RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23hr 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!
1d ago
They're either pirating it, streaming it from some sketchy website that pirated it, or watching free preview stuff.
There's loads of porn available for free. Twitter, reddit, boorus, 4chan, discord... People who pay are suckers or have more money than sense.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Quite right. As time passes, cash will diminish. It's more convenient to swipe a card or scan a QR code.
Either we end up using privately run cryptocurrencies or state-run central bank digital currencies. Right now there are some issues with transaction costs, scams and volatility on the crypto front.
However, if we end up using CBDCs, human freedom is caput. CBDCs allow total financial surveillance and total financial suppression. It goes beyond debanking, you could make people impossible to transact with. This is the key technology that allows for totalitarian social credit schemes, the seeds of which we see in China. CBDCs are seductive to governments and central banks - taxes become impossible to evade! Monetary policy can be implemented hour by hour! Criminal assets are easy to seize, money-laundering is impossible. But they also enable the mainstreaming of the debanking tactics we've seen with Paypal and high-profile wrongthinkers. After cash people will probably stop thinking of money as something concrete and physical, it becomes an abstract, malleable concept. Your UBI money can only be spent on the right goods, made by the right people. Maybe the climate means you can't buy more than a certain amount of real meat each week, perhaps you can't fly more than what's strictly necessary for your work. Your stimulus money has to be spent in 30 days before it disappears. Billy might pay different prices on the same good to Aisha or Joe. Your politics are dangerous and unacceptable? Good luck getting a website, accepting donations or doing anything at all.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
South Africa did feel quite threatened, they were trying to develop their own modern fighter jets to counter the Mig-29s they expected Angola and nearby Soviet allies to receive. At any point the Border War might flare up. Unlike Israel they had no superpower backer to get advanced weapons from, nor did they have access to world markets due to the weapons embargo. They tried developing their own Atlas Carver but the cost of developing advanced fighters was too high.
A shortage of will sure but South Africa also had a less fortunate position than Israel. Though the critical error was probably letting so many blacks into the country, rather than any military issue.
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around.
Occupation is hard and bloody work. One of the many things that went wrong in Afghanistan were the methods. There were stories about US soldiers gritting their teeth to nubs at their Afghan 'allies' raping children in the barracks and how they couldn't do anything about it. The soldiers on the ground knew the whole campaign was a massive farce a decade before withdrawal.
https://www.thejournal.ie/afghanistan-sexual-abuse-us-soldiers-2343921-Sep2015/
The locals would do everything they could to cheat and rip off Western forces, launching attacks to get us to pay them for protection money, blowing up bridges so they could get lucrative contracts to rebuild them. If you're trying to do imperialism you have to have the right political/social methods. You need to credibly threaten enormous violence against those who displease you, you have to make it clear that you're not a pinata that can be extorted for money, you have to project fear and power. Consider what Israel does 'to make their presence felt':
Many roads are “sterile,” and the nearer they are to the settlement, the less access Palestinians are allowed. They cannot drive, they cannot open a store, and, closest to the settlers, they are not allowed to walk the streets. If a Palestinian family has a home fronting one of these streets, the army will seal the front entrance and the Palestinians will only have access over the roof and through the back door.
Our main job was to “make our presence felt.” The conscious policy was to give the people the sense that the IDF was everywhere, all the time. We patrolled the streets 24/7, picking houses at random, waking up the families at night and separating them into men and women, and searching, loudly and publicly. It fell to me as a commander to pick the houses, a selection that was made unrelated to military intelligence.
As an occupying force in a territory, you have to act like this. It’s a simple equation, as surely as one plus one equals two; this is what an occupation will result in. You can’t serve as a soldier in the Occupied Territories and treat a Palestinian as an equal human being, as the only way to control a civilian population against their will is to make them feel chased, harried, and afraid. And when they get used to that level of fear, you have to increase it.
Or:
In some army units, making one’s presence felt is referred to as “creating a sense of being chased.” That means instilling fear into the entire Palestinian population, a mission that by definition makes no distinction between suspects and innocent civilians, or between “involved persons” and “uninvolved persons,” as it is called in IDF parlance. Sometimes soldiers invade homes in the middle of the night just for training purposes. I raided homes in Jenin or Nablus simply to seize more optimal observation positions. According to one former soldier who gave testimony to Breaking the Silence, they would invade homes to test a new door-breaching device. Another witness said they went into a Palestinian home to be filmed eating sufganiyot (Hanukkah donuts) for a feel-good news story to be broadcasted that night on Israeli television.
That's what imperialism is about, stuff that would immediately put you in the 'glowing red eyes baddy' camp according to our norms. This is why we can't do imperialism proficiently. I don't mean it in the leftist frame that everything about imperialism is evil. It's a method all states have used to achieve objectives. In Afghanistan we were too lax, the Israelis seem too harsh (though they're still here). It's difficult to navigate between ineffectual rule and backlash, yet can be done. The Malayan Emergency and suppression of the Mau Maus show it's possible. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was very proficient as suppressing! Technology is not a factor - the Assyrians did imperialism in the Bronze Age, the Arabs did it, the Mongols did it, the Romans did it, the Spanish did it, the British did it, the Russians did it. There are gradations in repression, different kinds of institutions and administrative techniques. But you cannot do this stuff and keep your hands clean, it's just not possible. I know you mentioned will and stability but the proposals are standard progressive-frame economic/social-worker interventions.
