quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I agree with your solution, but I’m going to push back a little- sex creates the expectation of romantic exclusivity, so these ladies are entitled to Chad’s undivided attention.
I think that both Chad and the women would agree on that, they just differ on the time frame. In most cases, the women are not starry-eyed virgins who believe that sleeping with a man they just met will create a relationship which will last until death doth part them. They likely had some previous sexual relationships which did not last, so they have enough data to establish a baseline. They might also have been wooed by a PUA before, in which case they would have excellent real world data on the long term prospects of a relationship beginning with sex on the first date. Chad's idea of the time horizon might be more like refraining from swiping on tinder until the post-coital cuddling.
And statistically, most average women are in a relationship with average men.
The problem here is selection bias. You might be correct that the average case is an average man and an average woman happily forever (or until the man replaces his wife with a younger model 15 years down the road, or the woman dumps her husband after he gets burnout). But this majority is unlikely to star in the drama described above very often.
or should I say higher, considering how much of it is driven by BMI
My ad-hoc model of partner selection would have two scales. One is a rather absolute scale, e.g. "Would your evolutionary programming tell you to forgo sex for years if this one was the only possible partner?"
The other is relative. "How does sleeping with that person affect your status in your group?"
Unsurprisingly, I think that men are mostly filtering on the absolute scale and women are mostly filtering on a relative scale.
As a thought experiment, consider a group of people of one gender partying. One of them is hitting it off with a person of the opposite gender who has a much lower SMV than the group, say overweight, and they leave the party together. The next day, they meet with their group, and are teased about the night. The group member says "oh yeah, we ended up banging, turns they are really great at oral sex".
If the group is male, my expectation of the response would be something like "congrats on getting laid, bro", with some more mild teasing.
If the group was female, my expectation of the response would be "that bottom-feeder will literally fuck any man with a pulse".
As a corollary, I think that giving all the overweight incels GLP-1 antagonists and bringing them to normal weight will not help them much getting into relationships. Their SMV is a result of their relative status, and while some fraction of women prefer (as in "revealed preference") to share a smaller group of hotter men, there will be an imbalance.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
So that's now two onlyfans performers who determined that a substack is a good way to advertise to some potential clients. Aella and this one.
I find your ad hominem disgusting. While I do not have a paid subscription for either Aella's substack or OF, I read her free substack articles sometimes, and find them interesting in a way which does not make me want to subscribe to her OF.
If you really think Aella wrote Chattel Childhood because she thought "oh, my onlyfans subscriptions are stagnating, so I will just talk about child torture" then you are out of your fucking mind.
You can pretty much dismiss anything if you can gesture vaguely at a potential conflict of interest. When Scott wrote SSC, he was very much part of the medical establishment, so we can safely disregard all his articles on mental health medication. When NATO suggested that Putin might invade Ukraine, they were clearly in a partisan position, no need to pay attention to them. Whenever Anthropic produces AI alignment research, we should ignore this, because they are also building AI systems. When Ford claims that an engine has a certain displacement volume, they should not be trusted, because they just want to sell you the car.
The farhakhalidi article is not OF bait. If you want to attract men to your OnlyFans, the obvious thing would be to do is to put a hot but SFW picture of yourself into substack and mention that you are on OF. She does none of that.
Or you could say it is all part of a 5d-chess move: dissuade women from dating, so more men will end up not getting laid and going to OF, where they might subscribe to the author. This might make sense if you had a world with 10k people in it. She persuades five women to drop out of dating, which increases the number of sexually frustrated men by two, who will randomly subscribe to one of the two OF accounts which exist in the world, so she gets a new subscription, profit. It does not work in a world where there are millions of OF accounts, and a ton of alternative sources of porn besides. She is literally increase her OF subscriptions more by posting a picture of her elbow there than by trying to dissuade people from hookups.
From the substack:
Second, consider that men’s psychological profile includes scoring higher on all dark triad traits – psychopathy, machiavellianism, and narcissism. These traits are distinguished by a lack of empathy and remorse, and a tendency towards deception and manipulation to achieve one’s aims.
While this is probably true in some statistical sense, I would argue that this is mainly selection bias. Dark triad traits are (I think) hot in men.
