RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
29d ago
Thames Water is going bust, apparently: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68738410
I don't know how a company with a 100% monopolized industry selling priceless life-sustaining goods to one of the world's richest cities could be going bust. Some have pointed the finger at former owner Macquarie for letting debt pile up and extracting billions in dividends. I suppose the government could also have regulated prices too low.
What a metaphor for modern-day Britain:
But this year's contest between Oxford and Cambridge came with a quite literal health warning that will resonate with customers of Thames Water and millions more around the UK used to hearing about the sewage in our rivers and beaches.
The boat race crews were given safety advice to avoid swallowing water splashed up from the Thames. After the race, the Oxford rowers criticised sewage levels in the river.
The Daily Mail has lurid stories of highly paid executives, nefarious Chinese investment (I don't know what Chinese banks could do to hurt Britain more than the e coli in the Thames is already doing) and characterises Macquarie as the Vampire Kangaroo: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13276291/ANDREW-PIERCE-Thames-Water-bankruptcy-MPs-Chinese-foreign-overpaid-bosses-personal-piggybank.html
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d ago
Quite right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Stink
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
28d 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!
28d ago
There's a difference between fixing a broken car and converting your car into a boat or vis versa. Fixing the car brings it closer to the Platonic ideal of what the car is supposed to be, converting it into a boat is something different.
I think Christians have a level of innate bioconservatism, Adam was directly made by God. You're not supposed to mess with God's vision, maleness or femaleness.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d 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.
Pick your poison, ChatGPT or Claude Sonnet. Go to their website, make an account with username and password, do a mobile verification and give them your email, promise not to do anything bad... and that's it. You just ask the machine your questions: "What are some good names for an enormously long armoured train?" and have a conversation with it: "Why do they [spiders] have eight eyes if their vision isn't so great, while birds have good eyesight with two?" You can ask it for code, stories, translation, just about anything you might ask a human (except anagrams and certain kinds of wordplay) and you get a pretty decent response, albeit it may make things up or give you blather.
It's like using microsoft outlook or gmail in your web browser, you're not downloading stuff unless you're an advanced user with a very powerful PC.
If you want the best models, you have to subscribe to Claude Opus or GPT-4, lesser models are free with ratelimiting. It's no harder than using netflix really.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
In the initial phase there will be huge wealth-destruction as industry, logistics and so on get hammered. You want to be shorting travel, energy and such or at least in cash, ready to buy low. Then you need to follow the moneyprinting and fiscal support wave.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
The funny thing is that Marx was massively against Lenin and the Vanguard Party idea. Marx was adamant that you had to go all the way through to the end of capitalism before you entered the socialist phase and on into communism. You couldn't skip from a semi-feudal economy to socialism, that's not how it worked. Russia had the weakest basis for proletarian revolution, Marx wrote off anything happening in Russia. Germany or the UK were supposed to be where the revolution happens because they were the advanced capitalist economies.
China is closer to proper Marxism than the USSR ever was since they are advancing through the capitalist phase. Now I don't actually believe that the state will wither away and I don't believe in Marxism either. However, what the fall of the USSR shows is that Marxism-Leninism failed, not Marxism. Marxism has unironically never been tried.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
There was an episode where someone went to Stalin and said something like 'this situation is absurd, there are coal miners being paid more than Politburo members like you and I' and Stalin said something like 'that's as it should be - there are vacancies in the coal mines but there's a long line of people who want to join the Politburo!'
Official vs unofficial wealth is also important to consider, as you can see from the above exchange.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Reading economics is like reading politics or history, there are many opposing schools of thought. Comparative advantage vs industrial policy and so on.
I'd just be wary of reading one book and thinking 'that's it, whew, I've got my economics'. Like politics or history, there's a great deal of it floating around, you're most likely to only find the orthodox versions. Yet orthodoxy changes! Tariffs and protection used to be despised and derided, yet they're coming back into fashion. Game theory is related and something to consider as well.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
It's easy to beat the market, you just need to be ahead of the curve. You need a thesis and then to act on it. You need patience and the mental fortitude to withstand losses too - losses are inevitable, some bets won't pay off, the unpredictable will happen.
Frankly I don't understand why more people here weren't riding the NVIDIA train up last year given how much AI talk takes place and how many AGI/singularity believers we have here. I vividly recall on the old site a fellow talking about how the 2020 release of GPT-3 might be bigger news than COVID when all was said and done (this was before COVID really got big). Why would you not buy shares in the obvious AI company, NVIDIA? And why not buy AI-related crypto as well?
Consider crypto. You identify that the whole market goes upwards in these cyclic patterns related to the 4-year bitcoin halvings - you identify trends in digitization of money and observe rampant central bank money-printing. In contrast, ethereum has programmed-in deflation and nearly all coins have fixed caps. Why not experimentally buy small/midcap altcoins looking for those big 10x, 50x gains that are so common in crypto but so rare in tradfi? Well, that's what I did in 2019 and that's what I got, explosive gains. I make it sound more casual than it is - it was an absolutely terrible experience in the COVID crash. -50%. Deep in the red. But I stuck to my thesis and was rewarded for it.
