RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
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User ID: 317
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
I'm ignoring that because it's not true. The Israeli military has been eager to bomb and wreck Gaza and they've worked hard to limit and constrain food and medical supplies coming in, despite pressure from the US and EU. The ethos is not 'first world standards' but 'the bare minimum that can be dubiously defended as first world standards'.
Since when did first world countries routinely shoot children trying to collect food? Or claim just about every UN/human rights NGO is biased against them? Even Israeli sources have been going 'what is the point of this, what are we trying to achieve by setting these arbitrary lines and shooting people who try to cross them':
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Come back when you've worked out the difference between 'skirmishing' and 'attempted regime change'. You have no idea what you're proposing, an incredibly simplistic or outright ignorant view of the relevant dynamics.
Russia and China do not care much about skirmishes, they care more about regime change. The response would be different.
Hypothetical Venezuelan protests have little to do with the situation, unless they're well-armed enough to be credible threats to the state. I already addressed this but you don't seem to understand it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
I agree completely with the rally-around the flag effect, I expect there's probably enriched uranium or plutonium dispersed or hidden somewhere too.
But also I think air power is a bit of a mirage.
If US/Israeli air power was so great, why haven't they been able to destroy Hamas? That was their goal right? Hamas didn't have any air defences whatsoever. Israel's bombing has been extremely intensive, they've wrecked most of Gaza and gotten lots of lefties upset with how intense the bombing has been, people have been throwing out terms like 'absolute destruction', just look at all the footage. In addition Israel controls entry and exit into Gaza so they've been able to quasi-besiege it and block off food imports. But it still wasn't enough to destroy Hamas!
Nobody in the West really likes Hamas that much, they're considered a terror group. Gaza is a pretty small mini-state right next to Israel. Hamas is a tiny fraction of the Iranian military in strength. There have also been Israeli ground attacks. Even if Hamas was destroyed and Israel achieved a full victory it would not necessarily show that airpower would work in Iran, since just about every factor is much worse for an Iran campaign. And yet Hamas is still around, they're shooting collaborators.
If air power was so great, Hamas should be gone, right? You can blow up a commander, they just replace him again and again and again. I suppose that Hamas and Gazans are highly motivated to be anti-Israel and this compensates for being bombed? But it also seems that the strength of airpower is overrated if in even a highly favourable environment it fails.
The Iranian opposition don't seem to be armed, unless they're armed I don't think they're too relevant, the government can crush them if they want Tiananmen style, it's just that they don't particularly want to.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
You haven't provided military analysis at all, all you say in your little substack post is 'bomb and good things will happen'. At no point do you investigate the value proposition, the historic success rate of these air campaigns, consider relevant factors such as 'what are the risks of starting a major war in a key energy exporting area'? Go read a RAND report, there are far smarter ways to be hawkish.
mass protests and regime change in Iran to Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Ukraine was in the middle of a civil war when Russia invaded, the rebels there had gotten FAR further than in Iran. They actually controlled territory, were well organized into their own mini-states in Donetsk and Luhansk. And even with the Russian bombing... Even with the Russian invasion... It's still turned into a mess for Russia because Ukraine (considerably smaller than Iran) is not easily toppled. Ukraine has outside support, so would Iran.
I love that you leave out "China" when discussing the Korean War.
Yeah, the Chinese provided the ground troops that retook North Korea. They fought the bulk of the ground campaigns. Ground campaigns matter, I have stressed this. But the US destroying 75-90% of the standing structures in North Korea still didn't bring them to the negotiating table, do you think a few measly missiles are going to knock out Iran? Israel has bombed the shit out of Gaza and marched in troops several times, it took a long long long time to achieve a draw. And that's all they've achieved! Hamas is still in charge on the ground.
It's insanely dumb to go 'yes, the Israelis have managed, after years and years of shelling and bombing and ground invasion against a tiny poor state they outnumber and totally encircle, to get back their captives, while Hamas is still in charge - so the US and Israel can bomb a mountainous country 50x bigger than Gaza in population, 80x the size of Israel in size, a country with much greater military resources and somehow this will overthrow the regime, without even a ground invasion since even in my fantasy world that's still too far'
There's no reason why this would work!
Where were they last June?
Sending military aid takes time and depends on the situation, whether it's a tit for tat squabble or a major campaign. We've been through over 20 years of interventionists proposing 'easy' campaigns in the Middle East that almost always turn out to be long, expensive, failures and yet no lessons seem to be learnt. Iran is not even an 'easy' campaign, it is an extremely difficult campaign in a mountainous, highly populated, huge territory. It is the hardest campaign.
