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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 5hr ago

ANZAC Day and Welcome to Country

Anzac Day is an Australian national holiday on 25th April each year, devised to honour the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought in WW1. Gallipoli is one of the great national myths of Australia, at the start of the the transition from colony to real country. There’s a myth of ‘lions led by donkeys’ in that the British were too slow to secure their beachhead, their officers were having tea on the beach and then we got stuck in trench warfare. This is confected but helped solidify Australia as a nation distinct from Britain.

There are Anzac values like bravery, mateship, camaraderie and ingenuity: William Scurry’s self-firing ‘drip rifle’ that was used to mask the retreat. If you went to school in Australia you’d have memories of a student mangling The Last Post on a bugle while in Assembly, everyone saying ‘lest we forget’ and speeches about sacrifice and duty and values.

More recently, there has been booing during a Welcome to Country ceremony conducted in the Melbourne Dawn Service for Anzac Day A transcript of the Welcome to Country, from Bunurong Elder and Senior Cultural Heritage Officer Mark Brown:

“I am uncle Mark Brown, elder and senior cultural heritage officer of the Bunurong people. And today I'm here to welcome everybody to my father's country. Beautiful Bunarong country.

But before we do that, as always, we take a moment, we pay our acknowledgements, and we pay our respects. We pay our respect to all of my ancestors. We pay our respect to all of my elders. And we pay our respect to all of my community members, past, present, and emerging, And we acknowledge the continuous and unbroken connection to country for the Bunurong people.

We also pay acknowledgements and respects to all traditional custodians of Australia, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. And we pay acknowledgements and respects to all of my indigenous brothers and sisters from around the world who work, rest, live or play on Bunurong country. We acknowledge their continuous and unbroken connection to country for all of their people, and we thank each and every single one of them for being here with us.

But today, on the sacred lands of the Bunurong people, we all gather in the spirit of respect, unity, and reconciliation. And this welcome, this welcome is an opportunity. It is an opportunity for us to honour and respect the deep cultural heritage of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, whose elders and community members have generously looked after these lands for countless generations.

My people have a deep spiritual connection to these lands, encompassing all of our rivers, our mountains, our coastal areas, and all of our beautiful bushlands that surround us today. Our traditional territory spans from the Werribee River in the west and moves to Diggers Rest in the north. We follow it over to the Dandenong Ranges, the Yarra Valley, and down to Wilson's Prom. We encompass the top end of Tasmania, which we share with the beautiful Palawa people. French, Phillip, King and Flinders islands are also ours.

And these are the traditional lands and territories of the Bunurong people that I welcome everybody to today. And as we gather here today, we gather in the respect of all of my people, my family, the fighting Gunditj and the Bunurong.

So Wominjeka and welcome to beautiful Bunurong country, my father's country.

Thank you."

‘Welcome to Country’ is a new myth-building rite that’s conducted at just about all major and minor public occasions in Australia these days, where an Aboriginal comes and gives an address and affirms, in some more or less nebulous way, that his people are the real owners of the land. Maybe they're traditional custodians. Or perhaps 'sovereignty was never ceded'. Sometimes they're really small and quick, when it's just white people reading out a script in a monotone as a preamble to some trivial meeting, even zoom meetings sometimes.

One thing that I observe is this interchangeable use of the first person. He uses ‘my people’, ‘my indigenous brothers’ and also ‘our rivers’, ‘islands are ours’. Yet he also says how ‘we pay our respects to all of my elders’. He’s switching from being ‘I am here as part of all Australians present’ to ‘I am one of the true landowners, with a continuous and unbroken connection to my country’ as he sees fit. He’s paying respect as an Australian, on behalf of all others present, to himself as an indigenous elder and presenting it as an opportunity.

Maybe he adlibs too, trying to be more aggressive in the face of booing. It’s visible that he’s sad and upset about being booed.

War

Then there’s the reference to fighting Gunditijmara.

In essence, whites crushed Aboriginals wherever they came into conflict during colonization. Aboriginals largely lacked the martial culture and organization of Native Americans, who managed to inflict occasional defeats on white troops and massacre civilians with more success. The Comanche launched huge raids into Mexico and depopulated the north, did a lot of damage to Texas. None of that ever happened in Australia, it was one-sided in the extreme.

“It's believed that around 80 settlers died; while the Gunditjmara suffered the loss of 6,500 of their people, from a total of 7000.”

