RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14d ago
Should we have a 'should be longer' and 'should be shorter' upvote/downvote button?
A good few reported comments make a point but I believe the real problem with them is that they don't substantiate their claims or elaborate. They can't, nobody can in only a few sentences.
Alternately, there are some top-level and mid-level posts that are so long my eyes just glaze over and I scroll onwards. I'm wary of doing that myself and try to prune things down. That comes at the cost of detail, I sometimes end up letting considerable weight rest on single word qualifiers I add where perhaps sentences are needed. Scylla and Charybdis. I don't know how hard length-voting would be or if anyone else cares. Opinions?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Ukraine has been by far the worse Russian strategic failure.
I'll stop you right here. No, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin era was catastrophic for Russia in a way that Ukraine is not. Massive impoverishment of the population, economic collapse, social collapse, demographic collapse, military collapse. Gorbachev had a strategy to reform the Soviet Union with policies of perestroika and glasnost. He wanted socialism with a human face and to preserve the Union. It failed massively and disastrously. I'm not sure if Yeltsin had a strategy other than 'remain in power' but it certainly wasn't good for the country.
https://tradingeconomics.com/russia/gdp-per-capita-ppp
It's possible to reform a socialist country into a market economy without shock therapy, without shelling Parliament, without a decade of chaos. China did exactly that. Ideology is a part of national strategy, if people stop believing that's a problem in and of itself. With better management of the economy and internal politics, the crisis of belief would've been mitigated. They could've transitioned to other sources of legitimacy in a more graceful manner. And hey, there are people in the West today who still believe in socialism. Indeed, the Russian communist party was quite competitive electorally - it took some trickery to keep them from ejecting Yeltsin.
Equivalence of NEETs and cultural equivalencies isn't an advantage remaining with China, it's the undermining factor of any strategy that depends on social elan by denying it unique advantages proscribed to it.
You don't see the kinds of hysterically aggressive Western nationalists that are found in China. There's a reason why I highlighted Little Pink and not lying flat. You don't see many novels in the West heaping xenophobia and revanchism into their story, demonizing national rivals. Furthermore, US social elan is in a pretty poor condition - January 6th is proof of that.
You seem to be under the impression that the national security strategy is only about the field of security, which is a very important indicator that you haven't read it. And are probably confusing it with the National Defense Strategy.
Above you were saying that the fall of the Soviet Union was a failure of ideology, unrelated to security issues (which is wrong, given how Chechens and Islamists immediately took advantage of Russian weakness). Anyway, you were saying strategy was about security. Now you want to say that US strategy encompasses more than security? I had a look through the document you nominate as the holy text of US national strategy and there's loads of ideological and legitimacy content in there, the need to defend democracy and human rights. Plus there's a fair bit of DEI stuff as well - they want more STEM for girls, there's anti-racism content, they affirm diversity as a national value...
They don't outright say DEI is at the core of their ideology, they say many things they don't really mean. It's a public document, not to be viewed as a window into their innermost beliefs. Only in the implementation, in the specifics of outcomes do we see what they truly desire. That's what's important and why I brought up the DEI/CHIPS article in the first place.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
20d ago
I think a more compelling argument might be "back in the 1970s the Science said that we were heading for an Ice Age due to industrial pollution and emissions - plus they've been predicting catastrophic climate change (melting of the ice caps, massive temperature changes and disruption) by 2000, 2010 and 2020 so they clearly don't know what they're doing'. We don't need to get bogged down in whether the greenhouse effect works as stated.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier
How would anyone know? We'd be relying on nutritionists. They've succeeded in confusing and/or deceiving the public for decades. Do eggs cause cancer? Reduce cancer? What fats are good or bad? Fat or sugar? The nutritionist consensus keeps changing, they're not doing real science.
I don't usually make traditionalist arguments but we should return to time-tested, traditional diets. Bread, cheese, milk, olive oil, fruit, fish, vegetables, meat, eggs... If it's been around for centuries, that in itself is a good argument for it. The meat/milk loving Mongols demolished grain-fed Chinese armies, meat and animal products have been historically valued despite their expense. Alas, we probably can't ban alcohol and tobacco. Alas, importing Japanese style intensive fat-shaming is unlikely.
But it is possible to prevent the development of synthetic meat. We can rely on industrial agriculture to cut corners and manipulate research to support their profits. That's how we got the food pyramid and a mountain of HFCS, breakfast cereals and so on. We should assume that they'll use this technology in an antisocial way. Drug dealers do the same thing - make the most addictive products at the lowest prices, they prioritize short-term profits over the long-term health of their customers and society. We should strictly regulate drugs and food for that reason. Synthetic meat should only be developed carefully, after we have a really sound understanding of how the body works, after biological immortality IMO.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
Do you think that first society is going to have solid investment in research, developed logistics, good infrastructure?
