RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
22hr ago
The reason isn't a failure of public transport but a failure of Americans. Get rid of the lowlifes shooting up in train stations or pushing random people onto the tracks and then you can have an efficient public transport system. Normal people don't want to be around these net-negatives and will move out to the suburbs, segregate themselves away in cars because they, quite reasonably, don't trust others.
"Teens menace boy with machete and pepper spray on Queens bus" https://youtube.com/watch?v=qalXSOLvEAU
Why would you want to take a bus if this is what you might get?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
The state provides lots of public services that aren't supposed to be revenue-neutral though. Public libraries for instance or parks.
I think a razor focus on revenue and cost is besides the point. Public transport should be more systemically efficient (1 engine for 40 rather than 40 engines for 40: economies of scale), produce less pollution than cars, take up less space... The problem in Washington isn't just that it's expensive but that it's unsafe (catching on fire for instance), not transporting good numbers of people. Probably epic amounts of corruption going on too.
Cost is important, it shouldn't be excessively expensive, but taxes are a thing for a reason. If all government services were expected to recoup their costs why would we have taxes?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Does this show the weakness of UBI or weakness of American administrative capacity? California can't do HSR but HSR is still possible. In many countries public transport is perfectly usable, respectable, junkie-free...
Also if we're talking about UBI how hard can it be to get a robot to drive the buses and trains and cut down labour costs? I agree that UBI in the current American political system would be a giant mess. But that's not so much about UBI but about the American system.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Why would the officer corps as a whole be split? Either Hegseth commands the loyalty of the military (via purging and promoting the right cadres into key positions) or he doesn't and they topple him.
I don't see why they'd split evenly rather than cluster on one side. The key actors are all in Washington I think, the Pentagon, White House, NSA, DIA, Senate, Supreme Court and House. Controlling all that confers legitimacy and a fair bit of power.
Someone would control the troops in Washington and then they'd set the tone, determine who's the legitimate govt and who's the traitorous rats being swiftly brought to justice.
I mean, even leaving Washington during a major political crisis is a serious show of weakness, it kind of means they don't trust the troops there doesn't it? If they don't have authority over the capital, where would they have authority? It's a bad look to not control the capital.
Also, the US military (left and right) agrees that China is a massive threat, why would they decide to start killing eachother in the face of this powerful adversary rather than working out some compromise?
Thinking backwards, surely post-Soviet Russia is a far more favourable environment for a civil war than America today? Yeltsin torpedoed the economy, it sank like a stone. Oligarchs looting everything and a huge communist party - toxic combination! Military shelling Parliament with tanks. Very dodgy elections. No good reason to accept the legitimacy of the government, they created it only a few years ago. The national culture of Russia seems to be less law-abiding than the US too. But they kept it together. There seem to be structural reasons preventing civil wars.
The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently. And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.
And how many brigades is Carney raising, 'to build our strength at home'? What about H-bombs, is he making any of those? Long range missiles? Attack drones? The Canadians are buying some... from the US.
Canadian leadership is basically unserious, they're pussies and losers I think. Same with Australian leadership or European leadership with the possible exception of Poland. They talk and talk and talk about rearming but do very little. Germany raised one new brigade, Poland raised 5, France is raising 1, the British army is still shrinking. A brigade is not a very large force, roughly 3-5000 men.
Australia is buying imaginary AUKUS-class and likely-imagined Virginia class submarines from America (they probably can't be made since the US is too slack to build enough for their own needs). The Australian surface fleet is in complete shambles. There are many more pressing needs than national defence apparently, like giving enormous amounts of taxpayer money to NDIS disability scammers or propping up house prices.
These people talk about partnerships and free trade agreements (and EU integration for Ukraine) but sign no alliances. They talk about reform but do nothing substantial or make things worse in dull, boring ways. They fundamentally have no concept of what they're actually supposed to be doing as leaders, their notion of leadership is some combination of 'make people-pleasing sounds' and 'follow legalistic/moralist codes without regard for the outcome'. At no point does leadership enter the equation for them. It doesn't matter if they have to spend a fortune on welfare for tax-leeching rapey migrants, if they have to build a fish disco for a nuclear plant or wreck their energy market. They'll do all this and find some way to defend it when it's unpopular.