I don't claim to be a financial genius. I half-called the COVID crash and sold some but not all. I've made some serious errors with leverage. Leverage is very dangerous and should be avoided - mess about in crypto, mess about in stocks but don't mess with leverage. Nevertheless, I am way ahead of any index fund.
You don't need stock pickers. What you need is to formulate a thesis based on things you know that most people don't. You shouldn't be reading the news in a reactive way but a proactive way to form your thesis so you can then pick your own stocks. Don't day-trade, patience is everything. There will be random noise on the day to day level, 'support' and 'bear flags' and 'technical analysis' - this is rubbish. Trade over the span of months and years, buy and wait for the news to catch up with you.
Surprised by what everyone else is saying. Power sounds very difficult! An oil-rich country with what, some S-300s and Mig-21s and no allies? Could LARP as Equatorial Guinea's fantastically corrupt ruler but you couldn't even play the race card when someone decides to launch some regime change. And what about threats from within - there are going to be ministers and officials. Governing a country is hard, how would you know to deal with the locals? Do they speak English? This is the kind of thing an air force colonel or a baron could pull off, I doubt many of us have the right management skills.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d ago
Yeah I saw it, the intro theme is something else.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
27d 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!
26d 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!
26d 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!
25d ago
They have the edge in a few places, but it's not a massive or universal advantage.
A few places? Where's the Indian space station, where's the Indian navy, the Indian air force, the Indian high-tech industries in comparison to China? Where are the robotized gigafactories?
Xiaomi car factory: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a5KhnLLpoQ0
High quality scientific papers by country: https://www.nature.com/nature-index/annual-tables/2022/country/all/all
India is apparently less scientifically productive than Australia, albeit improving. The population of Australia is 26.6 million. There's an absolutely monstrous gap between India and China. China makes 5x more cars than India, they're so far ahead in AI and computing it's incomparable. In China big cities have this cyberpunk aesthetic - during COVID lockdowns they had drones flying around saying "Please restrain your soul's desire for freedom. Do not open the window or sing." I don't want to live there - I want freedom and artistic expression. Even so, the aesthetic is pretty good!
Shanghai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bw3yXaVHuLs
Big Indian cities have a Malthusian slum aesthetic - a totally different kind of dystopia. When it comes to cybercrime, Indian thieves tend to prefer scamming credulous octogenarians with gift cards - Chinese hackers steal 5G tech, turbines, sensitive and secret documents. When it comes to climate change, China builds all the solar panels and wind turbines, India asks for climate finance. There's a qualitative difference between India and China.
Mumbai: https://youtube.com/watch?v=gV5EU6daoVI
Even in history, India was conquered by the British - China got wrecked but not colonized. They fought bravely and desperately against all comers rather than rolling over. China was if not one of the Big Three in WW2, at least the Fourth of Roosevelt's Four Policemen. They got their UNSC veto, India begs for one. Postwar, China fought the US to a stalemate in Korea, skirmished with the Soviet Union and Vietnam. India just clobbered Pakistan a couple of times and lost a skirmish with China.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
25d ago
The only way there is any headway for the economy is through the establishment of Special Economic Zones
Case in point. China created SEZs, India didn't. China deregulated its economy, India didn't. Was Chinese liberalization traumatic, were there people angry about losing their iron rice bowls, was there inflation and inequality? Of course! Yet they struggled through rather than shying away from reform. You say 'weak state, strong society', I say 'qualitative difference'. Build up a strong state, change those labour laws, compete or lose - that's the rule of this world.
Yeah, you wouldn't have happened to hear about the 700 years of constant Islamic conquest
Did China have foreign invasions? Yes, they had to deal with the Mongols and the Manchus. They had to deal with the Japanese. They had to deal with the Europeans too.
Yeah, the seat that the UN originally offered to India and India conceded to China.
OK, so India made a massive blunder helping the PRC. Nevertheless China was rewarded for its wartime performance with a veto, they used their strength and diplomatic abilities to take their seat from ROC. And it's the same today. All around the world, China flexes its muscles - they help Russia in Ukraine, they arrange Saudi-Iranian rapprochement. What does India do? Buy Russian oil and military technology because their own defence-industrial base is pretty poor. India's influence in world affairs? Pretty minimal.
Why do you think China that dropped down to 51st spot on Climate Change Performance Index is better than India that ranks 7th.
The reason India ranks so highly on the Climate Change Performance Index is because it's poor - I bet if they included Congo or Malawi they'd be even higher still - the Phillipines is even higher than India. Very low emissions there! Climate change is a joke and the Chinese clearly don't care - they're building loads of coal power as well. Yet they see renewables as a market to dominate like all the others.