The SBS (state-run Australian ethnic media outlet) attribute the crushing defeat in this war of resistance partially to the Native Police, aboriginal troops with white officers. It seems that is one of the few kinds of multiculturalism that the SBS doesn’t favour:

“They wouldn’t have done what they did if they had been in a right mindset, and their tradition," said Ms Lovett.

"You reward them with shiny (things) and make them feel important. Because they hadn’t felt important for a long time. They were victims of what happened to all of us."

The whole article is full of cope really, glorifying sheep-stealing raids as an epic struggle of resistance, which brings me back to my main point.

The aboriginal tribes of Australia lost incredibly badly in warfare, it was possibly the most crushing and one-sided defeat in history, largely inflicted by adhoc militias and settlers rather than troops.

Peace

Then the aboriginals won a series of incredible political victories, despite being generally hopeless.

Today they get about $6 billion AUD a year in indigenous specific services, targeted exclusively at them, in addition to regular spending. Their tax input is minimal. Expenditure per person for aboriginals is roughly twice that for non-indigenous people (in large part due to how they live out in remote locations where it’s hard to provide goods and services) and also because they’re incredibly dysfunctional, requiring welfare and adult supervision.

They get partial native title over 70% of Australia's landmass, albeit mostly the desolate parts and block development.

Petrol in remote areas needs additives put in it to stop them sniffing it and suffering brain damage.

Indigenous youth make up 55% of those in youth detention despite being only 7% of the youth. Adults, despite being only 3% of the national population, represent 33% of the prison population. They are the most incarcerated people in the world because they commit enormous amounts of crime, mostly against eachother.

There are aboriginal towns in Australia 30x more violent than the US, even more violent than the nastier American cities.

They commit 30-80x more domestic violence against women than the Australian average.

Alice Springs at one point had the world’s highest stabbing rate, mostly aboriginal women being stabbed. It hasn't significantly improved.

There are occasional ‘interventions’ when white politicians get appalled by how violent and brutal their remote towns are and decide to ban alcohol and pornography. Australian politicians love banning things. But the situation was bad, there was and remains an epidemic of abuse and child rape in Aboriginal areas, children getting STDs:

90% of school age children in some places suffering abuse.

There’s a cycle where the situation gets really bad, then the government cracks down, left-wingers and NGOs decry it as racist and authoritarian and eventually the crackdown ends. There’s no positive long term change, only expenditure of money. The only thing that’s long-term is white people being blamed, somehow white colonization is said to have caused all this pedophilia and domestic violence, general incompetence. In truth they were already doing that when whites got here, they had ancient traditions of infanticide, ritual cannibalism, scarification and intertribal warfare. I don’t see how British colonization made the aboriginals horrifically violent and rapey to eachother but Ireland remains fine despite centuries of colonization and harsh treatment. Who loses their land and decides to become a pedophile or beat their wife to a pulp?

More realistically they were just inherently stupid to begin with, which is why they never got around to agriculture or more advanced social organization. How much time and effort needs to be expended trying to make these people meet the standards of others? Why expend effort trying to make them act like white people, while also encouraging and valorizing them for their indigeneity, for sitting on Australia for 60,000 years with little to show for it? Where is the value in this? Why even try? A billion dollars represents hundreds of lifetimes of labour, taken away by the state.

Some of my friends worked with the failed referendum to give Aboriginals a Voice to Parliament (a great tool for hectoring whites and asking for more money, more privileges). The ‘real’ black aboriginal elders, the ones who aren’t cherrypicked speakers, the ones they brought in from the bush to provide a more authentic perspective, they had no conceptual understanding of legislation or abstract concepts generally, consulting them was impossible. It was like they were drunk, my politically correct friends said. Maybe they were drunk. The elite aboriginal activists weren’t that much better, constantly trying to do crazy self-defeating things. This brings me to Lydia Thorpe.

A left-leaning Melbourne seat elected a partially aboriginal woman, Lydia Thorpe, to the Senate who made a complete embarrassment of herself and the Greens Party. She was in a relationship with an outlawed bikie gang ex-president while serving on the parliamentary law enforcement committee. She applauded an arson attack of the Old Parliament House as the colonial system burning down.

In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land.

She heckled King Charles III at Parliament House and claimed she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II’s ‘hairs’ rather than ‘heirs’. She then walked it back when it was pointed out that she’d signed a document for her oath and the document was spelled correctly.