I think they'll have all those things precisely because they know they're needed for strength.
It's the societies that favour weakness that are going to lag on infrastructure and research. It's not fair that some people are better at engineering, at innovating, at making new things. Stupid people can be #RealScientists too. Money should be redistributed from them to the non-productive. Everyone has positive rights, there are no responsibilities. Martially minded people are dangerous and give the ick, they need to be controlled and restrained (maybe to Harrison Bergeron levels). Lo and behold this society isn't going to last very long.
Strength is good actually, big armies are useful. What good is it to have scientists if they're whisked off by someone else? What good is it to have infrastructure if someone else marches in and takes the trains and ships? All these things are good in as far as they translate back into strength. There are ways to overstress and damage people, tradeoffs between long-term and short-term, game-theoretic considerations in many-player games... Yet strength is still good.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
By contrast, Gorbachev's decision to undertake reforms were taken because of accurately-identified issues
Yes but the way he dealt with issues was poor. Reducing military spending would've greatly ameliorated the economic situation, it was sucking up a good 10%+ of the Soviet economy. Gorbachev didn't even have the power to control military spending but he thought he could radically alter the whole ideological and economic structure of the Soviet Union - in a controlled way! The man was dreaming.
That the 90s followed doesn't mean that the strategy of change was a wrong decision
If a strategy is launched in an inept and naive way and fails, it's a failure of strategy. A return to hardline Stalinism would be a 'strategy of change' yet that wouldn't have helped either. Change and reform is not sufficient, it needs to be the right change done in the right way. Implementation is important - gradual and controlled marketization beats chaos. Nothing about the Soviet system required handing everything over to robbers in a mad rush to privatize all assets before the communists could be elected, the Yeltsin approach was extremely counterproductive. Gorbachev's ineptitude led to the hardliner coup, he didn't manage the situation sufficiently well. Now nobody had ever done this before, it's a difficult task that he wasn't trained to do. Indeed, the Soviet failure helped inform China's success. Yet it was still a failure.
However, good management is not some made up video-game skill, it requires a sound understanding of the people and institutions that control a country, it requires certain personal characteristics that Deng clearly had. Even Putin did a decent job in cleaning up much of the mess that Yeltsin left behind - Putin is not an exceptional leader but he's not a Gorby/Yeltsin-tier blunder-addict.
The result was a Union where even Crimea wanted to leave it, and when ungraceful suppression was ended, did
That was the result of mismanagement and a certain level of naivete (itself a result of poor management) about how things would be outside the Soviet Union. As late as 2013 Ukraine regretted leaving the USSR.
Anyway, you started this diversion saying the war in Ukraine was the worst disaster for Russia since '41 - did you miss the increasingly frantic rhetoric coming from Macron and the Pentagon about how the Russians are about to roll the Ukrainians?
“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources told POLITICO.
It's not looking good for the rules-based order.
If you mean 'see' as in 'it's not there,' this would be flatly incorrect, and anyone who lived through the early 2000s could probably recount more than a few American examples.
No, American nationalism is not on the same order as Chinese nationalism today or in the 2000s. Not even after 9/11. The US ambassador in Beijing was trapped for days after the Belgrade embassy bombing as hordes of rioters threw rocks. China routinely blows up tiny maritime incidents into completely disproportionate affairs. The most popular movie in US history wasn't a patriotic war story like Saving Private Ryan toned up to 11 with 'the eternal glory of the US Army remains in our hearts forever and ever, amen' on the postscript. What are you thinking of - Islamophobia? China is way more Islamophobic than the US has ever been, as the US govt delights in telling us so often.
in a conventional conflict in Europe, the Russians were likely to be decisively beaten in any conflict with the Americans
Firstly, the Iraqi army is not the Soviet army. Just the arsenal Ukraine inherited from the Soviet Union is a whole other world to the SA-8s and Rolands Iraq was fielding. The Iraqi army was also saddled with Iraqi soldiers, who were not known for excellence under US tutelage either. We've yet to see how Airland Battle deals with S-300s or the arsenal of a proper military. Secondly, conventional inferiority was no problem for NATO in the 1970s or Russia today, they have nuclear deterrence.
Before I posted the link, and before you posted your opening thesis on American strategy, had you ever read or reviewed an American National Security Strategy?
