RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
https://www.seatrade-maritime.com/security/iran-says-thai-ship-allowed-to-pass-the-strait-of-hormuz
The Iranians have established a safe passage between the islands of Qeshm and Larak in the straits. Friendly tankers can go through the approved sealane, perhaps after paying a 2 million dollar fee. Unfriendly tankers can be sunk.
I'm begging people to read more deeply about what's going on!
And a lot of the AI investment that we're seeing in the US adds to Taiwanese GDP and it adds to Korean GDP but not really that much to US GDP.
How can this be?
NVIDIA's revenue for fiscal year 2026 (ending January 25, 2026) was $215.94 billion
Nvidia revenue would be roughly 0.7% of US GDP if it were all in America. Nvidia margin is about 75%. So 25% of revenue goes to manufacturers in Korea or Taiwan. Maybe another 25% is foreign employees, operating expenses abroad. At least 50% of Nvidia should be derived as US economic activity. The chips are designed in the US after all. That's a cool 100 billion dollars or 0.3% of GDP, nothing to sneeze at.
Then there are all the other AI hardware companies like AVGO, the cloud providers like Azure or AWS, the AI companies themselves.
How could people possibly be building these gigantic datacentres and not have that picked up in GDP? https://youtube.com/watch?v=VLgDvjcvURc
There's another more technical point which is that some of the AI investment as the AI investment directly in semiconductors isn't actually classified as investment in the national income and product accounts. It's classified as intermediate inputs.
If GDP is somehow not measuring the impact of AI investment then so much the worse for the GDP calculators I think. And it's not even clear that this is the case, EY seems to disagree:
https://www.ey.com/en_us/insights/ai/ai-powered-growth
AI-driven capital spending – especially in software and computing – has become a major growth engine, fueling an impressive 1 percentage point (ppt) boost to GDP growth in the second quarter of 2025 alone
I don't know if EY knows better than Goldman Sachs, I don't have a high opinion of either. However, I think that there are lots of people who want to hear that the bubble is popping and grasp for any sign that it is.
Imagine that it was the 1910s and tractors were the big new thing. Obviously tractors raise agricultural productivity. But maybe they're kind of unreliable, maintenance for this new technology is a bitch, maybe the methods for using them aren't well-established, maybe there's some difficult soil where the tractors get bogged down, maybe fuel distribution in the countryside isn't well-developed. There are lots of conservative farmers around. One could easily produce convincing anti-tractor arguments and examples. But in general, tractors would still remain the future of agriculture, profitable to produce and use. You could derive this from first principles, considering the power of engines and their utility vs horses. There was no tractor bubble, there is no AI bubble.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
How so? I remember that everyone shunned the Leninists because Marxism specifically said there would be no revolution in Russia because the industrial working class wasn't developed, hadn't fully reached capitalism. But then Leninism worked while revolution in Germany and Britain was a total failure. All the orthodox Marxists died out and Marxism-Leninism replaced them. Isn't this a relatively straightforward Leninist approach?
I guess there's a big element of 'waiting for revolutionary conditions' but I emphasised that already?
It really depends on it being the 'right time', delegitimization of traditional authorities and persuading a good chunk of the military to join up with the People. The US security forces have certain leftist leanings and maybe the upper officer class too.
Maybe drones democratize combat power such that you can take on any reactionary forces that move in too quickly...
I don't think this plan is desirable or workable really. But how else are you supposed to bring back a dead ideology like Marxism-Leninism?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
he's creamed other smart people in a presidential debate, for instance
Trump can be highly charismatic and adept at manipulating the media without being strategically intelligent as a President, without being a wise leader, without knowing or caring about details, without being able to gauge the competence of advisers and officials, without mastering the institutions he nominally runs.
I think people have an excessively Manichean view of intelligence. It's not that smart people are always better leaders. You can have an intelligent and hard working man fully committed to nation-wrecking ideologies who devotes his intellect to gaslight people to further his wrecking of the country... A stupid leader could run rings around him. Trump has done this at times.
