RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8hr ago
But is the US military actually involved in decision-making, or is it more people like Hegseth and Laura Loomer? CSIS and RAND are serious about strategy. Are their reports actually read by the decisionmakers? The serious strategists have been saying for years that the US needs more cost-efficient SHORAD and anti-drone weapons and large-scale production of munitions yet the message doesn't seem to have filtered through.
If the US and Chinese Navies sink each other in a Taiwan fight, the status quo is maintained and the US wins.
If the US and Chinese Navies sink eachother in a Taiwan fight, the Chinese build a new navy much faster and win. They also bomb Taiwan's ports and energy infrastructure to threaten or actually inflict intolerable suffering on the island.
How are big, slow, flammable cargo ships supposed to get through to a port if the Chinese decide to sink them with missiles or just wreck the ports? These are the east coast ports not needed for invasion... How is Taiwan supposed to produce its own food without fertilizer, without power for food processing and refrigeration, without fuel for food distribution? How are the fuel storages and food storages supposed to survive bombing? All of those things go away if the Chinese decide to hit them with their huge arsenal of missiles and drones. The world's biggest drone producer is not going to have a shortage of drones.
That's where I disagree with the CSIS wargames, they assume a very rosy picture:
Even if China blocked all imports, including food—and accepted the global criticism for deliberately starving a population— Taiwan could feed its population for nine months using both domestic production and inventories.
How are inventories going to be sustained and distributed under a constant bombing campaign? Hardening fuel storage is good but what about the engine rooms and pumping machinery needed to get the fuel out of storage? That's tricky to harden, needs ventilation...
And what are the chances this conflict is over within nine months? This would be a great power war and they last for years and years. China's greatest strength is in industrial power and manpower, they would prefer a quick victory but will accept attritional, industrial warfare too.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
You know what's even better than first principles reasoning? Already knowing the answer. I already know that fusion rocketry designs can perform long-range spaceflight, to the edge of the solar system at least without being restricted to tiny payloads. You can do a quick internet search if this is new information to you.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Without the radars, THAAD is not very useful. Yes, you can have uplink to other sensors but they've been hitting the uplinks too. Missiles and drones are getting through regularly, daily... And it's not just a single THAAD radar either that's been destroyed, 2-3 have been lost on the THAAD front and another very heavy fixed radar in Qatar got hit too. Losing one would be bad enough, there are only 8 THAAD batteries in the world. These are not easily replaced systems.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Trump demonstrated quite clearly that the US military is far more capable and combat-ready than observers had assumed
But without proper planning or strategy. Trump apparently didn't consider that Iran might close the straits of Hormuz, only now is there bleating about insuring vessels, only now are defence company executives being summoned to boost production. The plan seems to have been 'big strike package and then we win', which just isn't how things work.
Maybe nobody in the US decision-making cabal knows that Taiwan imports the vast majority of its food, energy and fertilizer by sea. Maybe they aren't aware that Taiwan can be blockaded into submission while China retains access to land markets and enjoys self-sufficiency in grain if not meat. Maybe American leaders are still thinking in terms of wars lasting a few days or weeks, rather than years. Wars between strong powers tend to drag on for a lot longer than expected. What is the plan to defeat China in attritional, industrial warfare?
THAAD getting wrecked by Iran's missile and drone arsenal is also pretty alarming. THAAD is what's supposed to defend Guam and other US bases necessary for this war.
Capability is not just tactical success but understanding the nature of the war you're going to fight, preparing the proper force and choosing the right missions and tactics. Executing the wrong approach proficiently isn't good enough.
“Currently, we are doing very well in terms of building the capacity and the resolve to use [military deterrence], but we still need to work on ensuring that … both overt and potential adversaries fully understand the consequences of deterrence and the gains and losses,” he said.
He could well be saying 'how do we deter Trump, he doesn't seem to think strategically at all.' And that is indeed a nightmarish situation to be in, since quantitative superiority means nothing to a man who doesn't understand numbers, just makes them up. Qualitative superiority is useless since Trump always thinks he has the biggest and best of everything. What can you do but roll the dice and let the outcome speak for itself? Or just wait for more unforced errors? The waiting for unforced errors strategy seems to have been going pretty well for China thus far.
