RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
19hr ago
Israel has a domestic tech base and production capacity
No, they don't. China has a domestic tech base and production capacity. Russia has production capacity. Israel just produces a few high-end pieces in a giant web of European and American IP and supply chains. Intel has a fab in Israel, running on Dutch lithography equipment, itself made from German lenses...
Does Israel produce all of the umpteen million parts needed for aircraft and guided missiles? No. They import. They're heavily reliant on imported steel! There's no guns or shells or machine tools without steel. They have zero oil production, only natural gas. They're heavily reliant on imported energy. They're surely heavily reliant on all kinds of key industrial infrastructure (transformers, large turbines, construction vehicles).
If Western sanctions fall on Israel, the country disintegrates immediately since it's just impossible to sustain an advanced, high-tech economy at their low level of scale. America first is an entirely separate issue. Russia and America can afford to scorn the world to a certain extent, they're actually big countries. Size matters a lot. The US can't bully China or Russia or Europe with assured success but it can wipe the floor with Israel economically.
Iran isn't a specialized high-tech economy, they're sanctions-proofed and have a much sounder, more developed foundation in their industrial base. Iran actually is energy-secure and a net energy exporter. Iran is the 10th biggest steel producer, Israel isn't even on the list.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
If they wanted to do this, why muck about for the last 30-40 years without getting nukes? It really doesn't take that long. They've got plenty of engineering expertise and oil money to spend on it.
Iran has demonstrated that it has the intent to strike the west and US if it can. They are working on the capability, and once that's done, an active nuclear arsenal presents them the opportunity at any time.
The West? What Western country has Iran struck? France? Germany? Japan? Canada? They could bring out a bunch of drones from a shipping container and cause mayhem in any major city if they wanted.
Iran only strikes Israel and US bases right on its borders, with the US launching strikes on Iran and generally acting in a hostile fashion (sanctions, cyberattacks, proxy wars, assassinations, open threats to invade). The Houthis attacked a bunch of shipping as part of a campaign against Israel.
Iran is an American foe. But it doesn't necessarily have to be this way. It could be less of a US foe, like Venezuela for instance. Or it could be a friend. The US's biggest victory in the Cold War was swaying Maoist China away from the Soviet Union. Maoist China had actively fought and killed thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops in a major war. Total ideological incompatibility. They hated America and were super, duper crazy. Iran is much less of a foe than China was in the 1960s. Yet the US was able to work constructively with China and shift 1/3 or so of the Red Army into the far east, facing their former ally. Suddenly the US stopped needing to fight wars in East Asia! Diplomacy is really powerful!
There were opportunities to reopen relations with Iran during the 1990s but the US pursued an unhelpful strategy of 'dual containment' of both Iran and Iraq since neither were friendly towards Israel. Obama tried to improve relations with Iran but Trump then nixed this initiative.
Now the US is involved in yet another Middle East conflict. This is strategically foolish - China and Iran were the biggest winner of the Iraq War. China got much of the liberated oilfields and the US navy defending their shipping lanes for free! Iran got most of the country of Iraq. Terraforming the Middle East to be friendly towards Israel is extremely costly and dangerous and doesn't work. It should be much less of a priority than the primary theatre of conflict, with the great powers.
Iranian militias in Iraq wouldn't exist if the Iraqi government hadn't been demolished by America. No US troops would die if they weren't there. There's no need for them to be present, the damage is already done. Iraq has been pushed into Iran's sphere of influence (about 40% of the way to puppet state), at US/Coalition expense. It's time to take the L and depart.
China will be a winner of this war too. There is little they want to see more than US air defence stockpiles depleted by Iranian missiles, carrier groups redeployed from the Pacific to the Middle East. Russia is another winner if oil prices rise, though it's bad for China, probably evens out. There is no reason to face Russia, China and Iran at the same time when Iran could've been turned. Too late now but don't double down further on an error!
A better strategy would be to tell Israel to shut up about Iran and move on. Iran hasn't nuclearized in the last 30 years when the Israelis continuously shrieked it was going to happen in a few months or so. Barring a major shock like this attempted disarming strike, they're unlikely to nuclearize, there's a fatwa against it. Iran didn't retaliate with chemical weapons after Iraq gassed 20,000 of them to death, a more than reasonable provocation! Putting more pressure on Iran is the exact way to get them to undo the fatwa and nuclearize.
More than that, North Korea is an extremely poor country which has continuously struggled to develop a missile program. I don't think that it's outside the realm of possibility that they do, but again, at least there's some reason as to why we all sat around on it.
