wlxd
6mo ago
Can you make your clear? Are you suggesting that the person you are replying to might genuinely not be aware of that, or are you just engaging in petty language policing?
wlxd
1yr ago
The West has not even started to massively expand its production capacity, and our peace time production capacity is order of magnitude too low to keep up. By the time we get on that, it might be all over.
The West is no longer the place where things are built, where factories pop up, where you can find tens of millions of people who know how to operate a bridgeport, lathe, or a rivet gun. It’s no longer in our DNA. We outsource that shit to China.
I think many westerners look at the achievements of their grandparents and great grandparents, and believe that we could do the same. We can’t. We would need to change our entire culture, and we won’t do that in a matter of months. My hope is that the current predicament at least causes our society to get on that path and start to grow serious. Might be the only way to recover from current degeneracy.
wlxd
1yr ago
Russia has just mobilized twice as many people as entire Polish army + reserve. This is even before the utter hardware disparity. In terms of competence and experience, I’m sorry to say that I have no reason to believe that they are any better than Russians: no smart Pole has enlisted in Polish military in 30 years, there was too much opportunity elsewhere. There might be good amount of morale and bravery, or there might not, same as in Russia.
In short, if you want to win this, you’d need to send your friends from Joint Base Fort Whatever en masse, instead of expecting that more Slavs will grind each other to dust.
wlxd
1mo ago
EVs share a lot of the parts with ICE cars. Structure, doors, windows, seats, trim, suspension, wheels. If you consider hybrid ICEs, which most car manufactures already have a lot of experience with, this grows even more: batteries, electric engines, regen breaking. Moving to EV only does not require starting anew: you just ditch the drivetrain, and replace it with beefed up version of what you already do for hybrids. None of this is easy, but it’s not $51B of assets going down the drain.
wlxd
1yr ago
First, this is not what they were created for. This is only one reason for which they were created. In common speech, when we say that "A is for B", it carries implication that B is the single most important reason for A, and other reasons are of little significance. Second, even if they were, in fact, originally built mostly for military transports (which they weren't, though it was important reason to build them), if they are not meant for this use case today, one can scarcely say that they are for it. At best, you can say that they were built for it.
wlxd
1yr ago
I simply thoroughly disagree with this sentiment, and I am quite certain that I am not exceptional here. The process is important, the social context is important.
I would probably go as far as to posit applicability of some sort of labor theory of value: if you print out a random photograph, nobody will value it very highly, but if you paint the contents of the photograph on canvas, it will immediately be seen as having more value. Even more so, if we build technology that allows us to make a painting with a some kind of a gantry CNC painting machine, it’s product will be seen as less valuable than something that human painted by hand.
I think the above sentiment is shared by most normies, whereas your comment exhibits rather postmodernist ideals that few people actually share, as shown by revealed preference. Why are people spending millions on original artworks, instead of hanging cheap replicas that are exactly as beautiful? Because they strongly disagree with you.
wlxd
6mo ago
Makes sense, but new genetic evidence makes it rather hard to sustain. Eg from what I remember, the Turks (or maybe just the non-peasant ones) are something like half Greek by ancestry, due to many centuries of Greek settlements.
Westerners are indeed not so much into purity, but that might be just a result of decades of extremely relentless anti-Nazi indoctrination.
wlxd
1yr ago
I mean, my point is that of course US is very happy with Slavs grinding each other to dust, but I think it would also like to actually win.
wlxd
8mo ago
“Grifter looking for cushy consulting and lobbying gigs” is pretty ridiculous accusation, considering that his career before running for president has been much superior than what you suggest he’s after. You might as well accuse Trump of only running because he wanted to make a bit of money by selling his memoir afterwards.
wlxd
1yr ago
Defund higher education, focusing on female dominated degrees with little human capital value (eg. slash funding for psychology and education degrees to near zero, but things like medicine or veterinary are fine). Defund 3rd tier and below schools hard across the board, hopefully closing as many as possible altogether. Goals is to get people, and especially women, into adulthood as soon as possible.
Introduce very high tax benefits for married families with small children where mother is not working. Pair this with cuts in maternity leave benefits, might be needed to do these covertly to not increase uproar. Eg. cap the income paid out by social security, make it possible for small businesses to fire the employees who took the leave, in exchange for eg. making the paid leave period longer for the fired mothers, and restarting the paid period when another child is born during the leave. In short, the goal here is to make sure that get as many mothers out of employment as possible, so that they don’t have it lined up and waiting for them. When returning to work is not trivial as showing up at the end of the leave, you might as well have a second and third child, and only go back to work after you meet your fertility goals.