This may be news to you but you do not have to read these documents to discuss national strategy. You can look at what actually happens in the real world. You can interpret govt priorities with your own eyes. This is better than trusting in the documents. Govts lie! The Chinese might say that they're interested in purely peaceful development - yet actually build up a gigantic navy and forces targeting their near abroad. The US might say it's worried about Iraqi WMDs and Saddam's links with terrorists - but have other motivations and goals for invading Iraq.
And when govts don't lie, they try to be tactful, they massage their words and adopt a certain frame. The Chinese adopt this supercilious tone where their military may be forced to take action if foreign provocateurs incite a rogue province into illegal independence activities. That's not a lie but it's not straightforward communication. Better to ignore the cheap talk and look at results.
Congratulations. You officially won the argument and convinced key American elites years ago. DEI and migration policy are how the US government under a Democratic administration believe the US will long-term compete with PRC STEM diploma numbers, and it made it into policy.
The migration policy of having a de facto open border? I note this is contrary to what is indicated in your august strategy document. US migration policy isn't primarily about improving the quality of the STEM workforce but about demographic and political change, plus serving certain corporate interests. The vast majority of the millions of people arriving in America (many flown in at state expense) are not trained in STEM. In fact US legal immigration is a rather byzantine and complicated mess, making it difficult for the most skilled to arrive.
This is where the advantage of my 'look at what's actually going on' approach kicks in. I can observe that DEI and migration policy is not motivated by a desire to acquire STEM talent. If they wanted talent, they could adopt a points-based system like Australia and enforce the border. If they wanted talent, they'd favour meritocracy as opposed to diversity quotas and affirmative action. It's not rocket science. This policy isn't secret - its publicly observable and it does get communicated. But people massage the truth, they arrange their intentions in certain ways to make it sound more defensible. Children are taught things like 'diversity makes us stronger' in school and via the media, just like how China is taught nationalism via school and the media.
Furthermore, relying on Chinese STEM talent to counter China has a number of rather obvious flaws. This is what I was pointing out initially. The DEI and Rules-based order strands are in conflict. The US wants to skim off Chinese STEM talent but not end up training them so they take skills back to China, not have them spy for China. They want to whip up popular sentiment against China (another thing you won't find in official strategy documents but which can be observed through funding of various organizations and media slant) but do so without inciting racism or civil unrest. These are the contradictions I've been talking about the whole time.
The purpose of a system is what it does, not what it says in the PR brochure.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
There are distinctions between selective breeding/advanced animal husbandry and synthetic meat.
It's easier to mod a game than to make a new game from scratch.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
You're not alone: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oXMjtVnLD4o
Harden your heart Putin, Increase your attacks, Banish them all to Palestine and we shall marry Ukrainian women!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
Iran's firing off Shaheds that cost $10,000 to $50,000 to produce. Israel's trying to shoot them down with F-15s and F-35s, plus their air defences. Can that possibly be economical? The flying cost of an F-35 is about $30,000 to $40,000 per hour. They can shoot down multiple Shaheds on each trip but I assume they're firing air to air missiles, it's a rather small target for cannon. Sidewinders apparently cost nearly $400,000. The Israelis make their own missiles and price is unclear but one imagines it's somewhat in that hundred thousand dollar zone.
At any rate it's somewhat academic, I imagine the US will be paying the bills.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
It's easy to say those things now but when the time comes, will you say 'no, we shall preserve this massive pot of wealth as a national park'?
Imagine a hundred million tonnes of gold and uranium. A trillion barrels of oil. A hundred Australia's worth of coal and iron ore. All of that is a rounding error compared to the Sun. Its value goes up into the wacky numbers, the sextillions and nonillions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Sure, the US does do this but not quite at the scale and commitment China's working at. How much money has the US promised on the CHIPS act? Tens of billions. Is the US willing to build nuclear plants? Not really. Other considerations come before aggressive implementation of technology. Musk has to file his environmental impact statements before launching his rockets.
China is spending in the hundreds of billions on chips. They're building the most nuclear plants in the world. They've got a huge industrial policy machine, they really put in effort when it comes to technology. When it comes to high-speed rail, they don't just talk about it, they build it. They don't care about environmental impact in China like they do in the US. Technology comes second only to communist party control.
The US still spends more on research but they're not exactly growing their research spending like China is:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS?locations=US-CN
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
We can synthesize infant formula but it's not as good as the real thing. We synthesize fake sugar, fake chemical food (by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients). That was instrumental to the global obesity crisis and millions of premature deaths yearly.
Why would we be capable of synthesizing meat that's just as good as real meat? We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins. The people who brought us the food pyramid are hardly going to help. After obesity, microplastics and an ongoing crisis of mental illness we should be very wary of any novel synthetic-agricultural processes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
21d ago
they might have let some of the missiles get through, lol. This is just too comical.