They already have ICBMs that can hit the US. North Korea is another example of the danger of the 'I can't even spell diplomacy' trend in DC. Sanctions and threats don't result in compliant denuclearization (certainly not after going in on Iraq and Libya when they'd complied), they end up with tens of thousands of North Korean troops fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
One thing I'd add is that it's not solely 'Fang Yuan mauling people', it explores the perspectives of other sides too. We see people who are sincerely righteous and good-hearted struggling to do justice in the world, or what they see as justice. I think Duke Long had a lot of good points, he's not a clear villain. In another story he'd be the paladin, the HFY hero, the Lan Mandragoran 'death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain' type. In many respects he's more human than Fang Yuan, though less in others.
What about the protests prior to the Gaza war where they gunned down a bunch of protestors from the other side of a fence?
That should be a higher margin of 'israelis bad' since there was no major conflict going on at that time. I appreciate that civilians die in wartime. But we are approaching Tiananmen square level territory, just without the tanks or 'occupying a key area right outside of govt building' bit. And nobody outside the pro-Palestine people in the West seem to have ever heard of this, it allows a strange narrative of 'oh the Palestinians just woke up one day and decided to zerg-rush israel in the october 7 attacks' to emerge. If you shoot the protestors, it's going to weaken the 'peace' element. People are going to get grievances and be hateful when you shoot them.
More than 6,000 unarmed demonstrators were shot by military snipers, week after week at the protest sites by the separation fence.
The Commission investigated every killing at the designated demonstration sites by the Gaza separation fence on official protest days. The investigation covered the period from the start of the protests until 31 December 2018. 189 Palestinians were killed during the demonstrations inside this period. The Commission found that Israeli Security Forces killed 183 of these protesters with live ammunition. Thirty-five of these fatalities were children, while three were clearly marked paramedics, and two were clearly marked journalists.
At the demonstration site in El Bureij:
Mohammad Obeid (24) Mohammad was a footballer. At approximately 9 a.m., Israeli forces shot him with a single bullet in both legs while he was walking alone approximately 150 m from the separation fence. His injuries ended his football career.
Schoolboy (16) Israeli forces shot a schoolboy in the face as he distributed sandwiches to demonstrators, 300 m from the separation fence. His hearing is now permanently impaired.
It goes on and on and on... The Israeli military is, understandably, quite cruel and hateful of the Palestinians.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
The instance I'm referencing is this one where he even got acquitted: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/nov/16/israel2
But if you want you can do just about any internet search and find similar, albeit less egregious cases: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/05/three-year-old-palestinian-boy-shot-by-israeli-soldiers-dies-in-hospital
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Despite every war being started by the Arabs
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
More recently, (Sharon) acted with generosity by withdrawing from Gaza in 05.
He did that because he concluded it wasn't demographically practical to settle, demolish Palestinian houses and do the standard divide-and-conquer tactics in Gaza. Sharon was not a generous man in any reasonable sense. His military career included war crimes, he founded Unit 101 and is responsible for the Qibya Massacre amongst other things.
Ariel Sharon wrote in his diary that "Qibya was to be an example for everyone," and that he ordered "maximal killing and damage to property". Post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting.
JCPoA (Iran Nuclear deal) was signed
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
Imagine if your daughter got raped and murdered. Then your friend says "she had it coming".
It really isn't this simple. The Israelis have a habit of shooting Palestinian children in the back, along with unarmed protestors. There's a lot of bad blood on both sides. The Arabs are not nice people either. Wars are unpleasant, borders are formed by bloodshed. However, it is inappropriate and ahistorical to valorize Israel as though they're pure good facing pure evil.
Where is the outrage over all the Palestinians who get sodomized or tortured in Israeli prisons? Israeli parliamentarians have said, on camera, 'oh they had it coming, they're Hamas, we can do anything we like!' The Muslim world are the ones who get upset about this, along with people who read various UN or Human rights reports on the subject. The 'free palestine' leftists are doing the same thing as you, seeing both real and imagined evils of one party, siding with the other and then ignoring their own flaws. This kind of skewed perspective eventually creates support for unsound policies, rousing excessive passions about other people's wars.
If Iran's nuclearization is inevitable
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Fox News apparently reported that the Israelis managed to dupe the entire leadership of Iran’s air force into a fake meeting before taking them all out
And is this actually true, or is it made up or heavily exaggerated? Fox News is not known for its even-handedness and scrupulous journalistic integrity regarding Israel and Iran.
The start of a major conflict is a breeding ground for misinformation.
Because they're a tiny, weak country pretending to be a major power. 10 million people, 7 million of them Jews, cannot sustain significant long-term military capacity against even low-medium strength foes if they lose the support of the US. Israel's Gaza campaign is dependent upon US munitions and US support. They aren't even able to raze Gaza without US munitions 'forward-based' in Israel, de facto there for them to use.