Bombing Iran more aggressively is the surest path to them nuclearizing.
Seriously? I thought they didn't want weapons? What are they waiting for?
You understand the concept of theory of a hypothetical scenario, right? If it's warm, I don't need a coat. But if it's cold, I'll wear a coat. I might bring a coat in my bag if I think it'll suddenly get cold enough for me to need it! I'm a latent coat-wearer.
Ensuring victory of the opposition and reducing the chance of protracted conflict and bloodshed.
What opposition? Led by who? Can you even name them? What are their goals and ideologies? Have you justified that an air campaign would result in the success of this amorphous political grouping, as opposed to tarring them with comprador status (presumed to be in alliance with foreigners trying to bomb the country)?
Imagine if you will how you would feel if Venezuela had been undergoing mass, violent protests?
'Feelings' are not supposed to come into it. Strategy via 'feelings' is stupid and usually immoral too in its final outcomes, inferior in all respects compared to sober analysis.
How would attacking Iran benefit America?
Throwing missiles around isn't going to do anything significant. How many missiles has Russia dumped on Ukraine, how many thousands of drones and missiles have they fired off? They've largely broken the Ukrainian electrical grid yet Ukraine remains in the struggle after years and years of bombing and a large-scale ground invasion.
The Saudis bombed Yemen. The US bombed Yemen. The bombing did very little.
How many bombs did the Allies drop on Germany, they flattened whole cities with firestorms comparable to nuclear strikes! This did not break the will of Nazi Germany, they fought on till ground troops conquered the country. The US flattened North Korea, they literally razed the entire country such that people were living in holes in the ground because the buildings had been destroyed. The war ended in a draw and from then on North Korea devoted massive resources into armaments and bunkerization and has taken a very hostile stance to America, as one might expect. Bombing Vietnam caused considerable casualties for Vietnam but it did not achieve the political goal, Saigon was lost. The Russians bombed the hell out of Chechnya but needed a ground invasion to secure it.
Bombing has military relevance but the political effect is very weak, often counterproductive. If you want a political effect, you need to have ground troops for an invasion and this invasion needs to be in progress or very likely to succeed to pressure leaders into surrendering. Alternately, you can aim for a military effect in that bombing can swing the tide of a relatively evenly fought civil war as in Syria or Libya. Only the bombing of Serbia worked out per the 'air campaign only' concept. Iran is a lot bigger than Serbia and a lot further away from NATO airbases. Air campaigns only work in special cases, not generally.
The prior Israeli and American bombing of Iran did nothing, there was no significant military or political effect. The bombing of Fordow had no effect since Iran does not want nuclear weapons. The Israelis have been saying the Iranians are 6-18 months away from nuclear weapons for the last 30 years. The Israelis are lying. If the Iranians wanted nuclear weapons, they'd simply acquire them like other countries that want them. Pakistan didn't stay months away from nukes for decades, they just acquired them. Same with North Korea. Iran probably wants to be a latent nuclear state like South Korea or Japan, they'll only change this stance if threatened with imminent disaster.
Bombing Iran more aggressively is the surest path to them nuclearizing.
There are also a myriad of other costs of bombing Iran. Oil prices will rise and economic uncertainty will increase. The cost in munitions will reduce US strength in more important theaters like Asia. It will further worsen US diplomatic standing. Russia and China will support Iran to inflict costs on the US, they won't be alone like Serbia was. The Iranians will fight on since a ground invasion is totally impractical and a ground invasion is the only thing that can actually deliver the goal of regime change, unless there is a civil war.
If you think the regime might be collapsing and is totally unsustainable then why bomb, why should the US not just do nothing and save a lot of effort, risk and blood? If you're right then doing nothing is the most logical choice, if you're wrong (and the semi-annual major Iran riots are another nothingburger) and the US bombs, then it probably won't work?
Trump shouldn't make these rash proclamations, he should take some notes from Xi about doing nothing, developing internally and biding his time. This recent Venezuela campaign seems to be incoherent. Maduro is gone, some people are dead but the whole socialist structure is still there. Maduro is a clown, not some evil wizard holding the whole country under his thrall. Trump could've just unsanctioned Venezuelan oil if he wanted to buy it, would have probably been much cheaper than moving all these troops around. He thinks he owns Venezuela, people are making memes about conquistadors but conquistadors fought ground campaigns and actually conquered territory, putting it under their complete political control. That comes first, then comes resource extraction. Montezuma's vice-emperor didn't take over the Aztecs!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
I think people overrate the testimony of that guy.