Modi boasts about reaching 1/4 of Chinese coal production, India doesn't care either but they'll opportunistically ask for aid: https://twitter.com/narendramodi/status/1774844651394228422
Compare the national attitudes! China says 'we're a renewables/electric cars/industrial superpower' as they advance their own global strategy as a competitor to the West, India says 'give us more money', coming to the West as a supplicant.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
LCS was horrendously bad, was it even suitable for Iran?
In April 2012, Chief of Naval Operations Greenert said, "You won't send it into an anti-access area"; rather, groups of two or three ships are intended to be sent into areas where access is jeopardized to perform missions like minesweeping while under the cover of a destroyer. The LCS's main purpose is to take up operations such as patrolling, port visits, anti-piracy, and partnership-building exercises to free up high-end surface combatants for increased combat availability.
Sounds like it was supposed to be handling Yemen...
By May 2022, the Navy shifted its plans to decommission nine LCS warships in Fiscal Year 2023, citing their ineffective anti-submarine warfare system, their inability to perform any of the Navy's missions, constant breakdowns, and structural failures in high-stress areas of the ships.
Or not.
cherry-picking of instances that serve your argument
So far I've brought up space capabilities, naval power, air power, high tech industries like car factories, high quality scientific papers, AI, urban development and skylines, cybercriminals, green industry, coal production, diplomatic influence, cybercrime, market reforms, resistance to colonizers and post-WW2 military performance. Is that cherry-picking?
Where does India outperform China? In a green index which declares the Philippines a major leader? Meanwhile, big industrial powers like Taiwan, China and South Korea are right at the bottom.
India's level of development is just lower. I have a special interest in military affairs - the comparison is marked. The Indian army - a whole fleet of Russian T-90s and T-72s, Russian BMP-2s, Russian Tunguskas, Konkurs, Iglas. There are some Indian light vehicles, helicopters and missiles but even Brahmos is codeveloped with Russia. Most of their arsenal is imported. It's the same in aviation, they fly Migs, Su-30s, Rafales, Jaguars... and a few domestically produced and long-delayed Tejas fighters.
China is a different story. Nearly all their vehicles and equipment is made domestically. Like India they bought aircraft from the Soviets but supplemented them with hundreds of domestic J-10s and their own 5th gen aircraft, which India doesn't have at all.
India has lower CO2 emissions than China and higher birthrates. That's it. OP's original point was that China wasn't much more successful than India, which is bizarre. China is way more successful than India.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
So your thesis is 'there's a phase-change after a certain point where organizations become more political/institutional above Dunbar's law but despite all the bad things we know about big institutions it's necessary and fine?'
Or were you opposing that, saying that you deny that recruitment is the best thing people can do, that the human, non-optimized element is good, that organizations need soul to start off with? I don't understand, is it that the strategies like tricking Coca Cola are hyperdunbar and therefore good? Bad? It seems like a really complicated thesis!
I'm guessing we all struggled through university lecturers telling us to give Topic Sentences and Introductions and it was always cringeworthy to read someone's essay that said 'in this essay I will argue that...' But I think it's important to provide some kind of guidance, especially in long essays. I'm hopelessly lost. Are other people lost or am I having a skill issue?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
You'll need enormous amounts of transmission capacity to take solar electricity from California over the mountains to the East Coast or down from Northern Canada. Burning thermite seems energy-inefficient - and that's another huge capital cost since you make a specialized power plant.
Power should be produced near where it's consumed, reliably and consistently. Breeder reactors are the way to go IMO, or we could rush towards fusion. Just one set of infrastructure with 90% capacity factor and minimal transmission cost. It's not hard to make reactors, the US has the technical chops to fit a 300 MW PWR reactor on a submarine along with sonar, torpedoes, stealth all for a total cost of $2 Billion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
24d ago
The US can make a 210 MW reactor, cram it in a submarine (with oodles of advanced stealth/sonar/missile technology) for about $2 billion. They can produce one such submarine every year. Or in the Nimitz class, they install two 550 MW reactors in a floating city/airbase/fortress for a grand total of $5 billion. The reactors surely can't be that much of the overall cost, 20% at most. The missiles and gadgetry are far more complicated, the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.
Small footprint nuclear reactors are proven technology, they've been made for decades. The US chooses not to administrate civilian nuclear energy competently, there's no technical problem. This is 1960s technology, at most. There's nothing all that sophisticated about nuclear energy, even breeder reactors.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23d ago
Just get rid of the regulations! It's insane. In Australia, nuclear power is illegal - we're actually trying to buy US nuclear submarines because they're superior to conventional subs in range. But no, we can't have nuclear energy for civilians despite having by far the biggest uranium reserves on earth. Our geography is stable and technology is quite advanced. We have a research reactor. We should be a nuclear energy superpower, mining and enriching and building reactors.
Stalin blamed Soviet economic problems on 'wreckers', workers deliberately sabotaging machinery, undermining morale, giving false orders. Ironically the wrecking came from the top down, in incentives, laws and institutions that undermined performance. That's the problem the West faces - industry taking body blows from regulators on housing, energy, production and so on.
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.
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.
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?
It's not looking good for the rules-based order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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