While we’re at it, high benefits and support to young married couples. Goal is to encourage people to marry early. This is the hardest part, not sure how to get good ROI here.
Covertly defund childcare subsidies for infants, and increase costs of private childcare by regulations. Freeze annual budget increases, regulate lower children-to-caretaker ratio to increase cost, increase credential requirements, compliance costs, reporting requirement etc. The idea is to make childcare by anyone other than mother rather silly and uneconomical choice for most people.
Overall, the guiding idea is to make people start having kids much earlier, and once they take the plunge, make having a second kid much smaller marginal cost/effort compared to returning to work ASAP. People should plan to first meet their fertility goals, before they start building their careers, because there is little to no support to having kids while you are having a career.
wlxd
1yr ago
That having high skin melanin content improves your income, all else (most importantly, ability) being equal.
wlxd
6mo ago
I specifically mentioned the Russian puppet state of Belarus to point out that you can do much better than Ukraine while remaining in Russian orbit. My point was that if Ukraine experienced decades of stagnation while in Russian orbit while Belarus grew, why expect much different outcomes in western orbit?
Poland well the breakup of the USSR made it not possible for them to do war so they had an easier route.
Poland left the Communist Bloc years before USSR broke up. They managed that through diplomacy and negotiations, not western warmongering. Ukraine should try the same.
wlxd
7mo ago
Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?
wlxd
6mo ago
I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.
This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.
The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.
wlxd
7mo ago
Yes, only majority of homeless have on-demand internet access wherever they go, it is no longer overwhelming. That’s why many of them hang out around free wi-fi, yes. But so what? What does it have to do with the argument you were making? Here, let me helpfully quote you:
who obviously will not have regular access to Internet or cellular connection, due to lack of affordability of a mobile plan, let alone a mobile phone.
Observe that the quote from the study you just gave clearly and explicitly contradicts what you said earlier, and supports what I replied to you with.
As a bonus point, observe that out of the homeless who are interested in using internet at all (66%, I assume that the third which didn’t use internet at all within past 3 months simply does not want to do it), more than three quarters do have it on their phone on demand.
wlxd
8mo ago
all this while ignoring the context of the 1% having stolen all the economic growth of the last 40+ years for themselves
This is a popular claim, but I don’t think it is true at all. People today are more prosperous than similar people 40 years ago, comparing like for like, ie. comparing non-divorced, employed, married people 40 years ago to similar people in same age range today.
See this, for example: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A794RX0Q048SBEA Top 1% of population is physically unable to consume so much.
wlxd
1yr ago
Why would he do it, though? What’s the gain? If someone were to buy an apartment from him, he’d notice that it’s a third of its advertised size, so no buyer would ever be defrauded. Similarly, higher valuation means higher property taxes, so overstating value of his apartment is a loss for him. Seriously, why would he do that? What for?
wlxd
5mo ago
Yeah, I don’t really want to argue for high likelihood of this scenario in Palestinian context, just that it doesn’t seem at all impossible considering the plentiful historical examples.
wlxd
6mo ago
Yeah, they signed agreements, and then didn’t keep to them. That’s not how you conduct diplomacy.
wlxd
1yr ago
I think bribery to be an overblown concern. You can already bribe people today, without them being able to prove that they voted the way you prescribed. Sure, some of them will take money and still vote the other way or not vote at all, but this does not make bribery ineffective, it just pushes up the cost of buying a vote. Ability to prove who you voted for would affect the market price for a vote, and so would probably increase amount of bribery on the margin, but is by no means required to make buying votes an effective strategy.
wlxd
6mo ago
I know about these, but I can hardly believe that these static photos of the aftermath made the original poster “wince”, compared to the videos of Hamas attack. I assumed that he referred to something else.
wlxd
6mo ago
This is a much more reasonable comment.
A private company that doesn't make a formal disclosure can't commit securities fraud by making a false one.
Yes, but this is precisely why I phrased my comment as such:
if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas
I simply don’t see how you can argue that spending all funds on gambling in Vegas is just a business decision, anymore than you could argue that spending all investor funds on buying yourself a villa and a Lambo is just a business decision.
wtf I love naraburns now
(just kidding, just kidding, I always liked naraburns)
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