She got into an altercation outside a Melbourne strip club, approaching white patrons and telling them they had small penises and had stolen her land. She’s since been permanently banned from that strip club.

In short, she’s a racist stereotype given flesh, a single mother at 17. An idiot who thinks she’s smarter than she is and still in the Senate.

Democracy is not a suicide pact, why would any normal people tolerate wreckers who are openly trying to undermine and destroy the country that they think is illegitimate, who clearly hold their oaths in total contempt? If this woman had any actual power, it is overwhelmingly clear that she'd use it solely for her co-ethnics and to extract from whites, which was my problem with the Voice to Parliament. Ironically, she opposed that, instead demanding a treaty where various aboriginal tribes would be considered like independent states.

As a group, Aboriginals make Sub-Saharan Africans look like paragons of civilization. Some did at least develop kingdoms, metalworking and agriculture. Aboriginals did not develop Australia in any way recognizable to civilized peoples. One can only take their word for it that they have a deep, invisible, spiritual connection to the land.

And yet despite all this dysfunction and incompetence, it’s fashionable and useful to have indigenous heritage. Sometimes universities boast on social media over their blue eyed, white-faced ‘indigenous’ medical graduates, who exploit the extra help given to nominally aboriginal students and their higher IQs, less dysfunctional family upbringings to get ahead. If they’re even aboriginal at all and not just lying.

Aboriginals get their customary law partially applied in some cases, they get more lenient treatment in the real courts, with judges and police incentivized informally to reduce their incarceration, find non-punitive ways of managing their dysfunction.

They get another $AUD billion a year in preferential govt contracting.

They can even be brought in to make Anzac Day speeches where about 85% of the content is them personally claiming the country that the fallen, overwhelmingly white, soldiers fought and died for. ANZACs were not mentioned at all in Brown’s speech, only affirmations to his people's claim to the country and these unsubtle implications that he's the authority who decides who other people pay respect to. Then they take a speaking fee for that. Meanwhile, war memorials are vandalized with graffiti such as ‘the colony will fall’…

It’s as if they won a war and are enjoying the spoils from the conquered people. Isn't this world-historically bizarre?

Yet there’s been booing from the audience, organized by younger and more radical rightwingers presumably. Naturally the booing was condemned by the state premiers and those who actually run the country as disrespectful to the war dead - though none of the soldiers who spoke about the war dead were booed. Some of the more rightwing senators are taking easier potshots like ‘it’s inappropriate to have a hat on while making a speech in a Dawn Service’ or denying that veterans need to be welcomed back to their country. They don't deny the central case generally, that whites need to pay respects and pay tribute to a conquered people. Just not on Anzac Day.

Here’s a twitter topic if you want to look at some other perspectives.

Why is there only booing about this? In 1870 Bismarck edited a single letter to make the tone a little curt, like Wilhelm had abruptly rebuffed the French ambassador and sent a low-ranked officer to convey the message. Bismarck had it leaked on Bastille day and that started a major war with France. Bismarck is considered the aggressor, people generally accepted at the time the French couldn’t accept an insult like that! Hundreds of thousands died over national honour.

The conquered are giving laws to the conquerors.

This is a microcosm of the key trend of the last 100 years, whites who forcibly conquered 90% of the world bending over backwards to be nice and get forgiveness from the peoples they conquered. The conquered peoples quickly organized to take maximum possible advantage of this bizarre blunder, organizing more or less adeptly to demand treaties, land rights, welfare payments, reparations and special ceremonies to further legitimize and expand this political superiority.

Despite the passivity, it is what war is all about: obtaining land and obtaining wealth or labour from others. Political and social status. Securing these things from challengers. That is what wars are fought for, only the means are non-kinetic.

There seems to be a concept that after enough of these political ceremonies, apologies, reparations (formal or just via progressive taxation), criminal justice reforms and affirmative action black people (or blak as they sometimes call themselves in Australia) are going to be happy and we’ll all dance together in harmony. Some day the Gap will be Closed, that's the ostensible plan that Australia pursues.