The link you posted just looks at Sweden and America and finds no clear evidence of overall construction productivity gains, despite them being wholly different countries with different regulations, environment, scale and market dynamics. It's not very useful, which is why I didn't address it.
My link is also, on reflection, not particularly helpful.
Prefabrication is not a silver bullet, it's just one part of a series of improvements that should be made. There should be prefabrication (especially in the larger projects where it's most helpful), consolidation of the construction sector, planning reform, expert management of large infrastructure projects and cost-efficient safety and environmental regulation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
It's true that there are issues with low volume and transportation. Prefabrication works best for bigger projects like multi-family houses or apartments. Even so there are still some gains from prefabrication and related but distinct techniques like panelization: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877705816301734
I was going to make my usual argument about AI being used for target acquisition in Iran, new mathematical proofs, finding zero-day exploits in Firefox, general-purpose robots, just about everything...
But nobody's going to be persuaded by that who hasn't already been persuaded at this point.
What happens without the 'AI bubble'? In the minds of the finance class, it means that the big tech companies go back to share buybacks. They conducted hundreds of billions in buybacks 2015-2022 and have since largely stopped to fund their investment in AI. Enormous amounts of money are being diverted from asset managers and financial elites to producers of HBM, to advanced packaging, to Nvidia, to power plants, construction workers, AI researchers... That's what they're unhappy about.
This is what definancialization looks like. It's anathema to a certain short-termist mindset that has predominated since the 1980s, a shareholder-first capitalism that has resulted in a hollowing out of productive industry. The beancounters preferred to offshore, to cut R&D, to cut investment, to cut costs.
There's a conflict between financial capitalism and productive capitalism and productive capitalism is taking back the reins. The beancounters are discovering that they're no longer in charge and are spreading fear and doubt to try and get the tech companies to change course. The tech companies know a bit more about technology than the beancounters and are fully committed to competition and investment.
And so we get these headlines:
Oracle and OpenAI drop Texas data center expansion plan, Bloomberg News reports
In September, the companies had announced plans for an additional potential expansion of 600 megawatts near the flagship Stargate site in Abilene, Texas. That capacity will now be fulfilled at one of the other data center campuses being built, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Friday.
They're just moving their plans around. The other article:
But investors have grown worried about how it would fund the data center expansion needed to serve OpenAI and other customers, including Elon Musk's xAI and Meta.
In December, the company said it expects capital expenditures for fiscal 2026 to be $15 billion higher than the $35 billion figure the company estimated during its first-quarter earnings call.
They're spending more money and investors are upset ('it should've been me getting that money, not people working in the real world!') Oracle is a relatively small company but they used to do enormous buybacks, $150 billion 2015-2022. Now they stopped, now they're issuing shares and borrowing money to invest. Investors don't like that at all. Thus we get this bizarre discourse about how supposedly all these companies are selling API access at a loss when open-source models are very cheap and suggest huge profits on inference. Then there's all this talk about how R&D costs should be classified - beancounter talk. The people who actually know the real numbers in Google, Microsoft, Amazon have clearly made their decision to spend big, why should we second-guess them based on vibes?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form
This is the underlying problem, not a functional constraint. We easily have enough wealth in the Western world to afford a one-worker household. The problem is that wealth is being siphoned off into a boomer class of homeowners who got in under the old scheme and demand house price appreciation/free medicine, a migrant class that soaks up welfare/scams and a giant bureaucratic class that chokes the productive economy with idiotic rules.
This is the result of a lack of patriotism and virtue. Greedy boomers demand more welfare and fewer taxes (to hell with investment and science if it pays off after they're dead!) Treacherous politicians invite in low-performing populations to prop up their voter base (and drive more productive, sceptical, informed voters out of their electorates), aided by short-termist business lobbies looking for cheap labour. They set up huge DEI infrastructure that complicates and worsens everything with quotas, they let criminals out onto the streets. Bureaucrats do empire building and feel-good wrecking of energy infrastructure for the climate, they wreck national defence while the politicians start stupid wars. Everything is far more expensive than it needs to be.
Voters and sensible people generally get disillusioned with politics, leaving the corrupt and stupid to become leaders. Everything compounds on everything else, metastasizing.