But while you don't have to be smart to do a good job it certainly helps. Intelligence and good judgement is vital for making critical decisions and achieving good outcomes.
Would an intelligent president launch a shambolic tariff campaign against US allies, allies who at times are needed to provide the capital goods for American reindustrialization? Or even start this war that all the other presidents have shied away from? Even at the heights of US power in the 2000s they were unwilling to attack Iran for reasons that the administration is now discovering.
Or back in 2020, if Trump was smart he would've discovered or produced evidence of vote-rigging, not been found trying to produce evidence of vote-rigging.
If Trump were smart he'd organize a clear justification for the war, not have different officials give different adhoc explanations. Certainly not have Rubio out there saying that it was because Israel was about to attack, which may well be true but shouldn't be admitted. He'd explain what the goal is and how the campaign will achieve it. The campaign would be planned out in advance so the necessary forces were there, not bringing in Marines belatedly. He'd be consistent and coherent, not idly proposing that the US and the Ayatollah jointly control the straits of Hormuz, threatening to blow up power plants, walking back threats, saying the war is simultaneously over and needs to continue.
Q: You said the war is 'very complete.' But your defense secretary says 'this is just the beginning.' So which is it?
TRUMP: You could say both
It's dumb. The approach we're observing is a show of weakness, it gives the Iranians hope that if they cause enough pain Trump will chicken out. TACO is just an observation of this inconstancy, it's one of many obvious flaws in the pattern Trump has shown - sensitivity to markets. Even if Trump had been consistent, without the intelligence to formulate good strategies they still wouldn't work. Tariffs alone cannot industrialize America, you'd need judicious and well-executed industrial policy. Air war with Iran isn't going to produce regime change and will have huge costs, this should've been known at the start but wasn't. He needed a rigorous understanding of what can and cannot be done with various forces, considering the balance of power.
I agree that Trump has a strategy but it's dumb, based on false premises.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I don't deny that Leninism works, it clearly does. All the theorycel anarcho-syndicalism and similar kinds of socialism never got off the ground.
Also, is it really Leninism that results in state responsiveness to issues or is that just proficient administration?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Now, if you are inclined to laugh at the outgroup, show how would you do better. Your homework, your hypothetical scenario for today is:
Picture this: January 6th but the protestors bring guns and launch a real coup.
$250 M is peanuts in terms of 'marketing campaigns' but it is a lot of guns and ammo. Obviously you'd need to wait for a good time, during some kind of major crisis when govt authority is weakened. But then you drive in with your comrades and do some shooting and see how it goes from there. If opposition is limpwristed, divided and feckless enough maybe you can get away with it.
Marxism-Leninism is an ideology of shooting, not theory. The Vanguard Party and democratic centralism ideas are almost overtly anti-theorycel. Vanguardism means 'we know better than the plebs how the country should be run and we're going to take over forcefully', democratic centralism means 'shut up and obey the Party Line'.
If you let people vote all you get is democratic socialism not ML. Nobody is going to vote to lose their SUVs and WFH lazygirl jobs. You don't give them the chance to vote, not if you want ML. Nobody ever voted in a communist regime that did real communism (collectivization and nationalization communism), bullets are the way to go.
90% of this is 'waiting for the right time' though. Being lucky is also very important.
If the straits actually open, then logically the Iranians have chickened out. If Trump says he'll bomb power plants unless the straits are opened and then doesn't, doesn't it follow that he chickened out?
Yet gradually, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei opened up. The spokesperson said: “Over the past few days, messages arrived through some friendly countries indicating America’s request for negotiations to end the war, which were responded to appropriately and in accordance with the country’s principled positions – Iran’s stance regarding the strait of Hormuz and the conditions for ending the imposed war has not changed.”
Doesn't seem like much cause for hope, the Israelis will presumably try their hardest to wreck the whole thing. Negotiations at this point seem to be both sides issuing maximalist demands at eachother.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Well he just chickened out, didn't he? He said 'oh we're having productive discussions, deadline is pushed back 5 days' while Iran denies any such negotiations and sticks to their position.