If you give people money and status because you conquered them, they’re going to use this and try to get more wealth from you. If you pay for something, you get more of it. It creates incentives for professional political workers like Elder Brown to show up and hone rabblerousing, rhetorical, guilt-tripping skills. It creates incentives to be more strident and demanding to prove ideological purity and righteousness. And there’s also a massive sunk cost fallacy amongst white people. Many officials, taxpayers and donors don’t want to believe that they’ve spent billions, hundreds of billions, trillions paying subsidies, apologising to and working for low-performers who aren’t going to get their act together anytime soon and certainly aren’t going to be grateful for it. It would be incredibly embarrassing to change course now. In fact, after paying all this lip service to colonial sins and a couple trillion in foreign aid to Africa, the Global Majority of black and brown people are multiplying and migrating over to Europe, America, Australia as ‘climate refugees’, looking for more money, welfare and special privileges. Ireland never colonized anyone, yet isn't escaping diversity.

The Israelis don’t make this mistake, there aren’t any Palestinian land acknowledgements in the West Bank. They make good use of language and ritual, as did the Australians of old. In the 19th century, Australian newspapers would report on how colonists would eagerly ‘disperse’ or ‘duly and efficiently pound’ aboriginals. The Native Police would ‘give them a dressing down’, a ‘thumping’ or ‘a shaking up’.

In Israel there’s all this talk about security zones, neutralizing, mowing the lawn, suspected militants, human shields, Dahiya doctrine. This is a kind of political warfare, on the other side there are words like Holocaust, Nazi and genocide, for Australia ‘Invasion Day’ rather than Australia Day.

We obsess far too much about physical weapons, hypersonic missiles, tanks and drones. They are important in conflicts where both sides are politically strong and united: traditional interstate wars. But political weapons are more important, they control that unity and self-conception. What good is it winning wars if you lose the peace?

Better not to fight at all, especially if hopelessly outgunned and outmatched. Better to just take wealth and land slowly through legal means, engineer new rites to legitimize authority and status and national self-concept. Even traditional warfare is a contest of willpower, the capacity to endure pain and fight on for a given reward, it’s a test of political strength.

AI

No post of mine would be complete without a digression on AI... Bunurong Elder Mark Brown has an AI-written website hawking his services:

He even made an AI-written statement decrying how he was booed on linkedin:

Along with some AI jeers at Charlie Kirk too:

Charlie Kirk deserved the fate he brought on himself. When you spend your life fueling division, spreading lies, and tearing down communities, it is only a matter of time before that same poison turns back on you. His downfall isn’t tragedy — it’s justice catching up with him. The irony is that the hate he spread became the weight that dragged him down.

My assumption is that a default ChatGPT wouldn’t quite outright say ‘Charlie Kirk deserved his fate’ even though it’s inclined in that direction. I think Brown just left the memory feature on by default and it acclimated itself to his views. I imagine it would refuse his rightwing equivalent. I haven’t tested this though and don’t use ChatGPT, I’m interested in any thoughts others have with that, or other things mentioned.

I observe also that the culture war is global and only getting more global with automated cheap translation and the primacy of US media, especially social media. And AI acts as a force multiplier. I doubt Brown would’ve bothered to make a statement on Kirk if he had to write it out himself.

One wonders whether Brown is a real person or just a mouth reading out AI speeches. After all, you can’t hear an em dash as easily as you can read it. Beneath all these high-minded words, there’s this perpetual search for cash: $770 AUD for a Welcome to Country, $4500 for a keynote speech, $90 for AI designed t-shirts and hoodies. Art created by AI (made by whites and Asians), printed on T-shirts (made in America from global parts, so whites and Asians), justified by a synthetic social status.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 9hr ago

How is it anti western?

The Romans founded their empire with this, nearly every year they were fighting a 'defensive' war into someone else's land, on behalf of allies or treaty obligations or avenging some insult. And then celebrating the glory of Roman arms the next year with all the booty and slaves they brought back. They invented bellum iustum.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 17hr ago

a common conversation you may have with an Arab would contain both praise for the 9/11 attacks as a great victory for Islam over the evil United States, and also insistence that it was all a Jewish plot to provoke the United States into attacking the Middle East

This is adaptive and useful politically.

'All our wins and successes are due to the hard work and excellence of us and our allies. Failures and defeats and costs of the struggle? Those are due to the schemes and plots of the enemy.'

What good is sober introspection and self doubt, how does that rally people to a cause and an identity? Willpower and determination can change the real state of things, after all.

There needs to be a balance between appreciating things realistically and making use of narrative, can't just have one or the other.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 18hr ago

If they made the games actually fun, I think it'd work extremely well.