Venezuela can't even maintain their own oil industry, the core basis of their national wealth, why would they be any good at fighting? They probably didn't know how to use their equipment and certainly couldn't maintain it. The Russians quit giving Venezuela loans to buy military equipment a few years ago, I think that even they had written Venezuela off.
Security Guard: Without a doubt. I'm sending a warning to anyone who thinks they can fight the United States. They have no idea what they're capable of. After what I saw, I never want to be on the other side of that again. They're not to be messed with.
I think this indicates he was paid to say this as part of the propaganda campaign. He was probably paid much more than he was making as a soldier. The real superpower is just having a certain level of organization and discipline.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
Meanwhile in the realm of AI videos: https://x.com/ShitpostRock/status/2007643143257096461
Or you can just go on /gif/ and there's usually an AI thread and maybe a Grok Imagine thread too. Gooners find a way.
The ongoing adventures of George Droyd did a lot of mental damage to Google I suspect, even though it has nothing to do with Google.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11d ago
I think what's happened here is a successful air raid, based on Trump's desire to seize Venezuelan oil. He has always been interested in other countries oil reserves and has been trying to steal their oil tankers too.
https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/2007520406199251070
President Trump says the US will use Venezuela's oil reserves and sell "large amounts" to other countries after capturing Nicolás Maduro.
Step 1, a decapitation strike on Maduro, was a complete success for the US. Unsurprisingly a non-white, non-East Asian country that can't manage its own oil industry or run agriculture properly is not going to be great at fighting. But Step 2 is the key part, getting someone in charge of the country who'll let you take and sell the oil, installing a puppet and keeping them in power. That's the part where the US has historically floundered.
The invasion of Afghanistan also started with a highly successful airborne special forces operation: the Taliban were ousted in weeks and Rumsfeld laughed at the reporters who'd been anxiously worrying about 'quagmires'. Only later did things start to go south.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Well at least we won't be hearing about the rules-based international order for some time now...
A US invasion of Venezuela would be a smart move to put the squeeze on Cuba, secure the hemisphere and a good amount of oil - if the US was good at imperialism that is. I expect a complete mess, lots of munitions expended for very little practical gains. Whatever military gains there are will be outweighed by failing to install a stable puppet government.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
Good definitional clarification, I understand where Jiro was coming from now, not being American myself.
People need to get more mature about images I think.
Imagine if, at the dawn of the internet, there was a big shock at all the dodgy information sources, conspiracies, cults and so on that emerged. 'We invented freedom of speech in an era of printing presses, not high-capacity assault routers!' someone might say. And it's true, there's a difference due to the speed and nature of the connection. We are bombarded with information, it can be quite overwhelming and mindbreak the weak-willed. Ziz cultists, Extinction Rebellion, retarded tiktok trends... The internet seems to have catalyzed many bad things in ways that aren't easy to counteract without squashing the whole thing.
But the answer isn't to shut down the internet, the answer is to strengthen our mental integrity, raise our willpower stat.
What is the alternate answer here? Restrict Grok from putting people in a bikini, ahegao face, milk sprayed on them? Restrict Grok, they'll just go back to civitai where this stuff has been going on for years. Men clearly desire lewd images of women.
How are you supposed to restrict this? If it's libel, then what about the time-honoured tradition of spreading false rumours about people, is that banned too? Do we all line up and go to the nanny state about how we were wrongly smeared as whiny, dumb, small-penised, ugly bitches who did something unspeakable at a party? Do we all line up in front of some ruinously slow legal system and give lawyers money to defend our reputations (they can't defend your reputation even if you win in court)? Do we have AIs surveiling every private groupchat to defend the honour of maidens? A gigantic Chinese style state surveillance apparatus to uphold the wholesomeness of the entire internet?
The best solution is for men and women to act in a more dignified and honourable way and not do any of this in the first place. That clearly isn't going to happen after decades and decades of subverting and violating just about all of the old taboos. What are taboos and censorship for if not enforcing a standard of behaviour?
Men still have the responsibility of dying in a trench for their country (now with their drone-killers filming their deaths for war propaganda), women will need to accept some downsides in a technological environment that's freed them from a lot of their unpleasant work. Picking and choosing to preserve just the taboos that overwhelmingly benefit women over men isn't a sustainable pattern in the long term.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12d ago
No, that's not how it works at all.
A state pension means that the government is taking from taxpayers and paying the old.
Pensions are provided because the old don't have savings (or because they don't have 'enough' savings, after they've fiddled the figures to ensure they don't).
