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RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

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joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

				

User ID: 317

RandomRanger

Just build nuclear plants!

1 follower   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 05 00:46:54 UTC

					

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User ID: 317

'From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free' isn't even egregious as a phrase. They want borders to be changed. Israel also wants borders to be changed - they've changed them in past wars, annexing the Golan Heights amongst other things! Spain wants Gibraltar back. Ukraine wants Crimea back. Russia wants Novorussia back. Japan wants the Kuril Islands back...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes

Saying 'From the river to the sea' doesn't neccessarily require violence (though realistically it would need a lot of bloody fighting), 'kill the Boer' is a clear call for violence, despite considerable effort from the NYT and leftist media to obfuscate it.

Right-wing commenters claim that an old anti-apartheid chant is a call to anti-white violence, but historians and the left-wing politician who embraces it say it should not be taken literally.

In theory, you could have some kind of non-violent settlement where Palestine gets the territory they want. It's extremely unlikely of course, all kinds of things would need to go wrong for Israel. But in principle it's possible. And that's not even 'not taking it literally' which can apparently be done for much more overt statements. Far easier to 'not take literally' abstract ideas like freedom, as opposed to killing.

I didn't say that food deserts don't exist, in fact I agree that a lot of American food is chemical slop not fit for human consumption. Yet there's also a level of personal responsibility (and social shaming) that's clearly absent. You can see it in this libertine 'whatever floats your boat' attitude many Americans seem to have:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=to7BMBJR9P4

A real food desert is somewhere like Niger or Ethiopia. While there are structural problems, there are also solutions. You can order groceries to be delivered in some places. I imagine there are farmers markets out in rural USA.

Doubly so, originally the consensus was leaning 'oh Trump's rushing the vaccine, I wouldn't trust anything he puts out with a bargepole'. My now 5x vaxxed friend said something like that back in late 2020. Trump was and still is one of the biggest pro-vaxxer (non compulsory though), he views it as his great achievement.

Hey, if they took a half hour walk to the supermarket and brought their groceries back with them, that would be enough exercise to keep them in shape!

why is the strict Oppressor/Oppressed dichotomy so hip and cool? Speaking as someone who is totally against that model. Why does opposing these models make you look so....nerdy,

I think it's the female frame. Women tend to be less aggressive and more caring. In the past men had exclusive control of politics, foreign policy and so on - and conducted things with an emphasis on aggression, violence, honour and logic. Realism/realpolitik dictates that you court the strong and use the weak as pawns. Now women are involved and try to do things their way, care for the weak and hector villains. Thus we have a huge proliferation of 'caring' diplomacy. In the past we just had realist models of international relations with an emphasis on strength and logic, now there are liberal and constructivist schools of thought focusing on institutions and vibes, respectively.

On twitter these women are getting excited about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. There's an entire parallel universe where this treaty isn't a massive joke, where these lawyers and academics are doing real and meaningful work: https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1770863175937708279

They have a fundamentally different mindset to realists. If you skim the wikipedia page of neorealism, all the thinkers are male. Look through constructivism and there are loads of women. Conceiving of the universe as ruled by mutable ideas and social constructs is a naturally female perspective, just as men are more interested in game theory and structural, abstract rules.

Because the female frame has taken on such influence, opposing it has become unfashionable.

If Biden wanted to reduce petrol prices, he wouldn't have banned keystone XL on day 1. January 20th, the first thing he did was block a pipeline. Then he put a moratorium on exploration in public lands. Just recently he froze export permits for natural gas (imagine being European at this point, trusting in an 'ally' that behaves like this).

Trump was genuinely pro-oil and gas, thus US oil production reached record highs under Biden due to delayed-action investment. But Biden has been relatively anti-fossil fuel.

Estimating what North Korea 'spends' is very hard. It's an actual planned economy for the most part. You do your work at a state enterprise and you get rations. You're not buying a house, it gets allotted to you. A lot of economic activity happens outside the market and exchange rates are a bit of a joke. Just because a farmer isn't paid $1000 for a $1000 worth of wheat, it doesn't mean the wheat is worth less. If you look at a list of countries by GDP, North Korea is lower than Palestine or Niger, I think that's nonsense.

