RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
They could cut the 'import Afghans and house them in hotels secretly with gag orders' budget... Or refrain from giving Mauritius money and land.
There's no shortage of money in the UK, the British government just knowingly allocates it towards bad ends.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
If we just want to make money, why not send children straight to work? Give them amphetamines too for heightened performance... There's more to civilization than making money.
Society isn't really organized for financial benefit, some parts are but most is not. It doesn't make any financial sense to redistribute wealth from young to old via pensions and choke off productive investments. Much of university has no economic return. The origin of university was to train erudite clergy after all.
Excessive materialism is a real problem, especially in Asia. But in other places there's insufficient materialism or a misguided kind of piety that results in wasting resources unnecessarily. Abandoning phonics for instance, nobody was being paid to teach worse, nobody profited from it. The teachers just wanted to do things that way.
There needs to be a balance between 'money money money, I want more money by hook or by crook, let me spin up 50 AI agents thirst-trapping lonely dudes on Insta' and 'fuck the rich, tax the bastards, unrealized capital gains tax now so we can spend six figures on every homeless', far away from those cartoonish extremes and the more moderate but still harmful failure modes they point to.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
If I have a psychopath, who stabs someone to death with a kitchen knife vs one who does it with a switchblade.
If you have a psychopath with a machine gun (or a truck in a tightly packed crowd) then that's a lot more of a problem. The answer is to get rid of the psychopaths, terrorists, enemies, criminals, feral hogs, pit bulls... Not the guns, trucks, drones, fertilizer, chemicals, knives...
In the 18th and 19th centuries they'd go on about good governments bringing Improvement, how obviously you're supposed to drain swamps and irrigate the land and develop agriculture and industry. That was what civilization was all about. We should be continuing with Improvements today rather than just redistributing wealth to and fro.
Guns and drones and vehicles can all be very dangerous if weaponized. Better to make schools more tolerable so nobody shoots them up, better to ensure that school shooters are not sensationalized and rendered infamous by the media... Better to imprison, expel, execute terrorists (or refrain from 'invade the world, invite the world' foreign policy) than make bollards to impede their rampages. Better to liquidate criminals than having a revolving door prison system where they get arrested 14 times and then kill someone, only to be found 'unfit for trial' due to mental illness or retardation. The goal is to render improvements, not just blindly obey a huge agglomeration of laws. The laws were written by men and are interpreted by men for achieving real world goals.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The whole coaching system seems counterproductive to me. Excellence isn't produced by ruthless drill so much as internal all-consuming obsession. If there's some autist who loves maths, then let him do maths, give him more maths. If you train kids to be super good at passing tests, they'll learn and get very good at tests and maths but is that needed? The internal motivation to make cool things in the real world cannot be taught or trained, only internally developed. I guess if you just need more engineers then maxxing the number of good engineers makes sense... But is that what India or Asia really needs, more engineers?
Better more obsessives who make BYD or whatever, new products and companies. Jensen Huang is an obsessive.
Indeed coaching might be talent-destroying if it destroys internal motivation and enthusiasm needed to pursue new things, start new businesses, make innovations. I met a kid who'd been extensively coached to the point of PTSD, literally shaking at the thought of even simple equations, his whole ego had been eroded to nothing by competition and the mathematical certainty of disappointing due to the severity of competition.
And like you say who cares about education now? The best AIs are getting better faster than anyone can learn maths. We should be shutting down schools and universities.
None of this is inflammatory or surprising or extraordinary. The same country that goes around massacring, raping, launching various bombing attacks, assassinations and false flag attacks its entire existence continues to do so... stop the presses! They've been torturing prisoners for many years, why would we expect them to stop now?
They did this kind of thing long before 2023, shooting people because they can: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition?LangID=E&NewsID=24226
There are videos here of a goofy attempt to cover up rape: https://x.com/ApartheidReview/status/2054208876048679271
They dropped the charges, it's not politically possible to punish these guys. How would it be possible, when people riot to free them and politicians leap to their defence? What do they have to fear? It's not like America or a Western country where war crimes are taken painfully seriously.
Would we be surprised if the Syrian government that went around torturing and massacring and suppressing almost the whole time it existed (Hama for instance) continued to do so? Or if the Chinese government which has been constantly being incredibly authoritarian and repressive for its entire existence continues to be authoritarian and repressive? That doesn't need sourcing, it's ordinary and normal.
