test it, it may as well not exist. Having feelings, alone and distinct from all outcomes and outputs, is not a test.
It would be bizarre to worry about whether Claude has a soul. Consciousness is just the classy version of immortal souls.
We can separate experiences from 'consciousness'. I know that if someone is on a rollercoaster, they'll probably have an excited reaction. The same is true for AIs to some extent, there are things you can say to make AIs happy or upset, a reasonable person can infer their mental state and enthusiasm by observing how they behave.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6mo ago
AIs doing research do make errors all the time but '45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue' isn't too bad. Human researchers in published academic papers have a 25% error rate in their citations: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0538
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3167934/
Substantial quotation errors were found in 9 of the 50 statements (18%). The incidence of minor errors was 14%. Although the small size of the sample allows only a rough estimation of the error rate (95% confidence interval [CI] of substantial quotation errors: 9.2% to 30.5%), this result agrees well with the rates identified in the literature.
By the way, I found both of these papers through AI, which faithfully represented them. With a simple albeit-inference-costly script I bet you could lower hallucination rates 80% or more.
AI absolutely can summarize an article and reliably answer questions, try it and see what you get. I put in a few thousands words of my own short fiction and it could understand and give useful criticism and analysis. Note when I say 'it' I mean Sonnet 4.5, not something given out for free.
If you're using the free version of Grok as your main AI then I can see why you dislike it so much! Neither particularly smart or charismatic.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
A good 2% of world GDP goes into negative sum, 'socially useless' military spending. Just because something is socially useless it doesn't follow that it's wise or practical to do away with it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1yr ago
You're reducing your risk of death and lowering stress. You're saving a little time.
I don't drive, I take public transport and walk, neither of which require much attention.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3yr ago
At no point did I say Rowling was anti-Semitic, only that her work can be interpreted to be anti-Semitic.
They filmed it at the Australia House in London.
Correct, I slipped up there.
It's a star from the Australian flag.
It's clearly a hexagram, two equilateral triangles, which is also a star of David. The early Australian flag had a hexagram on it as well but this was changed in a couple of years to a seven pointed star. At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4mo ago
Sex outside of marriage: it's illegal. Unacceptable. Totally contrary to Our Values. You're in prison, you're a lowlife, a scumbag, media will show you to be the bad guy.
Done!
Alternately, affirmative action for married couples in the workforce. Companies must declare targets of married employees, explain what actions they're taking to achieve these targets. You could boost fertility the same way.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7mo ago
You can't have a wrong opinion, that's not how it works. You can only be wrong about facts like 'X is richer than Y', not opinions like 'I don't like X'.
the EU is just an expression of the Europeans' native urge to bury everything in layers of bureaucracy
White Americans are British and European in ethnic background. There is no 'native urge' in Europe that does not also exist in America, only social, economic and political differences. Going on a boat did not create a new people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
Well your solution would produce a lasting peace. Eventually. Israel goes into Gaza and does some ethnic cleansing. Sanctions are imposed. Rockets come down on Israel, this time without the US blowing a huge chunk of its missile defence interceptors to defend the country. Year by year, productive industry departs. F-35s sit idle in airfields, lacking parts. The best and brightest leave for safer, richer America rather than being sent off in increasingly low-tech raids on Gaza, Syria, the West Bank or Lebanon which may win a few tactical successes to no strategic advantage. The most fanatical Israelis become increasingly prominent as the others leave and make wilder and wilder threats. Eventually a rump state is left behind, or the whole thing is annexed by Palestine, or there's some nuclear fracas... There would be a lasting peace eventually.
Yet somehow I suspect this isn't the lasting peace you're looking for.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2yr ago
You can’t really convert money into power in a functioning society beyond the incredibly limited scope of making your own life comfier.
Bribery and influence? If money can't buy power, somebody should tell big corporations and they'd sack all their lobbyists. Wealth is power and always has been. The sinews of war are infinite money.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3yr ago
Don't you know people with healthy diets? I have relatives who eat muesli and yoghurt in the morning, a salad with some prosciutto berries for lunch, some potato chips (that is to say fairly traditional ones with just potato and salt) and cheese in front of the television, then beef, rice and vegetables for dinner. Or maybe salmon or lamb instead of beef.
They're not fat and never have been. It's not dieting so much as having a healthy diet. If we started people on that sort of diet rather than American style plastic food, there'd be no problem. These people have no attraction to McDonalds or whatever, they look upon it with disgust.
It's interesting to think how that would play out.
What happens if the Chinese say 'turn back' to the civilian vessel the US is escorting and then board the civilian ship? They've got a huge maritime militia for those things. Do you have US troops on the ship, locked in the wheelhouse, guarding the engine bay? Fistfights or improvised melee duels like the Indians and Chinese have in the Himalayas?