I have no problem with people saving their own money, my issue is with the government subsidizing the lifestyle of the old at the expense of the young. Welfare /= savings.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Put simply, social security and other forms of elder welfare need to be either phased out or replaced with something far less permissive to the old and intrusive to the young.
You do want to slash pensions though. I also want to slash pensions, I think it's a good idea. But it's incredibly toxic, since you'd also need to disenfranchise the olds. They will always vote for loot now and consequences later. While we're disenfranchising, may as well keep going and remake the entire political system...
None of our political solutions are at all likely to happen without a major transformation of the system, something comparable to a coup. So I also agree on the importance of a technological fix.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
And if we started offering affirmative action for people who have kids, I don't know how it would stop otherwise-low-performing people from having kids to game the system
Well in the fantasy world where this policy is implemented, I'd block low-performers from taking advantage of it. Right now the affirmative action system doles out money and jobs to people of the right (wrong) race, I'm conceptualizing a system where it doles out money and jobs to married couples who meet certain baseline standards - their children aren't menaces, they work in more skill-intensive occupations, good character...
There's always going to be gaming of all government systems and there'd be gaming of this too but the system would be designed with perverse incentives in mind, not as a political patronage system.
If we just meritocracy-max then we're back to IQ-shredding, there needs to be a balance.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Why not just offer affirmative action to married couples with children?
Want a promotion in your white collar job? Have a husband/wife and have children!
Want your kids to get into a good university? Have more children!
This would efficiently target the most valuable, productive, ambitious people too, rather than the welfare class who don't really want to go to university, don't have anywhere near the necessary marks and aren't in line for promotion anyway.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
13d ago
Sex outside of marriage: it's illegal. Unacceptable. Totally contrary to Our Values. You're in prison, you're a lowlife, a scumbag, media will show you to be the bad guy.
Done!
Alternately, affirmative action for married couples in the workforce. Companies must declare targets of married employees, explain what actions they're taking to achieve these targets. You could boost fertility the same way.
This is something that a big state could easily do. The US and much of the West quasi-criminalized going outside during Covid, there is an enormous river of state power that merely needs to be directed towards pro-social ends. In Britain they arrest thousands of people for tweets, that's their 'incentive' for people to think a bit more carefully before they speak. The state can indoctrinate children for hours and hours a day, there's a gigantic surveillance apparatus watching just about everything, they have 20-40% of GDP to spend...
Our elites simply need to make a decision and then enforce that decision and then it just happens. The difficulty of social engineering is overestimated. The US did it pretty well, they pointed bayonets at teenagers so they'd go to school with blacks, they forcibly bussed whites to black schools, implemented affirmative action schemes to give blacks better jobs. It didn't change performance-based outcomes that much but they certainly could produce behaviours, they dramatically reduced racism just via straightforward suppression and indoctrination.
They could suppress adultery too, it's really not that hard. But they don't want to.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
Somalians can and do rob eachother but they also have nationalism and a sense of group identity. You see these Somali-American politicians going on about how they want to help Somalia, help Somalians.
I assume this is right, I don't see a community note. Former Somali Prime Minister Khaire at MN rally for Ilhan Omar, speaking some Somali language: 'The interests of Ilhan are not Ilhans, it's not the interests of Minnesota, it's not the interests of the American people, it's the interest of Somalians and Somalia'
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
A 16 inch gun uses hundreds of kilos of propellant, you're not launching anything, you're just vaporizing people inside a tube. Ironically, I think this would be much more humane as an execution method than the 'give him a lethal injection that makes him writhe around in pain' model.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15d ago
I don't necessarily disagree but the simpler explanation of 'there is money and they see they can easily take it' works better. They wouldn't take money from Somalis, they can distinguish between gradations of friends and enemies. And in Minnesota, they have this magic wand of 'racism' they can wave and get people to bend over backwards to ignore their tricks.
Truly, Somalis in Minnesota is the reductio ad absurdum of antiracism. Who seriously thinks that it's a good idea to bring in Somalis? Did they ever invent anything or create anything? Somalia isn't exactly in good shape either, a very poor country of nomadic herders.
Low-value people.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16d ago
This is not a 'more tokens' task but a 'more intelligence' task, requiring ultra-long horizons and qualitatively superhuman ability.
It would be far easier to make a fun AAA game. It would be far easier to write a LOTR-tier book series. Humans have at least done those things in the past, individually or collectively. Nobody has ever made an unhackable, actually useable system. A system will have to be considered in its entirety, AI training is complex and can't just be reduced to small pieces to be secured independently of eachother. At minimum all this will have to run together performantly. That is no small feat and cannot be achieved monkey-typewriter style.
