RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
No bio...
User ID: 317
Pretty sure it's not just those, also generic govt office jobs and generic white collar jobs at PWC or similar.
Key findings include:
52% believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” in hiring
1 in 6 have been asked to deprioritize hiring white men
48% have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications
53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees
70% believe their company has DEI initiatives for appearances’ sake
Once we get to 40-50% then it's more than just prestigious university jobs? For clarity, I'm quoting another report not OP.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
That is my ought - it would be good for human flourishing if countries expected wars of aggression to not be net positive at the margin
Well to really achieve this, you need true world hegemony where one power is so strong that it can rule the world and prevent any shift in the balance of power. China's plan is to become so strong that they can trounce the US and allies directly. No amount of credibility or 'resolve' can compensate for outright weakness.
Alternately, widescale nuclear proliferation. The non-proliferation treaty is another example where the natural defensive tendencies of various powers have been suppressed by a world of vibes and theory. As the balance of power shifts, states are inevitably going to nuclearize and probably in a more dangerous and chaotic way than if the natural course of affairs developed.
I think people are too fixated on the status quo of the past 20 or 30 years, where the US could wreck weak countries at will while the strong countries were mostly independent inside their borders. It's not natural for only America to have a foreign policy, for American wars to be 'counter-terrorism' or 'police action' or 'pre-emptive strikes' while other people's wars are 'illegal invasions'. All great powers will have their own foreign policies, that's how it works. There is nothing that can be done to persuade China to accept an international system where they can't invade or install friendly govts where they like but the US can. China has armies and fleets, nukes and tech, they are made to be used.
I would be really interested in who you think "ought" to win, who would you prefer, based on what you have written above?
I'm sympathetic to Russia taking Russian-majority parts of Ukraine in abstract but I also think this war is net-negative for Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the Western bloc. We in the West could've and should've resolved it before it happened by making credible promises about our intentions for Russia and Ukraine, by doing nothing with Ukraine, pretending it didn't exist rather than waving a red flag to a bull. In RAND reports from before the war they talk about ways to put pressure on Russia by arming and getting closer with Ukraine, you can sense that it's about point-scoring in Syria and Libya, imposing costs on Russia like they're a naughty schoolboy. We're not in school, there is no police to call and routinely attacking an
I don't think putting pressure on Russia is a good idea, it just pushes them closer to China. Russia can do all kinds of things to impose costs on us if they want.
We should've been wooing Russia away from China. What ought to have happened is that our statesmen should've displayed elementary diplomacy and grand strategy, stopped huffing vibes about Euro-Atlantic integration and the open-door policy, learnt to prioritize and delay gratification.
I don't see any good ending now, only bad and worse endings. The key lesson is to break out of the stultifying prison of vibes that we're still immersed in.
WW1 for sure and WW2 in part happened because states (mainly but not just Germany) were assuming that their limited and focused wars could come out as solidly net positive
WW2 was as bad as it was due to a conflict between vibes-based and realist strategic thought. The UK and France decided to declare war on Germany in 1939 for the sake of Poland, who they had no plan or hope of defending but guaranteed anyway. It makes zero sense to do this. Hitler, quite reasonably, did not expect this insane behaviour. If Chaimberlain understood what he was doing, was prepared to prioritize and strategize, WW2 would've been a quick and easy victory. He could've made an alliance with Germany against Russia, then perhaps betrayed Germany. He could've allied with Russia against Germany, at the cost of Poland. He could've just done nothing, rearmed at home and waited for a better opportunity. He could've worked with Italy if it weren't for some idiot journalists revealing the partition plan for Ethiopia and wrecking the Stresa front (this was before Chaimberlain got into office tbf).
Anything would've been better than 'diplomacy so shit that Russia and Germany (who deeply hate eachother) ally against us' and 'military so weak we can't attack while Germany is conquering Poland' and 'declare war on Germany anyway.'
But Chaimberlain was entranced by vibes and bungled so badly the world's greatest empire was destroyed. And Poland was absolutely wrecked. Another massive failure for the vibes-based school of international relations, which they somehow repackage as proof that you need 'resolve' and not to 'appease'. No, countries need to think strategically and pick between a range of options based on the situation and their capabilities.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
You can think there are good aspects of Ukrainian culture that need not be tainted while also thinking you don't want the bad aspects of Ukrainian culture like the corruption.
Say you value a jar of Northern Europe at 100, Ukraine at 50 and migrants at 10. Mixing Europe and Ukraine worsens Europe. Mixing migrants and Ukraine worsens Ukraine. I bet he'd prefer to replace all third world migrants with Ukrainians if that was somehow possible.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I worry about a world where wars of aggression are seen to be net positive, and if small countries look upon this and see that the past promises of allies aren’t worth nearly as much as they were expecting they may well scramble for nuclear weapons or launch arms races.