Take housing. Housing is easy to build, you can build the pieces in a factory and assemble on site. Yet productivity has actually been falling because unions and lobbies refuse to allow superior methods, because imported labour does a shoddy job, because the bureaucrats drown everything in idiotic regulations, because there's woeful planning and administration of infrastructure projects needed to go alongside housing... In the UK they actually employ humans to wander around buildings checking for fires. It's retarded. They have de-automated the fire alarm. They stupidly built flammable cladding, stupidly adhered to a policy of 'have people stay in their apartments and burn', realized that was bad and mandated a 24/7 'waking watch' instead. A system run by this kind of intellect isn't going to produce good outcomes.
In 2024, construction began on just 107,530 homes in the UK — a drop of 29.5% from 2023 and 40% from 2022.
Much of the West is in a multi-causal social death spiral that technology and the industrial economy have been heroically outpacing, most of the time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, it's just not relevant.
I am saying these things:
- Conventional rockets are insufficient for timely and economical development of space beyond Earth's orbit.
- Fusion rocketry is much superior
- Therefore we should prioritize developing fusion rocketry before heading out into deep space
Quiet_Nan was saying
- Fusion rocketry is difficult
- Fusion rocketry won't escape the rocket equation
Neither point matters in relation to my argument. I think we all know that fusion rocketry is difficult.
You are asking in response:
- How much better are fusion rockets?
- It's kind of possible to estimate how good a fusion rocket is, even though we have no actual fusion rockets...
But that also doesn't really matter to my point. As long as it's significantly better than chemical rocketry, which it is, then that makes it a better option for long-range spaceflight, since it can do the work and chemical rockets can't.
I don't understand your somewhat patronizing approach of asking about concept-based performance. I don't need to cite a specific fusion design to know that fusion designs can provide much more capable rocketry. That's inherent given the nature of fusion vs chemical rocketry. We already know this. There is plenty of variance between designs and some may just not end up being workable.
Trying to explain specific impulse, thrust vs delta v to me is wholly irrelevant to the substance of what I'm saying!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
GPS is a very weak signal by the time it arrives all the way from a high orbit: not hard to jam or spoof as compared to something like radar. Jammers can be cheap and numerous.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Ironically enough quiet_NaN doesn't actually do that, he just gives general exposition about the difficulties of spaceflight. Misleading, in my view, since energy density is vital, that's the fundamental essence of the entirety of rocketry. Nuclear fusion based rocketry would not just 'help a bit' but provide enormously greater capabilities.
We all agree that nuclear rockets are far more effective. Trying to plug in numbers to the equation is useless at this phase because we don't know how heavy a fusion rocket will be, nor what kind of exhaust velocity can be achieved. We don't have any such rockets. But we do know that chemical rockets are extremely slow and inefficient. They're unsuitable for serious space colonization (as are human bodies in my view).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Assuming such a thing is possible.
It's not possible. The US navy is sitting back 100s of kilometres to be out of range of the short-range missiles and drones that Iran can field. They do NOT want to be sitting right off the coast of Iran! That would massively intensify the drain on US interceptor munitions too, moving right into the firing line.
The US campaign thus far has been reliant upon standoff attacks to minimize casualties, an enormous chain of in-air-refuelled carrier aircraft and long range missiles. Just look at the pounding delivered to the US naval base in Bahrain.
The damage to US prestige from a destroyer getting wrecked by a few of these drones is worth avoiding much more than the minimal gains from escorting.
They couldn't successfully defend shipping in the Red Sea against the Houthis, traffic remains way down from what it was, so why would they be able to do it for Iran?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
the tyranny of the rocket equation can not be escaped by providing amazing energy density
Why would we need to escape the rocket equation? It's like going from horses to cars. Both need fuel and both have limits in speed and transport capacity. But cars are so much better than horses. The range of a car is much greater than the range of a horse.
I know that fusion rocketry is very difficult, getting a magnetic nozzle or similar advancements has not been achieved. Fusion (besides Orion-style) has not been achieved. But that should be what we aim for.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I don't see why we should be worried about a little fallout in the atmosphere, we detonated thousands of H-bombs and there were no significant radiological consequences. Millions of people die every year from air pollution already.
Wait for fusion IMO.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Well unlike last time the Americans aren't going in for a ground war and occupation, just bombing. It's already fairly unpopular as a war. With Iraq there was at least a modest honeymoon period of support.