What world are you living in? Plenty of Iranian missiles got through. It's right there on video. Are people unironically believing the Israeli '99% shot down' routine?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
The optics would just be terrible
This wouldn't stop Israel. The optics were terrible when they shoot children in the back but they do it anyway and clear it in court. There's no shortage of bad optics on either side.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning
Well they sure did shoot at them before the war: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session40/Documents/A_HRC_40_74_CRP2.pdf
Imagine you're Israeli. All your life you hear about suicide bombings, attacks, rockets, problems all coming from these dirty uncivilized Arabs who belong to a death cult that hates your religion and routinely sneak-attack on your religious holidays. You hate these people.
Imagine you're Palestinian. Israeli troops will knock down your door at night-time and search your apartment. You're not allowed to move freely, they cut power off, they steal your land like they've been stealing it for decades now. You spent your whole childhood punctuated by bombs, assassinations of peaceful protestors, dead family members, dead neighbours, arrests, torture... You hate these people.
This is a war of hatred. They hate eachother (as a collective). Not all of them hate eachother but enough do. We cannot model this war without understanding that there's intense hatred. Trying to model leadership or boots-on-the-ground as calculating, rational plotters is not going to yield good predictions.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
Say there were two societies. One values strong over weak, the other weak over strong. Which is more competitive?
There's a huge continuum of possible societies. On the far end of weakness we have Harrison Bergeron and the handicapper-general. That's not a stable equilibrium, that vision of America will be predated upon. On the far end of strength we have rule by 1rep max and wrestler-princes. Again, not a stable equilibrium.
Yet surely the bulk of strength-first societies will outcompete weakness-first societies. You want tough, brave soldiers, hard-working and clever scientists, you want meritocracy. You want wealth flowing through to those who can make more wealth. Of course there are incidents where capable people look useless and useless people look capable, you need sophisticated methods to distinguish between talent and BS artists.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9d ago
The only one I'm aware of is The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. It's quite interesting, the author got to interview Pierce for many hours at a time, I think he was around for the funeral. Pierce explains a fair bit about his time with Rockwell, about the trouble of forming organizations, selecting recruits, getting the right people... It includes the whole story of his life, his experience with conservatives, the books he wrote.
You can get the book physically or read it on Unz: https://www.unz.com/book/robert_s_griffin__the-fame-of-a-dead-mans-deeds/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
True, there are those people who'll spend hundreds or thousands on gacha girls to get their waifu. Still seems like being a sucker.
I gave Genshin a go, there's some fun to be had. Lots of effort went into the game, it's very big and very pretty. But it's not worth paying for more spins on the roullette wheel, as many have remarked: https://youtube.com/watch?v=M5Hfd4wX2GE
Paying for these emotional relationships is still kind of hollow and artificial. Whether it's pokimane or Beidou or some onlyfans girl it's all still fake. The other party doesn't care about you, they care about your wallet. They're exploiting an emotional weakness in a way that a disciplined and discerning man should observe and reject.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
Because much of Ukraine is Russian. They speak Russian. They are Russian ethnically and live in a region historically called Novorossiya. The Eastern half of Ukraine is particularly Russian and there are considerable nationalist feelings within Russia about their co-Russians - which prompted the initial civil war in 2014. Strelkov and his band showed up and joined with locals to fight the Ukrainian army in Donetsk and Luhansk, now annexed. Strelkov is not the biggest Putin supporter in the world, he was imprisoned by the authorities. There's grassroots nationalist feeling in Russia that Putin has to respond to - formerly by suppression and now by encouragement.
The western part of Ukraine actually speak Ukrainian and can't be considered Russian. They hate Russians for a bunch of reasons, including the Holodomor. They sought to celebrate Stephen Bandera as a founding father. The Russians (and Poles) consider him a genocidal war criminal. The new 2014 regime sought to restrict the Russian language and Ukrainize the population, prompting the unrest in the east of Ukraine. Russia does not want a Russia-hating state ruling over large number of Russians right next door, aligned with the West.
Furthermore, the Eastern half of Ukraine is fairly industrialized. In the Soviet era it was supposed to be interoperable with the rest of the military industrial complex, engines for Russian helicopter gunships were made there amongst other things. There's lots of mines, coal and factories, the west is more agricultural. Eastern Ukraine also is the gateway to Crimea which is the most Russian part of Ukraine. Eastern Ukraine controls water and power supplies to the quasi-island. The land bridge and Mariupol region Russia took back in 2022 is key to holding Crimea, also a major naval base.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19d ago
US foreign policy is schizophrenic. Why would anyone want to negotiate with the US at this point? Obama takes great pains to advance diplomacy with Iran and join the TPP - Trump immediately reneges on the nuclear deal and leaves the TPP - maximum pressure and trade wars! Biden wants to go back to Obama policies on Iran and climate. Why should anyone trust in his word when the next guy can negate it?