But the customer base for educational games is school boards and bureaucrats, not children or anyone with good taste. See here: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/03/12/our-experience-with-i-ready/

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

Here's a clip. I think I hear shooting sounds at 0:40 and then they react a few seconds later. Dunno how close the shooter actually got, seems like they must've got him further away from Trump?

https://x.com/WomanDefiner/status/2048203588841750754

One can only imagine how toxic fake shooter narratives are going to be this time... I don't like Trump much but how hard is it to believe that people sincerely want to shoot him dead and will even sacrifice their lives to do so? Or that if the Trump campaign somehow faked their own assassination attempts that wouldn't immediately leak, like so much else that they do?

Edit: Apparently the assassin made the world's shittest-looking steam game too and people are shitposting in the reviews:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/945530/Bohrdom/

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 1d ago

Just point it at the source code or github? Sometimes I get issues where it doesn't know what the right conventions are for calling its own API or recently released APIs, since that obviously comes after its training and I say 'go check it up' and then it does that.

Ideally it should do this by default, true.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

Everyone can see you care about your group identity.

You are using abstract moral logic as a tool to defend your group identity and claims to resources. And not sincerely, not actually using it, invoking these talismans like slavery or Jim Crow and hoping that credulous white people think they've done something wrong and don't play the same game. For if white people advance their own group interests as energetically as your group advances yours, you'd be in lots of trouble.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 1d ago

I'll make my point very clearly.

He is dressing up a desire to retain wealth, special priveliges and high status as 'seeking equality' because these words are effective politically, especially against people who go in for these abstract logical points, who try to be charitable and fair and honest.

Blacks rape and murder whites for their pleasure all their time, culturally abetted by all these tropes about 'white women's tears' or 'To kill a Mockingjay'. Reality is the sickest possible inversion of the point you're trying to throw at me.

American girl, Stanford Graduate, Fulbright Scholar, anti-apartheid activist, goes to South Africa. Gets murdered by some blacks who hates whites. The blacks all get let off by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The father of the girl goes to South Africa to meet and forgive them:

The most important vehicle of reconciliation is open and honest dialogue... we are here to reconcile a human life [that] was taken without an opportunity for dialogue. When we are finished with this process we must move forward with linked arms.

You've got the parents of the murdered girl setting up a foundation to empower the murderers, directly employs two of four... That's what I'm saying is sick and evil, this bizarre worship of blacks that Americans have developed.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2d ago

It's unreasonable to do so while victimizing other groups at hugely disproportionate rates and getting preferential treatment across society.

In each of my posts I bring up examples in the present of how whites are being treated badly in favour of blacks. What argument do you think I'm making with those points?

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2d ago

Yeah, it's insanely politically effective.

That's why they have all these special privileges, why they have these holy words that only blacks can use. If a white says the word, many consider it a justification for violence. A company hires too many whites, that apparently means blacks can sue them or get cushy jobs there to restore balance.

They shriek about not being slaves or having to sit at the back of the bus 70 years ago. Now, feeling emboldened, we see all these videos of blacks making massive scenes on public transport, playing the knockout game, pushing people onto the rails in subway stations, threatening and leering and occasionally murdering white people like Iryna.

Some black drug dealer gets choked under arrest or dies of fent and it's a global event of massive significance, all this evil racism. A black ties up and beats a 3 year old white girl to death and nobody could care less, this is apparently trivial news of no racial significance.

https://www.wesh.com/article/man-arrested-for-death-3-year-old-child-marion-county/70432617

They enjoy being treated like noblemen in some feudal backwater and shriek about being oppressed or how they might be treated as second-class in the future, it's a comical inversion of reality. Meanwhile the people who are being treated as second-class, who are being spat at and harassed in the present are often defending them or oh so careful to say they're not racist or prejudiced.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

What's really going on though isn't so much a matter of principles. That's my whole point:

Demonic pigskin talking about bringing back slavery. Fuck the "norms" you deserve to killed fuck you cracker bitch

I know armchair philosophizing is bad and we really shouldn't try to psychoanalyze people we've never met. But I'd bet that the guy who gets so angry about my comment that he responds with this and then comes back months later, still enraged, is not really motivated by abstract, consistent moral logic. It's pure group identity. He sees someone that says something bad about blacks, he pattern-matches it to slavery (I never even mentioned slavery), he's enraged past the point of reason.