And most of all the whole operation seems to have been planned out by a gang of dribbling buffoons. Trump has just declared that the US will safeguard shipping in the straits of Hormuz (a repeat of the Red Sea campaign) but the Navy says no, all their warships are allocated. Rubio says there are issues with missile shortages, Trump says munitions stocks are virtually infinite... They're blurting out random justifications and new strategies daily, (we'll try arming the Kurds, that's a neat trick!) Now Trump is lashing out at Spain for not providing assistance. Events have drifted out of their control.
The Ashkenazi elite are not showing proof-of-intellect either. Perhaps they simply cannot sway anyone with a high IQ, perhaps all the clever planners in the Pentagon think this is deeply retarded? Colby never wrote anything about more wars in the Middle East in his strategic vision. The Israelis are reliant on these religious weirdoes who, per the disconcerted reports of their subordinates, are saying the campaign all part of God's plan, Armageddon and the end of days. You can install a religious weirdo in the Pentagon or various high offices but you can't make the general staff and the troops all convert to Evangelical Dispensationalism.
There are limits to Israeli control of America. They have considerable power at the top end and in media but not deep within institutions or amongst the general public.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The limits of what's possible are still very great. Ecology is just a thin smear on the crust of this planet. Our energy production is similar to a man standing waist-deep in a lake, sticking out his tongue in a rainstorm and slurping up a tiny fraction of the torrent that's falling out of the sky. Anything a human can do, AGI can also do by definition - and it would be a human that doesn't need to sleep, that can be produced in weeks, upgrading in months...
AGI absolutely can make spaceflight easy, by rapidly developing all the technologies we need, by accelerating energy research and industrial output. We can use AGI to tap new resources.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
I think the idea of biological humans colonizing Mars is silly. It's very likely easier to make a strong AI than colonize Mars, certainly more profitable. Send robots and develop Mars. Or move inwards, there is lots of solar power closer to the Sun.
Likewise I've always been suspicious of chemical rockets. If it's not nuclear, why bother leaving Earth's gravity well? Chemical rockets are just too wimpy for serious space travel. Develop fusion first, then move out.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Can you please link to a source?
https://x.com/GeoConfirmed/status/2028088723770945712
Occam's razor suggests that if a school is bombed in a country being bombed, it is overwhelmingly likely that the country bombing it that did the bombing. There needs to be evidence to the contrary to support any alternate hypothesis. There is no such valid evidence. This 'air of uncertainty' about what might be happening is silly. It would be ridiculous to say 'actually it's the US that is bombing their troops in Kuwait' without any evidence.
Exactly what steps would be required to "simply acquire" nuclear weapons?
It's 1940s technology. Enrich uranium, build the bomb casing, test and deploy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Echoes of the Gulf War here, everyone was stunned when Saddam offered to let in inspectors to check for WMDs. Putin offered to mediate. But the Israelis couldn't have that, they were going 'oh well there's no way to be sure, inspectors can be deceived' and the war started anyway. The troops were being moved in, the decision had been made, all this diplomacy was just to tighten the noose, to establish the face-saving rhetoric, not for the ostensive purpose.
In this case, the US had already moved an enormous amount of striking power into the region, those F-22s, the AWACs planes, the carriers and tankers. There was clearly a strike planned. The Israelis just didn't want Trump to chicken out at the last minute, they make each stage on the path to war seem like the path of least resistance.
The Israelis were nudging and pushing and cajoling the US into this situation from start to finish. Netanyahu was constantly flying to Washington to do this cajoling... I bet the Israelis were encouraging the US to go in with maximalist objectives for the diplomacy, providing 'intelligence' that the Iranians were lying or planning a pre-emptive strike. Then they create a deadline, make it seem impossible to back out.
Attacking Iran makes little sense as a strategic objective for the US otherwise.
The US is on the other side of the world! What does MENA matter to America, now that America is energy-independent? Why were there all these troops in the Middle East in the first place? Why not make a deal with Iran to pull them away from the Russia-Chinese camp? All these Gulf allies do deals with China anyway, they are not exactly loyal or capable allies.
If you're worried about Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, why would you assassinate the man who made a fatwa against producing, deploying, using nuclear weapons? That's stupid. It's possible that this is all part of the plan, they want Iran to try nuclearizing and then that will 'justify' a massive disarming strike or ground invasion, possibly nuclear-armed, blow the conflict completely out of proportion. Or perhaps it's a risk they've considered and approved. Israel can run rings around this administration, that much is clear.