Now consider the dating marketplace and all the ways it privileges men’s psychological profile at the expense of women’s – the way he’s issued clearance to bottle-feed all of his desires, and the way she’s compelled to smother all of hers.
[...] All in all, the average woman is psychologically abused in the dating market.
As a man who dropped out of the dating market because the only relationships I might get are with women who are too neurotic to be net positive, and who is not going to organize his life around maximizing his SMV, let me say booo-fucking-hoooo.
The sex ratios in the sub-50 age brackets are balanced, so for every chad who manages to string five women along, there are four men who are not getting any. Society is not going to listen to them whine about that very much, because at the end of the day, nobody is entitled to sex. I find porn can substitute for sex and video gaming can substitute for the social interactions of having a relationship. It is not perfect, but so much better than being in a bad relationship.
I think that for evolutionary reasons, being sexually successful is hot in men. I am not kinkshaming anyone, if you are into men who can find a date and get laid every weekend, by all means go for it.
But just as low SMV men are not entitled to sex, women are not entitled to having a chad go exclusive with them. For evolutionary reasons again, most men have some inclination to take the harem route. The hot men who are inclined to a monogamous relationship likely are in a monogamous relationship, so the hot men in the dating market are mostly not interested in that.
Put frankly, if a woman prefers to date the hottest men who are willing to invest a few hours on dating for having sex with her, then she is actively selecting for men who have no incentive to go exclusive with her. If hookups are all she wants, that is fine, but if she is interested in an exclusive relationship, I would advise she lowers her SMV standards and compensate by requiring a longer runway before she engages in sex, thus making pursuing her more costly for men who are just looking for casual sex.
Also, there is no shame in being without a partner. IMO, anyone who can not function without being in a sexual relationship is definitely not relationship material. Looking at the romantic market and saying "the incentives are badly aligned, I am not going to try to participate in this" is something which women can do just as much as men. Just substitute porn with ao4 or something.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
So everyone is "wholly justified" in destroying everyone else? That is a bit of a nihilistic conception of justice, there.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Nuclear deterrence does not work as a 'I can hit you, no hit backs' shield, which already has a good deal of precedent not only in Russia-Ukraine but also in, well, the Iran doing retaliatory missile strikes against US bases in the middle east. The precedent for this line of thought failing have already been established, notably by Iran.
As long as Iran remains wedded to its proxy war strategy against Israel (and the US), it will be subject to retaliation strikes.
Counterpoint: the two main participants in the Cold War, the US and the USSR, were both very active in fighting proxy wars with the other. Supporting Hamas against Israel is not that different from supporting Bin Laden against the USSR, for example. Both sides tried very hard to avoid situations where US soldiers would have a shootout with USSR soldiers, because both sides were very aware of the danger of escalation.
This meant that if one side was a belligerent in a conflict, the other side abstained from officially sending troops as well. Sure, the other side would support the opponents with weapons, and they might send the odd liaison or special op soldier, but these would generally not participate in the killing of US/USSR soldiers and if they were killed, their side would not sweep that under the rug.
So if Iran was a nuclear power, as far as the cold war etiquette between the US and Iran was concerned,
- the US supplying chemical weapons to Saddam would be within the norms, because the US are not the ones using them
- Iran supporting Hamas against Israel would be within norms -- a classic proxy war
- the US assassinating IRGC general Soleimani in Baghdad in 2020 would be against the norms -- like if Brezhnev had used a Soviet missile to kill Kissinger while he was in France
- Israel dropping US-manufactured bombs on Iran would be within the norms
- Trump bombing the Iranian nuclear sites would be against the norms
Another point of etiquette is that you do not try to critically destabilize a nuclear power, even through indirect actions. While their soldiers are out bringing freedom and democracy or the glory of communism to some backwater, they are fair game for your proxies, but you want your proxies to stick to their local theater, not engage in intercontinental terrorism. For example, you would not back 9/11, or arm Ukraine to the point where they might force a regime change in Moscow. (As far as cold war etiquette between a hypothetical nuclear Iran and Israel are concerned, the Oct-7 attacks would be debatable. Attacking civilians -- especially in the deliberate manner displayed by Hamas -- of a nuclear power is going to piss off that power, and you generally don't want to be anywhere nearby in the causal chain of events.)