North Korea's nuclear capabilities cost way more than $1-2 billion. Maybe $10 billion? A reactor alone would cost about a billion.

To get a credible nuclear capability you need a reactor for plutonium and you need the precision engineering for the explosive lens (which isn't too hard honestly). You'll need land you can stage a test on to prove your capability.

Reactors are easy to find (massive heat source), so maybe you go down the ultracentrifuge path for uranium. Uranium enrichment is easier to hide but needs rather specialist, monitored tools. Either you buy your ultracentrifuges somehow evading sanctions or you have quite good engineering skills.

The hardest part is credible delivery. You need fairly advanced rocketry. Solid fuel rockets for a quick launch, preferably road-mobile so you can hide them and play shell games with them. You need powerful early warning radar and preferably a satellite or two for over-the-horizon view. These rockets need to be tested as well. The warheads need to be miniaturized to fit on them, then there's guidance (you're not gonna be using GPS) so either you have your own satellite constellation or you relearn the arcane art of inertial guidance or celestial navigation. It's a pretty big R&D project.

The only person who could do this is Elon, Bezos's Blue Origin is a complete joke. The man can't even make civilian rockets properly, he can't make military weapons.

Fall From Heaven 2 for Civ 4 and the Fall From Heaven ecosystem generally (Erebus in the Balance is the most tame, Wild Mana the richest and Master of Mana the furthest from vanilla). It's basically a dark fantasy total conversion with interesting lore and a bunch of new mechanics: magic, heroes, armageddon counter. All of the civs have their own identity - the Illians have rituals to bring back the God of Ice, the Sheaim are here to end the world and the Calabim are vampires. Later in you can summon factions of demons and angels.

Advanced Civ for Civ 4 because they somehow managed to make the AI much smarter while improving performance significantly. Most mods just add huge amounts of content the AI can't use well, this is the opposite and deserves praise for technical skill.

Anbennar for EU4. Another fantasy total conversion, adding a magic system, non-human races and an enormous new map. Reclaim the empire of the Precursor Elves as Venail, unite the Empire of Anbennar or crush the world under the centaur hoof of Khuraen Ulaeg.

Third Odyssey for EU4. What if the Byzantines left for America in 1444? The mod struck me as overly complicated mechanically but the premise is irresistible. The soundtrack is also pretty good.

Ultimate Apocalypse for Dawn of War Soulstorm. Adds a huge amount of content, many new factions and Titans (that are way too big for the maps). The music also goes hard.

Forged Alliance Forever for Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. It's basically a balance patch/multiplayer community with its own submods.

Zero Entropy 2 for Half-Life 2 - fan made Half Life 3 from the perspective of the Combine's top guy.

Equestria at War for Hearts of Iron IV - enormously rich and detailed atrocity/total war simulator but set in the world of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Like many I was intrinsically sceptical of the premise but the bronies did a very good job.

AGI and ASI are the two greatest power-centralizing systems imaginable. Do we want them controlled by the two most powerhungry groups in the world - venture capitalists and government officials? I believe that power corrupts and these are the most corruptible people. What if they decide 'hey there are a lot of resources in this lightcone, how about I not share them with the overwhelming majority of the world population and take them for myself - what are they gonna do'? Some people are insatiable, some people have uncommon ideas about marginal value/simulations/clones - AI venture capitalists are very likely to have such greedy thoughts.

I favour regulation that slows down the corporate and state AI programs, to the benefit of open-source and decentralized AI. But we're unlikely to get that, regulation is most likely to hurt the less well connected players. Better not to have regulation at all, in that case.

Well they started 2 years before SpaceX, they have no shortage of cash and they still haven't reached orbit!

Looks like AI Music is having its ChatGPT moment: https://app.suno.ai/

Lyrics, long (2-minute) songs, different languages, quite high quality. If you're too lazy to write your own lyrics ChatGPT will do it for you, which gives it the whiff of terminal genericness. My personal favourites:

Bean Soup: https://app.suno.ai/song/524dd0c0-c4e3-4c94-9968-aaa7c93c6fbc

LOOK MOM I AM A MUSICIAN!!!: https://app.suno.ai/song/aada88a3-9d7f-422a-843d-2a544379d059

You could take this and just slap it in a game I reckon - not the greatest video game OST of all time but perfectly decent: https://app.suno.ai/song/4c95e7de-8d99-4db0-af7d-922c274569bd

Per their terms of use, you fully own anything you make if you made it while you have their 10 dollar subscription. I think a lot of people lose work over this.