Orange man does seem to be dumb. He's been signalling weakness the whole time with these bizarre market-manipulation/weekend proclamations. Inconstancy and incoherence weakens your position in war of choice where Iran's strategy is to damage the world economy and outlast the enemy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Trump declared victory on day 2 but the key thing about declaring victory is that first you have to actually win... If you declare victory and the other side keeps fighting then you've lost.
Why would Iran cease hostilities only for Trump to attack them again in 6 months time, like last time? How are they supposed to negotiate with an America that constantly tears up agreements with them, with Israelis that bomb their foreign ministers, with assassination attacks when they gather to discuss negotiations? Do they want to turn into Syria, which can apparently just be bombed and invaded by everyone, which has virtually disintegrated as a state? Do they want to turn into Lebanon?
There's a hoary old cliche where people say 'the only thing _____ understands is force'. In this instance, it's not quite right since Trump is interested in both wealth and force. But the general idea stands. If the diplomats are assassinated or otherwise sidelined, then there can only be a military resolution.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I'm inclining towards TACO. Trump is at heart a businessman, why would he want to blow up all this energy infrastructure? He wants to somehow secure the oil, not wreck it. He's been badly misinformed by his 'advisers' but a man who constantly times announcements to game the markets should be relied upon to try and sustain markets.
Also, why are we treating random proclamations on Truth Social like they mean anything? He's declared victory several times, he's made vague nuclear threats, he's just making up nonsense.
But the whole thing has been one unforced error after another, so who can say what will happen?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
Well they've been hitting back at Israeli nuclear sites just today, the town next to their nuclear facility I believe. So it's safe to say their missile arsenal remains operational.
RIP fuel imports... Not holding my breath for this latest threat to be effective.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Are you the Iran Propaganda Minister?
There's clearly a huge gulf between our information sources on this war. You and I are not commentating on the same conflict, at a fundamental level. Maybe you're listening to the mainstream, 'approved' sources. I too saw a little bit of them. On day 1 they were clearly expecting some kind of mass revolution that overthrows the regime. They were clearly delusional. These are the same people who just recycle atrocity propaganda and 'Israeli government sources confirm' or 'US military announces' as news.
If the war was going well, would the Trump administration really be unsanctioning Iranian oil? They're flailing around like a drowning man.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
Oh is that why they changed it? I thought it was her squeaky whiny voice. The new one is better though.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
The US took Iraq also (including defeating the Republican Guard), and they were supposedly a juggernaut as well.
Iraq was an Arab country, they didn't make weapons and never showed much proficiency in fighting. They just relied on Soviet weapons, US assistance in their unsuccessful war with Iran, who was fighting alone. Iraq was also strategically unprepared for the US invasion, they hadn't built up their military specifically over decades to deal with America.
Consider also that the Iraqis are the ones who quickly collapsed to ISIS and had to be bailed out by the US and Iran.
Iran is bigger, smarter and stronger with much more defensible terrain and decades of preparation.
That Iran's capability to bombard is down doesn't mean it's zero.
They just fired off their big alpha strike at the start and have since switched to a more sustainable firing pattern. Same with the US. The US launched its big alpha strike at the start and since then sortie rates have greatly fallen.
The Houthis were being supplied from Iran.
And now the challenge is fighting Iran... I don't see how that supports your case.
Perhaps it just means Bolton is a reverse weather vane.
What, so he was calling for war for the last 30 years and it was dumb then but suddenly it's smart now, when he starts expressing doubts publicly? What's the mechanic here? I think 'reverse weather vane' is an idea that sounds a lot more clever than it actually is.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
likely adequate to sustain the suppression of an Iranian power network indefinitely
The key factor is more sortie rates and speed at which grid infrastructure can be repaired/rebuilt than raw munitions production. Long range B-1 strikes and in-air refuelled F-35s may not have the necessary throughput given other targets. But say that the Iranian grid can be destroyed.