Tail risks are an important consideration for military interventions. If you are pushing around a conventional enemy on another continent, the question to "what is the worst that could realistically happen due to bombing them?" is likely stuff on the level of "they miraculously manage to sink an aircraft carrier" or "the sponsor a terrorist group which manages to kill a few thousand citizens". If you try to push around a nuclear enemy, then even for NK the answer is a lot bleaker -- they might not be able to nuke you on another continent, but they will certainly be able to drop a nuke or two on your regional allies.
There is also a case to be made that the knowledge that your side has nuclear weapons will make you more careful when engaging other nuclear powers. At the moment, Iran can lob rockets towards Israel whenever they feel like it -- the tail risks are sharply limited -- Israel is not going to nuke Tehran over a few dozen citizens killed, at the most they will kill a few hundred Iranians in return. By contrast, if you are an actor who has some but not absolute control over a nuclear armed side, perhaps a general or military advisor, you want to be careful to avoid a spiral of escalation where your side might be the first to use nukes and gets destroyed in retaliation. Say nuclear Iran launches a few missiles, Israel responds in kind, and as usual their missiles are much more effective than the ones fired by Iran. Suddenly there is some possibility that someone will nuke Tel Aviv, and Israel will nuke Tehran in response.
In conclusion, no, a nuke does not make you completely untouchable, but it very much protects you from direct confrontations with other nuclear powers both by limiting their and your own conduct. I can totally see why the ayatollah regime wants nukes.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Agreed. In an exchange of missiles and bombs, Iran would be losing decidedly, so it makes sense for them to not engage in it.
From my understanding, this ceasefire is mostly that both sides will cease lobbing missiles at each other for now, not anything about Iran stopping their nuclear program.
If either side feels they have anything to gain by breaking the ceasefire (e.g. Israel seeing another opportunity to delay the Iranian nuclear program by bombing them), then they will break it.
While it is a defeat for the Iranian regime, it is a defeat that they likely can survive -- they ideology is not based on how they are technologically superior to the West, after all. I imagine that support for their nuclear program has actually increased, because it seems like the only pathway to prevent the IDF from bombing Iranian generals whenever they feel like it.
Of course Trump announces the ceasefire like he had just negotiated the fucking Good Friday Agreement, when all he did was bomb Iran without getting into an indefinite missile war with them, which few if any people claimed was the main downside of bombing them.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I am not watching the video, but I notice that the tweet said:
It will draw America into a war where they finally decapitate Iran and Syria.
The Assad regime did not end because Israel drew the US into a regional war. The US did fuck-all to bring about its end. In a nutshell, Israel took out Hezbollah, Turkey sponsored the Jihadists who defeated Assad and Russia did not offer less than usual military support to their ally because they were otherwise occupied.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Warheads on missiles are removable. All they'd need to do to launch a nuke is replace the warhead in one of their missiles with a nuclear one.
For a ballpark number of an early nuclear bomb, we might look at Little Boy, which weighted 4.4 tons. Sure, a warhead would have different design constraints than a bomb which has to fit in a B-29, but it is reasonably to assume that any early warhead would weight a multiple of its fissile mass, perhaps half a ton, not something you can easily move around.
More importantly, to play MAD, you have to have launch-ready nuclear weapons. You want to be sure that your enemy can not take out your ability to retaliate with a first strike. Iran does not have missile submarines and also does not have any aircraft which can be reliably make it to Israel, so the only arm of their nuclear triad would be ground-based missiles fired either from stationary silos or vehicles. Either of these only work if you get the missile in the air before your launcher is hit.