Trump wants to throw Ukraine under the bus. Well, fair enough. May as well get off the sinking ship in a lifeboat rather than swim in the cold. But it's still not consistent, it's confused and certainly does Zelensky no good.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
There are ways to use military power to get what you want non-violently. The US quelled the Chinese in the last Taiwan Straits crisis by sailing a carrier group in and demonstrating China's military weakness back in 1996. They blockaded Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US created a bunch of international institutions that serve US interests using military/economic power - they invented the UN for instance.
If you're strong enough you can bomb other countries with impunity like the US and Israel do in Syria.
Finally, use of strength can be profitable! Wagner's gold mines and holdings in Central Africa for instance, that's sustainable warfare. Or annexing land, that's how countries get their borders and the basis for their strength. Show me a major power and I'll show you a successful war-winner and land-annexer.
Alliances can also be a source of strength yet they are also fractious and problematic. Are all five countries equally threatened, do they take the enemy seriously? Are the weaker allies passing the buck to the stronger countries?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
26d ago
Based essay:
"The inexorable logic of techno-industrial efficiency, on its anti-gravity vector, means that the only consistent motivation for leaving the earth is to dismantle the sun (along with the rest of the solar-system), but that doesn’t play well in Peoria"
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
but it has been the biggest national strategic disaster for the Russians since 1941.
Worse than Yeltsin and the 1990s? Worse than the collapse of the Soviet Union?
A common failure of armchair strategizing is to treat states like they exist in strategy games, where the populace is implicitly supportive of the controlling player and where the agent only has to get the Technologies and Industry and all the good metrics just go up and up and up.
I spent some time talking about popularity and how well the strategy was communicated through to the population. Just lie flat gets a lot of hype in certain parts of Western media - but what results have come from it? Similarly, there are NEETs and quiet quitters in the West - they're not exactly bringing down the govt. This looks like it's part of the modern lifestyle, common to all developed countries.
For one, the US has a public national security strategy
Promote a Free and Open Indo-Pacific -Deepen Our Alliance with Europe -Foster Democracy and Shared Prosperity in the Western Hemisphere -Support De-Escalation and Integration in the Middle East -Build 21st Century US-Africa Partnerships -Maintain a Peaceful Arctic -Protect Sea, Air, and Space
Yes, that's the part I described as 'rules based order', one of the three strands of US strategy. Note that I said national strategy as opposed to national security strategy. You seem to be thinking about national strategy only in the field of security, which is a very important factor but not everything.
DEI isn't just a policy used to achieve a strategic goal, it's an end in itself. The US has tried influencing Estonia to be more multicultural. Blinken apparently brings up LGBTQI in every conversation with the Saudis. US media pushes the virtues of blacks just like Chinese media pushes nationalism, albeit in a less hamfisted way. I was watching an Avengers film the other day, the super-smart black African girl in the hidden hyper-advanced African country clowning on the white physicist was a little cringe-worthy. There's a huge affirmative action apparatus in the USA, subsidies and assistance for non-white businesses.
They didn't naively read that McKinsey paper and think 'hey diversity is really efficient and improves our other goals, let's do it'. There are true believers that the US Air Force ought to be more representative of the country's demographics, that there should be plenty of female construction workers building chip factories, that there need to be more people from marginalized communities on company boards. The people who write these papers believe in reshaping the world in a certain direction and that is happening in all kinds of different areas. China teaches national rejuvenation in schools, America teaches diversity in schools, you've got the gay-straight alliance and various other initiatives. Perhaps I could add China's 'uphold the supremacy of communist party' as a strategy with all kinds of supporting policies but that really goes without saying.
Such a large-scale and comprehensive effort isn't just a policy. A policy would be something like the semiconductor suppression against Chinese high-tech industry, it's subordinate to US national security. It's specific, discrete and focused, usually in just one sector like economics.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Yeah, I reckon people overhyped the halving. It's supposed to be a long term effect, it takes months for the bull run to really start in past cycles.
Nothing could happen for six months after the halving and that would be standard. Of course there have been structural changes, ETFs are now involved.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8d ago
Yes, though I honestly thought it was spelled that way, never having read it on paper.
There's loads of porn available for free. Twitter, reddit, boorus, 4chan, discord... People who pay are suckers or have more money than sense.
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