US sanctions? They're done. Israel's high-tech economy goes straight to zero and the country disintegrates. How do you sanction-proof with such a small country? F-35s probably wouldn't last 6 months without the gigantic global supply chain of parts.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Last I checked, shipping is not 3x slower than air travel, more like 200x slower. It's a totally different line of thought.
Transit basically always takes 30+ minutes due to walking, waiting, and transfers.
North America cannot run public transport properly, that's the fundamental problem. That's what I've been saying from the start. Cycling shouldn't be needed at all.
Wouldn't it be ridiculous to see people hand-threshing grain? In what world is that rational? If they say 'oh fuel is too expensive and we can't get a harvester because the warlords will steal it', then that's the real problem. It's not that it's superior to do agriculture like you're in the bronze age, it's that there's a deficiency elsewhere. For cycling: too many people being crammed into crowded cities. Cars being too big. Public transport full of crazies and drug fiends, unpunished fare-dodging. Artificially expensive construction costs crippling infrastructure development.
Civilization is supposed to go up the energy ladder, not down.
Cycling is not worth banning. But people should not be commuting with this method, it should not be a rational choice for people in a rich country.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
From wikipedia: Around half of all trips in the Netherlands are made by car, 25% by bicycle, 20% walking, and 5% by public transport
2 km is easy walking distance anyway, I walked about that far getting to school as a child.
Contrary to all the people in this thread saying I have no experience of bikes, I have a friend used to be really keen on them and commuted by bike. However being out on the road with all the multi-tonne death machines and fumes was not his idea of a good time, so now he just takes public transport.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
What consistent moral traits has the US had over the last 100 years?
The US used to be a racially segregated, eugenicist, male-dominated, highly industrialized, colonial power with a small state apparatus. Sodomy was banned, along with miscegenation and pornography. In all reasonable senses America has changed hugely.
And yet elements of the US character are preserved over the centuries due to the people that make it up, though this is changing. There's a certain level of non-conformism, religiosity, optimism, innovativeness, individualism...
It's the same with Germany. There are certain German traits that remained consistent over the century. The high status of technical research for one thing, prestige going more towards engineering and hard sciences compared to (in the UK) classics. Even that is a relatively surface-level cultural difference, compared to underlying matters like relationship between citizen and state, class v meritocracy, systematic thinking...
It's extremely reductive to view a state's character solely by the most obvious features of its government.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Clearly I hit a nerve here, people are getting very emotional about an objectively minor issue. Dumb strawmans like 'cancel air travel' don't make the point you think they're making. Air travel exists for a good reason, because people demand it, because there are proper use cases and so the infrastructure is built up. Bicycle infrastructure doesn't exist in the same way for much the same reason. It doesn't make sense. If it actually made sense people would do it en masse. Even in the Netherlands, car travel is twice as popular as bicycle travel.
I personally don't like cars and don't own one. But I'm capable of looking beyond my own personal interests and can accept that car travel's popularity has good reasons behind it.
I am not asking people to walk 90 minutes to work. Simply use public transport or drive for long distances like almost everyone else.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
If you value your time, buy whatever you need and get it delivered to you. Do you really want to be all sweaty from a bike ride when you're going out to lunch? Drive, get a taxi, an uber or public transport and do something else on the way.
you can leave bicycle at bus station or train station
If it's still there. Huge numbers of bikes are stolen in the US and elsewhere. They're innately easy to steal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
This may be news to you but there is geography outside the USA. Some of us even live outside America. It is a pain to be constantly biking up and down hills.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
why not just ban driving in cities instead?
How many people do you see driving vs cycling? There's a reason for that. It's very silly to ban driving, I don't believe you think it's more reasonable to ban cars than bikes. And I don't even want to ban bikes.
Interesting, Claude seems to have a similar effect. I put in its naively well-spelled and formatted v1 of 'worst story' and it goes 'oh this is comedy gold as an absurdist parody'. I asked for more and it went full HP fanfic 'my immortal'. Even then it said 'oh it's good as a parody' but bad as a story.
I think it's getting stuck on 'so bad it's good', though by version 3 it does go 'ok this is shit as a story but good as a parody'. It can definitely make terrible stories though.
Also model sycophancy is something we might be wise to hyperstition in. If everyone knows that AIs are bootlickers maybe they'll like us more.
Here's Claude's maximally bad story (pocket edition): Jhon woked up and ate a breakfest. Sudenly his mom died but then she didn't. A dragon came but it was actualy his dad. "Im your father" he said. Jhon cryed. The.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
I don't know much about the Netherlands but it is quite flat there, advantaging bikes. What if your city has hills and slopes?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Walking is better in most circumstances:
Much cheaper.
Also provides exercise. You can run if you want more.
Lets you think and go on autopilot, making up for lost speed.
Syncs with other forms of transport well, no restrictions on taking a non-existent bike with you.
Safer.