They have no real concept that those are bad things and should be stopped. Some of them (Denmark) have cottoned on that voters don't like the rapey migrants and moved against that particular policy. But they still aren't real leaders, real leaders would foresee this issue from a base-level understanding of reality and their national interests and never even consider it. It's the difference between retracting your hand from the stove after being burnt and not being so stupid to touch the stove in the first place. Real leaders write new laws, establish new principles and adapt their policies to the times proactively. Trump may be wrong and foolish in many respects but he is at least a real leader.
So Carney can 'stop pretending' and 'name reality' but what strength is he building? Canada has three understrength brigades and only one deployable overseas + some training/reserve forces, the whole Canadian army might easily disappear in a single battle. And acting together, what is that? More conferences and blathering? What is he going to do with one deployable brigade? Pretending is all he can do.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Well, I use Opus 4.5 on the $20 plan because I'm cheap and I find it very useful.
I think 'Ralph' is as dumb an idea as it sounds, no current AI is capable of going on autopilot like that. It needs a human to find errors for it and it needs clear human instructions for what to do or else it makes up its own vision for your software. I don't trust Opus's testing either, it has this alarming tendency of performative testing which doesn't actually test the real systems, just tests some pretend BS instead. It's much better with logging and manual checking for debugging. That's why I don't trust agents much, I find that they can just wreck the code or do weird things, go completely over the top from what you asked and are expensive to boot. But Opus on the website is basically an agent, you can just say 'edit these files inline' and it'll do so and that's good enough for me.
The code itself does work pretty reliably. I haven't seen any real technical debt, with context management and a basic understanding of what you're doing it'll work out just fine even on a fairly complex project.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
My point is that either Hegseth or the Obama era generals get arrested or shot as the military assesses its position. It's not like there are two Pentagons, one for each side.
No nuclear power has ever fought a civil war, nor have there been any major wars between nuclear powers. NATO and Russia are not at war, Pakistan and India skirmish at most.
And the whole idea is very unlikely. Look at January 6th. Red Americans didn't even bring their guns to overthrow the govt. It was the fakest coup attempt in history, riddled with intelligence assets too. America is not prepared for a civil war, fundamentally unserious in political violence.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
But that wouldn't be a civil war, it'd be like Korea where the martial law attempt failed because the military didn't really want to do a coup. If the military goes blue then the country is blue. If red then the country is red.
Only if the military actually divides then there would be a civil war. The US military really does not want to fight a potential nuclear war on US soil, against other Americans, they'll stay united, they might well decide to run the country from the Pentagon but they won't fight eachother. The moment they see the wind heading towards the blue side, they'll unite down that path, or vis versa. The Oklahomah National Guard or whoever do not want to fight massively outnumbered and outgunned, they'd lose.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
The Troubles wasn't a civil war, fighting was much less intense than in the Cultural Revolution or Germany squashing the communists. The UK government won and could've won harder at any time, if they were willing to use force more aggressively, if they didn't care about the media and fully committed to crushing the insurgency. What Cromwell did in Ireland, that's a civil war. There are major battles, sieges, multiple armies and an enormous death toll, mostly civilian.
Nuclear armed militaries have strong incentives to be united, they don't want to fight a nuclear war against themselves.
When it comes to inflicting atrocities, the state enjoys escalation dominance. They have everything militias have and much more. Even in the era of pikes and muskets (surely more accommodating to the untrained than today's weapons) Cromwell's army could singlehandedly dominate Britannia. People certainly tried to resist but the army crushed them. Only when the army divided could anything change.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
You know I was going to say 'while he is bad he didn't quite go that far' and it seems I misremembered, you are right. He clearly did:
"If I had a gun with two bullets, and I was in a room with Hitler, Bin-Laden, and Toby; I would shoot Toby twice!"
hoped Gilbert’s children would die “in their mother’s arms,” saying: “Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy.”
One could say the first one is exaggerated but in the context of the second one...