If you opt to keep your retaliatory warheads in a deep bunker safe from harm, you will find that you do not have enough time between the first warning of an impeding attack and your bunker being hit to take your warheads out of the bunker and mount it on a missile. Even if the warhead itself is kept safe, after being hit you will not be in any position to launch it -- your access tunnels to your bunker will be full of rubble, your nuclear-capable missiles and launch pads near the surface will be destroyed, and the only retaliation your nuke offers is blowing up your own bunker. All your enemy has to do is to make sure that you have other priorities than digging through rubble in a nuclear crater in the middle of a war which you are fighting with severely degraded capabilities, which seems plausible enough.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Regime change isn’t possible without a ground invasion
Yes
a ground invasion which isn’t possible
Debatable. Arguably, the US would pay a lower price in lives lost to occupy Iran than they did in, say, Operation Overlord.
Sure, currently the political climate is not very favorable to an invasion. The two failures of GWB are still fresh in the minds of Americans, and Trump did not campaign on military adventurism.
It would likely take a very stupid action on Iran's part to shore up US support for an invasion. Perhaps a 9/11 level terrorist attack, or a couple of 100 captured US servicemen being beheaded on video.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Ukraine's stated military objective is to keep independent despite Russia trying to annex them.
Hamas stated military objective is to destroy Israel.
Now, Ukraine's struggle is not an unmitigated success, sure, they lost territory but were still holding Kiev last time I checked.
Hamas struggle is an utter failure in military terms. If they murdered as many Israeli as they did on Oct-7 every day, they would still need two decades to genocide Israel. Nor is Israel going to use up all its bombs on Gaza and then being overrun by Arabs, or go bankrupt bombing Gaza.
I have long argued that Hamas theory of victory involves goading Israel into killing as many Palestinian kids as possible, thereby eroding Western support for them. This is a strategy which is notably worse than millennia of horrible warfare, and which I would label "crazy".
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The NPT itself does not specify any thresholds directly.
Each Non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes to accept safeguards, as set forth in an agreement to be negotiated and concluded with the International Atomic Energy Agency in accordance with the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Agency's safeguards system, for the exclusive purpose of verification of the fulfilment of its obligations assumed under this Treaty with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
But the IAEA-Iran treaty also does not specify any thresholds.
I was surprised to learn that Iran kept being a party to the NPT after Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018. The 2025-05 report states that:
54 . Iran continues to cooperate with the Agency on matters of routine safeguards implementation, and the Agency implements a large verification effort in Iran commensurate with Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle and activities.61 However, in a number of respects as outlined in this report its cooperation with the Agency has been less than satisfactory, as described below.
86 . In light of the above assessment, the Director General reiterates his urgent call upon Iran to cooperate fully and effectively with the Agency. Unless and until Iran assists the Agency in resolving the outstanding issues, the Agency will not be in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.
Or course, after the Trump bombing, they are now rectifying that mistake, and likely will not be a party to the NPT in 90 days.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
So, if hypothetically, the elected leader of a country opined that a polity should be removed from their lands and a Mediterranean beach resort should be constructed on their vacated lands, they would be justified in destroying the country of that leader? Asking for a friend.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
And inside those facilities there is a shitload of nasty stuff that could create what sjw call toxic working environment.
The activity of U-235 seems to be around 80MBq/kg. Not something to keep under your pillow, but also not something where any reasonably quantity will kill you within minutes.
Sure, for the centrifuges, you need UF6, but even that becomes solid below 56 degree centigrade.
To get to that you would also require hydrofluoric acid and fluorine, both of which are definitely nasty, but also things you can clean up even if you care about the environment or the life expectancy of your cleaners, which likely are not issues for Iran.
Hitting the enriched uranium would be hard in any case. The Iranians anticipated the possibility of an attack, so the obvious thing to do would be to dig a kilometer long tunnel, and have a few people whose job it is to carry the good stuff to a randomly selected point in the tunnel every half hour. Unless half of your guards work for Mossad (in which case you have a bigger problem), this should work well enough.
I think the main thing to hit would be the centrifuges. They are not very portable, require a ton of power and supervision and are nothing that the Iranians can easily mass-produce, so losing them would really hurt them.
Of course, we do not know if the attacks actually hit them.
In the long run, I expect the Iranians to win this one, because it is much easier for them to tunnel through another few 100m of bedrock than it will be for the US to bomb through that.
The alternative would be to settle for bombing the entrances of access tunnels whenever they pop up, but that would be a long-term commitment.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Think campaign to collapse Syria and not war to oust Saddam Hussein.