You best start believing in a world of international anarchy and self-help, you're living in it.
The US went in on Iraq. The US and NATO went in on Serbia and Libya, the US seems to be moving on Venezuela any minute now. I don't mean this in a whataboutist 'it's not fair!!!' sense, I mean this in a descriptive sense, this is just what strong powers do. This is what they've always done. Russia and China are not uniquely peaceful countries with a deep-seated love of international law only for the big mean US to bully them into being aggressive. Russia has interests, America has interests, China has interests. No country can get such huge amounts of land, wealth and power peacefully.
They're biding their time, prioritizing, calculating, scheming, plotting, building up, saber-rattling and then drawing their swords for a fight. They don't necessarily want to fight, certainly not against strong opponents. But they will do so if they think that's their strongest strategy. The US likes fighting most because America's become accustomed to weak opposition since the end of the Cold War, China will be as or more aggressive if they find themselves almost unchallenged.
China and Russia aren't going to 'play by the rules' if some random bureaucrat in the EU or State Department gets to write the rules and introduce new ideas all the time like 'responsibility to protect' and then interpret the rules to his advantage. The rules are made up, they're a facade resting on top of a skewed balance of power. The 'rules' didn't even work during the Cold War when there was a vaguely objective system with each great power getting a veto in the UN security council. The UNSC did not stop fairly large wars between the power blocs then. A vague and unspecified, infinitely flexible 'rules based international order' certainly isn't going to now.
Wars of aggression are always going to be calculated according to the balance of power, risk and reward. Then some diplomats will produce evidence, justifications and rhetoric to show they're the good guys, the baddies started it, we're defending ourselves. That's just how the world is. The real danger is from the dud schools of international relations, the people who kept calling for spreading liberalism all around the world at the point of a JDAM. This behaviour has consequences, it makes the Western bloc more threatening. It makes other countries suspicious of our motives and intentions, it makes us look crazed or rabid and to some extent we are, fighting irrational conflicts for the sake of liberalism.
Or the people who said 'serious warfare is such a 20th century thing, let's do more damage to our military industry than all the chaos of post-Soviet Russia could inflict on Russia.' Joe Biden literally laughed at the prospect of Russia-China-Iran cooperation in the 1990s. John Kerry said regarding Ukraine "You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests," he said it was 19th century behaviour. No, it's eternal behaviour. The US does it, everyone can and will do it. Only some in the US got pretty arrogant and lacked both self-awareness and awareness of the power-balance. Thus they made a bunch of strategic errors.
Ukraine is done for, regardless of whether they lose less or lose more the country is wrecked. The Ukrainian leadership did not perceive the gravity of the situation and operated under a world of vibes and ideology when they needed to be considering the balance of power. They just aren't going to be beating a bigger power with more men, materiel and nukes, when said power is determined to win. That doesn't happen in industrial warfare. If a great power truly wants to beat a secondary power, it will win. All moments of luck, all tactical excellence, all fleeting technological advantages are eventually erased by weight of numbers, weight of industrial output, weight of firepower.
If Korea and Japan wake up and think seriously about their situation and whether they need nukes, that's a good thing. The highway is no place for sleeping drivers, the world is no place for sleeping, or even drowsy, countries. Taiwan needs to think very carefully about their position. Can they fight China? They're an island totally reliant on external food and energy. If they fight China and China doesn't get knocked out of the war fast, Taiwan loses. There's nothing Taiwan can do to change this, they can't develop nukes now, it's too late. The US was the one who shut down the Taiwanese nuclear program (twice), they thought they knew better about Taiwanese security than Taiwan did. Same happened in Australia albeit less dramatically. Vibe-based nuclear non-proliferation would never work on the big powers, the US isn't going to disarm and nor is Russia. You can see this in the tragicomedic 'disarmament' aspect of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Under Article VI of the NPT, all Parties undertake to pursue good-faith negotiations on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race, to nuclear disarmament, and to general and complete disarmament
If this seems unrealistic to you, trying to cancel aggressive war is the same kind of thing.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I think most people will embrace the AI. Most people are not discerning enough to deal with well-prompted AI, recall the 'changemyview' redditors who got their views changed by an old Sonnet, 3.6 or 3.7. They were very upset about that when it was revealed they were talking with AIs but they couldn't tell the difference.