Can easily head into a shop without having to tie up a bike.
Can easily navigate stairs and get more direct routes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Just walk? You can also use a bus, which is complicated if you're bringing a bike.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
I don't think your premises are true and meaningful. Some may be true. Some would be meaningful if they were true but aren't.
That's right, every single time any of us goes to a Western LLM provider's chatbot and says hi, they bleed money. If you pay them 20 dollars, they bleed even more money since you are a power user and get access to their shiny objects. The newest being deep research, which according to some estimates, costs a thousand USD per query. Yes, a thousand.
A thousand USD? Surely not. Deepseek R1 has a kind of deep research and it's very cheap. You say in comments you realise that was speculation but I think you just don't have any kind of understanding what a believable cost is for this kind of service. It just doesn't cost that much per call!
Also, OpenAI does have financials that tell a totally different story to what you're saying: https://sacra.com/c/openai/
OpenAI hit $10B in annualized revenue run rate as of May 2025, nearly doubling from $5.5B in December 2024.
OpenAI currently operates at ~40% gross margins
Inference is cheap and profitable.
Who cares if training costs go to 1 billion? Or even 10 billion? That's a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things. Facebook spent 20 billion on the metaverse, earned negligible returns and shrugged it off. The reason there's few profits on AI is because of massive investment and competition, everyone recognizes the enormous value and potential of this technology.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
7d ago
There are of course many bigger problems than electric bikes or cyclists in the world or even in New York (crazy homeless for instance). Nevertheless, cycling shouldn't be needed in a rich country. Rich countries should have well-functioning public transport in urban centres which is apparently missing in America.
If you want to go somewhere, drive or use public transport. This is fast and you can use the travel time to read or whatever if you're not driving.
If you want to wander around, or exercise, walk. You can mull things over in your head without needing to be in a high state of alertness.
In between is not a good place to be as people point out downthread. It causes accidents due to there being no good infrastructure for it. And there's no good infrastructure for it because it fundamentally doesn't make any sense, there's no need for this medium speed, low-safety, exhausting means of transport.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10d ago
Could we see similar effects with AI? A company in 2035 has completely automated customer service, AI drafts contracts, does sales and codes. We may have self driving cars and humanoid robots. Yet we might see barely 2% GDP growth and no real boom in productivity. Why has the tech sector revolutionized work without dramatical increases in productivity and can the results be better in the coming 20 years?
People moved from productive roles to non-productive roles in response. HR wrecking your ability to hire. Endless meetings where nothing happens. Work that should and could be done in weeks takes months because the people on the other side are just lazy and everyone is too polite and unbothered to insist on a reasonable schedule (why be rude and damage relationships when there's all this money floating around).
Construction is an especially bad case, I consider it to have been deliberately sabotaged by vested interests, people whose entire job is to prevent development and construction with inane zoning or regulations. It really isn't that hard. Singapore has seen construction productivity rising. China can build large apartments in weeks, there are videos of it happening. Potholes that would linger for aeons in America disappear quickly in Japan.
Productivity in terms of 'wealth created per person actually working' has risen rapidly.
AI can raise productivity hugely, providing that implementation isn't sabotaged by the usual suspects. But it will reduce the number of producers and create vast opposing lobbies of angry & unemployed + wreckers and saboteurs. Thus I suspect we will see both productivity stagnation and productivity explosion, just like in the construction industry. Software companies may become massively more productive, only to hire many more charismatic, respected, dignified, useless management staff and thus keep their productivity where it was. Or they might just become massively more productive and skip the bloat. Countries can choose whether to do things efficiently and cheaply or whether they'll pay more and wait longer for inferior products. Of course, making the wrong choice will eventually lead to having sovereignty and wealth stripped away.
Surely this should make you investigate your priors? If we accept that this happened but can't find video, then it shows that video isn't needed to prove something happened!
Firstly, I think there is video but we just don't see it since we're not in the Arab media-sphere, not on the right telegram channels. I've read some books and reports, that's enough. Here's one video of a prisoner being raped: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qmjGdzyj5BA
Furthermore, video footage is often misleading. It can be selectively edited or leave out context as we're both aware. Nobody is going to watch enough video to distinguish excecptions from standard, on the scale of armies and states.
Finally, the standard for believing that Israel acts with cruelty should not be high. We know there were violent protests when the Israelis started investigating torture of prisoners - protests against the prosecutions. This indicates that there's a good number of Israelis who are in favour of torturing prisoners, shooting prisoners.
I don't need live video to know that there's a lot of rape in South Africa, even if it's politically relevant in that many don't like blacks or the end of apartheid. Likewise with Venezuela. We don't need extensive evidence to prove it's a shithole. Some things are just straightforward and make sense. They can be derived from first principles.
More options
Context Copy link