They're mildly pro-Palestinian politically/rhetorically, China is the country that invented thirdworldism after all. But that won't stop them trading with Israel on weapons technology.

See Russia and China's veto of the recent US ceasefire proposal and the US veto of other ceasefire proposals.

The Soviet Union wasn't that poor all things considered, it just allocated a very high proportion of resources to military development. 10-15% of GDP was tied up in armaments, 10-15% of the labour force IIRC. North Korea is similarly focused on military power at the expense of civilian goods. But military goods are still valuable.

North Korea has a life expectancy of 72, Palestine was apparently at 74, so I'd agree that Palestine has a higher quality of life. Having access to the internet is also a good thing! Yet North Korea is an advanced economy, it's not like most African countries where the government runs off mining rent, totally bereft of industry. The total GDP of North Korea, not merely per capita, can't possibly be lower than Palestine as the official statistics say. The economy isn't a complete shambles - they had a lot of hunger recently due to COVID and shutting the border with China but that's really an external factor.

So you need to capture him, addict him to drugs and then coerce him via withdrawal into eating pork, renouncing Islam and so on - and then kill him?

Don't know if that would work, you'd probably get fatwa'd and bring down more lethal attacks, perhaps with an emphasis on suicide-bombing. I favour the Polish/Japanese solution of not having Muslims in your country.

And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer. So maybe it's OK to just let China take over the car industry, just like we let them take over every other kind of manufacturing.

Trucks are really important for logistics. Soldiers need offroader vehicles - a humvee or something like it.

Furthermore, the broader learning in how to make factories, production chains, engines, working steel all helps military industry. If you've got a big car industry, you'll have a big robotics and machine tools industry too. You'll have lots of experienced engineers who can help make weapons. If you have a big electric car industry, you'll have a big battery industry and batteries have all kinds of military applications in lasers, drones and so on. Everything connects to everything else.

Converting factories to war production, that will be much harder these days. But the pools of knowledge, capital goods and experienced workers are still quite important.

if given a level playing field

There are entire government agencies that exist to give preference to 'socially disadvantaged' Americans - it basically assumes everyone from Asia, Africa and Latin America is disadvantaged by default. There's a wide-ranging diversity apparatus devoted to elevating non-whites and reducing white employment in hiring and promotions.

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-13/chapter-I/part-124

https://www.resumebuilder.com/1-in-6-hiring-managers-have-been-told-to-stop-hiring-white-men/

You may not want a level playing field as much as you think.

avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place

I truly believe that God wants us to play God. We didn't get a paradise on earth. There are all kinds of blind chance BS that wrecks people - cancer, random accidents, horrible parasites from the rainforest, earthquakes and volcanoes. I don't think God is benevolent in an earthly, human sense and I lean towards Deism rather than Christianity. You don't leave your beloved children in the snake pit and watch as some inevitably get eaten by snakes, you wouldn't structure the universe that way - just don't make the snakes in the first place! You wouldn't send an earthquake against your devout Lisbon Christians on a feast day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake

But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible. For earthquakes, we could still the Earth's core or disassemble the planets and stars directly.

If God didn't want us to kill, he wouldn't have allowed for weapons, strangulation, bone-breaking... Our skin could be infinitely tough. If God didn't want us to live forever, he could have some mechanism that annihilates souls at a predetermined age. If God didn't want people to sin, he could send down legions of angels or lightning bolts. If God didn't want abortion, he could render fertilized embryos invulnerable.

In reality we have incredible freedom of action, the physical properties of the universe are very permissive. We are encouraged to advance down certain pathways, those who advance are rewarded with wealth and power while those who lag behind are rewarded with humiliation and expropriation. Some choices are of course dead ends - Aztec sacrifice was uncompetitive. These choices are where God's will is most apparent. Our role is to accept the challenge and choose wisely, we can't shrink away from the powers already within our control.

