RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d 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!
1d 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!
1d 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!
1d 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!
1d 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!
3d 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!
3d 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!
3d 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!
3d 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!
3d 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!
3d ago
Just walk? You can also use a bus, which is complicated if you're bringing a bike.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d 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!
4d 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.
Fake history. The Six-Day War was started by Israel and they were the aggressor in Suez.
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.
The US reneged on this when Trump got into office, Trump being heavily backed by Israeli lobbyists who got what they were paying for.
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.
They've been six months away from nukes for 30 years now, according to Israeli intelligence. How is this line of argument evergreen?
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