Less Ideally, we turn them into a failed state that wouldn't be able to muster up a nuclear weapons program even if they wanted one
The standard of bombing needed to destroy the grid may not induce state collapse. Germany and Japan were bombed very aggressively but retained their industrial capacity. If even burning down whole cities didn't destroy the grid and military industrial capacity generally then how is the US going to fare today? Iraq's state did not collapse despite a Coalition air campaign successfully wrecking their electrical infrastructure, despite a Kurdish uprising, despite much of the Iraqi army being smashed in Kuwait. Iran is much bigger, smarter and stronger than Iraq in 1991, it seems doubtful that an air campaign alone could destroy their state capacity.
Iran's military facilities probably have their own hardened power sources too like Ukraine. They can probably get China to send them some transformers or power infrastructure, China and Iran are both on 50 Hz grids after all.
Furthermore, if the bombing campaign is explicitly part of a state destruction effort, wouldn't this strongly motivate nuclear weapons development? It seems like a bad option strategically, which is the 'even if it were possible, it would be extremely costly and dangerous' part of my argument.
torchbearer for Western values
Like what? White supremacy or multiculturalism? Fascism or Marxism-Leninism? Scientific racism and social darwinism? Monarchism and the divine right of kings? Catholic integralism? These are all Western ideas.
I guess you mean liberal democracy. But how liberal should democracy be? Should voters be allowed to get what they want, or is that populism? What should be censored? Communists? Nazis? Porn? Anti-feminists? Islam? What should be taught in state education, what is the correct kind of history? Who should be debanked and suppressed? Who controls who is let into the country and in what numbers? Are there such controls? Or are they racist? Who can be murdered with impunity? Who can say certain words? Who runs the administration?
'Western values' as we mean them are a recent idea. They aren't even Anglo. The Anglos of old did not really believe all the things we believe today. The Americans of old believed in white supremacy, homophobia, all kinds of things that are unfashionable today.
There is indeed a Western culture, language group, philosophy, worldview to a certain extent. But it's such a vast tree with so many branches. It's like how 'America' in a certain sense includes Peruvians, Alaskan natives, Montreal latte-sippers, Texas cowboys, Venezuelan lowlifes. But that meaning of America is so broad as to be all but useless. It's ever changing and whole groups disappear in time, changing beyond recognition. The cowboys are mostly gone. The Aztecs are all gone. The Puritans are gone.
The issue is not just in 'not anglifying' others but in others changing what it means to be 'anglified.' The danger is deeper and more insidious than just seeing the Somali Learing Centre and thinking 'oh it's not so hard to get rid of these jokers' - it has to actually be done and not just talked about. Values have to actually be preserved, not just defended. Culture wars must be won rather than merely fought.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
There are many timelines where AI still ended up being a Big Deal, but where Altman decided not to release ChatGPT for safety reasons
Someone would've released this tech eventually though. It was more than just ChatGPT, there was character.ai reaching prominence in September 2022, Facebook was doing something similar for academics... People could've read some of gwern's posts about GPT-3 and seen the potential there. He was going on and on and on about how powerful this technology could be.
I admit I cannot predict timing. But just knowing that something will be big in the future at some point, that's worth something.
There are many timelines where AI still ended up being a Big Deal, but where Altman decided not to release ChatGPT for safety reasons and hence LLM's didn't see unprecedented human and financial capital investment, and where the hyperscalers had time to build out TPU's, Trainium, Ascends, whatever, and hence Nvidia never ended up becoming a multi-trillion dollar company.
They wouldn't need trainium if they didn't want to train AI models, nor Ascends... And we can judge the strength of Nvidia's execution and their knowledge, that's fundamental analysis. We can say 'ok the people making these kinds of accelerators for 20 years know a thing or two about it, whereas latecomers are less likely to do well'?