If it were merely about spending a few billion dollars and a lot of programmer time wouldn't the Pentagon/NSA be totally secured against cyberattack by now? They're not, even state actors can't do this.
I can't understand the world you're proposing, where Chinese AIs are smart enough to shield the entire Chinese training stack but US AIs are not smart enough to hack them before the shield can be completed. The trend suggests that at any given point in time, US AIs are smarter than their Chinese siblings. So there will be a gap between when this defence-shield can be completed and when the US could launch its attack. The US will likely retain a qualitative and quantitative advantage in AI this whole time.
If the Chinese AI can see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll write this replacement to secure it and then fit it in with the rest of the stack while still maintaining performance' why can't an American AI see 'this software is subtly vulnerable to infiltration, I'll infiltrate and exploit it before the upgrade process is complete?'
Why is my 'superhacker AGI' lazy thinking but not your 'superhuman perfect defence + performant AI training stack code-writer AI' not lazy thinking? I agree that it's possible in principle but the former will come before the latter.
If China has 100 quadrillion tokens, then the US will have yet more, they have more compute after all. I doubt Doubao's tokens are worth as much as Gemini or OpenAI's, 'token' could be anywhere on the curve of intelligence and cost.
Maybe the US decides not to hack, maybe somebody cuts a deal, maybe Trump makes some inexplicable decision or maybe AGI isn't a big deal. But I don't see your scenario happening.
Furthermore, there are still hardware issues to consider. There are probably many unfixable flaws that humans aren't smart enough to find like these: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/5-years-of-intel-cpus-and-chipsets-have-a-concerning-flaw-thats-unfixable/
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Even finding all the things you'd need to secure is a nightmarish task. The CPU's physical structure, the microcode, the BIOS, the lower levels of the OS, a myriad of applications... You'd need a completely accurate, top to bottom model of the whole system: thousands of devices, routers, OSI... You'd then need to rewrite all of it while somehow maintaining proper functionality. Have fun updating the ROM of the management engine! Good odds there are physical flaws in CPUs that either humans are too dumb to uncover or were put there by intelligence agencies for spying purposes, so even if you do all that it still isn't sufficient.
ASI is a bare minimum requirement. Probably ASI + a whole new generation of chips is needed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17d ago
Many OpenAI investors don't believe in the singularity. Microsoft is demanding revenue-share from OpenAI right now. They see the power of the technology and naturally decide to invest in it, even if they're unpersuaded on mass automation or singularity. They want it to sell more subscriptions, speed up software development. It's the myopic facebook mindset of 'this technology could sell us so many short-form video ads' and tbf, that is true. AI is making huge amounts of profit for Facebook right now. Tiktok makes enormous amounts of money (in China) based off its algorithms which include LLM tech. AI is highly profitable right now and it is a sure bet that there will be further highly profitable offshoots from LLM technology, besides the singularity. They just require lots of investment to tap and we are still in an early-growth phase of a new market, whereas video is a lot more mature.
Older versions of Claude Sonnet could easily snipe redditors per the /r/changemyview experiments, obviously AI can make huge amounts of money for businesses.
OpenAI is valued at a mere $500-830 billion. The market cap of gold and silver is about $35 trillion. If OpenAI valuations were genuinely driven by belief in the singularity, it'd be worth a lot more than shiny rocks! The lightcone contains a hell of a lot of gold, a company with singularity-pilled investors would get everything money can buy even if they are just one of a few leading competitors.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18d ago
And yet nobody is using provably correct software because the core requirement is 'does it actually work' not 'is it totally secure'. This is the first thing they teach you in a cybersecurity course, the mission comes first. It's not cost-efficient to security-max.
Only a strong AI can do this cost-effectively, not even the state actors can manage this, they get hacked all the time. And given we're talking about what happens when strong AIs first emerge, people are not going to have provably secure software already widely proliferated from kernel to application.
It all makes sense now. Reflexive support of a totally unknown opposition. Great confidence in intervention, despite a poor track record. Complete assurance that this time, they really are developing WMDs... Very little interest in detail (what carrier groups are there to use for this attack, there aren't any deployed in CENTCOM right now) or any consequences of the attack. No attempt to weigh up pros and cons.
Yes, I can completely believe you worked on US foreign policy in the Middle East.
If the Venezuelan operation were done in the context of a mass uprising, who knows what would happen? A civil war, a new government or just more chaos? How does that help achieve US goals, how does that secure the oil Trump wants? These are totally different situations with different goals.
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