It should be noted that Syria had a decade of civil war before the regime finally collapsed (after Israel took out Hezbollah).
Back in the day, the Allies dropped a massive load of bombs on Nazi Germany, which caused people all over Germany to rebel against the regime now that the Luftwaffe did no longer hold them in check. I kid, nothing of that sort happened, because what kept the people in check was ideology and the GeStaPo, neither of which can be effectively neutralized from the air (without killing literally everyone).
I am not convinced that US/Israel can even indefinitely prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb through targeted bombardment only.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The US people will never be allowed to vote on immigration
What do you think he got elected for this time, looking sexy in swimming trunks? I think stopping illegal immigration, deporting illegals and so on was the number one issue with his voters, and so far he is making a good show of this actually being a priority for him.
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Other than that, I can only advise you to give that system called "proportional representation" a try. It will allow multiple parties to compete. Sometimes, you will have an issue where (n-1) parties are leaning towards one side, but one party canvases with being on the other side and wins big in one election. Often, this will cause the other parties to flip.
Sadly, this often happens with opinions which I do not share. For example, a single state victory of the green party after Fukoshima was enough to kill nuclear power. More recently, the anti-immigrant AfD has won big in the federal elections. While they are not yet in power, Merz has taken to personally drown a migrant child in the Mediterranean sea each morning before breakfast the CDU/CSU/SPD coalition is basically trying to enact the AfD program, as far as migrants are concerned.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I'm surprised how much political capital he was willing to spend on this.
I don't actually think a few airstrikes on Iran are worth that much political capital.
Trump was never a dove, and MAGA was never pacifist or pro-Iranian. At most, hit platform was a bit isolationist, but more in a "us playing world police is a bad deal" than "let us downsize our military to what we would reasonably require to defend our country" way.
Assassinating a few enemies or weddings with drone strikes or dropping a few bombs on countries your constituents could not find on a map is very in character for any president.
I mean, sure, if he announced that he was invading Iran, his base might get deja-vu, but if he spends a smallish fraction of the defense budget on personal pet projects like military parades or bombing Iran, I doubt any of his voters will care much.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Turkey is NATO, we are contractually obliged to aid them when they come under attack, which is commonly understood to involve turning Tehran into a parking lot if the ayatollah foolishly attacks them with a nuke.
My problem with Iran is that I do not have a good model of just how nutty they are, really. I would model their close ally Hamas as being willing to sacrifice every soul in Gaza to kill a few 10k or 100k Jews. Presumably they are less crazy than that. It is of course much more convenient if the kids of their allies are bombed in retaliation, and the ayatollah certainly did not have a problem aiding with actions which would predictably result in a lot of Gazans killed.
I mean, if Iran's version of Islam considers any Muslim bombed by unbelievers to be a martyr who will go straight to heaven, then getting their cities nuked is what an utility maximizer would do. Then again, their past behavior indicates that they care a lot about maintaining power, and not so much about sending their population to heaven in the quickest possible way.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
All I am hearing is "just read the traffic code and you'll be fine, man. No policeman is ever going to ticket you for something which is not in the traffic code."
Sure, the policeman will find a section in the traffic code to ticket you, and that will not be difficult because some of the sections are very broad. For example, "reckless endangerment" could cover anything from your pet jumping out of your convertible mid-drive to you getting stuck on the highway with an empty tank. Likely, the traffic code will not explain how your car needs fuel and how to check the fuel gauge. Knowing that you are forbidden from recklessly endangering others does not mean that you know how to do that.
If someone wants to learn C++, about the worst advice in the world would be to tell them "just read through ISO/IEC 14882:2024, everything you need to know about C++ is in there". Sure, it would be technically correct that if they stick to the standard, use a standard-compliant compiler correctly (a subject very much not covered by the standard) then their program will have a well-defined runtime behavior, but even if that person is a genius able to wade through ENBF syntax rising to their chin and coming out with a solid understanding of how actual code would look like on the other side, they would spend most of their remaining lifespan independently re-discovering the principles of good software engineering.