Tech tends to concentrate as the barriers of entry can be quite high in hardware. There are only a few companies that make HBM. No matter who makes the GPU they'll still need HBM. So that's a good pick. Or ASML. Only they make the most modern chip fab tools. 147% in 5 years is pretty decent, more like 250-300% since the start of the AI boom in 2022/2023. The big chipmaker is a pretty obvious buy for something that runs on masses of chips...
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
The US took Afghanistan, as you may recall
Afghanistan is in a totally different league to Iran. Afghanistan didn't have much of anything but light infantry in technicals (and that was still enough!) Iran is an industrialized country. They know how to fight.
If the goal is just killing lots of Iranians, there's a simple tool for that: H-bombs. Killing people is not sufficient to achieve US strategic goals, which are more complex than just destruction. The US wants some kind of positive regime change - this strategy has achieved the reverse. The US wanted security of energy markets and to retain control of the seas. The petrodollar is now under attack by Iran's control of the straits of Hormuz.
but now that Iran's capability to bombard them is way down
the expensive part was taking out air defenses
The US navy will enter the straits of Hormuz.
You seem to think the war is all but won. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Iran's capability to bombard US bases is not 'way down'. The US has been evacuating its in-air refuelling aircraft further away after Iran keeps striking them with missiles deep into Saudi Arabia. A meagre sortie rate from a couple of carrier groups and a handful of strategic bombers is not sufficient to win this war. 44 B-1s at 47% readiness are not going to do much.
The much-vaunted US navy couldn't secure the Red Sea against the Houthis after a whole year of escort operations and bombing, how the hell are they supposed to secure the straits of Hormuz? They're staying well away from the straits because they're not complete fools.
The whole concept of this war is unfathomably dumb. Even people like Bolton are publicly questioning war with Iran. Do you have any idea how off the rails this has gone if the hawk's hawk, the warmonger's warmonger who's been agitating for this war for decades is criticizing the strategy? The plan was clearly 'quick war', they never anticipated that they'd need to bring in marines or extra THAAD from Korea. They are improvising because the strategy has already failed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
You were suggesting that this would work against Taiwan earlier this month.
Taiwan is an exception, as I said then. Only small islands with massive reliance on imported food and energy can be bombed into submission. Large countries with land routes cannot. It also matters if the power in question doing the bombing has China-level industrial capacity.
Iran would retaliate by wrecking the rest of the Middle East's energy infrastructure, including Israel. This would probably end up being a US strategic defeat when considering the global-level balance of power.
Trump is trying to keep energy strikes 'off limits' for the war, as per his latest tweets. He is not keen on an energy-destruction war!
But why is this even the right frame of looking at things? If it looks really powerful and useful, probably it is just really valuable. There might be reasons why it isn't but they should be specific.
What has tech been doing for the last 10 years besides AI? I can't think of any great improvement between 2012 and 2022. More irritating ads, having to subscribe to Microsoft Office, VR headsets with a handful of good games... Incremental advancements at best.
But now if I want to do something with a computer, I can get an AI to give me precise instructions or just do it outright. That's a genuine improvement. I don't have to wade through forums or oceans of SEO + ads with a search engine. I don't have to learn to code to make and sell code commercially - they seem to enjoy it and find it very helpful. I can just have it output niche, highly specific pieces of writing just for me, on a whim.
The technology sector has finally contributed something positive after about 10-20 years of resting on their laurels and now people are complaining about a bubble, it seems bizarre to me. This is putting aside all the scientific innovation and prospects of superintelligence.
Cisco had a P/E of 200 back in the day, Nvidia is in the 30s and is the largest company in the world. Where is the bubble? Is it just isolated to the AI pureplay companies like Anthropic or OpenAI who aren't profitable because of all the R&D they're doing?
I know it's cliched to say 'this time it's different' but if it looks different, then it probably is different? Maybe OpenAI has just gone down too many paths and finds that short-form video is not cost-effective since it caters to a population of poor people trying to game porn restrictions and upsets influencers/artists who love to hate AI video. Whereas selling coding AI actually makes lots of money, so they're redirecting compute for business use. In my experience it's far harder to make a profit selling AI to consumers than it is to businesses.
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