"The AI-generated content proved significantly more effective than human comments, with personalized responses ranking in the 99.4th percentile of all users on the subreddit, meaning only about 0.6% of human commenters were more persuasive"
AI is only going to get more persuasive while the population's faculties are plateauing or even declining. It's a huge boon for the algorithms running social media, making them more addictive and also producing more content.
I think that this forum and its users are wildly out of distribution. Go to webnovel.com, the nhentai comments section. Go to a normie facebook server or sports twitter or the average AO3 story. These are not very sophisticated thinkers that are going to be outwitting modern AI used adeptly.
Nobody wants to pay though.
Try running a paid subscription internet service. I'm actually selling something that costs money, so there's more of a value proposition than 'internet forum'. It's bleak. Over 100 free trial users, 4 subscribers, 3 of them unsubscribed. Of course I am not a very good businessman or marketer or developer tbh... but I think people underestimate the difficulty of getting people to subscribe!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
4d ago
Isn't this just talk?
The EU’s new emergency powers will remain in place until “Russia ceases its war of aggression against Ukraine, and provides reparations to Ukraine,” according to a legal text, seen by POLITICO, that was backed by the EU’s 27 ambassadors on Thursday afternoon.
They can just undo the emergency powers whenever they want, if they decide it's expedient. Either take the assets or don't take them, playing games over who has the authority to take or return them reeks of impotence and disunity.
What is the point of this? The war has already cost Europe trillions in economic damage and energy costs, they took that blow fairly well. They can keep printing money if they want to, it's not like they're about to go bankrupt without that 200 billion. Europe's shortfalls are in materiel not finance. It's not like there are dozens of empty Russian shell factories in Europe that, with the stroke of an official's pen, they can take and rev up to produce munitions for Ukraine. These 'assets' are just bonds, just pieces of paper. The order book for munitions, spare transformers, air defences and so on is already full, no amount of paper assets is going to provide much help.
Plus it was staggeringly silly for Russia to hold Chinese bonds in Europe, I don't know why they'd possibly think that was a smart thing to do. It's like how Venezuela has its gold in the UK for some reason. Not your vaults, not your gold!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
It'd outrage people a less since it'd be 'damn that's impressive'. The sexes are different. It's like how when a female teacher has sex with a boy internet commenters are like 'Nice' or 'why couldn't it have been me' and when it's a male teacher and a girl there's a much harsher response.
Even I can't help but think that Bonnie Blue is worse than her male equivalent, in part because the male equivalent isn't really imaginable. I don't see a guy having sex with 1000 girls in a day as a PR stunt that boosts his profile to that level. But the hypothetical equivalent would be very bad. I support harsh treatment of Chad Thundercock if he goes around and disrupts the social contract or demoralizes people like Bonnie Blue.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
mission was nontrivially different from training data or b) that it involved more than 'follow quest marker, spam A at enemies when lock-on-button does anything.
Well they did show it going to Liyue, whereas the training data was all in Mondstadt. And they showed it playing different games which weren't in the training set.
Also Honkai Star Rail is turn-based rather than real time? I don't see how it can be surface-level pattern-matching if you can completely change the characters, aesthetic, gameplay, map geography and UI and it still basically works. The generalization isn't complete of course, it thinks it's still playing Genshin and wants to use the Wind Glider to glide down but that's not a thing in other games. But even if it took 10 minutes or running into an invisible wall it eventually figures out the 'press the lever to move the bridge' puzzle and progresses through something that, under Genshin logic, would never even be a puzzle.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6d ago
The intended meaning of my post was that this is what other people think, not an accurate, complete model of reality:
I think people get quite upset about those who get ahead via unorthodox means too.
Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on? Maybe it's all lies and money-laundering but the point is that people believe it to be true. You are working hard and getting paid a miserly wage while someone else is doing fuck all and getting huge amounts of money.
I was trying to explain what might be lurking in the back of people's heads, who aren't neccessarily aware of power-law distributions or attention economies. The same could apply to the Island Boys or any number of other influencers. I was thinking of those /pol/ threads that show some lowlife making huge amounts of money that get 300 replies because it's ragebait and attentionbait.
And to a certain extent, isn't this whole discourse proof of my point? It's a potent topic both here and in less erudite forums. It makes people upset with how the economy is functioning, people in this thread are talking about income distributions. I was not trying to raise the object-level topic, only use it as an example and yet here we are in another huge battle/wealth of the sexes and pornography discussion.
Because Jews tend to push multiculturalism and communism. George Soros infamously uses his high IQ and great abilities to create an 'open society' - more blacks and browns, get criminals out of prison, basically eroding nation-states, including Israel tbh.