One also wonders what leverage Israel has on Trump. Trump feels free to scorn his other billionaire donors like Musk or the entire business lobby with his tariffs, suggesting that it's not just Adelson money at play here. Perhaps it's just natural affinity, he was after all Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel in NY. Or maybe the Kushner connections. Or maybe something else, who can say?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
So you are confident it was Israel who did that?
Yes, the 'actually Iranian rockets blew up their own school' storyline has been debunked.
it's pretty clearly better for Israel to be feared than to be loved
How's that working out for Israel right now?
The notion that Iran's desire for nuclear weapons was maximal is bizarre. If they wanted nuclear weapons, they would simply acquire them like North Korea did. They would not go back and forth seeking deals or negotiating, they would just acquire the weapons, test them and deploy them. Iran has not done this! Therefore, their desire for nuclear weapons was not maximal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
But I suppose they can just scale up mass production of nukes, like the USSR did in the 80s... how did that work out for them.
I don't think the US wants to enter a contest of mass production and industrial capacity with China. Missile defence has never been cost-effective, isn't today (as we see all these missiles piercing the existing Iron Dome whether via saturation or just outright penetration) and likely won't in the future unless there are major developments in laser efficiency. It's not that hard to make low-flying nuclear cruise missiles or fractional orbital bombardment systems or HGVs, very hard to shoot them all down.
Chinese missile defence probably doesn't work either. But at the end of the day, they do have this huge pool of talented engineers (much more than America), they do have all these robots and industrial machinery, they're marching up the value chain in all kinds of industries. Drones, 5G, renewable energy, shipbuilding, steel, nuclear power... There's no reason they can't match and surpass anything the US can do, given enough time. If an American engineer can make something, so can a Chinese engineer.
Even if we were to go invade North Korea tomorrow, what do you think China would do about it?
Well they'd just push the US out of North Korea like last time, probably. I think people just don't understand the scale of what China can field, if they really want to. They have 20 Million men turning 18 each year. Imagine facing an army of 20 Million at the front, imagine facing 85% of the world's drone production fired off at you day and night, imagine facing the production engineers that are brutalizing the world's car industry with their 'overproduction'. That's not even a fully mobilized China. The US mobilized about 12% of the population in WW2 for the military, so for China that'd be well over 100 million men.
You have to kill 20 million in a year just to keep up - they'll have another 20 million to throw at you next year! It's a ruthless autocracy, a party-state with total internal control and massive propaganda capabilities. Don't take them lightly!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Hold on, are we considering WW3, a full nuclear exchange, global economic collapse and megadeaths on US home soil in relation to the mid-terms? Huh?
I know it's him that brought it up... but the midterms really don't matter. Elections do not matter at all in comparison, you could have a military coup and it would barely make the top 10 most important details about this situation.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Well they did blow up a bunch of kids and the head of state on home soil whereas before Israel mostly just blew up nuclear scientists or proxies elsewhere... That could get anyone's blood up.
Things can always happen for the first time. Things can always get worse.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
The US has a whole legal requirement to maintain Israel's 'qualitative military edge', so they refuse to sell advanced hardware to anyone that might be or become anti-Israel. The Egyptians for instance get the crappiest versions of the F-16, no AESA radars and no AIM-120s.
Israel meanwhile has no such concerns about damaging US interests by selling on technology. This is what I mean by the relationship being asymmetric.
Firstly the US lost another F-15 to Iran, apparently they rescued the pilot, also lost a bunch of drones...
Secondly, air superiority in NATO parlance means 'the degree of dominance in the air battle of one force over another that permits the conduct of operations by the former and its related land, sea, and air forces at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.' It is not derived from calculating losses of aircraft.
Thirdly, there is nothing above air supremacy. If the US possessed air supremacy US forces would not be under air attack.
The US doesn't actually have air superiority, partially on a definitional level because this is a weird air-only conflict... Both sides are just bombing eachother. Also, the US doesn't have air superiority because Iran is also launching their own air attacks against US forces and Israel, at times and places of Iran's choosing. This is why the US is launching all these standoff attacks and long in-air refuelling chains to bomb Iran, why even Hegseth is saying it will take some time to achieve air superiority. If the US held air superiority they could move closer in, secure the straits of Hormuz against air attack and focus on bombing Iran.
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