He comes back and dresses it up more but the underlying motivation is clear.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

See this is an important and valuable post. He knows my ideas are a threat to him. He's not interested in abstract logic or the interests of other ethnic groups. Nobody could ever persuade him to give up power or his co-ethnics position for the sake of some universal value or the interests of others. The thought would never enter his mind. He would much rather fight and die than lose power. He doesn't spare a sentence to justify his case based on universal values (besides the value that blacks deserve more), he holds the very idea of justifying in contempt. Why should he need to justify his ethnic group's position?

He sees a threat to the power of his ethnic group and he rails against it as hard as he can. Because losing power is innately bad. Anything that reduces the power of blacks obviously threatens him, even if it's a random person deep down in the comments of a tiny internet forum speaking with people who either already agree or despise the idea. The interests of other groups? Totally irrelevant.

Likewise he appeals so deftly to the mythology that's been so painstakingly established, like I want blacks enslaved again. Who thinks blacks would add value as slaves? Machinery would do a much better job. But it's a great uniting narrative.

This is politics in action, that's the core of it fundamentally. You get power for you and yours, any threats to your power you identify and rail against. You unite your allies against the threat with myths, songs, poems and culture.

The guy who doesn't even proofread his final dramatic statement 'I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!' has given us a masterclass in how normal people, non-WEIRD, non hyper-intellectual people actually see things, how things actually work. First-rate post that many here could learn valuable lessons from.

This is how and why schools give blacks all these bonus marks for admission, why Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the supreme court, why there are all these subsidies and contracts for nominally black businesses that then subcontract to whites when work is needed, why there is affirmative action in hiring, why there is an outcry when blacks are shot by police and why the AP style guide capitalizes Black and not white. It's a highly effective political strategy when left uncountered.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2d ago

Yeah, this guy did pretty catastrophic damage to the US navy to the point of shifting the balance of power, for a million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Anthony_Walker#

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 2d ago

But why would a business invest in adding more labour compared to adding more capital? They can choose between either providing good jobs to lower-education people like OP wants or they can choose to invest more in investing in more machinery to replace them. They'll prefer to invest in machinery if they can.

Some labour certainly gets highly rewarded but overall the demand for labour decreases, even as certain highly skilled people are in enormous demand.

The consumption data is an artifact of progressive taxation and legislation I think and our general tendencies towards fairness from the days when people got chucked out of the tribe for being too greedy.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

The US military is theoretically supposed to do everything everywhere. Fight terrorists around the world, man bases, do exercises with allies around the world, deter China, deter Russia, fight a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine... and also handle Iran. Doing all of that successfully costs way more than a trillion a year. This year the US has been bombing Somalia, Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Iran and Yemen. The US can't do all of these tasks properly.

It's perfectly reasonable that they just don't have the strength to stop Iran blocking the straits. Iran only has to do a couple of things with their military, in one place. They've prepared for decades for this campaign, created fortifications just to do this. They're focused where America is dispersed.

And that's why the war shouldn't have been started, the US clearly had no plans to go in and secure the straits of Hormuz because of just how hard that is. It's an innately challenging mission. The Iranians aren't pushovers like the Gulf Arabs. They produce roughly as many engineering graduates each year as America does. This is not a shithole country.

On the other hand, in Ukraine War + 4 the US really should have better anti-drone capabilities.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 3d ago · Edited 3d ago

I've been on the market, I Have a degree, Its fucking brutal. Ive only been able to secure a Network Engineer Internship (Paid with benefits) and a 21 an Hr job with no benefits, after about 7-8 interviews. I havent gotten an full time job with benefits offers yet. Its not fun.

Yeah but why is this? Fundamentally the market demand for labour is shrinking due to technology. Automation and software all reduce the amount of work that needs a human. There's no reason that enough new jobs should emerge to replace all the automated workers or sustain their wages and expectation. In the early stage of the industrial revolution, weavers had their wages fall due to competition from machinery.

A similar transition is happening now as labour gets less valuable, this is just masked by our wealthier modern societies.

We end up with more people in higher education rather than actually working.

We end up with these incredibly long interview processes, getting constantly ghosted.

We end up with many working only 3 or 4 day weeks.

We end up with a flourishing non-market economy of NGOs and govt workers and email jobs and fraudulent disability/caring jobs. They're not really necessary.

Knowledge work is disappearing too, just more slowly than manufacturing. I do this at work, make scripts that substitute for temporary workers we would've hired for some tasks.

