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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

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.

'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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Been playing Backpack Battles, the most overtly shape-rotator game since Tetris.

You buy items and backpack slots, fit together your swords and items so the right things are touching for synergy and watch as your character battles it out with other players online. It's an autobattler where all the gameplay is inventory management.

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.

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.

Re Claude 3 Opus, is its fiction tainted with ultra-generic? I briefly subscribed to GPT-4 and had it do some fiction but it was always too predictable in tone. I blame the RLHF.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

as opposed to all other competing visions of infinite power, then that clearly reveals an aesthetic preference on your part

The key thing is that there are no other competing visions of immense power, not in the material physical sense.

I can appreciate the aesthetics of other scenarios and yet I know they won't come about just because I find them cool and superior. I said this before and I'll say it again, the tradbros who say stuff like 'Cool story Roko but your vision of an earth populated by trillions of bugmen has no relevance - the good life is best achieved by an aristocratic band of horseback warriors riding out on the plains'. There is a certain aesthetic quality to the trad lifestyle. I believe it fits human needs quite well. But if it goes up against self_made_human's vision, it gets smashed into paste and trivialized to the point of being pathetic, surviving only on reservations if that. Hey, it already got smashed into paste by 19th century armies.

Imagine the Qing courtier who deeply resented the foreign devils, bringing disharmony with their weird gadgets and disrespectful mercantile practices. Surely China knew better, with all the millennia of philosophy? Well, no they didn't. They fell behind and suffered severely for it. China learnt a very valuable lesson that I fear we've neglected.

Humility and subjective ideas of moral virtue can't save you from superior firepower. I think the greatest kind of humility is respecting the structure of the universe. If the universe favours the cruel, brutish, horseback archer to the hard-working, peaceful peasant - there's nothing we can do about it, the rules hold. If the regimented, robotic columns of riflemen beat the noble, free horsemen, then so be it. If swarms of tiny robots overmatch the manly courage and patriotic zeal of all human warriors, that's that. There can be change on the margins (who gets uploaded, what distribution of resources happens) and these changes are supremely important! But we still go through the phase-change even if we think it's ugly and depraved that clusters of jumped-up graphics cards become so powerful.

I guess I'm more Deist-by-Simulation-Hypothesis, though I've been wrestling with what simulation means for our ability to understand reality.

putative Abrahamic God is god-awful at his job

In a literal sense, sure he's terrible as an omnibenevolent omnipotent being, as Lisbon discovered. But in a practical sense, He has His uses! A God that suppresses marriage between relatives, a God that demands monogamy, a God expected to uphold oaths and enforce pro-social behaviour via punishment in the afterlife, that deity has great power. We could easily list the flaws too. Like all other technologies, religion has pros and cons depending on how it's configured. Many Christians do good work in charity, others do bad work. The suppression of incest alone might have pushed up IQ a couple of points, an inestimable boon for the devout! Anyway, the Christian God is dying, other deities are emerging, including god-machines.

I think there might be some kind of conservation of religiosity going on. Religion is such a powerful entity. Traditionally people had religious feelings about celestial bodies, their dead ancestors and spiritual entities. Environmentalists have religious feelings about plants, animals and industry. Nationalists have religious feelings about their co-ethnics.

You and I have vaguely religious feelings about trends in computing and scientific development. They provide eschatology. There will be semidivine beings soon capable of reading our thoughts and memories (plus trawling through our digital history), capable of vast cruelty or benevolence. We're actually right and have by far the strongest physical/technical forces on our side.

But most people find this laughably silly. I tried to convince some friends of mine about this stuff and they politely suggested I was mentally ill. I'll enjoy gloating to them later on. Most people don't think like we do, they're rooted in aesthetics. They see soy-looking techbros and are repulsed. It's like that cringey kid with the 'In this moment I am euphoric, I am enlightened by my own intelligence' quote that did such terrible damage to atheism. It had nothing to do with metaphysics, yet it was more powerful than 10,000 logical arguments. Even Marxism-Leninism has more pull than our AI-singularitarian beliefs have, it speaks to most people far better than we do. There's great power in these social forces that I wish understood.

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.