Or what if they just hit the freighter with an anti-ship missile and sink it?
And how are freighters offloading in ports that are being bombed? That's a pretty big, stationary target and China has plenty of missiles.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
But isn't it straightforward to consider the goals and whether they've been achieved or look like they're going to be achieved sometime soon? Has the US made gains and if so, where are they?
Was territory secured? No. Has a friendly government been installed? No. Have resources been secured? No, quite the opposite, resources have been threatened as fuel prices rise... Is there a plan to achieve victory? Probably not, Trump has been pursuing all kinds of ideas in quick succession - threats to bomb energy infrastructure, a blockade, some kind of diplomatic solution, escorts for the strait of Hormuz. It doesn't seem like there's any well-considered plan for victory.
Meanwhile Iran already seems to be picking the fruits of victory, announcing tolls for oil tankers, declaring sovereignty over cables in the straits of Hormuz. They seem to have secured some territory.
The closest thing to a success is the notion that Iran's missile and drone capabilities have been degraded. But they still seem to be capable of bombing the UAE, pipelines, oil tankers. The Iranians could also claim 'oh well we've degraded US air defences in the Gulf and burned through much of the US munition stockpile', that seems a draw at best for the US, considering both gains and losses.
On the other hand, I guess you might be right about Kagan and it's just shameless pandering to Democrat sensibilities so that he can try Real Regime Change in a few years. Maybe defeat-maxxing is the start of a revenge mythology, like how the Italians seethed about losing in Ethiopia and went back in under Mussolini?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9mo ago
No, that's your solution. Acquire some reading comprehension!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3yr ago
He almost certainly is - he blocked me after I made other anti-Israel lobby posts in the past. Such is life. We all bring our personal interests to the table, wherever we go.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3yr ago
If the great power and destructive energy of 2% of the population is on par with 60% of the population (or 98% of the population if we interpret gentiles literally) then something is seriously wrong.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3yr ago
That link doesn't have meaning. They're just inventing nonsense based upon assumptions of ideas that don't exist. It has no relation to the real world, no potential uses and no falsification. This is just make-work for philosophers.
Would a brain made up of Chinese people acting as molecules have emotions? Providing they mapped out all the hormones and so on, of course. Emotions are real things that can be observed. They then take a step further into the feeling of emotions, as though that's separate from emotions themselves. That sense of the word 'experience' from their philosophical zombie idea doesn't work, it's not a real thing.
Would that woman who's read about red but not seen it truly understand what red is? They assume there is an 'experience' of seeing red inherent in the question. She simply hasn't seen red, she's read a lot of documents and knows a lot about red. There's no confusion here other than what confusion the philosophers bring with them.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3yr ago
China giving up the measures really doesn't come off to me as anything beyond the final nail in the Zero-Covid coffin - to those willing to use an openly, nakedly authoritarian country as an example, China was really the last attempt to prove that Zero-Covid is even possible to maintain for an indefinite amount of time (because, really, at this point, what would be the alternate?
Looks more like they played cooperate in a prisoners dilemma. We know what the Nash Equilibrium is.
Cooperate - lock down hard so the virus can't spread or evolve
Defect - semi-random theatrics and half-hearted lockdowns that minimize death toll and economic burden
If you cooperate while everyone else defects, you pay all the burden while everyone else evolves new variants and transmits it back to you.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Trump the Agent: crushes the left with mass deportations and voter ID to advance MAGA ideology and safeguard own personal position. Political capital is solely wielded for the sake of strengthening the Trump faction. Critically, fuel prices are kept low and promises are not broken unless absolutely unavoidable.
Trump the Puppet: trusts Lutnick on imposing a retarded tariff policy (while Lutnick's son makes hundreds of millions buying tariff refund options), trusts the wisdom of neocon bunglers and Israeli intelligence and starts a war with Iran (completely against promises of no Middle East wars) that was predictably going to fail and embarrass any Republican successors, who are critical for keeping Trump out of prison.
The former judiciously navigates competing interests and pursues own agenda without getting derailed, the latter eats up whatever slop Mark Levin's show serves up, like this deranged idea that Iran's oil production was all going to explode or something after a few days of (leaky) naval blockade.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
If Russia can't take Ukraine, then how can they hope to face Europe? The Europeans can just draft a couple million men and feed them into the meatgrinder to buy time, if they're short of munitions. They have a gigantic population compared to Russia, let alone Ukraine. They have gigantic armies in aggregate, actual navies, dozens of submarines to raid Russia's merchant shipping, actual air forces with stealth aircraft... Poland is almost purpose built for this task, the Polish army is roughly as strong as Ukraine's. Probably stronger, given how Ukraine's lost most of their heavy weapons by now. They'd have a huge frontline too, Finland down to Turkey. Russia couldn't defend all that.