Jews certainly are quite clever and capable. The polio vaccine for instance is a Jewish innovation.
But just being clever and capable isn't always a good thing, it only shows a capacity to do good things. They can use their wits for bad ends. They can invent communism (Marx), push communism (Trotsky and many others), leak nuclear secrets to the communists because they sympathize with communism (Goldbergs), invent and push anti-racism. Who was the main proponent of blank-slatism? Franz Boas, Jewish. White anthropologists and political theorists generally tended to have a balance between scientific racism and antiracism, political left and right. Jewish intellectuals, financiers and so on lean heavily to the left. It's not just 'overrepresentation' but a clear political slant, like blacks have a clear slant. There's no similar Jewish overrepresentation pushing right wing ideas, opposing diversity, pushing back on excessive tolerance - there's Stephen Miller and that's about it. If only Jews voted in the US, Democrats would win every time. Even in 2024, a full year after October 7th, Jews still voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris over Donald 'Grand Marshal of the Salute to Israel, bomb the shit out of them, block immigration from Muslim countries' Trump.
Mariana Pfaelzer, Jewish, strikes down California's Proposition 187 that sought to discourage illegal immigration. Noel Ignatiev, Jewish, makes a whole career about abolishing whiteness (and Israel too). Horace Meyer Kallen writes books against the idea of the melting pot, he's one of the earliest proponents of multiculturalism. Just the other day, we had a Jewish US senator, Sarah Stalker, talking about how she feels bad for being white, wants white kids (and especially white men) to feel bad for their privilege in society.
See also my post about the 2020 election donors and their general leanings - Jews to the left, or Jews to Israel, whites tending more towards small-government or right-wing values: https://www.themotte.org/post/205/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/37000?context=8#context
There's no monolithic bloc here, there's a smaller pro-Israel faction and a larger pro-diversity/LGBT/communism faction that are in a partial conflict.
Does anyone really believe this? Is it hip to wear a burka? Do we see the power of Allah valorized in the media? What about those blockbuster anti-Shiite films that show Sunnism as the true path? Where is the US's Islamophobia czar to match the antisemitism czar? Where is Biden's personal imam? Are Trump's children marrying sheikhs? Is the US giving Saudi Arabia billions in military aid every year? Are US states legislating against BDS of Islamic countries?
The oily lands are just doing garden-variety corruption, not full-scale cognitive warfare. Islam is only really prominent in the US because of the 1965 immigration law, Hart-Celler... you guessed it! Celler's Jewish while Hart is white.
In contrast, what we get is Holocaust education, Biden's personal rabbi, Trump's children marrying Jews, endless film/game/book franchises about evil Nazis.
We've got the US secretary of state, Pompeo, saying: "There is no more important task of the Secretary of State than standing for Israel and there is no more important ally to the United States than Israel. There is much more work to do."
We've got Nancy Pelosi saying things like: "If this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel. That’s fundamental to who we are"
Nobody says this about the Arabs! AIPAC is enormously more powerful and influential than Qatar or the UAE. It's easy to see how Israel might exploit the US with leadership this suffocatingly lovesick.
The Israelis notoriously sell US tech to China, they never show up to help the US in any US wars, yet they receive US Patriot batteries and air cover to defend them from those in the Middle East who hate them. They send fake intelligence about Iraqi WMDs to motivate the US into destroying their enemies. The first Twin Towers bombing was motivated by anti-Israel sentiment, as was Osama Bin Laden to a large extent.
Israel has done more damage to US interests than any other ally, yet they get the best treatment of any US ally. The US should just test its weapons at home! 'Testing' US weapons against incompetents in MENA is only going to provoke dangerous overconfidence when it comes to fighting whites or East Asians.
No, Islam is militarily very weak. US nuclear forces could reduce the Islamic world to ash within half an hour. A tiny force of Wagner can easily coup a few weak Muslim African countries and take the gold. Only politically is Islam capable of harming the West, they're terrible at fighting with their armies and have no navies to speak of. Only via political means do they show up, take up space, go around forming rape gangs, being criminal, abusing welfare, reproducing at speed, starting terror attacks. You don't NEED terrorism if you are good with armies.
Only because of political ideas like tolerance and antiracism and white guilt that Jews tend to push (often honestly and without regard for the interests of their coethnics) is this political mismatch possible. We could just take a leaf out of Algeria's book and send the Muslims back, whether they grew up here or not, what are they going to do about it in the face of total military inferiority? The answer is not to rely on Jews to get us out of a problem that Jews got us into. For whatever reason they tend to come up with and promote many terrible ideas in the political and economic spheres, the answer is to direct them to STEM only and out of politics.
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