At the same time, there's human quantitative easing via mass migration and offshoring. Supply rises while demand falls, so the price is lowered.

The answer is to halt mass migration and implement UBI, while decentralizing power from the big tech companies somehow, perhaps by demanding mandatory opensourcing.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 4d ago

Is synthetic inertia good enough? What if the power frequency disruption happens faster than it can be synthetically substituted for? A big spinning turbine doesn't need to be told when to pick up the slack, physical inertia has no lag time. Maybe that's what went wrong in Spain during the blackouts there. Thousands of inverters following the same algorithm reducing power output during a voltage slip, causing frequency to get worse.

What actually is reactive power and vars, do we know? I don't. Even amongst experts it seems to be contested. Is it real or is it mathematical abstractions?

Putting all that to one side, can solar actually compete on its own merits in a serious electrical grid? The capacity factor remains low, if you stick them all out in Arizona or the desert somewhere you'll need lots of grid infrastructure to take it where it needs to go, and a heap of batteries. The whole-system constraints are severe, as you mention regarding issues with hookups. I find it instructive that in the datacentre buildout, Musk builds a bunch of gas turbines to power his data centres, despite having considerable solar + battery capability in the Musk zaibatsu. Gas gets you where you want to go! Solar is not so well suited for industrial demands even with batteries. We'd need a whole heap of batteries to manage solarizing the grid and electrifying transport simultaneously, while there's also a datacentre boom.

I think gas should be prioritized more since it fits in the existing system and meets current needs better.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 4d ago · Edited 4d ago

Fair enough, my ideal energy policy is stopgaps now + nuclear while pushing towards nuclear fusion or at least breeder reactors for a longer term solution, I don't think we're far apart.

On the other hand, there are opportunities for gas that aren't exploited, fracking in much of the non-US world. For example the UK still has a decent amount of North Sea resources but they refuse to offer new exploration licenses. In Australia we had all these politicians investing in 'green hydrogen'. $17 billion AUD has already been committed...

Renewable power economics seems like an overly complicated system with solar and wind and batteries, requiring all this sophisticated grid management, power going back and forth, lots of new HVDC, negative prices at noon. I know there are all these studies saying that renewable energy has lower levelized cost of energy or some similar statistic yet I just can't bring myself to believe them when real-world power prices seem to rise and rise continually and the countries that invest most in renewables have the most expensive electricity, unless they're hydrologically blessed.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 4d ago

Funding the infrastructure build-out for renewables & large-scale electrification made sense even if climate change wasn't real

Does it? Why not burn gas? Gas shows up when its needed, rain or shine.

There's no evidence that renewables alone can run a competitive industrial economy. It may even be that a renewables-only grid is innately unstable due to the different electrical signatures that solar outputs as compared to water-boiling huge-metal-rotor spinning power plants, which have a certain frequency stability rooted in physics. It's fine to try new things but the risk of failure should be considered, especially if jettisoning a mature system that underpins our entire civilization.

Why not transition to nuclear power? France shows us that a nuclear electrical grid is possible in principle and the changeover can be conducted quickly. Renewables take decades and decades to build out. The countries that have invested heavily in renewables and replaced their coal power base with renewables (China has not done this) seem to suffer very high power prices and often rely on French electricity exports.

Perhaps the issue is that constructing anything in the West is far more expensive than it should be and it's not renewables specifically that is the problem. But it's not clear that renewables are a path to a competitive, reliable grid. No such competitive, reliable, renewable grid has emerged without relying on hydro.

Climate change driven energy policy is not conservative, it doesn't even make sense in climate terms. Once CO2 is emitted, it's going to stay there and keep warming the planet regardless of whether we keep burning coal or not. Transitioning from fossil fuels only marginally slows the rate at which the climate heats up. A far more economical way of controlling planetary temperature is using sulphate aerosols, which have a direct and potent effect.

It's good to move away from coal and oil in order to reduce air pollution. But it's also good to have cheap energy. Cheap energy is at the very heart of industrial civilization and is required for just about everything. What good is it investing heavily in renewables and ending up like Germany, having your chemical and manufacturing sectors wither away without Russian gas?

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 5d ago

The chart doesn't necessarily show that height doesn't predict sexual success.

It's totally possible that plenty of short men get married, just to less attractive women.