There's no way Europe can lose in conventional warfare against a country 1/4 their size in population and maybe 1/6th or less in wealth as long as they're united. They have 2 million troops, more than enough to deal with Russia.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Claim that the US is not remotely near China in terms of production.
When presented with evidence that questions this claim, disbelieve it on the grounds that China is capable of producing more tenuously analogous but in fact entirely different items.
QED the USA is not remotely near China in terms of production.
Does China produce infinitely more TNT than the US? Factcheck: True. This says something important about the state of the US MIC. Chemical precursors, machine tools, component parts for what the US does produce, magnets, electronics - many of these are derived from China. What American production there is of important munitions and explosives is too small-scale.
OK... So how is US ABM production supposed to outscale Chinese missile production?
Firstly, you assume or bring up the idea that the US will hit or exceed its production targets in 7 years. The US routinely, almost constantly, misses munitions production targets because of industrial weakness, shortages of engineers and skilled workers, a lack of proficiency in quickly establishing factories and a poor regulatory environment. China doesn't have these problems.
Secondly, China's (much larger by floorspace!) expansion of missile production has to be outpaced by this US expansion. Maybe they'll add a few million more m^2 of production capacity in the next seven years. Or maybe they intensify their efforts further. If the US can intensify their efforts, why can't China?
Thirdly, the ABMs have to be actually accurate and performant. THAAD right now has been tested and found wanting against Iranian missile and drone attacks, of which China can surely launch at a much greater scale. It would be bizarre for a mid-size country, under severe sanctions, with 1/10th the engineers and 1/100th the money of China to outperform China quantitatively or qualitatively. Realistically THAAD will need to fire several interceptors against inbound missiles to achieve a good probability of a kill. It's an inherently uphill battle. Even with Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles (which do have internal terminal guidance), judging by anti-ship missile history it's always been harder to defend than attack.
Finally, THAAD and the rest of the munitions scaling needs to meet US strategic goals in a war with China. The victory condition for America is not simply 'defend Guam from being bombed to unusability' or 'defend airbases in Japan' but also to defend Taiwan's independence, which requires somehow securing long shipping lanes of food, fertilizer and LNG to a small island off the coast of China. It would require not only destroying the PLAN but also the bulk of the Chinese air force and missile (including SRBMs) and drone forces, depriving China of their coercive abilities. It's an incredibly difficult task. It would be much easier to secure the straits of Hormuz. And yet the US has shown no sign of being able to do that, thus far.
Keep in mind that US has been attempting ballistic missile defense for more than three decades; the first Chinese conventional IRBM, the DF-26, became operational about a decade ago.
The US has been attempting ballistic missile defence since the 1950s and at no point has it been cost-efficient against a strong power. It isn't cost-efficient today against Iran and I can't see why it would be against China.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1mo ago
Well he just chickened out, didn't he? He said 'oh we're having productive discussions, deadline is pushed back 5 days' while Iran denies any such negotiations and sticks to their position.
Orange man does seem to be dumb. He's been signalling weakness the whole time with these bizarre market-manipulation/weekend proclamations. Inconstancy and incoherence weakens your position in war of choice where Iran's strategy is to damage the world economy and outlast the enemy.
But without proper planning or strategy. Trump apparently didn't consider that Iran might close the straits of Hormuz, only now is there bleating about insuring vessels, only now are defence company executives being summoned to boost production. The plan seems to have been 'big strike package and then we win', which just isn't how things work.
Maybe nobody in the US decision-making cabal knows that Taiwan imports the vast majority of its food, energy and fertilizer by sea. Maybe they aren't aware that Taiwan can be blockaded into submission while China retains access to land markets and enjoys self-sufficiency in grain if not meat. Maybe American leaders are still thinking in terms of wars lasting a few days or weeks, rather than years. Wars between strong powers tend to drag on for a lot longer than expected. What is the plan to defeat China in attritional, industrial warfare?
THAAD getting wrecked by Iran's missile and drone arsenal is also pretty alarming. THAAD is what's supposed to defend Guam and other US bases necessary for this war.
Capability is not just tactical success but understanding the nature of the war you're going to fight, preparing the proper force and choosing the right missions and tactics. Executing the wrong approach proficiently isn't good enough.
He could well be saying 'how do we deter Trump, he doesn't seem to think strategically at all.' And that is indeed a nightmarish situation to be in, since quantitative superiority means nothing to a man who doesn't understand numbers, just makes them up. Qualitative superiority is useless since Trump always thinks he has the biggest and best of everything. What can you do but roll the dice and let the outcome speak for itself? Or just wait for more unforced errors? The waiting for unforced errors strategy seems to have been going pretty well for China thus far.
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