Enforcing laws is so much easier than real imperialism! And the US can't even do that, there are open-air drug markets when Xi isn't in town. There are blatant robberies, out in the open. In San Fran police have given up on traffic infractions.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/bayarea/heatherknight/article/sfpd-traffic-tickets-17355651.php
In Canada you see the most cucked advice from police:
“To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at your front door,” Const. Marco Ricciardi said at the meeting. “ Because they're breaking into your home to steal your car. They don't want anything else.”
This wimpy attitude is the problem, not a shortage of education or bussing or needing higher wages. It's not hard to whisk the problem people away, Bukele did it in El Salvedor with limited resources and opposition from the US. China does not have high wages yet people do not go around stealing and murdering like in America or Canada - they know the state will crush them. This is a lesser kind of imperialism in my mind, yet it's still of the same essence. Using force to create order but on internal rather than external entities - that's what police do.
What happens if people made to work in Amazon do a really bad job (many won't want to be there and some are innately bad workers)? What if they show up late? Are they fired, lose their welfare and are left to starve? Are they beaten? What do we do about protests - ignore them and crush rioters?
Or do we pay Amazon to have better workers cover for the bad workers in their make-work jobs? Do we fire the worst workers and give their welfare back, accepting the obvious incentive? Do we capitulate at the first riot because it's 'a bad look', it makes people think of Nazis? Do we capitulate at the first time somebody is unjustly mistreated by our policy, reshaping the whole policy because we're not yet adept at the techniques?
It's the same in education. What if the students are beating each other, thoroughly ignoring the teacher, making a circus of the whole thing? Are they actually punished or are they 'suspended' and given a holiday? Nobody would dare to behave in a British school 100 years ago like they behave today, there were real consequences. We don't need to cane students who aren't good enough at Latin, nor should we build a huge surveillance state like China. But we do need to accept that not everything is going to be resolved amicably, sometimes we need to punish and punish severely.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d 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!
4d ago
Didn't she confuse de facto and de jure?
https://twitter.com/RogerSeverino_/status/1587611399668342790
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them.
What do you mean by this? I thought Trump just executed the Sailor strategy and appealed to the neglected Republican base. He might not have thought about it mathematically, he's a great politician by instinct rather than calculation... but in principle a calculator could've done that and concluded that was the way to go. Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump, he has sincere aesthetic beliefs and style yet will do whatever seems easiest decision-to-decision. Consider all the swamp creatures he appointed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The reason I wouldn't be a good financial planner is that I don't really come up with new ideas that often. If I was in an office people would just see me doing nothing 90% of the time rather than busily making new reports. But laziness can work really well. Imagine the stock picker who just said 'buy Apple' for ten years in a row, he'd beat SPY and the sweaty actively trading index fund managers.
Right now I am basically all in on AI and crypto, my theory is that it's still undervalued. I believe that OpenAI is cooking something big, GPT-4 is still a top-tier AI and it's a year old with a few updates. What are they doing with all their huge infrastructure spending if not producing next gen models? Just the other day I saw a paper about how you could push up accuracy by having AI models vote on the right answer, getting the wisdom of the crowd. The bitter lesson of AI scaling is that pumping in more compute beats clever fine-tuning, this is the kind of simple trick that works well.
There have got to be a tonne of killer apps yet to be produced with this technology. AI Dungeon for instance, what happened there? It was running off GPT-3 before censoring down to oblivion, there's clearly a market out there for it. Klarna is replacing its customer service people with bots. We've got Suno in music... Yes, NVIDIA stock went down 10% the other day - lots of people seem to think it's a bubble but I disagree. My AGIX went up 15% (what a brilliant name, AGIX, people are sure to buy in on press releases about AGI!). I'm happy to live with volatility, same with crypto.
I also think fossil fuels are undervalued. I have only a small position there since I think tech is worth more but since all the attention and prestige is going towards renewables, I think coal and gas deserve more love. Yes, everyone in the developed world is racing to decarbonize. But industrializing countries are raving about coal, Modi was boasting about reaching a billion tonnes of coal production: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422
China is building up more coal too: it's a reliable, cheap baseload energy source and you can place it anywhere you like, right next to the factory. It needs to be replaced in the long term of course but replacing coal is hard. Germany's been scrambling to get more coal and they've been a huge investor into renewables. DEI funds loathe coal and universities try to divest... There are also wartime price surges as we've seen with the Ukraine war and energy shortages.
Electronic cash is basically the same thing as a CBDC, they just haven't added all the AI-enabled fine-grained control and monitoring yet. They can print and freeze money at will, it's just a hassle for them to do so.
Taxes are easy to evade all around the world because the administrative capacity and technical methods are poorly developed, especially in Russia. But they won't be poorly developed forever. China's social credit scheme is pretty benign at the moment, you just can't get certain train tickets if you're a scammer, have to put down deposits to rent an e-bicycle. But it won't stay that way forever, they're testing and developing it over time.
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