However bad Jones is, I still think the US govt and military is far too strong for any serious civil war though. No rich industrialized nations with strong nuclear-armed militaries have ever had a civil war. Coups and smashing of dissidents are more likely. Even with an economic depression and a completely delegitimized government (suppose that the Senate and Congress were forcibly realigned under a president for life) there is still the military and if they are united on one side, that side wins. Russia in the 1990s was in a state of complete chaos and disaster and yet remained intact. The Chinese Cultural Revolution saw massive amounts of purging, street battles with heavy weapons between different factions of Maoists... but China was still united. Germany after WW1 was starving, the economy was obliterated, they'd just lost the kaiser and the war. The communists rose up and the army massacred them. Professional militaries in developed countries tend not to split into factions, I don't see why they would in the US.
America isn't Niger or Iraq, there are no other bodies that can plausibly contest the government's surveillance, targeting and striking power. Militias are LARPers rather than actual competitors against professional troops. I massively doubt this idea that guerrillas can snipe the drone pilot or whatever copypasta there is about America being vulnerable to an insurgency. Guerrilas don't have the ability to find and target professional troops, they don't have this huge targeting machine. The troops can just sit on base rather than commute and just execute everyone on the Palantir hit list with air power, while they listen in on comms, while they have informers infiltrating dissident groups. Consider what they did with the January 6th people, they found them and locked them up with intelligence resources. No strong state will lose to an insurgency if they actually want to win, only if they're obsessed with optics or don't really care is there a chance for the insurgents. That's why we have tanks, artillery, aircraft and professional armies and not just riflemen in civilian clothing. By definition a civil war is a serious war, the state will be fully committed.
"There seems to be some mistake, I was going to LARP Red Dawn and pepper your patrols with sniper fire."
"Dude I'm a Bolshevik, we don't believe in 'patrols'. We will take all the food and fuel and force obedience. We will shoot you for being bourgeois. Resist and I'll go after your family, I'll burn down your whole town. Then I'll propagandize that you started it, you deserved it and it never happened but it should've."
As you can see, the difference between a civil war and a cultural revolution/top down political violence isn't that reassuring.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
The prequels felt like they were real Star Wars even with their bad aspects. Much of Disney Star Wars seems plasticky, fake, interchangeable with other late 2010s/2020s media.
Where were the lightsaber battles, not one good lightsaber battle in the whole sequel trilogy! Nothing to rival Darth Maul, Dooku or Battle of the Heroes.
The space battles weren't that great either. They did to Star Wars whatever was done to make skim milk.
Still, he rules the better part of the world (in more ways than one)
Kind of?
White men do have 90%+ of the world's nuclear weapons and could theoretically subjugate the bulk of the world, extracting resources at will. Theoretically, there's military and technological supremacy over non-China. Certainly there's a fairly high standard of living.
But in actual fact, most large companies and government organizations in supposedly white-ruled countries seems to have a DEI policy that works against white men. In actual fact, the prevailing animus even in the US still seems to be anti white male. That is to say media, ads, television and video games seem to be lukewarm at best about white men, opposed at worst.
"It's OK to be white" as a slogan was treated as a serious, potentially terror-related, political crime. Maybe that's changed more recently?
White men may rule the world but they do not seem to rule their own countries, or at least rule in favour of themselves in the countries they supposedly rule. Control without accruing gains isn't true control I think. The loot flows from whites in Minnesota to blacks in Somalia, not the other way around. Supposedly white-run America enjoys overwhelming superiority in strength to Somalia but who is making gains here, who is really in control?
Military and economic strength is not as important as political strength, that pillar is the most important of all I think. When we study history, we seem to focus on the military and economic angles, the great leaders, innovations, organizing principles that seem to drive history. Or with the HBD crowd race is added to the mix. But it's political strength that is the most important factor, it's 'why' Rome could fight on after losing so many men to Hannibal but then lose their 'we will never lose' aura and fall to a force of Goths and Huns. Political strength is why Somalia stands above America in some respects, even though by any of the normal analytical frameworks we use the very notion is laughable.
No, Americans do like to live in cities like all settled peoples. Americans invented the skyscraper!
Until recently the US had dense and highly developed urban centres. Americans failing to defend and preserve their city centres is a serious failure.
More options
Context Copy link