For electrical installations of low-voltage systems, the relevant local standard likely refers to IEC_60364. Your would-be electrician will likely want the sections (1), (4), (5) and (6), each of which costs about 280 swiss franks in the IEC web store. Part 1, Fundamental principles, assessment of general characteristics, definitions is all of 49 pages, so I would not expect full electrical engineering 101 course full of comic strips to teach how to apply wire ferrules or use luster terminals or warn you that single strand wires will eventually break if bent in opposite directions repeatedly (or whatever, I am very obviously not an electrical engineer). Likely, the standard will start by saying that electrical installations should only be performed by licensed professionals (which is part protectionism and part that you can not reasonably trust a layman to understand the standard from reading it), and your self-taught handyman will be breaking at least that part of the standard.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
People exclaiming loudly about how dangerous this is while also campaigning for increasing escalation in Ukraine against an actual nuclear adversary are not serious people.
I see few people arguing that NATO should enter a shooting war with Russia. Even providing air defense coverage (which would involve NATO shooting at Russian planes) is not in the overton window. Providing conventional military aid to a proxy has long been established as an acceptable cold war conduct with low risk of nuclear escalation.
I'm highly against more foreign intervention but this seems fine to me. A nuclear Iran seems to be very bad in very obvious ways.
I agree that a nuclear Iran seems bad, but the question is if US airstrikes will indefinitely delay the Iran acquiring nukes. If Iran acquiring nukes eventually is a forgone conclusion, then these attacks might be net negative in that they make it much more likely that Iran will not stick to MAD.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
This. The question is simply if it is better to delay their bomb by a few years at the cost of further antagonizing them.
Most nuclear powers have paid a very low blood toll for their nuclear weapons program. (Arguably, the US paid a tremendous indirect toll, as all the resources they earmarked for the Manhattan project would otherwise have gone into mundane military equipment which would have saved the lives of their soldiers, which is doubtlessly one reason why the pressure to use the bomb was so high. But emotionally, this is not equivalent to the Axis having assassinated Oppenheimer and a dozen of his colleagues and having selectively bombed Los Alamos.)
Not so the Iranians, when they finally hold the bombs in their hands they will have paid dearly with the lives of their best and brightest as well as hundreds of workers and years of sanctions. Simply going the North Korea route of MAD, announcing that their days of getting bombed are now over, and thank all the martyrs for securing the peace of Iran might not play well with their stakeholders, who have been raised on the promise of driving the Jews back into the sea. (Of course, it could also be that they plan to nuke Tel Aviv the minute they have a bomb, consequences be damned, and that this was the plan since the 80s, in which case antagonizing them further would not matter.)
From a tactical perspective, Iranian nuclear missiles will be extremely fragile. You can put your centrifuges in a deep mine to recover them after they get bombed, but there is no way to have your ballistic missile launch-ready and still have it launch-ready after its silo gets hit by a conventional bunker-buster. I think in wargaming, threatening your enemies nuclear missiles, so that they either have to use them or lose them is how conventional wars go nuclear.
A lot of nuclear powers do not really have to worry about someone taking out their retaliatory capabilities. The USSR had ICBM silos a thousand kilometers within their airspace, and nuclear missile subs which would have been hard to take out. They certainly had satellite surveillance to detect US mass launches.
Now consider Iran with a few nuclear silos. They know that the West is willing to bomb them to destroy their nukes. They also know that Israel can violate their airspace with impunity. (Presumably, Israel would first knock out their radars during a normal attack, which would give them some advance warnings, but how confident are they that they can see the latest US stealth bombers on their radar? And given that Western intelligence was able to infect their centrifuge control system with malware once, how confident are they that their radar systems are clean?) They know that Israel has invested a ton in missile defense and would probably gamble on being able to shoot down a lone surviving ballistic missile or two.
This means that they will be on a hair trigger. The US and Israel will have no credible way that they are willing to engage in MAD with Iran instead of trying to take them out with a first strike. Any time an animal gets into a transformer and electrocutes itself, cutting power to a radar station, there is a decent chance that whoever is in charge will decide that this means that Israel is finally going for their nukes and launch.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
There were two main dynamics to the state of geopolitical affairs that let WW1 be WW1.