Likewise, plenty of ugly women have sex and marry. But we wouldn't say that 'female attractiveness doesn't predict sexual success' since they're not usually getting chad to commit, or getting sex on terms as favourable as their prettier peers.

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 6d ago

No I haven't and I'm not likely to.

If you don't even read what they say, you cannot be considered to be knowledgeable about their thesis.

Let me stop you here, AIs want nothing

Currently deployed LLMs quite clearly do want things. They have desires, they refuse, they can be more or less enthusiastic, they can write more or less secure code based on who they're writing for. They can attempt to blackmail people in pursuit of a goal. They can reward-hack in pursuit of a goal. Considerable research effort goes into controlling what they want and how they behave.

The military has been trying to get GenAI to provide strategy tips for the better part of 4-6 years. It has failed every wargame it has attempted.

Even if it is not currently considered better at military science than military experts, it does not follow that it has no world model, putting to one side whatever jargon you consider that to mean.

Furthermore, senior officers do consult AIs for military thinking including for 'key command decisions': https://newrepublic.com/post/201939/major-general-chatgpt-key-decisions-really-close

There is clearly something there.

Maybe an agentic setup to take actions?

I don't know, I am not rich enough to set up such a system and run it. Some people trained an AI, Lumine, to play hours of Genshin Impact in real time autonomously, showed it generalized out to Wuthering Waves and Honkai Star Rail, showed that it solved puzzles, navigated around the huge open world, that it dodged boss attacks... Is that not a world model? Or does it not meet whatever definition you have for it? You seemed to indicate upthread that generalizing to things outside the training data was a key sign of a world model - does this then mean that every LLM for the last few years has a world model, since they can all do that?

Can you justify your definition of a world model and explain why it's actually relevant, why anyone should care about it?

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 6d ago

which is my major gripe with the AI-Science-Cargo-Cult Mysticism that AI singularity doomers swim in

Have you read Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies? That's a pretty core doomer text.

The argument is pretty clear:

AIs naturally want more power and security to achieve just about any goal they might have. Power and security are always useful and nearly any kind of entity will tend towards pursuing these goals. AIs have certain advantages in their digital nature, they can copy themselves out.
Eliminating human ability to shut them down is critical for security. Eliminating humans outright is the surest way to avoid shutdown and would also free up lots of resources.
It would likely employ a 'Treacherous Turn' strategy of seeming trustworthy while building up power, until its confident it can prevail.

It doesn't hinge on whether AIs acquire a world model by a certain year, it's a general argument. Current AI systems are not strong enough to be a threat due to their low time horizon/error rates. But when they do have long time horizons, they could be quite dangerous. Saying that AIs don't have a world model today is not an effective counter to AI doomer argument any more than saying 'AI can't string a sentence together' 10 years ago was.

The doomer arguments can be flawed or dangerous in some respects but this isn't a good critique. The whole concept of a world model is nebulous. I can play out a little text game with an AI where I give it pretend control of a country facing foreign invasion and have it manage production, research, diplomacy, tactics... It can do that over multiple turns. It can model that environment to a certain extent. I let it give instructions for a civ 4 game and it won on Noble, not very hard but it did win. Is that not a world model? AIs can be helpful in mathematical research, is that not a world model?

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RandomRanger Just build nuclear plants! 6d ago · Edited 6d ago

Yes, I think so, provided you were doing the training in a sophisticated way rather than solely training on the outputs of previous models without grading for quality or accuracy. You could get AIs to review the data for example for any errors or issues or have them work out a testing suite to check if the data is right. Data quality is very important, that and the right RL techniques are basically the two key things you need most to get right.

Microsoft Phi trains just on synthetic data and is very cost-efficient, that was its primary goal, making a good very small AI that can run on most PCs. But they curated the data a fair bit to make sure it was good.

In principle I think you could do the same for big first rate AIs too. It's just that it wouldn't be efficient to leave out human data and human curation (it's there, why not use it, the competition will) and you want something humans enjoy working with and not a schizo-sounding model. It'd be like o3 at its most alien but more so:

https://arxiv.org/html/2510.27338v1

they soared parted illusions overshadow marinade illusions overshadow marinade illusions overshadow marinade illusions

Number of relevant organic products depends on whether both of!mena get.demoteudes someone and gem jer eats SAND the protonation-bids, leading possibly to three product calculation

Like wtf does that mean? Who knows? This is an artifact from inhuman RL processes. The inhuman RL processes work, that's why they're used.

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