It's ironic that there are all these people who cry about leftists holding Israel 'to a different standard' than Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran or Syria - when they are the ones who do so, demanding all this evidence that Israel has done something wrong, as if there aren't mountains of killings and atrocities they dish out... If any other country said 'oh the UNHCR is biased against us, Amnesty is biased against us, all the journalists we keep shooting are biased against us, they're all just anti-Our_Country' they wouldn't get even the most credulous to believe such a nakedly self-serving assertion.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
AI capable of fully automated software development should increase demand hugely. Everyone would want their own software, everyone would want to make their own hyperspecific games or movies, send agents out looking for cool stuff in a sea of dross.
Plus business needs like designing new chips, tools, products, marketing to people and agents...
The human Israeli soldiers are rapey - recall the protests and rioting when the Israeli govt briefly tried to arrest some of its soldiers for raping prisoners. Apparently the rapist is now a celebrity in Israel, appearing on TV shows.
It's absolutely believable that the same govt who tolerates raping of prisoners also tolerates the use of dogs for rape. It is a very ordinary claim, not an extraordinary claim.
An Israeli parliamentarian on live camera vigorously protested for doing anything to prisoners:
Lawmaker Hanoch Milwidsky was asked as he defended the alleged abuse whether it was legitimate, "to insert a stick into a person's rectum?"
"Yes!" he shouted in reply to his fellow parliamentarian. "If he is a Nukhba [Hamas militant], everything is legitimate to do! Everything!"
Abusing prisoners also fits into the general Israeli policy of rule by terror and force, their Dahiya doctrine of maximum destruction to civilian targets.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
Is Hantavirus that much of a big deal? There were a bunch of scares, Nipah and Marburg and monkeypox and H5N1 that turned out to be not such a big deal. Everyone is just a bit scared since COVID and so the media will amp that right up.
I know degens on 4chan have already anthropomorphized and sexualized the hantavirus like COVID before that but we should probably be fine? They panic about everything, real or imaginary.
Nevertheless anyone who comes down with a novel strain of disease should be strictly quarantined IMO, not flown around the world to max out infectivity.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
But isn't it straightforward to consider the goals and whether they've been achieved or look like they're going to be achieved sometime soon? Has the US made gains and if so, where are they?
Was territory secured? No. Has a friendly government been installed? No. Have resources been secured? No, quite the opposite, resources have been threatened as fuel prices rise... Is there a plan to achieve victory? Probably not, Trump has been pursuing all kinds of ideas in quick succession - threats to bomb energy infrastructure, a blockade, some kind of diplomatic solution, escorts for the strait of Hormuz. It doesn't seem like there's any well-considered plan for victory.
Meanwhile Iran already seems to be picking the fruits of victory, announcing tolls for oil tankers, declaring sovereignty over cables in the straits of Hormuz. They seem to have secured some territory.
The closest thing to a success is the notion that Iran's missile and drone capabilities have been degraded. But they still seem to be capable of bombing the UAE, pipelines, oil tankers. The Iranians could also claim 'oh well we've degraded US air defences in the Gulf and burned through much of the US munition stockpile', that seems a draw at best for the US, considering both gains and losses.
On the other hand, I guess you might be right about Kagan and it's just shameless pandering to Democrat sensibilities so that he can try Real Regime Change in a few years. Maybe defeat-maxxing is the start of a revenge mythology, like how the Italians seethed about losing in Ethiopia and went back in under Mussolini?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
What I am trying to say is that the Iranian government's hatred of Israel and desire for nuclear weapons was pretty maximal before the latest attack, so I doubt that this will provoke the reaction you predict. At this point, the main thing for Israel (and the US) to do, to paraphrase the Untouchables, is the Chicago Way.
t. you
No, it's not merely the random Afghans that make their own way that I'm talking about but the ones that the government went out of their way to resettle in the UK, ostensibly because some idiot leaked some data. It was thought the Taliban might do recriminations against Afghans that worked with British forces there. Realistically the Taliban have other concerns.
That's what I'm talking about. I think the UK should have spent those billions on British people, not Afghans.
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