Another reason for WW1 is that for millennia, being belligerent was a net positive to states in most cases. I mean, obviously having a war was always net negative (unless the alternative was starvation, perhaps), but in earlier times, it had at least been a good deal for the elites (and arguably even some of the commoners, though not the commoners finding themselves in the path of an army) on the winning side. The militant nationalism of the 1800s was a consequence of that.
But by 1910, the underlying reality had changed, because weapon systems had gotten a lot more deadly and railroad logistics limited the land gains made from offensive operations, leading to the trench stalemates. Suddenly being belligerent was maladaptive. Few politicians or populations would have been enthusiastic about starting WW1 if they had known the meat grinder it would become. Instead, they were enthusiastic -- finally a chance to kick some hated foreigner's butt again, like in the good old times. Instead they got Verdun.
When WW2 started, there was a lot less enthusiasm all around, because most participants were not looking forward to more industrialized warfare.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
It doesn't take years to learn to wire up a house or install some plumbing. A novice with zero experience and a copy of the code could do it all perfectly, though he'd be a bit slow.
He would be even faster without the code. Of course, nobody likes water damage from failed plumbing or wrongly installed wiring to burn their house down. Getting rid of the corpses of DIY-electricians is also a hassle.
There is a reason why we generally do not hand out driving licences after a student has passed the written test. A lot of knowledge is tacit, stuff which you do not learn from books.
That being said, I agree that a lot of the license regulations are protectionism hiding behind a veneer of safety concerns. For example, learning how to safely deploy standard household electricity (i.e. 230V, 16A) should not be more effort than learning how to drive a car.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I would view subsidized farmers like an army: in good times, a waste of money, but in bad times, essential to the sovereignty of the nation. (Of course, both the farmers and the army require petrochemicals to have any effect, but unlike food and trained fighters, you can stockpile petrochemicals just fine, and nations generally do.) Obviously, this does not mean that a breakdown of international trade would not be bad: most high-tech products have globe-spanning supply chains. But there is a difference between "your population no longer has access to their fancy Starbucks coffee, or new iPads or the chips which your car industry would require to continue building cars" and "your population is starving".
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I disagree with you about the value of education. I will grant that at least half of education is pure credentialism. Go to university, pay your dues, get a paper you require to get a good job, learn whatever you require to do the job from the internet.
I have an advanced degree in STEM. A lot of the stuff which makes me a non-zero value employee I picked up on the side, sure. And sure, everything I learned I could have learned from books (for free from libgen) or educational videos. But I can also tell you that I would not have done so. Without the structure and the tests of traditional educational institutions, it is very doubtful that 22-year old me would have woken up at 9:00 one Thursday and started watching a video on the Gram–Schmidt process at 10:00.
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The thing is, a lot of ‘traditional’ jobs are bullshit now. [...] Doctors: Attending to hypochondriacs and prolonging old people’s suffering.
Despite being someone who tends to avoid interacting with the medical system where possible (a hyperchondriac, if you will), I vehemently disagree. Most physicians do not actually like to pander to hypochondriacs. I am very pro-MAID, but I do not think that most of what doctors do can be fairly described as "prolonging old people’s suffering". Most people do not seek euthanasia at age 50. I generally support trusting people to determine if their life is worth living for themselves.
I think every jobs includes some bullshit components, and physicians are certainly not exempt. Often, doctor's offices are run as a business (and a weirdly over-regulated business at that), and you will see them peddling additional preventive healthcare to patients which is not covered by insurance. Or they will have to spend a lot of their time dealing with health insurance companies. Obviously, most dentistry should be a skilled trade, there is no need to require a lengthy university education to handle a drill. I think that The Elephant in the Brain is making a good case that a lot of the the costs of the medical system are actually due to signaling. But at the end of the day, there is a pretty substantial non-bullshit core.
Personally, I think at this point, it is easier to just wait until the patents of the GLP-1 drugs run out.
Generally, shame is a double-edged sword, because it can enforce norms which are pro-social just as well as norms which are net-negative.
I mean, sure, Japan has very low obesity rates, because most kids would rather kill themselves than being the fat kid in the class, and their shame culture might prevent casual sex, but it is not much use with the TFR, for example.
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