Abortion isn't going away, we can't uninvent the pill, retroactive action may be one of the few things that God really doesn't want. We need to choose how to use this technology such that it improves rather than detracts. You know that it can't be effectively banned, people don't want it, countries can't coordinate on this for a global and effective ban. US states can't even coordinate on banning it, it makes only a marginal difference in outcomes if it's legal in one state, illegal in another. Better to manipulate structures so that children are valued more, that people don't end up in situations where they want to abort, that the abortions that do take place get rid of antisocial or unhelpful people.

Israel's the worst ally the US could possibly have, their competence is irrelevant.

Consider the invasion of Iraq. You might naively think that Israel would be really useful, sending troops to help the Coalition in their mutual goal of destroying Saddam Hussein's regime? No, of course not. They didn't lift a finger to help the US. Of course they sent some false intelligence to suggest Iraq actually had nuclear weapons, of course they flexed their influence to encourage the invasion. They just didn't do any fighting.

Why? Because the Arabs hate Israel and it would've let Saddam reframe the war as yet another Arab-Israel war. He tried doing that in 1991 by throwing some Scuds at Israel. Israel's presence would've made things worse for America.

There's no convincing reason to think that Israel would help against Iran, based on past practice. If they did help it would probably be net-negative in creating more opponents for US forces. Dumping Israel would make it much easier to work with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey, Egypt...

Hmm, on balance it looks like a rather complicated story of leases v permits by each president. There are of course non-executive factors involved, the fracking boom for one.

However, I maintain that Trump was more pro-fossil fuel than Biden. Oil companies voted with their pockets:

Little wonder that Trump Victory, the joint fundraising committee of Trump’s campaign and the RNC, has raked in $9.3m from fossil fuel donors in 2019-2020, while its counterpart Biden Victory has raised a meager $40,465 from fossil fuel donors in the same period, according to Open Secrets.

Bill Miller, a major industry lobbyist and consultant in Austin, told the Associated Press that while many fossil fuel companies were hurt by the pandemic, parts of the industry had begun to recover. “It’s the kind of industry that remembers their friends through thick and thin, and Trump is their friend.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/09/big-oil-trump-campaign-donations-fossil-fuel-industry

The US has apparently been kicked out of Niger after a failed diplomatic gambit.

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/niger-revokes-military-accord-with-us-junta-spokesperson-says-2024-03-16/

A U.S. official, speaking on the condition anonymity, said senior U.S. officials had "frank discussions" in Niamey earlier this week about the trajectory of Niger's ruling military council - known as the CNSP.

(Per Yes Minister, 'frank discussions' is about as bad as it can get. Only thing worse is 'frank, bordering on direct')

Since seizing power in July last year, the Niger junta, like the military rulers in neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso, have kicked out French and other European forces, and turned to Russia for support.

There were about 1,100 U.S. troops in Niger as of last year, where the U.S. military operates out of two bases, including a drone base known as Air Base 201, built near Agadez in central Niger at a cost of more than $100 million.

"In light of all the above, the government of Niger, revokes with immediate effect the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian employees of the American Department of Defense on the territory of the Republic of Niger," Abdramane said.

Some people on the right have pegged the case as 'USA sends girlbosses to lecture Islamic African strongman regime on human rights, inevitable consequences ensue'. The mission was led by Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee.

Per the Intercept, apparently they already rebuffed Victoria Nuland, who is not someone I'd want to cross if I lived in a coup-prone country. The Intercept also says that a fair few of the putschists were US-trained: https://theintercept.com/2024/03/19/niger-junta-throws-us-troops-drone-base/

opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19

So now they're suppressing opposition to the lab-leaks? We've come full circle!

And yet they're still not banning Gain of Function! The bioterrorism NGOs are still running around, receiving public funding. The US government position seems to be 'we accept the lab leak in the political sense that it makes China look bad but not in the physical sense that we should stop doing this stuff'. Meanwhile the Chinese seem to have settled on 'it's nothing to do with us, the virus came from elsewhere, probably America'. Truly, the superpowers are made for eachother.

Do they simply not care that much?

The Palestinians and Israelis hate eachother, what you're seeing is hatred. You see these incidents where the Israeli soldiers shoot school children in the back and get acquitted:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2

In the recording, a soldier in a watchtower radioed a colleague in the army post's operations room and describes Iman as "a little girl" who was "scared to death". After soldiers first opened fire, she dropped her schoolbag which was then hit by several bullets establishing that it did not contain explosive. At that point she was no longer carrying the bag and, the tape revealed, was heading away from the army post when she was shot.

Or when Hamas suicide bombers blow up Israelis. Doing horrific things to civilians is a goal in and of itself. They've been doing this kind of thing for ages, shooting unarmed protestors, pregnant women. It's hatred.

The Palestinians resent getting kicked off their land, they resent getting bombed, gunned down, getting their water stolen/filled with toxic waste, demolished houses... There are these giant lists of complaints they have: https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

Why would Palestinians trust Israel when they've spent decades suppressing and impoverishing them, so as to maintain and expand Israeli territory and control? There is a massive abyss of negative trust between both sides. Furthermore, Israel knows they aren't going to lose US support, America's leaders tout their unconditional love for Israel to anyone who'll listen. Trump was on Truth Social the other day saying he's far more pro-Israeli than Biden, who has himself been sending billions in extra military aid. So what cost does Israel pay for behaving heavy-handedly? The US will clean up the mess, they'll deal with Yemen and anyone else who tries to target Israel.

Plus there've been swirling allegations that Netanyahu helped Qatar to support Hamas - dividing Palestinians between the Authority and Hamas helps prevent them forming a state. Divide and conquer tactics.

People here underestimate the power of hatred.

Elements from both sides do all kinds of unhelpful terror bombing - Ukraine had drones attack random office buildings in Moscow. They tried to blow up Dugin. They torture eachother. There's a rather infamous video of somebody castrating a prisoner. They dehumanize eachother: orcs, hohols.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/11/15/both-russia-and-ukraine-tortured-prisoners-of-war-un

If power is distributed widely, people can gang up in coalitions to stop aggression. If we all had our own ASI and roughly equal resources, there would be no problem.

If only one country has a nuclear arsenal, they could conquer the world quite easily. If many countries have nukes, there is no such danger. There are other dangers but no hegemonic danger.

The point of HBD is to get rid of the currently dominant framework in society. Normative equality with factual inequality is ridiculous. Most would agree that the idiot/drug-dealer/robber deserves worse outcomes than the Nobel prize winning family man.

The current system pretends that 'investing' in lower quality people will increase their quality. If we shuffle around welfare policies and make more investments, we'll eventually have everyone be really high quality and it will all be harmonious and great. Of course there are various ethnic resentments and greed that really motivate things but officially, that's what the explanation is. That's the source of legitimacy.

HBD explains why the investment doesn't work. It shows that you might make marginal changes on the edges but that fundamentally low-quality populations will remain low-quality. It shows that there's no end to this 'investment', that it's actually a tax on efficiency, meritocracy and society generally. Prosocial people might pay for an investment to improve all of society but few are going to throw money down the drain when it's guaranteed not to work and actually creates problems. The beginning of blankslatism was founded on scientific fraud for this very reason - they fiddled with the figures of skull measurements so it looked like their opponents were lying, evil racists. First you establish the facts, then you explain how your policy solves the problem, then you purge the old guard of nonbelievers, then you implement it.

HBD will show the danger in taxing the most capable while subsidizing the least capable. I know a bunch of really clever, productive people - zero children, one child, zero children, two children... Very few have more than three. Meanwhile you see single mothers on welfare with a brood of children, statistically of much lower quality. Consider how sex and reproduction are considered among society's elite. Sabatini was this genius researcher with one son who's been impoverished and excluded from his work because he dared have consensual sex with a woman. HBD would say we need lots of this, that the best should be reproducing the most. https://www.thefp.com/p/he-was-a-world-renowned-cancer-researcher?s=w

Blankslatism is a huge drain on group efficiency, understanding HBD increases efficiency. Even if blankslatist ideology can't be voted out, it does go against the structure of the universe. Those groups that are less blankslatist will get a competitive advantage. If we don't vote it out, then the Chinese army will. If not them, then some other force.